This interview w/ Eric Topol of Scripps isn't optimistic. He doesn't like what he sees.

[JoanofArgh]

Last edited Tue Aug 10, 2021, 08:11 AM - Edit history (1)

Too many people are dying right now- interview with scientist Eric Topol of Scripps



These numbers are disorientingly grim to me. How are you thinking about what’s going on?


Well, I’m trying to use the other countries that have been through this already, or are concurrently going through it as a reference or an anchor. And I think our rate of rise of hospitalizations is really alarming. We saw quite a bit of hospitalization increase in the U.K. But this is so far worse than that. And many of those people are going to die.

Just looking at the U.K. and Israel, which had been our guideposts, I thought we would keep the hospitalizations pretty darn low — maybe a fourth of where we’d been in prior waves. And deaths 10 percent of prior waves. But we’re not doing that at all. If you look at the log charts of the U.S. and the U.K, you’re starting to see some real separation for death. It’s certainly going in the wrong direction, and it had been tracking incredibly closely, until recently. Now, we are under-testing, too, compared with those other countries. That might be giving us a distorted picture of what’s happening here. But I just don’t know where we’re headed.


Most people aren’t being that careful.
The vaccinated — who are now a very slight majority — those people just think the pandemic’s over. There’s still this sense that if you’re vaccinated, you’re good to go. I mean, I’ve even seen on television, you know, some of our leading health experts, tell people it’s perfectly okay to have indoor gatherings among vaccinated people. Well, it’s not true. So we’re getting bad advice.

This booster thing is yet another issue, because we don’t even know if they’re going to protect against a Delta. I mean, everybody’s assuming it, but there’s no data. You know, there’s some neutralizing antibodies from the Pfizer report in 23 people and there’s an Israeli pre-print, it says there’s waning immunity without any neutralizing antibodies. So we’ll see. But these are just classic spike-protein boosters. There’s nothing special about them to handle Delta. So I don’t know. I mean, I suspect they’re going to provide some protection, but I’m not sure I’m so confident it’s going to be great.


https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/too-many-people-are-dying-of-covid-19-right-now.html?utm_source=tw&utm_campaign=nym&utm_medium=s1

For copyright reasons I could only post a couple questions but the whole interview is worth a read.

Topol said that people with breakthrough cases are getting very, very sick and that the people getting extremely ill are the ones that got vaccinated the earliest. He thinks we need a vaccine targeted specifically at Delta because he's not sure another shot of the original vaccine will be very effective.

Topol also said that San Francisco's surge in hospitalizations shouldn't be happening in a city that's 70% fully vaccinated.



This is encouraging. 1st early look at booster shots in people over 60

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215720477

[MustLoveBeagles]

1. K&R

[bronxiteforever]

2. Kick & recommend. Thanks for posting this important article.

[A HERETIC I AM]

3. Mother Nature is having a go at killing us off....

And the ignorance of the masses is making the job easier.

[JoanofArgh]

4. That's for damn sure.

[Lord Ludd]

22. Considering what humans have done to the planet

I don't blame her.

[LisaL]

5. Our actual infection rates are a lot higher than official figures, because we aren't testing a lot.

We are mostly testing people with serious enough symptoms. We pretty much abandoned covid precautions.
Most places don't have mask mandates anymore.
We are still having huge mass gatherings. Are we even doing contact tracing?
And here are the results.

[JoanofArgh]

6. Exactly. Topol was asked about the variant producing different outcomes here than in the UK

and Israel and he said both those countries are more fully vaccinated that the US by about 15 points so that probably made a difference.

We also need a national database of people who get vaccinated so they can't get into places with fake vaccine cards.

[LisaL]

7. They also test a lot more than we are.

So our actual infections are even higher than our official numbers. Hospitalizations and deaths reflect our actual infection rates, and not the reported infection rates.

[tableturner]

8. We're testing mostly symptomatic people, which skews infection rates upward.

If we tested a greater percentage of the populace, then a lesser percentage of those tested would be symptomatic, which should lead to a lower actual infection rate.

But I agree with everything else you wrote.

[LisaL]

9. Yes, we testing symptomatic people mostly, which means

we are missing a lot of infected individuals. So in actuality we have a lot more infected than official numbers show.

[TheRickles]

10. Have you seen any stats on what % of people who test positive on PCR are actually symptomatic?

And how does that break down into mild, moderate or severe symptoms? I've been concerned that PCR generates many false positives, making it hard to know who is really sick (ie, symptomatic and a good spreader).

[wnylib]

17. You don't have to be symptomatic

to be a spreader. Asymptomatic but positive people are like Typhoid Mary. They carry and spread the disease without getting sick themselves.

[tableturner]

11. But we're missing more uninfected people, very few of whom get tested.

If most people tested do so because they have symptoms, then a higher percentage of them will test positive than if a random, broad cross section of people, a large percentage with no symptoms, are tested. Thus, the percentage of those testing positive is now artificially high.

Now we ARE missing people who are infected, but asymptomatic, and who thus do not get tested, in terms of overall numbers, but still, a higher percentage of symptomatic people will test positive than will a group of asymptomatic people, most of whom are NOT getting tested.

