I was looking forward in this issue of Friday's Elk to sharing some recent work of mine that is blissfully far from Covid. The pandemic is, of course, far from over, and I have still been pitching in at the New York Times with Covid science coverage. But I have also been grateful to work on some stories not focused on that blasted SARS-CoV-2. They remind me of how much there is to learn about the world, and how much the pandemic has narrowed everyone's experiences.
I will write about them in this email. But first, here's a reminder I got on Tuesday that the virus does not care about what we want....
Yes, I have Covid for the second time in less than six months.
My first case in January was very mild and very mysterious. I can't tell where I got it from. After an initial positive PCR test, I tested negative on a series of antigen tests and a PCR test. I felt under the weather for a few days, and then had a low-grade persistent cough for a couple weeks. End of story.
I figured my experience demonstrated two things: just how good Omicron was at infecting people, and just how good vaccines are at keeping Covid from getting really dangerous. (Here's a graph of New York State hospitalizations over the past year: blue is for unvaccinated people, red for vaccinated.)
The Omicron wave was in the middle of a fall at the time, and it kept falling through the spring. As the weather warmed, it got easier to meet with people at sidewalk tables for dinner, for drinks on patios, or just bumping into each other on the sidewalk. I adjusted my risk budget, sometimes venturing inside restaurants or stores without my mask. But when I flew to West Virginia last month to give a talk, I masked from the moment I got in a taxi to the airport until I arrived in my hotel room. And in advance of the trip, I got my second booster--even if it was a vaccine designed in 2020, when nobody thought of Omicron as anything but a Greek letter.
That all worked fine, until last Friday. I won't say exactly where I was that evening, for the sake of the privacy of the people I was with, but suffice to say it was a small local business throwing an open house. And it was great. I caught up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in quite a while, thanks to the pandemic and to the damage the pandemic did to my social skills. I walked home with my wife thinking that this was precisely the sort of thing that I had missed since Covid showed up.
Saturday morning, our host informed us with regret that he woke up feeling ill and tested positive. We started testing ourselves, but came up negative. On Monday afternoon, I felt run down--so run down I had to take a nap. I still tested negative, making me think I might just have a bad cold. I had a night of aches and a 102 degree fever, and the next day I tested positive.
I stayed in bed for a day and a half, my fever and aches abating, leaving me with just a lot of fatigue. I binged some TV, did some reading for a new project, and got back to writing towards the end of the week. I feel fairly normal again now, but today's antigen test is comically aggressive. This is what it looked like a few SECONDS after I put the swab in the cartridge: the positive line was a deep burgundy banner while the control line was just starting to form.
The version of Omicron I got infected with in January--probably the subvariant BA.1--clearly didn't protect me against reinfection. I wouldn't be surprised if I got hit last week with BA.4 or BA.5, which are surging here in Connecticut and can evade immunity from earlier forms of the virus. There's no reason to rule out more subvariants--or some other variant entirely--evolving in the months to come and creating a new risk of reinfection.
Still, my combination of a previous infection and vaccinations dramatically reduced my odds of getting a severe case of Covid, and for that I'm grateful. But getting Covid a few times a year is not a prospect I relish. A Covid infection, even a mild one, brings with it a risk of long-running symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue. And some new research indicates that repeated infections raises the subsequent risk for a lot of bad outcomes like heart attacks and strokes. Dr. Bob Wachter of the University of California San Francisco summed up the current research the other day in this piece for the Washington Post.
The spring decline in the United States stalled in April, and we've climbed to a plateau of about 100,000 new reported cases every day. I'm sure that the real number is far higher, since at-home tests rarely get reported and the positivity rate is high pretty much everywhere. It would be nice, 2.5 years into the pandemic, for the country to do regular randomized covid surveys, so scientists could make good estimates of the fraction of people in the U.S. with an infection. The United Kingdom does this fairly well, and the results are striking. Officially, the U.K. is logging about 20,000 new cases a day. But 3.35% of people in the survey turn out to have covid, which means that about 1.8 million Brits are actually positive.
Things could well get worse in the fall, when people start heading inside, immunity from earlier vaccines wane, and new subvariants possibly arrive. The U.S. government is making moves to get more people boosted, but companies are only just starting to test vaccines tailored for BA.4 and BA.5. By the time they'd be ready in the fall, will we be dealing with BA.7?
Isolation while I'm infected is a drag, a stark contrast from the happy party where I got infected in the first place. And once I finally test clear of the virus, I will probably dial back my social interactions, paring down my risk budget. Which is not what I had expected to be doing in summer 2022.
I wish you good luck in evading this virus and cobbling together a good summer in spite of it. And now, as promised at the top of the email, here are a few things to take your mind off the pandemic:
On Monday, I wrote about the first decade of CRISPR. I've been reporting on this genome-editing technology for years--in this 2015 piece for Quanta, for example, and at more length in She Has Her Mother's Laugh in 2018. Observing its development has been astonishing. It's important not to think of CRISPR as magic that has solved all our problems, or as a limitless power to do harm. But it's also important to recognize its progress. For example, ten years after CRISPR was first demonstrated as a potential tool, at least one company is on the verge of applying to the FDA to use it to reverse a hereditary disease.
Today, I look into a subject I explored last year in Life's Edge: how can we know if there's life on other planets? The James Webb Space Telescope, launched this Christmas, is just now starting to look at planets around other stars. It may be able to determine if they have atmospheres that could support life--the first step to the possible discovery of a biosignature.
I also wrote this month about some weird tiny life here on Earth. First, a virus that has wiped out hundreds of millions of rabbits in Australia--and thereby serves as a warning that viruses do not necessarily evolve to be more benign. And giant bacteria, the size and shape of your eyebrows, hiding in plain sight all this time.
