Prom Superspreaders

Posted on by Thor

ABC News reported that close to 100 students tested positive for COVID-19 after attending their High School Prom. Masks were optional but “strongly recommended,” for the prom held at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

San Mateo High School held the party on April 9, 2022 about 18 miles from the school. 90 out of the nearly 600 students who attended tested positive for the virus.

According to San Mateo Union High School District Superintendent Kevin Skelly, all of the cases were mild.

Though the BA.2 variant is highly contagious, it is not having a major impact on hospitalizations or deaths.

Despite the outbreak, school leaders and students said having the prom was worth it to provide a sense of normalcy during the pandemic. Other schools in the district will be adding more mitigation measures to their proms so they don’t experience similar outbreaks. The plan is to test students attending the prom to find out of they are COVID positive before they spread the virus. This isn’t rocket science. It is clear that school leaders don’t give a crap about student health.

COVID-19 Double Mutant

Posted on by Thor

A new COVID-19 variant known as “Double Mutant” is responsible for a surge in coronavirus cases in a a region of India that includes Mumbai. The existence of the newly discovered variant was first disclosed by India’s government on March 24, 2021. It is called a double mutant because it contains two mutations of the COVID-19 virus.

One day late, on March 25, 2021 one case of the Double Mutant was found in the San Francisco Bay area in California.

Dr. Benjamin Pinsky, a Stanford doctor, said, that this double mutation has a mutation in the spike protein which is found in the California variant and also a mutation that is found in the South African and Brazil variants.  “We do have some information on experiments on the individual mutations (California, Brazil, South African) suggesting that antibodies will be less able to neutralize this India variant.” Pinsky said. “So this rapid spread across the globe is pretty impressive, and also a bit concerning.”

The city of Manaus in Brazil was one of the hardest hit in the world with a conventional strain of the coronavirus, and it now there’s a lot of substantial reinfection with the new Brazilian variant, Dr. Stefano Bertozzi, professor of health policy and dean emeritus of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health, said at a UC San Francisco forum last month.

Dr. Benjamin Pinsky said, “Vaccines may be slightly less effective in preventing moderate disease or moderate illness with this particular variant, but the vaccines are still very effective and people should get vaccinated as soon as possible.” “We don’t know how those two mutations behave when they’re paired together.”

The emergence of the new variant underscores how important it will be to quickly vaccinate as many people as possible. The only way to stop the proliferation of mutations is to stop the spread of the virus through vaccines. If you are vaccinated, the immunity produced is believed to be better than immunity produced by surviving COVID-19. If you are vaccinated an get infected by one of these new variants then the result wold be a mild to moderate illness, likely not ressulting in hospitalization or death.