REGIONAL- With the Omicron wave of the coronavirus pandemic now in rapid decline, health professionals and common folk alike are wondering what comes next. New variants that are anticipated to show up may or may not behave the same as prior ones.
But nationally-recognized infectious disease expert Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CIDRAP, at the University of Minnesota, has a strong recommendation regardless of what the future holds: Get vaccinated and boosted.
In his weekly podcast last Friday, Osterholm said boosters should no longer be considered an extra, optional item, but a standard part of a three-dose regimen that provides much greater protection than an initial vaccination series alone.
“Please, if I can implore you all, if you have a grandma or grandpa, a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a son or a daughter, a friend, somebody who might not be your friend but you still don’t want anything bad to happen to them, please help them get that third dose. It’s important,” Osterholm said. “The data are surely confirming that this benefit of the third dose against severe illness, hospitalizations and deaths extends all the way down to 20-year-olds. We have to start thinking about a three-dose vaccine as the primary series. Skip that term booster.”
Osterholm expressed concern that while COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are now in decline, current levels are still running as high or higher than at any time during the two-year pandemic, and that the push to lift mitigation practices is happening without any agreed-upon health standards to guide those actions.
“Here we are celebrating what appears to be a real victory, and yet we are experiencing peaks in cases at this moment that exceed that of previous peaks when the house was on fire,” he said. “It kind of reminds me of those Minnesota winter days that after having five consecutive days of 20-below weather, it gets to 25 degrees Fahrenheit, and all of a sudden we are outside practically in short sleeves because it’s so much warmer. But if that same 25-degree day occurred in June, we would be freezing. And that’s what we’re experiencing right now.”
The relaxation of mitigation efforts is happening at a time when only 64 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, using the two-dose definition, Osterholm said, and with research confirming a significant reduction in vaccine effectiveness with only two doses, COVID strains still threaten a wide swath of the population if they don’t get vaccinated and boosted.
“Because only 42.9 percent of those (fully vaccinated) have actually received that third dose, that means overall, only about 27 percent of Americans right now really have the adequate protection from vaccination that they should have,” Osterholm said. “And unfortunately, the rate of new vaccine doses being administered daily is also decreasing, with the majority of doses administered recently being those third doses. Good news, but we are still far, far short of what we need to do.”
Osterholm said that while talk and research has been ongoing about having a fourth vaccine shot, and perhaps more, public health officials must adapt somehow to a public that appears to have little appetite right now for such recommendations.
However, recent studies reported Monday in the New York Times suggest that additional boosters may only be necessary for select segments of the population, such as those over age 65 or those with compromised immune systems.
Most research on the efficacy of vaccines has focused on the production of antibodies, which surges and then declines over time. A third dose of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines appears to produce a wider range of antibodies that could protect people from new variants.
And antibodies are only part of the body’s immune system. Four studies referenced by the Times article focused on T cells, which have long-lasting memory responses that could provide a level of protection from COVID variants for months, and perhaps years. A 2003 outbreak in China exposed people to a different form of coronavirus than that which has caused the COVID pandemic, and T cell response to that virus has lasted for more than 17 years.
B cells are another component of the immune system that can boost production of antibodies within days of being exposed to a virus, which can prevent or limit the seriousness of an illness.
These effects have been demonstrated with a three-dose COVID vaccine regimen, reinforcing Osterholm’s overall message from three days prior to the report.
“Please understand you may not prevent an Omicron-related infection right now with your third dose,” he said. “But the chances you have of avoiding a very severe illness, a hospitalization and even a death is absolutely one of the benefits of being vaccinated with that third dose. So, I can’t urge you any more strongly than that to get vaccinated with that third dose.”
Regional data
The seven-day case rate in St. Louis County as of Feb. 18, 64.7, is identical to the rate during the peak of the spring 2021 wave in early April, and similar to that in mid-September when the Delta-driven wave was on the rise. That represents a decline of nearly 85 percent in just one month.
Overall, the trend in ICU bed availability in northeast Minnesota has been positive. In the past week, as many as 14 staffed ICU beds have been available, although only six were available on Tuesday.
Soudan was the only zip code monitored by the Timberjay that did not have any new cases reported by the Minnesota Department of Health in its weekly zip report last Thursday. Elsewhere, the decline in new cases compared to the prior week was uneven. Ely had 30 new cases, four more than were reported the week before. Cook had 13 new cases, Embarrass and Tower each had seven, and Orr had three.