The Good News from TWiV

I started listening to This Week in Virology (TWiV) in March, 2020 and the cast of characters have become my long distance friends, as they came at the problem from their various perspectives as virologists, immunologist and lab folks. 

Back then, Rich Condit, who was on the faculty of a Florida university after knocking around academia for years, said we all ought to understand that anything this learned panel said should be taken the spirit of "current knowledge" will likely be wrong 6 months, a year later, because this is a new virus, at least to science, (although it may have knocked around in some form in bats for years).  But as they speculated about how the pandemic would end, one possibility was it would mutate into new, more benign variants and, like other coronaviruses, it would devolve into a virus we all get, but after the runny noses, the sore throats and headaches and aches, we get past what feels like "the common cold."

They cautioned, at the time, that would be the rosiest scenario and the disease could follow  a course more like influenza, which kill millions worldwide for years.

Now TWiV has interviewed Jake Scott, MD, from Stanford who says that in his infectious disease practice he has seen only 2 cases of serious COVID this year.  While he laughed about Joe Biden's "The pandemic is over," he conveyed much the same feeling, as he walked through the numbers and the stories of hospitalized patients and how things have changed.

Basically, people over 60 have to worry, but young, vaccinated people--and there is some reason to believe even UNvaccinated people--may do just fine with the new Omicron variants.

I had listened less often to TWiV over the past few months, as they drifted away from talking about COVID and I find their clinical guy, Daniel Griffin, insufferable. Griffin was so good early on, but the more exposure he got the more excrutiating it became listening to his self promotion and supercilious riffs on why he is the only physician in America who practices evidence based medicine. 

But Dr. Scott now says we have come to the Promised Land, or, not really the promised land because TWiV did not promise anything, but, more accurately, we have maybe arrived at the ardently desired land, where the COVID variant which has become dominant is not killing many people and making people miserable with "a cold" for a week, but otherwise not burdening hospitals with admission and ICU illnesses.

He said some new things--like the idea that instead of under-using Paxlovid, he thinks we may be over using it. It might be okay, even for an 80 year old with a positive test, otherwise healthy beyond old age, to just "ride it out."

Makes me feel better about what I saw in New York City, where young people crowding into bars and people eating at restaurants and going out wore no masks and looked blissfully indifferent to the risk of COVID.

Of course, the winter season awaits us, and SARS COV-2 is a winter virus, but the news looks hopeful.

And the gorilla chest pounders among the political Right will claim they were right all along and we should have never closed schools or worn masks or insisted soldiers be vaccinated. But, of course, it's all about timing. Those things likely saved lives then although they may not be necessary now.

And, what the Right is now trying to co-opt or ignore is the fact that actual scientists, who used the scientific method, which depends on evaluating evidence rather than just proclaiming stuff, these scientists with their wondrous vaccines saved more lives than all those Right Wing Rand Paul, Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Roger Stone will, in aggregate, ever save.