Dear Diary,
Took a break when my father died.
I seem to be back, more or less.
As I write this the coronavirus is raging through southern states, notably Florida, Texas, and Louisiana, as well as southern California.
We are making tentative plans to fly out to the east coast to get the older one to her freshman year of college. We have a “plan”, such as it is, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was genuinely worried about the trip. Some airlines are cramming planes full of people (American, United based on Twitter pics) and not requiring masking, although Delta and Southwest seem to be doing both of these things. I’m pinning a lot of faith on masks, based in part on the evidence from other countries.
Other, well masked countries (I’m looking at you Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, New Zealand) are doing a significantly better job at containing the virus. Maybe these countries lived under the shadow of SARS (the prequel) and so were much more willing to adapt to public health mandates? Maybe people in these countries have a different relationship to the idea of public health. It’s honestly very depressing to see how poorly the US is managing this crisis . The fact that masks have become political puts us firmly on the lunatic fringe.
At the very least it suggests that large swaths of people in the U.S. don’t trust scientific advice or can’t be induced to take an action in the name of “public good”. Or it’s the case that we don’t actually contain “a public” anymore, now it’s just “us” and “them” which feels as bad as it sounds.
Every day’s news coverage feels like a deeper descent into madness. The Mayor of Portland was tear gassed while out on the streets? Did he pose a credible threat? It reads like poorly plotted science fiction and I’d love to turn the page and find something else. My only somewhat helpful approach is to turn off the mainstream news and focus on science reporting in JAMA or NEJM or Nature, outlets that report on our progress, what’s been learned, what practices have been adopted and which ones have been overturned.
And these outlets do offer a ray of hope. Monoclonal antibodies. That’s where my money is. I just read an article in Nature about how scientists have identified a handful of potent, neutralizing antibodies (19) from patients who’ve recovered. They’ve isolated these antibodies and understand WHY they work, i.e. some of them attach specifically to the spike protein and block it from connecting to the receptor on the surface of cells, a receptor that acts as the gateway to inflitrating things we’d like to keep, such as lungs, blood vessels, etc. The scientists have isolated these antibodies (no small task) and injected them into too-trusting hamsters. Then they expose these hammys to coronavirus by making them hang out in crowded bars (jk, they spray coronavirus in the hammy’s nose) and then check the viral load in hamster lungs. And: good news! the antibodies do a great job of keeping the viral load down. If and when we figure out a cocktail that works, this could be a very usable bridge between now(ish) and a vaccine.
I have fingers firmly crossed.
Until Tomorrow.