It's almost enough to make you forget you have Covid!
That’s all for now. Stay safe.
You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.
I will write about them in this email. But first, here's a reminder I got on Tuesday that the virus does not care about what we want....
Yes, I have Covid for the second time in less than six months.
My first case in January was very mild and very mysterious. I can't tell where I got it from. After an initial positive PCR test, I tested negative on a series of antigen tests and a PCR test. I felt under the weather for a few days, and then had a low-grade persistent cough for a couple weeks. End of story.
I figured my experience demonstrated two things: just how good Omicron was at infecting people, and just how good vaccines are at keeping Covid from getting really dangerous. (Here's a graph of New York State hospitalizations over the past year: blue is for unvaccinated people, red for vaccinated.)
The Omicron wave was in the middle of a fall at the time, and it kept falling through the spring. As the weather warmed, it got easier to meet with people at sidewalk tables for dinner, for drinks on patios, or just bumping into each other on the sidewalk. I adjusted my risk budget, sometimes venturing inside restaurants or stores without my mask. But when I flew to West Virginia last month to give a talk, I masked from the moment I got in a taxi to the airport until I arrived in my hotel room. And in advance of the trip, I got my second booster--even if it was a vaccine designed in 2020, when nobody thought of Omicron as anything but a Greek letter.
That all worked fine, until last Friday. I won't say exactly where I was that evening, for the sake of the privacy of the people I was with, but suffice to say it was a small local business throwing an open house. And it was great. I caught up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in quite a while, thanks to the pandemic and to the damage the pandemic did to my social skills. I walked home with my wife thinking that this was precisely the sort of thing that I had missed since Covid showed up.
Saturday morning, our host informed us with regret that he woke up feeling ill and tested positive. We started testing ourselves, but came up negative. On Monday afternoon, I felt run down--so run down I had to take a nap. I still tested negative, making me think I might just have a bad cold. I had a night of aches and a 102 degree fever, and the next day I tested positive.
I stayed in bed for a day and a half, my fever and aches abating, leaving me with just a lot of fatigue. I binged some TV, did some reading for a new project, and got back to writing towards the end of the week. I feel fairly normal again now, but today's antigen test is comically aggressive. This is what it looked like a few SECONDS after I put the swab in the cartridge: the positive line was a deep burgundy banner while the control line was just starting to form.
The version of Omicron I got infected with in January--probably the subvariant BA.1--clearly didn't protect me against reinfection. I wouldn't be surprised if I got hit last week with BA.4 or BA.5, which are surging here in Connecticut and can evade immunity from earlier forms of the virus. There's no reason to rule out more subvariants--or some other variant entirely--evolving in the months to come and creating a new risk of reinfection.Still, my combination of a previous infection and vaccinations dramatically reduced my odds of getting a severe case of Covid, and for that I'm grateful. But getting Covid a few times a year is not a prospect I relish. A Covid infection, even a mild one, brings with it a risk of long-running symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue. And some new research indicates that repeated infections raises the subsequent risk for a lot of bad outcomes like heart attacks and strokes. Dr. Bob Wachter of the University of California San Francisco summed up the current research the other day in this piece for the Washington Post.
The spring decline in the United States stalled in April, and we've climbed to a plateau of about 100,000 new reported cases every day. I'm sure that the real number is far higher, since at-home tests rarely get reported and the positivity rate is high pretty much everywhere. It would be nice, 2.5 years into the pandemic, for the country to do regular randomized covid surveys, so scientists could make good estimates of the fraction of people in the U.S. with an infection. The United Kingdom does this fairly well, and the results are striking. Officially, the U.K. is logging about 20,000 new cases a day. But 3.35% of people in the survey turn out to have covid, which means that about 1.8 million Brits are actually positive.
Things could well get worse in the fall, when people start heading inside, immunity from earlier vaccines wane, and new subvariants possibly arrive. The U.S. government is making moves to get more people boosted, but companies are only just starting to test vaccines tailored for BA.4 and BA.5. By the time they'd be ready in the fall, will we be dealing with BA.7?
Isolation while I'm infected is a drag, a stark contrast from the happy party where I got infected in the first place. And once I finally test clear of the virus, I will probably dial back my social interactions, paring down my risk budget. Which is not what I had expected to be doing in summer 2022.
I wish you good luck in evading this virus and cobbling together a good summer in spite of it. And now, as promised at the top of the email, here are a few things to take your mind off the pandemic:
On Monday, I wrote about the first decade of CRISPR. I've been reporting on this genome-editing technology for years--in this 2015 piece for Quanta, for example, and at more length in She Has Her Mother's Laugh in 2018. Observing its development has been astonishing. It's important not to think of CRISPR as magic that has solved all our problems, or as a limitless power to do harm. But it's also important to recognize its progress. For example, ten years after CRISPR was first demonstrated as a potential tool, at least one company is on the verge of applying to the FDA to use it to reverse a hereditary disease.
Today, I look into a subject I explored last year in Life's Edge: how can we know if there's life on other planets? The James Webb Space Telescope, launched this Christmas, is just now starting to look at planets around other stars. It may be able to determine if they have atmospheres that could support life--the first step to the possible discovery of a biosignature.
I also wrote this month about some weird tiny life here on Earth. First, a virus that has wiped out hundreds of millions of rabbits in Australia--and thereby serves as a warning that viruses do not necessarily evolve to be more benign. And giant bacteria, the size and shape of your eyebrows, hiding in plain sight all this time.
It's almost enough to make you forget you have Covid!
That’s all for now. Stay safe.
You can information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Goodreads, LinkedIn, and Facebook. If someone shared this email with you, you can subscribe to it here.
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