Category Archives: Covid 19

Coronavirus – Solano County Health Officer will not require masks, waiting on State order

Coronavirus: Masks remain a recommendation in Solano County, not a requirement

The Reporter, by Nick Sestanovich, April 23, 2020

As the global coronavirus pandemic continues to show no signs of slowing down, five Bay Area counties and at least three cities have made it a requirement for residents to wear face coverings when going outside to help stop the spread.

This tally does not include Solano County just yet.

Dr. Bela Matyas, the county’s public health officer, said Solano may consider it down the line if the resources are available but there were a number of things preventing it being a requirement for the time being. The first, he said, was a lack of evidence that wearing masks reduces the transmission of the virus.

“From a public health standpoint, I don’t feel like there’s any reason to implement it, based on the absence of evidence that it provides usefulness,” he said.

The other drawback, Matyas said, was an issue of timing, noting that mandating wearing face coverings would be “making things stricter” at a time when jurisdictions have discussed relaxing their stay-at-home orders.

“It feels a little bit ironic to be, on the one hand, talking about relaxing the order and, on the other hand, implementing something that makes the order stricter,” he said.

Matyas also said that even with the recent orders, there has not been a consensus among Bay Area public health officers about requiring masks. Santa Clara County, for example, has opted not to issue a requirement, despite being the location of the first known coronavirus-related death in the U.S.

Finally, Matyas said that if Solano were to require face coverings, it would be obliged to provide them to residents who are unable to afford or obtain them.

“We can’t, in good conscience, be asking people to do something that they can’t do and then enforce on it,” he said.

However, Matyas said that if Solano were given the resources to provide masks to ensure everyone has one, it would consider a requirement.

“We’re not dogmatically opposed to it by any means, but there’s issues of timing and issues of being able to require something and then making it possible for people to be able to implement that requirement,” he said.

Matyas said the county is also waiting to see if the state requires it.

“This issue has been brought up to the state,” he said. “We’re waiting to see what their response is.”

“The expectation is that we can get something from the state that would be broader in its applicability,” he added.

On April 3, Solano Public Health issued its first notice recommending that residents wear masks when going out in public while still adhering to social distancing guidelines. The notice was not a strict requirement and suggested that the masks be fabric or homemade and not be medical grade.

On April 17, health officials in the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Mateo and Sonoma mandated that people wear face coverings when going outdoors, which went into effect Tuesday. Similar ordinances were also issued in Fremont, Pleasant Hill and San Francisco.

The ordinances tend to vary by jurisdiction, but they do not require masks or face coverings to be worn by children ages 12 and under and children ages 2 and under are prohibited from wearing masks because of suffocation issues. The orders also do not apply to people traveling alone or with family members in their cars or while exercising and are mainly intended for people standing in line at businesses, using public transit or going to a hospital.

Enforcements vary by jurisdiction, but many of the ordinances classify violations as misdemeanors punishable by fine or imprisonment.

Supervisor Skip Thomson said he felt requiring residents to wear masks was “a wonderful idea” but felt that there may not be enough masks available for everyone, particularly homeless individuals, to wear.

“It should be seriously considered, but until we’re able to give out masks to everyone, it just doesn’t work,” he said.

As of Wednesday, there have been 186 confirmed cases since the start of the outbreak — including 21 cases that remain active — as well as 48 hospitalizations and three deaths. The data by city includes 76 confirmed cases in Vallejo, 47 in Fairfield, 26 in Vacaville, 12 in Benicia and 11 in Suisun City. Dixon, Rio Vista and the unincorporated areas of Solano have all had confirmed cases of 10 or fewer, a sample size too small for the county to fully report.

Thomson acknowledged that a lot of residents are awaiting a return to normalcy but felt full testing and tracing needed to be done to paint a clearer picture of the data.

“There’s a lot of work yet to be done before we can reopen this economy,” he said. “As all the experts are saying, if we open it prematurely, we’re gonna have a resurgence of the virus infections. There’s certainly a balancing act between opening up the economy but not opening it up too soon to where we have another spike in cases.”

Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan said the city is following the direction of the Solano County Health Department, and the state of California when it comes to requiring residents to wear masks.

“I strongly recommend residents wear some sort of mask when they go out into public,” Sampayan said.

