People who maintain 60 feet of distance from others indoors are no more protected than if they socially distanced by 6 feet, according to a peer-reviewed study published April 27 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America.
Cambridge-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Martin Bazant and John Bush, PhD, developed a model to calculate indoor exposure risk to COVID-19 by factoring in the amount of time spent inside, air filtration and circulation, immunization, variant strains, mask use, and respiratory activity such as breathing, eating or talking.
“We argue there really isn’t much of a benefit to the six-foot rule, especially when people are wearing masks,” Mr. Bazant told CNBC. “It really has no physical basis because the air a person is breathing while wearing a mask tends to rise and comes down elsewhere in the room so you’re more exposed to the average background than you are to a person at a distance.”
As with smoking, even people wearing masks can be affected by secondhand smoke that makes its way around the enclosed area and lingers. The same logic applies to airborne droplets of the virus, according to the study. However, the study did note that mask use by both infected and susceptible people reduces “respiratory plumes” and thus increases the amount of time people may safely spend together indoors.
When crafting guidelines, the CDC and World Health Organization have overlooked the amount of time spent indoors, Mr. Bazant claims.
“What our analysis continues to show is that many spaces that have been shut down in fact don’t need to be,” Mr. Bazant said. “Oftentimes, the space is large enough, the ventilation is good enough, the amount of time people spend together is such that those spaces can be safely operated even at full capacity, and the scientific support for reduced capacity in those spaces is really not very good.”
Opening windows or installing new fans to keep air moving may be just as effective or more effective than purchasing a new filtration system, Mr. Bazant said.
The CDC currently recommends staying at least 6 feet away from other people and wearing a mask to slow the spread of COVID-19, citing the fact that the virus spreads mainly among people who are in close contact for a prolonged period.
“The distancing isn’t helping you that much and it’s also giving you a false sense of security, because you’re as safe at six feet as you are at 60 feet if you’re indoors. Everyone in that space is at roughly the same risk, actually,” Mr. Bazant said.
After three rounds of peer review, Mr. Bazant says he hopes the study will influence social distancing policies.
https://mailchi.mp/da8db2c9bc41/the-weekly-gist-april-23-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
Now that we’ve entered a new phase of the vaccine rollout, with supply beginning to outstrip demand and all adults eligible to get vaccinated, we’re hearing from a number of health systems that their strategy is shifting from a centralized, scheduled approach to a more distributed, access-driven model. They’re recognizing that, in order to get the vaccine to harder-to-reach populations, and to convince reticent individuals to get vaccinated, they’ll need to lean more heavily on walk-in clinics, community settings, and yes—primary care physicians.
For some time, the primary care community has been complaining they’ve been overlooked in the national vaccination strategy, with health systems, pharmacy chains, and mass vaccination sites getting the lion’s share of doses. But now that we’re moving beyond the “if you build it, they will come” phase, and into the “please come get a shot” phase, we’ll need to lean much more heavily on primary care doctors, and the trusted relationships they have with their patients.
As one chief clinical officer told us this week, that means not just solving the logistical challenges of distributing vaccines to physician offices (which would be greatly aided by single-dose vials of vaccine, among other things), but planning for patient outreach. Simply advertising vaccine availability won’t suffice—now the playbook will have to include reaching out to patients to encourage them to sign up.
There will be workflow challenges as well, particularly while we await those single-dose shots—primary care clinics will likely need to schedule blocks of appointments, setting aside specific times of day or days of the week for vaccinations. The more distributed the vaccine rollout, the more operationally complex it will become. Health systems won’t be able to “get out of the vaccine business”, as one health system executive told us, because many have spent the past decade or more buying up primary care practices and rolling out urgent care locations. Now those assets must be enlisted in the service of vaccination rollout.
Health systems will have to orchestrate a “pull” strategy for vaccines, rather than the vaccination “push” they’ve been conducting for the past several months. To put it in military terms, the vaccination “air war” is over—now it’s time for what’s likely to be a protracted and difficult “ground campaign”.
https://mailchi.mp/da8db2c9bc41/the-weekly-gist-april-23-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
With more than 222M Americans having received at least one dose of COVID vaccine, and 27.5 percent of the population now fully vaccinated, we are now nearing a point at which vaccine supply will exceed demand, signaling a new phase of the rollout.
