With COVID cases and hospitalizations climbing, UMass Memorial is bringing back a mask mandate for staff when interacting with patients.
“We have continued to see a dramatic increase in the number of COVID-19 positive employees over the past two weeks, which has led to exposures of both fellow caregivers and patients,” a memo sent to staff on Thursday stated. “In response to this, as a protective measure for our staff and patients, effective immediately we are requiring mandatory caregiver masking for all patient encounters in all licensed clinical areas.”
The Worcester hospital says that if the trend continues, it may need to require masks for anyone who enters the building. They will re-evaluate the mandate in four weeks, “unless worsening conditions dictate otherwise.”
Nationwide, the CDC says new hospitalizations jumped 21.6% in the past week. The agency is also tracking a new, highly mutated COVID variant called BA.2.86 that experts think might fuel further spread.
Tldr; anyone have a summary of the newer strain and why it’s getting worse?
“Worse” only in regards to increased number of cases. I haven’t heard any indication that infections are more severe with this new strain. It’s just that it’s mutated enough that even vaccinated people are susceptible to reinfection.
All of this essentially means that Covid will be with us for a long time just like the flu, which also mutates and requires frequent vaccine boosters. We’ve been expecting Covid to settle into a similar seasonal pattern as the flu and RSV, but so far it’s stubbornly refusing to do so.
And some experts think that Covid reinfection will decrease with successive generations who are exposed in young childhood until SARS-CoV-2 becomes just another nothingburger childhood viral illness like the other four or so endemic human coronaviruses.
EDIT: Successive generations OF HUMANS not of the virus. I think maybe that wasn’t clear. As in like, in 100 years enough people might have been exposed to SARS-COV-2 in early childhood that it starts to be just another one of our endemic childhood coronaviruses.
Current generation of humans remains fucked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
And some experts think that Covid reinfection will decrease with successive generations who are exposed in young childhood until SARS-CoV-2 becomes just another nothingburger childhood viral illness like the other four or so endemic human coronaviruses.
That seems to be a rather dangerous gamble considering the severe side effects and risks of successive reinfections.
What gamble exactly? I’m not sure what you’re talking about. This is simply the pattern that experts predict will develop in the future
The gamble is:
- drop any precautions, let everyone contract and survive covid, maybe (just maybe) in the future reinfections will be rarer and milder.
But on the other side…
- COVID is known to leave long-term and poorly understood health problems in a lot of people (ca 10% with any form of long covid, ca 2% disabled after covid).
So we roll the dice and hope the hypothesis 1) is a net gain over the fact 2). That if we sacrifice well-being of 10% of population (in this case children), a larger percentage will be better off in the future.
As far as things go now I’m not too optimistic.
Game theory of viral spread. Viruses are more likely to become less deadly, rather than more, as there’s a selective pressure on viruses to make someone as sick as possible (and spread the disease) WITHOUT killing them. It’s why the Spanish flu was deadlier in 1920 that the decendant that you caught in your last bout of flu (most likely).
COVID was a pandemic, now it’s endemic, and less deadly with every reinfection.
It’s not fucking endemic, words have meanings. For endemic you need steady, predictable number of infections and we don’t have that. With covid we have rampant mutations and wave after wave of poorly tracked upticks. “Endemic” became a buzzword excuse to drop restrictions and get people to spend money and work on-site again and has nothing to do with the actual epidemiology of covid.
And for fucks sake even if I agreed that the “endemic” status is debatable one thing is not: COVID is worse at each reinfection in an individual, the persistent damage is cumulative (did you know you can have long covid on top of a previous long covid?).
And uh oh I didn’t catch a flu in years. Yes, flu is bad too. It leaves lingering symptopms too. But how many people catch it two or three times within 2 years? Yeah, not many. With covid no one bats an eye that someone went through 3 bouts of potentially deadly, potentially disabling disease within 2 years. We’re going to face massive healthcare problems a few years on, problems which are preventable with basic precautions… But no one takes these precautions because eNdEmIc.
It’s not proven to be less serious with reinfections, instead cumulative risk of damage seems to grow.
Who on earth suggested we drop any precautions? I didn’t. The continued evolution of SARS-COV-2 is going to happen even with all precautions taken.
All governments and most media suggested and practice that. This is the gamble thdt is being currently executed and I’m giving a lot of good faith when interpreting it as an epidemiological gamble and not as a semi-deliberate eugenics campaign.
You’re sure reading a lot of things I never said.
Here’s a whole article written about the new variant BA.2.86: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-covid-variant-ba286-2023-what-to-know-experts/
I would also comment that a lot of this is probably a facility-specific artifact. The Massachusetts hospital where I work had a similar Covid outbreak among staff about a month ago, and we started masking up again as a result. It didn’t get any worse and we’re already back to not masking routinely.
Employees share breakrooms, computer stations, and often socialize together outside work. But the overall Massachusetts data like the Boston wastewater testing doesn’t look like any major outbreak is happening: https://www.mwra.com/biobot/biobotdata.htm
But a big hospital like UMass or MGH has a problem and it makes the news ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
