Why Covid is (and isn’t) like the flu
📅 It’s been 1,650 days since Covid became an ever-present part of our lives (I’m using March 13, 2020 as the turning point here, though you could obviously go back further)
Issue #167: the best job in the military, dinosaur descendants, and passive choices
By Harris Sockel
I’m flying next month, and for the first time in years I’m definitely going to mask up. Based on an analysis of wastewater across America (fun), Covid rates in the U.S. are currently “high.” Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and EVP at Scripps Research Institute, believes we’re entering a “major wave.”
This is a pattern we’ve started to see each year. It’s tempting to start thinking of Covid like the flu, with one new wave each year, but as Dr. Topol explains, that’s actually not true — at least not yet. “The FDA has tried to force fit Covid to be like Flu and that’s wrong,” he writes. “It doesn’t take a genius to see that we have 2 major waves each year” — the classic fall/winter wave and a summer wave when the new variants come out to play. Covid doesn’t mutate more than the flu, it’s just newer to us, thus more contagious, hence more waves. Maybe in the future it’ll even out into a single annual wave, but we’re not there yet.
If you haven’t, you should get the 2024-2025 vaccine (recommended by the FDA for anyone over six months old). If you’re in the U.S., here’s a database for booking an appointment at a local pharmacy (I’m getting mine at Walgreens tomorrow, wish me luck). It’s not free, but it’s covered by most insurance plans.
This new vaccine targets the KP.2 variant, responsible for one-third of new Covid cases as of this spring. KP.2 and its spawn, KP.3.1.1, are among the most contagious strains yet, and heirs to omicron — the dominant family of Covid variants since 2021.
I asked biotech master’s student Arina Ytterstad, who recently explained how vaccines work, if she had any useful info for us. She explained that the KP variant’s mutations “remove binding sites for antibodies that neutralize SARS-Cov-2, so there was a need for the updated vaccine.”
Elsewhere on Medium…
- 20 years ago, J.D. Vance served as a military journalist in Iraq. Basically, he wrote internal newsletters for everyone at the base, press releases, and took photos. Samantha Mazzotta had the same job, calls it “the best damn job in the military” and wishes Vance would talk about it more (instead of what she perceives as his defensiveness about having a non-combat role).
- Ecologist and paleontologist Sílvia PM, PhD, complicates the story that dinosaur extinction happened in one fell swoop after a meteor struck Earth 65 million years ago. That’s not quite true, because sparrows and eagles are also descended from dinos — and they’re still here.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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