Recent data hint at this possibility. Past brushes with the virus or the original vaccine seem to mold, or even muffle, people’s reactions to bivalent shots—“I have no doubt about that,” Jenna Guthmiller, an immunologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.
Policies are what normalize behaviors, says Daniel Goldberg, a public-health ethicist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. If that process begins to operate in reverse—“if you always just permit what people are doing to set your policies, guaranteed, you’re going to preserve the status quo.”
Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, suggests starting with the CDC’s community-levels map, which assigns counties colors using a combination of three metrics (one of which is cases). Green is low, yellow is medium, and red is high. If your county is in the red, then “no more data-sleuthing needed,”she wrote in an email—start wearing a mask indoors.
Some recent research shows that even once they’ve been infected, the vaccinated are less likely to spread the coronavirus than the unvaccinated. “We’re back in this category of, Yeah, it can happen, but it seems to be a very rare event,” Ross Kedl, an immunology professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me.
In later decades, researchers described other worm species that dropped segments from several chromosomes during early rounds of cell division in embryos. “But they didn’t have the technology to really explore it,” says Richard Davis, an emeritus molecular biologist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, in Aurora.
Elizabeth Carlton, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Public Health, offered a three-step approach. First, ensure that everyone in your party who can be vaccinated is vaccinated. Then figure out if you have high-risk attendees (perhaps an unvaccinated child or an immunosuppressed uncle). If you do, consider adding additional layers of protection, such as testing beforehand or moving your celebration outside.
“Having a PFO is not a risk factor for stroke in general,” John Carroll, a cardiologist and a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, told me. “In most people,” he said, “it’s an innocent remnant of the fetal circulation. You could close a quarter of the U.S. population and probably bring benefit to a very small number of those people.”
Sean O’Leary, a pediatrician and a professor at the University of Colorado [School of Medicine], told me that families that include both kids under 12 and people who can’t be vaccinated or are at high risk for severe COVID-19 might want to be extra mindful of their kids’ exposure, because they could pass it to someone who’s not protected. He also cautioned that “we don’t really have good data yet” on how severe the Delta variant of the coronavirus, which is on track to quickly become dominant in the U.S., is in children, though it does seem to be more transmissible among people of all ages.
January 12, 2023