Sampayan said he has spoken to Matyas about issuing an order requiring masks.

“His position has been that because Solano County is sparsely populated, and not densely populated like other local counties, he doesn’t believe masks should be mandatory here.”

Sampayan said that when he goes out, he sees people not observing the six-feet social distancing requirement and not wearing masks.

“I wish we all would be more concerned about our safety,” he added.

Matyas said masks and face coverings are recommended in Solano in situations where maintaining a distance of 6 feet from others outside their home is impossible. The county recommends the coverings be made from materials such as fabric, scarves, bandanas or towels and worn in a manner that covers the nose and mouth. The coverings are encouraged to be washed frequently, ideally after each use.

For more information, including a video on how to make your own face coverings, go to admin.solanocounty.com:4433/depts/ph/coronavirus_links/faq___face_coverings.asp.

John Glidden contributed to this report.

COVID-19 Solano County UPDATE – One new death and five new cases on April 23, even fewer tested!


Thursday, April 23: five new cases, one new death, total now 191 cases, 4 deaths

Solano County Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Updates and Resources.  Check out basic information in this screenshot. IMPORTANT: The County’s interactive page has more.  On the County website, you can click on “Number of cases” and then hover over the charts for detailed information.

Yesterday’s report, Wednesday, April 22

Summary

Solano County reported 5 NEW POSITIVE CASES today – total is now 191 1 new death, total now at 4.  As of today:

BY AGE GROUP

    • No additional positive cases of young persons under 19 years of age, total of 3 cases, less than 2% of total confirmed cases.
    • 4 of the 5 new cases were persons 19-64 years of age, total of 158 cases, 83%, of the total. This group includes today’s new death, total of 2.
    • 3 new cases of persons 65 or older, total of 32 cases, 17% of the total.  No new deaths, total of 2.
    • [We cannot reconcile the County’s report total of 191 cases with their age group breakdown: 3 + 158 + 32 adds up to 193.  Similarly, we cannot reconcile the report total of 5 new cases with the age group day to day increase: 4 + 3 = 7.  Maybe this will get resolved with tomorrow’s report….]

HOSPITALIZATIONS: 49 of Solano’s 191 cases resulted in hospitalizations (1 more than yesterday).

ACTIVE CASES:  Only 17 of the 191 are active cases. This is 4 less than yesterday.  Good news!

The County’s “Hospital Impact” graph (below) shows that only 9 of the 48 hospitalized cases are currently hospitalized, 1 fewer than yesterday.  Note also that only 9 of the 17 active cases are currently hospitalized.  The County’s count of ICU beds available dropped below 30% for the second time today, dropping from GOOD to MODERATE.  Ventilator supply continues at 31-100%, or GOOD.  (No information is given on our supply of test kits, PPE and staff.)

CITY DATA

  • Vallejo added 4 of today’s 5 new cases, total of 80.
  • Fairfield remains at 47 cases.
  • Vacaville added 1 of today’s 5 new cases, total of 26.
  • Suisun City remains at 11 cases.
  • Benicia remains at 12 cases.
  • Dixon, Rio Vista and “Unincorporated” are still not assigned numerical data: today all remain at <10 (less than 10).  Residents and city officials have been pressuring County officials for city case counts for many weeks.  Today’s data is welcome, but still incomplete.

TESTING

The County reports that 2,555 residents have been tested as of today.  This is an increase of only 29 tested since yesterday’s total of 2,555 .  This is not enough testing!  Other California counties are expanding testing with multiple drive-through testing locations.  Is Solano not planning to expand?  Last week, around 150 new tests were reported daily, but the numbers dropped over the weekend and since.  (I have no information as to the reason for the slow pace of testing in Solano County – inadequate supply of kits, perhaps?)  Under 6 tenths of 1% of Solano County’s 447,643 residents (2019) have been tested.

The blue bars in the chart, “Daily number of cases on the date that specimens were collected” shows why the County is interpreting a flattening of the curve.  Note that the daily date in that chart refers to the date a sample was drawn and so reflects the lag time in testing.

Solano’s upward curve in cumulative cases – as of April 23

The chart above shows the infection’s trajectory in Solano County.  It’s too soon to tell, but we may be seeing a flattening of the curve!

Still incredibly important – everyone stay home and be safe!

