Part of the Covid endgame we should probably be considering right now—and feel free to down vote me until I add links (if you hate me) or add links for me (if you love me) should probably be—underlying genetic resistance (or susceptibility). There are tantalizing clues that this might be relevant:
the UK challenge study—about half of the participants stubbornly refused to catch Covid
actual progress in identifying genes for susceptibility, lots of data
experience with other viruses, often with tradeoffs (e.g. HIV vs West Nile virus—weird, right?)
waves often don’t go past about 60%
lots of breakthroughs and re-infections and lots of people not getting it (consistent with my own social circle)
household secondary attack rates surprisingly low
myxomatosis in rabbits and virus/host co-evolution. As with humans and covid, interferons seem to be the key to understanding innate resistance/susceptibility to novel pathogens
At this point, I’m really starting to think I’m one of the lucky ones, since I’ve been plenty exposed and I test myself fairly frequently. Just like if I were to flip a coin and get 10,000 heads, at some point I start to wonder if it’s biased. I don’t feel too guilty about this, since swine flu got me pretty bad in 2009 and I’m old enough to have had chickenpox pre-vaccine (fun fact—everybody who gets chickenpox has “long chickenpox”—the body never clears it)
For my own personal closure on all this mishuggass I recently sent my spit to 23andme to get a sense of where I fall on the innate susceptibility spectrum. Don’t try this at home, dear reader. It’s pretty safe for me to do this, since I’ve got no plans to buy life insurance (no kids!) and I have a stable unionized government job with a great benefits.
Part of the Covid endgame we should probably be considering right now—and feel free to down vote me until I add links (if you hate me) or add links for me (if you love me) should probably be—underlying genetic resistance (or susceptibility). There are tantalizing clues that this might be relevant:
the UK challenge study—about half of the participants stubbornly refused to catch Covid
actual progress in identifying genes for susceptibility, lots of data
experience with other viruses, often with tradeoffs (e.g. HIV vs West Nile virus—weird, right?)
waves often don’t go past about 60%
lots of breakthroughs and re-infections and lots of people not getting it (consistent with my own social circle)
household secondary attack rates surprisingly low
myxomatosis in rabbits and virus/host co-evolution. As with humans and covid, interferons seem to be the key to understanding innate resistance/susceptibility to novel pathogens
At this point, I’m really starting to think I’m one of the lucky ones, since I’ve been plenty exposed and I test myself fairly frequently. Just like if I were to flip a coin and get 10,000 heads, at some point I start to wonder if it’s biased. I don’t feel too guilty about this, since swine flu got me pretty bad in 2009 and I’m old enough to have had chickenpox pre-vaccine (fun fact—everybody who gets chickenpox has “long chickenpox”—the body never clears it)
For my own personal closure on all this mishuggass I recently sent my spit to 23andme to get a sense of where I fall on the innate susceptibility spectrum. Don’t try this at home, dear reader. It’s pretty safe for me to do this, since I’ve got no plans to buy life insurance (no kids!) and I have a stable unionized government job with a great benefits.