Almost exactly 12 months ago, America’s pandemic curve hit a pivot point. Case counts peaked—and then dipped, and dipped, and dipped, on a slow but sure grade, until, somewhere around the end of May, the numbers flattened and settled, for several brief, wonderful weeks, into their lowest nadir so far.I refuse to use the term hot vax summer (oops, just did), but its sentiment isn’t exactly wrong.
In naked-mole-rat societies, the royals do not wield scepters or don crowns. But that’s not to say that their majesty is subtle. The toothy, pruney rodents live in close-knit underground communities of up to about 300 members apiece, ruled by a tyrant queen that refuses to be mistaken for just another balding pleb.
If the United States has been riding a COVID-19 ’coaster for the past two-plus years, New York and a flush of states in the Northeast have consistently been seated in the train’s front car. And right now, in those parts of the country, coronavirus cases are, once again, going up. The rest of America may soon follow, now that BA.2—the more annoying, faster-spreading sister of the original Omicron variant, BA.
Last Friday, Lakshmi Ganapathi’s son turned 5, and finally became eligible for his first Pfizer COVID shot. Ganapathi’s family had been anticipating that moment for more than a year, yet as of late, she can’t help but feel the slightest bit deflated. At first, the COVID vaccines’ trickle down the age brackets felt worth the wait because the shots were doing such a stellar job at blocking symptoms.
When a boa constrictor coils its midriff around a wriggling rat, it’s easy to feel sorry for the soon-to-be-lifeless rodent, its blood supply so blocked that its heart stops pumping.But consider, too, the plight of the snake. The curly-fry crush of a boa—which can exert pressures of up to 25 pounds per square inch—doesn’t just squish the life out of its prey.
At this very moment, the United States, as a whole, remains in its legit pandemic lull. Coronavirus case counts and hospitalizations are lower than they’ve been since last summer. There’s now a nice, chonky gap between us and January’s Omicron peak.And yet. Outbreaks have erupted across Asia.
About 18 years ago, while delivering a talk at a CDC conference, Gregory Poland punked 2,000 of his fellow scientists. Ten minutes into his lecture, a member of the audience, under Poland’s instruction, raced up to the podium with a slip of paper. Poland skimmed the note and looked up, stony-faced. “Colleagues, I am unsure of what to say,” he said. “We have just been notified of a virus that’s been detected in the U.S.
For male Santa Marta harlequin toads, sex is an exercise in patience.The ping-pong-ball-size frogs, which are native to a mountainous strip in northern Colombia, spend most of their days milling about the region’s burbling brooks, hoping to chance upon a mate. They don’t often get lucky: Only rarely, for a few days a year around the start of the rainy season, will the species’ much-larger females venture down from the trees to flit through these loose froggy frats.
The world was slow to recognize long COVID as one of the most serious consequences of the coronavirus. Six months into the pathogen’s tear across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 was still considered an acute airway infection that would spark a weeks-long illness at most; anyone who experienced symptoms for longer could be expected to be dismissed by droves of doctors.
If the coronavirus has one singular goal—repeatedly infecting us—it’s only gotten better at realizing it, from Alpha to Delta to Omicron. And it is nowhere near done. “Omicron is not the worst thing we could have imagined,” says Jemma Geoghegan, an evolutionary virologist at the University of Otago, in New Zealand. Somewhere out there, a Rho, a Tau, or maybe even an Omega is already in the works.Not all variants, though, are built the same.
And just like that, the national attitude on COVID is flipping like a light switch. As the United States descends the bumpy back end of the Omicron wave, governors and mayors up and down the coasts are extinguishing indoor mask mandates and pulling back proof-of-vaccination protocols.
In many ways, the pandemic has never felt quite so paradoxical. In the United States, cases and hospitalizations are falling, and millions of people are as vaccinated as they can be. A rash of coastal-state mayors and governors is peeling back mask mandates—a stateside mirror of countries such as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, where pandemic restrictions have all but disappeared. Things are definitively better than they were just a few weeks ago.
When researchers consider the classic five categories of taste—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami—there’s little disagreement over which of them is the least understood. Creatures crave sweet for sugar and calories. A yen for umami, or savoriness, keeps many animals nourished with protein. Salt’s essential for bodies to stay in fluid balance, and for nerve cells to signal. And a sensitivity to bitterness can come in handy with the whole not-poisoning-yourself thing.
After months and months of being told to wait, then wait, then wait some more, parents eager to vaccinate their littlest kids against COVID-19 have been gifted some good and very confusing news.
Two years into the pandemic, and two months into Omicron’s globe-crushing surge, our COVID-19 vaccines are finally on the cusp of a federally sanctioned update. To counter the new variant’s uncanny knack for slipping past antibodies roused by our first-generation shots, Moderna and Pfizer have both kick-started clinical trials to see how Omicron-specific vaccines fare in people.