Coronavirus – Contact tracing efforts in Solano County back in February

[Editor: the link in the first paragraph to “the patient in her 40s” is a fascinating account by 10 UC Davis physicians, covering Solano County’s first-in-the-nation community transmitted case of COVID-19.  The narrative covers everything from initial intake to the patient’s stable condition and discharge, along with x-rays and treatment timeline.  – R.S.]

Coronavirus detectives: Here’s how counties try to track everyone exposed

CalMatters, by Rachel Becker, April 23, 2020
California needs thousands of contact tracers. But counties and cities are overwhelmed and understaffed. “Woefully inadequate,” said one public health director.

By the time public health officer Bela Matyas learned that the novel coronavirus was spreading in Solano County, the patient in her 40s was already on a ventilator.

Back in February, the woman was the first in the nation known to be infected without traveling or being around someone who was sick. But she was too ill to answer questions about where she’d been and whom she had talked to, worked with and touched.

Dozens of public health investigators from local, state and federal agencies fanned out like detectives, questioning the family members who had visited her and the hospitals that had orchestrated her care — even staking out the store where she worked. Their mission: to piece together a list of people who could have been exposed to the virus.

In the end, the list totaled more than 300 people spanning six California counties, Matyas estimated. Four — including three healthcare workers — tested positive, each prompting their own investigation.

This process, called contact tracing, is a critical element in containing the spread of the novel coronavirus. But the ability of California’s 61 county and city public health departments varies greatly as they struggle to keep pace with rising numbers of patients.

“What we had to do was clear from the beginning,” Matyas said. “But actually being able to do it was very hard.”

Some local health departments, like Madera County’s, have managed to trace the contacts of every person who tests positive for the coronavirus. Others, like the city of Long Beach and Placer County, are so overburdened that they are only trying to trace contacts that could put vulnerable people at risk, such as healthcare workers or people in nursing homes.

To handle the pandemic, the nation will need 30 contact tracers for every 100,000 Americans, according to the National Association of County and City Health Officials. But no California city or county has anywhere near that many. Under that formula, for example, Long Beach would need 140 investigators, seven to nine times more than it has now.

North of Sacramento, Placer County, with a population of almost 400,000, would need 120 tracers.

“It certainly illustrates the point that 18 — which is our expanded capacity, which is more than our baseline of six — is woefully inadequate,” said Aimee Sisson, Placer County’s public health director.

Contact tracing will become even more important as the state starts reopening parts of its economy. The concern is that more human interaction could cause flare-ups, especially since people can spread the virus before feeling ill and limited testing leaves people unaware they’re infectious.

“We need to make sure that there is capacity in every county to do adequate contact tracing. That’s part of containing the disease,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California. “Are we ready today? No. When will we be ready? I don’t know.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom addressed the concern about inadequate contact tracing on Wednesday, announcing plans to train 10,000 people to help local health departments. “The good news is we believe we have the capacity to build an army of tracers,” Newsom said, although he did not say when they’d be ready to deploy.


Jeffrey Martin, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, said that fighting an epidemic is like fighting a wildfire: The state can’t afford to mess up containment.

“[It’s] important to track all of those people down to extinguish all the embers in that brushfire,” Martin said. “If we don’t do it right, and if the brush fires are not extinguished, you’d have to be a magical, wishful thinker, to think that there would not be a raging wildfire.”

Some counties keep up, others can’t

The San Joaquin Valley county of Madera typically has two to three people keeping tabs on tuberculosis and sexually transmitted infections in its population of roughly 157,000 people.

Then, the coronavirus hit — and the initial cluster encompassed about 200 patients and potential contacts, said Madera County public health director Sara BosseThirty-six people have tested positive.

Still, by teaming with the sheriff’s department and probation investigators, the county has managed to keep up contact tracing, isolation and quarantine for everyone potentially exposed.

Madera is unusual in that investigators, typically in plain clothes, visit patients and their contacts in person — sort of. They drop off packets of information as well as a letter excusing work absences to employers. Then they get back into their cars, and answer questions face-to-face through the window, over the phone.

“Then they can explain to them what’s going on,” Bosse said. “We understand that people are experiencing a lot of anxiety and it’s difficult for people to hear this news that they might have been exposed.”

