It’s a silent COVID spring
Fewer people at my grocery stores are wearing masks of any kind these days. The widely debated Cochrane review on masks made its brief ripple and faded. Except for the Chinese lab theory, the right largely has moved on to another set of culture war rants.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene would rather blather about fentanyl. And the 2020 election? Greene should be on a license plate.
Gov. Wokety-woke DeWoke has moved on to … you know.
But COVID has not moved on, writes Katherine J. Wu at The Atlantic. It has just gotten quieter. It’s still adapting:
Three years later, the coronavirus is still silently spreading—but the fear of its covertness again seems gone. Enthusiasm for masking and testing has plummeted; isolation recommendations have been pared down, and may soon entirely disappear. “We’re just not communicating about asymptomatic transmission anymore,” says Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. “People think, What’s the point? I feel fine.”
Although the concern over asymptomatic spread has dissipated, the threat itself has not. And even as our worries over the virus continue to shrink and be shunted aside, the virus—and the way it moves between us—is continuing to change. Which means that our best ideas for stopping its spread aren’t just getting forgotten; they’re going obsolete.
Meagan Fitzpatrick, an infectious-disease transmission modeler at the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine, tells Wu that symptomless spread likely accounted for 50 percent of transmission. But after rounds of vaccinations, symptomless spread may be less prevalent, Wu explains:
One possible reason is that symptoms are now igniting sooner in people’s bodies, just three or so days, on average, after infection—a shift that roughly coincided with the rise of the first Omicron variant and could be a quirk of the virus itself. But Aubree Gordon, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that faster-arriving sicknesses are probably being driven in part by speedier immune responses, primed by past exposures. That means that illness might now coincide with or even precede the peak of contagiousness, shortening the average period in which people spread the virus before they feel sick.
So, good news. And the bad?
That said, a lot of people are still undoubtedly catching the coronavirus from people who aren’t feeling sick. Infection per infection, the risk of superspreading events might now be lower, but at the same time people have gotten chiller about socializing without masks and testing before gathering in groups—a behavioral change that’s bound to counteract at least some of the forward shift in symptoms. Presymptomatic spread might be less likely nowadays, but it’s nowhere near gone. Multiply a small amount of presymptomatic spread by a large number of cases, and that can still seed … another large number of cases.
Plus, people are much less cautious, if supermarket and public event observations are any indicator. People not testing themselves before gathering in groups and fewer wearing masks provides an opening for more asymptomatic spreading the virus at the same time that it’s less likely to spread asymptomatically. So perhaps a wash, says Fitzpatrick.
Meanwhile, people are just straight-up testing less, and rarely reporting any of the results they get at home. For many months now, even some people who are testing have been seeing strings of negative results days into bona-fide cases of COVID—sometimes a week or more past when their symptoms start. That’s troubling on two counts: First, some legit COVID cases are probably getting missed, and keeping people from accessing test-dependent treatments such as Paxlovid. Second, the disparity muddles the start and end of isolation. Per CDC guidelines, people who don’t test positive until a few days into their illness should still count their first day of symptoms as Day 0 of isolation. But if symptoms might sometimes outpace contagiousness, “I think those positive tests should restart the isolation clock,” Popescu told me, or risk releasing people back into society too soon.
A friend who avoided a family reunion in Wisconsin last year told me Tuesday that it turned into a super-spreader event; one fully vaccinated relation got seriously ill but recovered. At an aunt’s funeral in Chicago last summer, too many maskless people stood way too close for comfort. I nevertheless dodged the virus until Jan.1, eight days beyond the family Christmas gathering where no one else got sick.
Hundreds of Americans per day are still dying from this beastie and tens of thousands infected. Just because it’s not front-page news doesn’t mean it’s still not out there. You may have forgotten COVID. It hasn’t forgotten you.