Pour one out for Delta, the SARS-CoV-2 variant that Season 3 of the pandemic seems intent on killing off. After holding star billing through the summer and fall of 2021, Delta’s spent the past several weeks getting absolutely walloped by its feistier cousin Omicron—a virus that’s adept at both blitzing in and out of airways and dodging the antibodies that vaccines and other variants raise.
For many months now, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine has been slowly making its way into smaller arms in smaller doses—from teens to adolescents to elementary-school-age kids in the fall. Now it’s just the under-5 crowd left, and the word on the lips of parents raring to protect their children is still, simply, when. Somehow, no one yet seems to know.
For weeks, the watchword on Omicron in much of America has been some form of phew. A flurry of reports has encouraged a relatively rosy view of the variant, compared with some of its predecessors. Omicron appears to somewhat spare the lungs. Infected laboratory mice and hamsters seem to handily fight it off. Proportionally, fewer of the people who catch it wind up hospitalized or dead. All of this has allowed a deceptively reassuring narrative to take root and grow: Omicron is mild.
If you’re trapped in COVID isolation right now, you’re making muffins. If that’s literally true, good for you, and I can recommend these. But I’m talking metaphorically. Right now, the infection you’re nursing, and the contagious risk it carries, is—hear me out—raw batter in an oven. You really, really don’t want to remove it too soon.Yes, we are in crisis right now. The pandemic’s been raging for two years, and I am talking about muffins.
On Tuesday, the CDC officially dropped the detailed, 1,800-word version of its new isolation guidance for people who have been infected by the coronavirus. So far, the best way I’ve got to sum it up is this: Hunker down for five days instead of the typical 10, then do what you want. ¯_(ツ)_/¯Okay, sorry, that’s overly simplistic.
For the past two years, Marie, a 30-something student in New York, had the right idea about COVID-19: She didn’t want to get it. Then, in the middle of December, as the antibody-dodging Omicron swept through her state, the coronavirus found her all the same. But Marie’s three vaccines helped keep her illness short and manageable.
Walter Barker has, since the fall of 2020, had five doses of COVID-19 vaccine. He’s already starting to ponder when he might need a sixth.Barker, a 38-year-old office worker in New York, received his first two doses a year ago, as part of an AstraZeneca vaccine trial. But the shots, which haven’t been authorized by the FDA, couldn’t get him into some venues. Sick of having to test every time he went to a Yankees game, Barker nabbed a pair of Moderna injections in the spring.
With Omicron, everything is sped up. The new variant is spreading fast and far. At a time when Delta was already sprinting around the country, Omicron not only caught up but overtook it, jumping from an estimated 13 to 73 percent of U.S. cases in a single week. We have less time to make decisions and less room to course-correct when they are wrong. Whereas we had months to prepare for Delta in the U.S., we’ve had only weeks for Omicron.
Killer T cells, as their name might imply, are not known for their mercy. When these immunological assassins happen upon a cell that’s been hijacked by a virus, their first instinct is to butcher. The killer T punches holes in the compromised cell and pumps in toxins to destroy it from the inside out. The cell shrinks and collapses; its perforated surface erupts in bubbles and boils, which slough away until little is left but fragmentary mush.
And there it is, the first trickle of data to confirm it. In the eyes of vaccinated immune systems, Omicron looks like a big old weirdo—but also, a kind of familiar one. That’s the verdict served up by several preliminary studies and press releases out this week, describing how well antibodies, isolated from the blood of vaccinated people, recognize and sequester the new variant in a lab.
If it doesn’t happen with this variant, it’ll happen with the next one, or maybe the next. Some version of this coronavirus is bound to flummox our vaccines. In the past two years, SARS-CoV-2 has hopscotched across the globe, rejiggering its genome to better coexist with us. The latest coronavirus contender, Omicron, has more than 50 mutations, making it the most heavily altered coronavirus variant of concern that researchers have identified to date.
As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday.Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast.
As fall dips into winter in the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus has served up the holiday gift that no one, absolutely no one, asked for: a new variant of concern, dubbed Omicron by the World Health Organization on Friday.Omicron, also known as B.1.1.529, was first detected in Botswana and South Africa earlier this month, and very little is known about it so far. But the variant is moving fast.
Albatrosses do not fall in love the way humans do.When the birds couple up, it’s almost always for keeps. Their lives start lonely—albatross parents lay only one egg at a time, and may leave their offspring unattended for days—and at just a few months old, each juvenile embarks on an epic solo voyage at sea. They fly for months and months and months, learning what it is to be a bird.
In the spring of 2019, the biologist Tore Slagsvold headed into the forests outside Oslo to stage a series of tiny crime scenes. He didn’t need bullets, or bootprints, or even bodies or blood; only a handful of plush, white feathers.Slagsvold’s audience was avian—the region’s blue tits and pied flycatchers. And with any luck, his faux, fluffy evidence was going to scare the bejesus out of them.