This week, for the first time since February, the daily rate of vaccinations slowed substantially, down about 11 percent from last week on a seven-day rolling average. Several states and counties are dialing back requests for new vaccine shipments, and the New York Times reported that some local health departments are beginning to shutter mass vaccination sites as appointment slots go unfilled.
On Friday, the White House’s COVID response coordinator, Jeff Zients, said that the Biden administration now expects “daily vaccination rates will fluctuate and moderate,” after several weeks of accelerating pace. In every state, everyone over the age of 16 is now eligible to be vaccinated, but experts expect that demand from the “vaccine-eager” population will run out over the next two weeks, necessitating a more aggressive campaign to distribute vaccines in hard-to-reach populations, and to convince vaccine skeptics to get the shot.
Vaccine hesitancy, like so many other issues related to the COVID pandemic, has now become starkly politicized—one recent survey found that 43 percent of Republicans “likely will never get” the vaccine, as opposed to only 5 percent of Democrats. Another 12 percent of those surveyed, regardless of party identification, say they plan to “see how it goes” before getting the vaccine, a subset that will surely be unnerved by continued doubts about the safety of the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccine.
An expert advisory panel on Friday recommended that use of the J&J shot be resumed, but advised that a warning be included about potential risk of rare blood clots in women under 50. The first three months of the COVID vaccination campaign have been a staggering success—but getting from 27 percent fully vaccinated to the 80 percent needed for “herd immunity” will likely be a much tougher slog.
NEW DELHI — More than a year after the pandemic began, infections worldwide have surpassed their previous peak. The average number of coronavirus cases reported each day is now higher than it has ever been.
“Cases and deaths are continuing to increase at worrying rates,” said World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Friday.
A major reason for the increase: the ferocity of India’s second wave. The country accounts for about one in three of all new cases.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Earlier this year, India appeared to be weathering the pandemic. The number of daily cases dropped below 10,000 and the government launched a vaccination drive powered by locally made vaccines.
But experts say that changes in behavior and the influence of new variants have combined to produce a tidal wave of new cases.
India is adding more than 250,000 new infections a day — and if current trends continue, that figure could soar to 500,000 within a month, said Bhramar Mukherjee, a biostatistician at the University of Michigan.
While infections are rising around the country, some places are bearing the brunt of the surge. Six states and Delhi, the nation’s capital, account for about two-thirds of new daily cases. Maharashtra, home to India’s financial hub, Mumbai, represents about a quarter of the nation’s total.
Mohammad Shahzad, a 40-year-old accountant, was one of many desperately seeking care. He developed a fever and grew breathless on the afternoon of April 15. His wife, Shazia, rushed him to the nearest hospital. It was full, but staffers checked his oxygen level: 62, dangerously low.
For three hours, they went from hospital to hospital trying to get him admitted, with no luck. She took him home. At 3:30 a.m., with Shahzad struggling to breathe, she called an ambulance. When the driver arrived, he asked if Shahzad truly needed oxygen — otherwise he would save it for the most serious patients.
The scene at the hospital was “harrowing,” said Shazia: a line of ambulances, people crying and pleading, a man barely breathing. Shahzad finally found a bed. Now Shazia and her two children, 8 and 6, have also developed covid-19 symptoms.
From early morning until late at night, Prafulla Gudadhe’s phone does not stop ringing. Each call is from a constituent and each call is the same: Can he help to arrange a hospital bed for a loved one?
Gudadhe is a municipal official in Nagpur, a city in the interior of Maharashtra. “We tell them we will try, but there are no beds,” he said. About 10 people in his ward have died at home in recent days after they couldn’t get admitted to hospitals, Gudadhe said, his voice weary. “I am helpless.”
Kamlesh Sailor knows how bad it is. Worse than the previous wave of the pandemic, like nothing he’s ever seen.