[wnylib]

21. You don't seem to understand

what "asymptomatic" means. It means someone who is infected and tests positive but has no symptoms. You are talking as if asymptomatic people are not infected. That simply is not true.

Also, asymptomatic people can get long covid. It shows up months after being infected, in the form of blood clots, heart inflammation, and lung and kidney damage. Nobody knows why yet, but it is being studied.

Your idea that the infection rate is skewed higher because only symptomatic people are being tested just doesn't hold up. Use a simple round number like a village of 100 people. 6 of them get tested because they have symptoms. That is 6% of the population. Even if you test the remaining 94 people and they are all negative, the percentage of infected people does not change. It is still 6%.

If you test 4 more people and 2 of them are positive with mild symptoms, you now have 8 people, or 8% infected. Does not matter that their symptoms are mild, they are still infected. They are still capable of spreading it to others who might or might not get a serious case.

Even if another 5 people test positive but have no symptoms, they are still infected and can still carry the viral load to others. If you add them to the previous 8 positive people, you now have 13 infected people, or 13% of the total population of the village.

Of those 13, some will have long covid, regardless of whether they are symptomatic or not. All of them will have some tissue damage from covid because that is what covid does. The degree of damage can be mild or serious. If mild, as in most younger people, it can get progressively worse as they age, resulting in heart or lung disease, or partial or complete kidney failure.

Your post sounds as if you think that only serious cases count and others are somehow "not infected" even if testing positive.

[TheRickles]

23. It's a continuum, not all-or-nothing.

Symptomatic people are better spreaders than asymptomatics because their viral loads are higher (high enough to have overwhelmed their immune response system) and because their coughing and sneezing spreads the virus-laden aerosol more effectively than breathing does. There are surely some "Covid Marys" out there, but how many is the question.

Here's one study that used contact tracing to show that there is essentially no spread from asymptomatics. It was done pre-Delta, and was published in Nature, a top medical journal) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w?fbclid=IwAR1TW1gnm-vSr9VpF_TlJmM494bor9QITAJcC9xDKAK7IjxgrRD-e5RBfQc

I'd like to see more recent data on this question of asymptomatic spreaders (how contagious they actually are, what % of long Covid patients were never symptomatic, etc.), because these concerns are driving our public health policies.

[wnylib]

25. I don't have a link on hand to give you now,

but the CDC recently announced that asymptomatic people with breakthrough infections carry exactly the same viral load as infected unvaccinated people with symptoms. This was BIG news just a week ago, based on analysis of a cluster outbreak in Massachusetts. I am surprised that you are not aware of it. It was discussed here at DU and reported in most media.

[TheRickles]

26. True about viral load, but there's another take-home point from that MA cluster.

Of the 1000+ who tested positive on PCR, only 8 had symptoms that were severe enough to require hospitalization, and no one died (per the Boston Globe). The story is muddied because PCR correlates poorly with symptoms and with viral load, and has a very high false positive rate. So even though Delta may be very transmissible (moreso if one is coughing or sneezing), it does not appear to cause severe illness.

The numbers in this CDC report on the cluster are similar but not identical to the Globe's (469 cases, 5 in hospital, no deaths):
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7031e2.htm?s_cid=mm7031e2_w

[Skittles]

12. just the fact that vaccinated people are getting covid shows they are not being careful enough

the CDC didn't help with their "honor system" for masking, either

[JoanofArgh]

13. No, they didn't help.I thought it was a big mistake as soon as they came out with the masking thing.

I mean Delta was surging in the UK at the time. They had to have known the same would happen here shortly.

[Skittles]

14. I knew exactly what would happen so why didn't they

I swear it somehow stunk of repuke politics

[not fooled]

15. Yes

fear of being called names on Fox.

[NNadir]

16. In general, the media's job no longer to provide information, but rather to sell advertising.

This requires the use of click bait in internet times.

It is reasonable to ask who exactly "Eric Topol" is, and what is his area of expertise?

I did this, since I never heard of him, by entering his name in Google Scholar and looking at his most recent publications. He's done a lot of work on telemedicine.

While some of his primary papers in the last year relate to Covid, many do not. Opening a few of them leads me to suspect that he is not the world expert in virology.

There is lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of papers published on the subject of the Delta variant, and his remarks do not strike me, even remotely, as consistent with what I read in broader scientific publications.

As for the Nymag reporter, and his choice of whom to designate as the absolute authority, I stand by my claim that one can usually not get a degree in journalism of one has passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

Dr. Topol may be a fine scientist, but he is certainly not the only scientist on the planet studying Covid-19, by a long stretch.

If one searches "Delta variant" and BNT162b2 one can see hundreds of papers. The one that comes up for me "Since 2021," is this one from the New England Journal of Medicine, published a week or so ago: Effectiveness of Covid-19 Vaccines against the B.1.617.2 (Delta) Variant

It's a little less panicked than Dr. Topol, with all due respect.

[JoanofArgh]

18. Thanks for this. I'll read it. This Topol thing caused me anxiety.

[JoanofArgh]

19. I bookmarked this site. Israel is administering booster shots or about to.

I'm sure they'll post something about the effectiveness. Thanks!

[TheRickles]

24. Excellent points - thanks. Science by click bait! Argggh....