I wrote my first article about COVID-19 on February 27, 2020, and wrote 5 articles related to this topic during March 2020.  I thought it would be a good idea to look back at my thoughts during that time, and see how much of what I said was true, and how much was off target.

And for the next year should I plan on taking advantage of Intertops casino bonus or can I actually plan that Las Vegas vacation I was thinking about going on a year and a half ago?

Are we close to a vaccine or is it still 18 months away? (Feb 2020)

By February 27, 2020, Trump was already talking about having a vaccine “very soon”.  Others were saying it was at least 18 months away.  On September 1, 2021, we will have reached the 18 month mark.

Politicians, don’t take any of them seriously

Unless you have been living in a bubble, the United States is currently in the middle of the most heated presidential elections in US history.  So, if the statement is coming out the mouth of a politician, take it with a grain of salt.  About half of what they are saying is probably true, and the rest is politics.

A COVID vaccine did get to market by February 2021.  That was great.  It helped with the original COVID-19.  But viruses mutate, and people can still be carriers and they still get sick.  For the most part, it is not hospital sick, and people dying as with the original COVID-19.  On the downside, the vaccine seems to become less “powerful” after 6 months.  But it is unclear exactly how it is not as powerful.  With people with immune system problems, did the vaccine just not hold or does the vaccine just not work?  I do not know, and I do not think that even the people who created the vaccine know.

Around 1995-2000, the FDA started to accept PDF submissions.  First, it was an option, and then it became a requirement.  The days of tractor trailers driving up to the FDA offices were gone, but it still took, on average, 3 years for a drug to be approved for mass production.

Around the year 2000, the FDA changed its procedures, so instead of a company doing all of their research and then submitting everything, all at once, at the end of the process, they were allowed to submit things piece by piece.  This change reduced the timeframe for an average drug submission from 3 years to 18 months.

That is still true.  And when companies are given an incentive to put a certain project to the front of the line, and the FDA puts certains products to the front of the line, that 18 month number can be cut in half.

So which number is right?

The answer is that they are both right.

The 18-month figure is an average figure. That figure can be cut down by a specific drug being put to the front of the line.  It can also be cut down by assigning additional people to evaluate the data.

But there are some things in the process that cannot be sped up.  Checking antibodies 3 months in the future, 6 months in the future, 12 months into the future, etc.  Although companies can run simulations and make expected predictions, nothing is going to take the place of seeing in real-time, under “normal” conditions, if something is or is not effective.

The second paragraph is especially true.  When governments started to give the vaccine to the population, they did not know what the antibody levels would be like at 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, in the future.  The COVID vaccines do not maintain antibody levels at a point where they can fight off variants of the virus to the same level as the original virus.

How to beat the odds of getting COVID-19? (Feb 2020)

Understand how the Coronavirus is the same and different than a “normal” cold or flu.  First, how long the time between somebody being exposed to a virus before showing signs of infection.  For a regular cold, the time period is one to three days.  For the flu, it is one to four days.  For the Coronavirus, it is between two and 14 days.  To put it simply, the time between exposure and showing symptoms is a lot longer.

This is still true.

With the original COVID-19 variant, people tended to develop symptoms or test positive between 5 and 8 days after exposure.  They can be contagious 48 hours before showing symptoms or testing positive with a peak at 5.61 days.

For the Delta Variant, the time between initial exposure to a positive COVID test was 3 to 5 days with a peak at 3.71 days.  Infected individuals with the Delta variant were contagious 2 days earlier than the original COVID patients, and they had a much higher viral load.  So there was a lot more of the virus in their body that they could potentially transmit to others.

Delta variant COVID patients had viral loads that were 1260 times higher than original COVID patients.

The reason for this is that the Delta variants “likes the human body” much more than the original COVID virus, so it makes it much easier to reproduce.

If you were to graph the growth of the virus inside two individuals — one infected with the original version of the virus, the other infected with the Delta variant — both would start at zero, but the growth line for the Delta-infected individual would rise much more steeply. Not only would that individual’s viral load reach a detectable level (positive PCR test) more quickly; it would also reach an infectious level sooner. An individual infected with the original strain of the virus would, on average, become able to transmit the virus between three and four days after exposure, in the 48 hours before developing symptoms or testing positive. In contrast, it appears that someone infected with the Delta variant may be able to infect others within a day or two of being exposed.