For now, the spread of the virus seems to be slowing. “We’re really hopeful that it’s at least in part due to the active contact tracing that we’ve implemented,” Bosse said.

The spread of the novel coronavirus in Madera County appears to be slowing, according to county data.

In Riverside County, cases are coming in faster than the county’s 30-plus person team can investigate them, according to Barbara Cole, branch chief of disease control for the county’s public health department. The county has 3,084 confirmed cases.

It can take multiple phone calls to build enough trust to reconstruct someone’s string of contacts, Cole said.

“It’s about trying to establish a rapport, stressing how we’re going to protect their confidentiality,” she said. “The majority of people, they’re concerned about their friends and their family.”

In the Northern California county of Solano, Matyas quickly realized that tracing and quarantining all contacts would be impossible for every case. To date, 186 people have tested positive in the county.

Instead, the county focuses on tracking the risk to vulnerable populations, including people who are older, have underlying medical conditions, or live without shelter.

Solano County’s communicable disease team, which has shrunk to its original staff of six, first interviews anyone who tests positive about where they work and who they came in contact with. That in some cases is a long list: people who visit their homes, coworkers who sit close or share food.

Then a member of the team calls all of the contacts. The idea is to identify and isolate people who are feeling ill or whose jobs put them at risk of infecting others in nursing homes, hospitals, or homeless shelters.

“We no longer pretend that we can do any kind of active quarantine,” Matyas said. “There’s no bandwidth to check on them to see if they’re doing it.”

Workers are conducting patient interviews and case followup at the Long Beach health department’s operations center. Photo by epidemiologist Nora Barin.

Long Beach and Sacramento and Placer counties also are only tracing the virus’s spread through vulnerable populations.

“Instead of asking every place you went to, every person you came into contact with, we say, ‘Have you been in contact with vulnerable populations?’” said Sisson in Placer County. “We just have too many cases for that full interview.” In the county, which is home to the first person to die of the novel coronavirus in California133 people have tested positive.

In Long Beach, every case initially was tracked. But then people kept getting sick, and most of the deaths are in long-term care facilities

As people sheltered in place, contact tracing didn’t have to be as extensive. “Now we’re to the point where we have more than 400 cases, and we’re really focusing on our healthcare worker cases, and our cases in our long-term care facilities,” said Emily Holman, communicable disease controller for the city’s health department.

Tracing contacts of people in long-term care facilities is different than in the community at large. Instead of focusing on reconstructing a web of contacts, the aim is to rapidly identify and separate infected and potentially exposed people from healthy people. Speed is key, so if someone’s symptomatic, they’re treated as a case even with no test results.

“Every minute in those facilities can be crucial and could prevent an exposure,” Holman said.

Staffing up

Former CDC Director Tom Frieden called for an army of more than 300,000 contact tracers in an interview with STAT. And current CDC head Robert Redfield announced plans to hire 650 more public health personnel, including to help with contact tracing, the Washington Post reported.

Local health departments have been bolstering their workforces on their own. San Francisco plans to recruit and train as many as 150 people to conduct contact tracing, including librarians, city attorney staff and medical students.

The Bay Area’s Alameda County also has ramped up from just seven staff investigating cases of communicable disease to 60 people assigned to the novel coronavirus — including 18 who follow up with contacts. As the epidemic progresses, “we anticipate deploying as many as 300 staff for contact tracing,” said Nicholas Moss, acting director of Alameda County’s Public Health Department.

Sacramento County is working to expand its six-person team to 30 by recruiting from other departments and training medical students to work with people who are homeless.

“We’re hoping that based on the modeling that’s occurring, that we will be ready — and actually, we’re hoping that there won’t be another wave,” said Public Health Officer Olivia Kasirye.

Is there an app for that?

Some counties are looking to technological help. San Francisco, for instance, is training its contact tracers to use a platform that Grant Colfax, director of public health, called “an integral part of our efforts going forward.”

The platform, developed by a software company called Dimagi, is not an app that people can download to their phones. Instead, it’s a web portal that public health workers can use to keep tabs on people with infections, list their contacts and keep in touch.

Apple and Google also have proposed tracking people’s proximities using Bluetooth. Newsom has said the state is vetting various technologies.

But Alameda County’s Moss is cautious about protecting the privacy of residents. 

