The last few weeks have flown past. It's been busier than normal.
The CDC guidance has shifted back towards masks, and Nevada has gone back to mask mandates indoors. I can understand the frustration and confusion because we had made good progress. Because we really had made some progress with almost 50% of the population fully vaccinated. The problem is that the facts on the ground have changed, which has led to a change of strategy. Some people are confused by the mixture of "vaccines work" and "wear a mask" because they seem like contradictory statements. And while social media isn't exactly great for long-form discussions of complicated topics, this is a space where I can write multiple long paragraphs with links to sources about what I understand is happening. And I'm going to do that.
First, to the claim that "vaccines work." The heart of this question is, "Works at what?" While we might hope that vaccines will bring us full and absolute immunity to illness, that's not actually how it works. Vaccines train our bodies to respond more effectively to viral particles in the body so that we reduce the level of infection when exposed and reduce the chances of getting sick. It's very effective at that: "The CDC reports that as of July 19, of 5,601 hospitalized breakthrough cases, 27% were asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19 and of 1,141 fatal cases, 26% were asymptomatic or not related to COVID-19." It's worth noting that 5,601 hospitalized breakthrough cases out of over 150 million fully vaccinated people is a very small percent of the vaccinated population. This is why just a couple weeks ago, this was characterized as a "pandemic of the unvaccinated."
So if vaccines don't give absolute immunity, how many people are still getting sick from COVID? As of about mid-July, "approximately 153,000 symptomatic breakthrough cases are estimated to have occurred." Again, that's in the context of over 150 million fully vaccinated people. That's still a small number. And we should actually expect more breakthrough cases as time wears on. But the real comparison is against what isn't happening. It's not 153,000 breakthrough cases compared to zero sick people if the vaccine were magically perfect. It's 153,000 breakthrough cases compared to however many cases there would have been if there were no vaccines. There have been over 35 million cases since the start of the pandemic. Vaccines have been broadly available since about April, so that's what we've seen over a 3 month period without any real major shutdowns. By comparison, in the first 3 months of COVID, we went from 0 to about 2.6 million cases and that includes the period when everything completely shut down.
But then why are masks needed? Unless you're wearing a properly-fitting N-95 mask or correctly double-masking a cloth mask over a surgical mask, your mask isn't really about protecting you. It's about protecting others. The original logic of the end of the mask mandate came from data that showed that vaccinated people that carried COVID has significantly lower viral loads. This meant that even the asymptomatic vaccinated people were unlikely to spread the disease. And that meant that vaccinated people could confidently go about without masks and know that they weren't likely to make others sick. But the delta variant is different: "[The CDC] found no significant difference in the viral load present in the breakthrough infections occurring in fully vaccinated people and the other cases, suggesting the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with the coronavirus is similar." In other words, vaccinated people are once again spreaders. And so we all need to mask up because that's how we reduce the spread of the disease.
And there's other data that is signaling concerns. For example, "Chinese scientists described viral loads that were about roughly 1,000 times higher with Delta than earlier strains." And there was evidence that 74% of people in a regional outbreak in Provincetown, Massachusettes were vaccinated.
And while this is uncomfortable news, it's important not to lose track of the two bottom line facts: Vaccinations are the best option for avoiding serious illness or death. Wearing a mask protects others if you happen to be sick and not know it. And so there should be no contradiction or confusion with the idea that "vaccines work" and "wear a mask" are valid operating assumptions at the exact same time.
I don't want to restart the social distancing counter again because I don't think we're quite there yet. And I honestly don't think that we'll go back into a full shutdown again beacuse the political will probably isn't there. And that might make things a little bit ugly going into the Fall. We'll just have to wait and see and hope for the best.
So with that all squared away, the last few weeks have been pretty hectic. I've been continuing to crank away at my class prep. I've got a complete set of notes for 3 out of my 4 classes, and the last class has about 1-1.5 months of notes worked out. And that last class is the capstone course for the data science students, which means we're going to be spending much of the last part of the semester working on projects. And so, in some sense, I'm pretty much done. Over the next couple weeks, I need to start to create my course webpages and load all of that onto Canvas. The first day of class is August 23, which is just about 3 weeks from now.
I'm in some ongoing conversations with the folks at the American Institute of Mathematics for getting my textbook onto their approved list. They asked for some feedback from the instructors that are using it, and I've provided that for them. One of the major challenges is that it doesn't fit into the "traditional" line of texts, and so they're struggling a bit on whether it should even be considered for inclusion on their list. So we'll have to see what happens.
I ended up doing nothing with the ATMI data this summer. I just had too many other things going on to be able to set aside the type of time I need to have in order to work through the data and see what information I can pull out of it. However, I'm going to continue to collect new data this fall. It'd rather have data that goes unstudied than have space to study and no data.
Along the same lines, I've done nothing with the feedback from the revise and resubmit I got for the article I wrote. I want to get back to it, but it's probably not going to happen until at least partway through the semester, if not even further. One of the things on my radar for "partway through the semester" is building the STAT 152 class for the data science program. I'm actually looking forward to running that class with a programming/simulation emphasis, but I really need to have some space to think about it and run through everything.
There's some other stuff going on, but it will have to wait for another day. It's getting kind of late, and I am feeling a bit fatigued from the last couple months. The summer has blurred by quickly, but hopefully things will soon settle down into a more normal routine that has a bit more space for me to slow down.
Still doing a lot of traveling in and out of California. Hummus is being made regularly, as are chilaquiles. Every time I make the salsa, it comes out a little different. Sometimes it's spicy and sometimes not, which is just the nature of agricultural products and especially those jalapenos. And Thor is doing well. I sometimes think he's beyond spoiled because he gets so much lap time. Don't ask about the piano. You know exactly how much I've played it if you spend any time reading these things. Each day is another day, and things are always moving foward. Sometimes, it's enough to say: Life is good.
