Here’s an overdue case update. Cases continue to rise for the US, California, and San Diego County. The timing of the current US peak makes it clear that the bump is directly related to the Thanksgiving holiday, starting less than a week after Thanksgiving, and after cases had started to come down. LA County currently has more that 100,000 active cases, more than twice the number than the next highest county, Cook County, the home of Chicago.

New case peaks have left the Northern states and are now centered in the Southwest and Northeast.

San Diego County now has 24,000 active cases, far higher that the 4,000 we had at the low point between peaks 2 and 3.

More on ADE and Vaccines: Some potential very good news for me on the vaccine front. For months I’ve been warning about ADE, the phenomena that some viruses can be even more dangerous in a second infection than the first. Karen Parrott, a former colleague at Quest Diagnostics, often provides me with interesting COVID related stuff. This week she sent me a podcast featuring Paul Offit, the developer of the first Rotavirus vaccine and an author of many books on immunology and vaccine production. I am not an immunologist but he is. More importantly, he’s the first authoritative person that I’ve heard in the media speak at length on the ADE issue and how it relates to COVID. He claims in the attached clip (time stamped at 14:40) that the current vaccines do not appear to trigger the ADE pathway in animal models, and human trial subject never displayed the signs that ADE was involved in secondary exposures. This difference from SARS-1 and MERS may be related to the fact the SARS-2 is much less virulent than these other 2 viruses.

This makes me more optimistic that the vaccine will be safe from an ADE perspective. I won’t be able to get the vaccine for some time, but I am more willing to get it now than ever before. Several physicians I know are eager to get it as soon as it is available. This is great news!

In the interest of full disclosure, I will point out the some patients receiving the vaccine the UK have experienced some injection site irritation, especially in those with allergies. This is actually somewhat normal for vaccines, and appears to pass within a few days.

In addition, now that mRNA vaccines have been produced for the first time, future development of this new kind of vaccine should be even faster than this time!

Don’t fear, but be smart,
Erik