“We want to make sure that any technological tool we employ where people’s health information is going to be input, that there are adequate safeguards for privacy,” Moss said. Plus, the app has to be easy to use, and it has to cough back up the data needed to keep tabs on the virus’s spread.

Eric Sergienko, Mariposa County’s health officer, worries that if each local health department ends up using different software, it might be hard to trace contacts that cross county lines.

That’s where Sergienko hopes the state steps in and standardizes the platform California’s counties use. “What can the state do for us? Just by finding the best one,” he said.

State Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said that California will need 10,000 more contact tracers as it modifies its stay at home order. Between 2,000 and 3,000 people could test positive per day. And each of them could have ten contacts, he said.

California might not have needed to push quite so hard to ramp up during the crisis if it had funded enough public health workers to begin with. “We’ve been seeking increased funding for years,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California.

More trained health workers could be important in fending off the next pandemic.

“By having these trained contact tracing public health workers, we can actually prevent infections, prevent the severe disease from happening in the first place,” said Lee Riley, a professor of epidemiology and infectious diseases at the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

“But right now, everything that we’ve been doing is just reactive to what’s already happened.”

Coronavirus lies, nonsense and misinformation… set straight

Misinformation goes Viral

TheStartup, by Jason Shepherd, Apr 13, 2020 (updated 4/22)

Self Isolation has led many to delve into crackpot theories that go from man-made viruses to spread of infections via 5G cell phone towers. Now, those that are rational are already asking the right questions and seeking legit sources of information…but more and more people are losing it. Feel free to use the information in this story to educate your friends. This pandemic is stressful enough without people confabulating nonsense!

I’ve found that people “listen” more if you have credentials, so while I’m not a fan of throwing letters at people…here are mine. I have a PhD in Cellular and Molecular Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. I did my postdoctoral work at MIT and am now an Associate Professor of Neurobiology at the University of Utah .

I run a research lab that works on the molecular mechanisms of memory and brain plasticity (www.shepherdlab.org). More recently, we made a surprising discovery between memory and..viruses. If interested, see here

and here.

All of that just means that I spent a long time being trained to problem solve, analyze data and I know a fair amount about biology.

All of the links below are public and I encourage you to read them. In no particular order here are some common themes of misinformation:

1. No, YOU (bar the first Chinese patients in Wuhan) did not have COVID19 prior to Jan 2020.

The first documented cases in China were in late November/early Dec 2019. Scientists can “track” the origins of viruses by sequencing their genetic material. Over time, viruses accumulate mutations that make them identifiable. Think of family trees and tracing genetic mutations, this is very similar. See this article for a good explanation:

UPDATE: If you are interested in the analysis mentioned in the NYTs article, here’s a great website that traces the sequencing data: https://nextstrain.org/ncov/global and for the US: https://nextstrain.org/narratives/ncov/sit-rep/2020-04-17?f_country=USA

2. The virus is NOT man made.

Scientists can compare the sequence of the new virus with other known viruses and determine how similar it is. The most similar virus is a coronavirus found in bats and the differences are due to mutations that occur through natural evolution, rather than an artificial sequence that was suddenly added.There are literally billions of viruses, all with different hosts and life-cycles…some mutations allow those viruses to jump into new hosts. The clearest picture so far is that SARS-COV-2 originated from bats and maybe an intermediate host. The most likely scenario is that this jump from an intermediate host happened in the wild animal market in Wuhan (https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(20)30328-7).

In addition, the interaction between the virus spike protein (that make the “crown” of proteins that stick out from the balloon-like membrane) and the human receptor ACE2, which allows the virus to get into human cells, is complicated and something that would be extremely hard to engineer (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9). Indeed, the ACE2 interaction had already been identified with a bat coronavirus in 2010, giving credence for a natural origin (https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12711).

4/17 UPDATE: There are insinuations that a lab in China working on bat coronaviruses may have let the virus “escape”. There’s a lot of finger pointing by various US agencies, but I’ve yet to see any scientific analysis that makes this claim credible…so far. There’s also precedent for coronaviruses jumping hosts and into humans, both SARS and MERS for example. Indeed, scientists had publicly warned that this would be one of the most probable causes for an international virus outbreak. Here’s a good write up on the evidence for all of this:

3. NUMBERS and MODELS are not deliberately misleading people.

Guys, this is a new virus and nothing was known about it prior to Dec 2019. The good news is that it is similar to the previously known coronaviruses SARS and MERS. But infectivity and mortality were completely unknown. Scientists use models to refine their ideas but no one model is correct. You’re seeing discrepancy in models/projections precisely because science isn’t magic…the more we know about the virus and how it works, infects people etc the better the model.