Sailor is the president of a crematorium trust in the city of Surat. Last week, the steel pipes in two of the facility’s six chimneys melted from constant use. Where the facility used to receive about 20 bodies a day, he said, now it is receiving 100.
“We try to control our emotions,” he said. “But it is unbearable.”
https://mailchi.mp/94c7c9eca73b/the-weekly-gist-april-16-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
For some time, we’ve been focused on the efforts of Walmart to launch and grow a care delivery business, especially as it has piloted an expanded primary care clinic offering in a handful of states. We’ve long thought that access to basic care at the scale that Walmart brings could be transformative, given that more than half of Americans visit a Walmart store every week. Along those same lines, we’ve always wondered why Dollar General and Dollar Tree—each with around four times as many retail locations as Walmart—haven’t gotten into the retail clinic or pharmacy businesses.
(Part of the answer is ultra-lean staffing—this piece gives a good sense of the basic, and troubling, economics of dollar stores.) Now, as the federal government ramps up its efforts to widely distribute the COVID vaccines, it turns out that the CDC is actively discussing a partnership with Dollar General to administer the shots.
A fascinating new paper (still in preprint) from researchers at Yale shows why this could be a true gamechanger. The Biden administration, through its partnership with national and independent pharmacy providers, aims to have a vaccination site within five miles of 90 percent of the US population by next week. Compared to those pharmacy partners, researchers found, Dollar General stores are disproportionately located in areas of high “social vulnerability”, with lower income residents and high concentrations of disadvantaged groups. Particularly in the Southeast, a partnership with Dollar General would vastly increase access for low-income Black and Latino residents, allowing vaccine access within one mile for many, many more people. And the partnership could form the basis for future expansions of basic healthcare services to vulnerable and rural communities, particularly if some of the $7.5B in funding for COVID vaccine distribution went to helping dollar store locations bolster staffing and equipment to deliver basic health services. We’ll be watching with interest to see if the potential Dollar General partnership comes to fruition.
https://mailchi.mp/94c7c9eca73b/the-weekly-gist-april-16-2021?e=d1e747d2d8
As states rush to fully reopen businesses, and Americans leave their masks at home in greater numbers, it appears that the feared “fourth surge” of COVID is now underway in many parts of the country. Coronavirus cases are up in half of all states, and up nationally by 9 percent compared to last week. While the latest wave appears to be much less deadly—largely targeting younger people who haven’t yet been vaccinated—it adds urgency to the effort to get shots in arms as quickly as possible.
The good news: that’s happening. Today the US surpassed the milestone of 200M vaccinations given, with nearly a quarter of the population now fully vaccinated (including nearly two-thirds of those over age 65). The progress on vaccines comes as the Johnson & Johnson COVID jab is sidelined, over safety concerns stemming from a small number of rare blood-clotting cases in younger women that caused the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to urge states to pause the use of the shot. Wednesday’s inconclusive meeting of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices meant an additional 7 to 10 days of limbo for the J&J vaccine, drawing criticism from experts who warned that the negative publicity could undermine confidence in vaccines among the general population, both in the US and around the world.
Count us among those skeptical of the decision to pull back on the J&J vaccine, which plays a pivotal role in the campaign against COVID, given that it’s a single-dose vaccine that can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, making it more easily distributed than the two-dose mRNA vaccines. While the blood clotting cases are serious, and merit investigation, the odds of suffering a vaccine-related blood clot are far outweighed by an individual’s risk of death or severe complications from COVID itself, let alone the chances of getting a blood clot from other medications (such as oral contraceptives).
It was a big week for innumeracy, unfortunately: headlines abounded about the CDC’s discovery of 5,800 “breakthrough” COVID cases, in which fully vaccinated people still contracted the disease. Unsurprisingly, the numerator got the headlines, not the denominator—the 80M people who’ve been fully vaccinated. Your chances of hitting a hole-in-one as an amateur golfer are better than the chances of getting COVID after being fully vaccinated. Furthermore, of those 5,800 people infected after being fully vaccinated, only 7 percent were hospitalized, and 74 died. Each a tragedy, to be sure—but we’ll take those odds any day.
Get vaccinated as soon as you can.
HENRY KOTULA 