Attention to the Unseen

Dhruv Khullar writes: The Covid-19 pandemic, like every pandemic before it, is a story of equilibriums: between viral biology and human immune response; between news of the pathogen and fear of it; between the damage it inflicts and the social, economic, and political choices we make. A disease persists as a pandemic as long as these forces remain in flux; it becomes endemic when the balance is, more or less, set. The morning after Thanksgiving, Americans awoke to an unsettling…

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Bloomberg reports: A two-shot course of Pfizer Inc.’s vaccine has just 22.5% efficacy against symptomatic infection with the omicron variant, but can thwart severe disease, according to laboratory experiments in South Africa. Researchers at the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban issued additional data on a small study released earlier this week. The research considered blood plasma samples from 12 participants. Scientists found omicron resulted in about a 41-fold reduction in levels of neutralizing antibodies produced by people who had…

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The New York Times reports: From the start of the pandemic, the coronavirus seemed to target people carrying extra pounds. Patients who were overweight or obese were more likely to develop severe Covid-19 and more likely to die. Though these patients often have health conditions like diabetes that compound their risk, scientists have become increasingly convinced that their vulnerability has something to do with obesity itself. Now researchers have found that the coronavirus infects both fat cells and certain immune…

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Nature reports: As the world sped towards a pandemic in early 2020, evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom gazed into the future of SARS-CoV-2. Like many virus specialists at the time, he predicted that the new pathogen would not be eradicated. Rather, it would become endemic — the fifth coronavirus to permanently establish itself in humans, alongside four ‘seasonal’ coronaviruses that cause relatively mild colds and have been circulating in humans for decades or more. Bloom, who is based at the Fred…

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Science reports: Since South African scientists announced last week they had identified an unsettling new variant of SARS-CoV-2, the world has anxiously awaited clues about how it might change the trajectory of the pandemic. But as big a mystery—if less urgent—is where and how Omicron evolved, and what lessons its emergence holds for avoiding future dangerous variants. Omicron clearly did not develop out of one of the earlier variants of concern, such as Alpha or Delta. Instead, it appears to…

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A virus’s genes hold a record of where it’s traveled, and when. imaginima/E+ via Getty Images By Claire Guinat, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich; Etthel Windels, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and Sarah Nadeau, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich More than 250 million people worldwide have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, usually after a diagnostic nose swab. Those swabs aren’t trash once they’ve delivered their positive result, though. For scientists like us they carry additional valuable information about…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: The Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus could lead to more infections among vaccinated people, according to several scientists, but some said there were reasons to believe the shots would protect against severe disease. While the new variant might evade the antibodies generated in reaction to the vaccines, the virus will likely remain vulnerable to immune cells that destroy it once it enters the body, said Ugur Sahin, co-founder of BioNTech SE, which sells a…

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AP Photo/Denis Farrell By Hamish McCallum, Griffith University These are very early days in terms of our understanding the Omicron variant. What is known is that it has a large number of mutations, particularly in the spike protein and it appears to be rapidly spreading in specific parts of the world. Very early indications from Africa suggest it does not cause particularly severe disease (though the World Health Organization has urged caution given the limited data available). At this point,…

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Science reports: At 7.30 a.m. on Wednesday, Kristian Andersen, an infectious disease researcher at Scripps Research in San Diego, received a message on Slack: “This variant is completely insane.” Andrew Rambaut of the University of Edinburgh was reacting to a new SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence found in three samples collected in Botswana on 11 November and one picked up a week later in a traveler from South Africa to Hong Kong. Andersen looked at the data and then replied: “Holy shit—that…

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Ashish Jha asks: How worrisome is Omicron? There are three key questions that help scientists understand how consequential any variant might be. The first question is whether the variant is more transmissible than the current, prevalent Delta strain? Second, does it cause more severe disease? And third, will it render our immune defenses — from vaccines and prior infections — less effective (a phenomenon known as immune escape)? On transmissibility, the data, while early, look worrisome. This new variant appears…

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