What exactly is going on with the Delta COVID variant and vaccines? (Aug 2021)

Vaccination is highly protective against severe illness, hospitalization, and death — even when it comes to the Delta variant. We also have evidence that fully vaccinated people are less likely to transmit the SARS-CoV-2 virus to others. “But no vaccine is 100 percent effective,” Stuopis emphasizes. “And because Delta reproduces so quickly and efficiently, it appears that the virus can sometimes reach detectable and infectious levels in vaccinated people before the vaccine-mediated immune response kicks in. Vaccination will likely keep you from getting really sick. It may keep you from developing any symptoms at all. But it might not keep you from spreading the virus to others.”

To put it in layman’s terms, when a vaccinated person gets exposed to the Delta variant of COVID, it becomes a race against time.  The Delta COVID variant against the vaccine’s immune response?  Each working.  Each fighting.  But since the body only knows how to fight the original COVID vaccine, it takes time for the body to learn how to fight the Delta COVID variant.  Since your body has a head start, you do not end up in the hospital.  On the other hand, you can still get sick, you can still transmit it to others.  And the virus does not stop with you.

Do vaccinated people need to wear masks indoors? (Aug 2021)

If you are exposed to the COVID-19 Delta variant, you can expose others 1 ½ days later.  The Delta Variant is more transmittable, because the viral load inside your body is higher.  That means even with brief encounters, you can expose the virus to somebody else.

In August 2021, are covid vaccines worth it?

The simple answer is yes.  In terms of the original COVID variant, which the vaccines were originally designed for, the COVID vaccines work (if you have not previously been exposed).  For the Delta COVID variant, your body still has to learn how to fight the Delta COVID variant, but it is not learning “from scratch”.  So although it takes time for your body to learn how to fight this specific variant of COVID, people are not ending up in the hospital (for the most part).  And from the time that you are contagious to the time that your body learns to fight the Delta COVID variant, you can still get sick.  If you did not have the vaccine, you could potentially end up in the hospital.

Remember, compared to the original COVID variant, the Delta variant has a viral load of 1260 times higher.  And it is a higher viral load inside of your body that can be the difference between ending up in the hospital and not ending up in the hospital.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) described Delta as more transmissible than the common cold and influenza, as well as the viruses that cause smallpox, MERS, SARS, and Ebola—and called it as contagious as chickenpox

The highest spread of cases and severe outcomes is happening in places with low vaccination rates, and virtually all hospitalizations and deaths have been among the unvaccinated, the CDC says.

How long will the pandemic last (realistically)?

So, instead of a three- or four-year pandemic that peters out once enough people are vaccinated, an uptick in cases would be compressed into a shorter period of time. “That sounds almost like a good thing,” Dr. Wilson says. “It’s not.” If too many people are infected at once in a particular area, the local health care system will become overwhelmed, and more people will die, he says. While that might be less likely to happen in the U.S., it will be the case in other parts of the world, he adds. “That’s something we have to worry about a lot.”

This is a question that I have, why don’t we just expose the young and healthy (not people with pre-existing conditions) — expose them to COVID-19, but make sure that they are taking vitamin C, Vitamin D, Zinc, and something to help the zinc absorb in the cells.

Many doctors discard this idea, because you do not know if the person would end up with a serious reaction or just “be sick”.

What are the symptoms of COVID Delta?

Cough and loss of smell are less common.  Headache, sore throat, runny nose, and fever are symptoms of the COVID Delta variant.

How long are you contagious with the Delta COVID variant?

No matter the variant, once you are contagious, you are contagious for 2 weeks.

Is the booster of the COVID vaccine worth it?

Prof. Sir Andrew Pollard, head of the Oxford Vaccine Group, which has contributed to the development of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, has even commented that, in his opinion, the highly transmissible Delta variant has made achieving herd immunity an impossibility.

“The Delta variant will still infect people who have been vaccinated. And that does mean that anyone who’s still unvaccinated at some point will meet the virus […], and we don’t have anything that will [completely] stop that transmission,” he told The Guardian.

Another argument against the booster vaccination is that low income countries still have not vaccinated all of the people in their countries that want to be vaccinated.  Countries like Venezuela have only vaccinated around 8% of their population.