Conversely, epidemiologists can study past and current data to INFER what will happen in the future. All models point to social distancing as a means to stop spread and indeed this is working

So no, there’s no conspiracy by scientists to “control the numbers”. While governments might be producing their own propaganda on how they are dealing with the pandemic, there are legit sources of data that are impartial to politics (eg. https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ and https://www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest).

4. COVID is not the flu! By now, I hope most are convinced.

But, here’s a representation of the worst case scenario happening in NYC right now (with updated numbers 4/16) and it’s scary ! From

The weekly COVID numbers are compiled from the daily Johns Hopkins numbers pulled from their GITHUB repository. The CDC flu, pneumonia and total death numbers are downloaded from the FluView site here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html.

The CDC flu, pneumonia and total death numbers are downloaded from the FluView site here: https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html

UPDATE: 4/22. Here’s a video that shows the daily deaths of COVID and the main causes of the death in the US. You get an intuitive grasp on how bad this pandemic is!

5. Bill Gates.

When he announced that he was going to help develop a COVID vaccine, people went nuts. People started asserting that: Gates wants to kill people with the vaccine; Gates patented the new virus; Gates knew about the virus before the Chinese. WTF people, let’s try and use critical thinking skills?! The richest man on earth gave up running a company to devote all his time to a foundation that is dedicated to public health (https://www.gatesfoundation.org/). Go check out their website. No, Gates won’t profit off of a new vaccine, no he doesn’t want to kill off people with it and NO he isn’t orchestrating some sort of grand plan to take over the world like a Bond villain!

6. The claim — virus is spread by 5G cell phone towers.

OMFG! First, 5G is just as safe as 4G. And 4G is just as safe as your home microwave. Second, a virus cannot be spread by cell phone towers because viruses, you know, only infect living things. So please don’t go and destroy cell phone towers.

UPDATE: Since I’m now also getting a lot of questions about 5G itself, I thought I would say something here. Cell phones use radio wave frequencies to transmit. If you remember your HS physics, electromagnetic waves include visible light, radio and X-rays. Radio waves carry less energy and are long-forms, X-rays much more energy and shorter. The latter is called ionizing radiation and are dangerous as we all know. The milli- and microwaves are safe, except for the generation of heat (which is how microwaves heat up food).

So, 5G has a little more energy than 4G but has orders of magnitude less energy/harm than visible light. You should be WAY more worried about UV rays from the sun. For more info, see here:

7. Health care workers and almost all the scientists I know are working to save lives.

There are accusations that scientists manufactured the virus or that we are covering up for big pharma companies. We are not paid off by the government or big pharma! We really just want to help people. Health workers are literally putting their lives on the line under challenging conditions.

Scientists are racing to find treatments and produce a vaccine. Science works by a process and that takes time. You will see announcements that X drug works but often this need repeating and validation. This isn’t because scientists don’t know what they’re doing! For a nice explanation of how this works, see here:

I understand that people are afraid and desperate for good news, but we should all wait for confirmation from the medical community before rushing to conclusions.

8. Herd immunity.

I’m loving that anti-vaxxers are now claiming that herd immunity is better than having a vaccine. Well, crap…did you know that vaccines actually WORK by accelerating herd immunity? Yes, that’s right..herd immunity is when enough people have recovered from the virus to then be immune and cannot reinfect other people or get sick. Now, there’s a lot of uncertainty of how well or how long people recovering from COVID will be immune, but ultimately the only way to control the pandemic is through herd immunity. BUT, natural herd immunity will need at least 70% of the total population to be immune. If this is done by just letting the virus spread unchecked, we are talking about millions of people dying world-wide over the next few years. Vaccines accelerate herd immunity without killing people by inducing antibody production that can kill the virus, the same kind of antibody response people achieve after recovering from an infection .

We are all in this together! The internet is a double-edged sword, endless access to information…but often it’s hard to determine what information to pay attention to. My advice,

Keep Calm and listen to Experts!