The Coronavirus Variant

This is the third in a multi-part blog series that I am doing for my experience with the novel coronavirus, a.k.a. COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

March and April of 2021 saw a small rise in COVID infections as businesses started to open up more and people ventured out for Easter and Spring Break. All while three vaccines were being administered to the U.S. public as quickly as possible: Pfizer (2 doses; at least 2 weeks apart), Moderna (2 doses; at least 3 weeks apart), and Johnson & Johnson (1 dose). While the thought of having to only endure one shot sounds appealing, the effectiveness of the vaccines vary.

It was tough to schedule a vaccine at first as there was quite the rush of people willing to do so. I can only write about my personal experience with scheduling and say that it was initially rough. The Washington State website for scheduling was not great, and the state-run vaccination centers sprinkled around King County were fully booked, but I was eventually able to make an appointment at a Walgreens Pharmacy 20 miles away from home for the Moderna vaccine. This occurred on April 7, 2021, but when I arrived, I was informed that they had run out of the Moderna vaccine and were instead going to give me Pfizer. This was good news to me as I've heard about less drastic side effects and slightly better effectiveness.

Between this time, Bethany was able to schedule her dose 1 of Pfizer at one of the aforementioned state-run centers since they opened up vaccine reservations to all adults on March 31, 2021. My dose 2 was administered on May 5, 2021, and two weeks later, I was considered fully vaccinated. Side effects were quite mild for me on both doses. With dose 1, I just had a very sore arm that would wake me up at night whenever I rolled over onto it in bed. For dose 2, I ended up working until 5 a.m. the next morning, so I didn't really have time to think about my side effects. When I woke up, I just felt drained and exhausted with a small headache and chills, but those cleared by the third day.

It was around April that I was starting to feel a bit frustrated with my job. We had gotten 10x busier due to the pandemic without seeing 10x the increased pay, time off, or appreciation. While getting to work from home most of the week has its conveniences, I was working 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. 5-days per week and was getting burnt out. Folks were assuming I was available through the whole day. During big streaming events, Microsoft Production Studios found it vital to continue 48 or 72-hour live productions that had us working crazy hours. My work put me in a hotel during the weekend of our big snowstorm here in the Pacific Northwest and I worked over 65 hours that week. The SolarWinds hack back in December had me working over 72 hours one week.

On April 19th, my friend Ricky (who I had worked with at Microsoft and have known since high school/college) reached out asking if I would be open to a new position his company was hiring for. I'm never against shopping yourself around for other options, so I decided to apply with my intention to just get some more interview experience under my belt. What I didn't count on was that I would actually really like all of the team members I interviewed with. Also, the company is growing and there's a lot of potential around it. Finally, they wanted me and expressed a lot of trust in my abilities.

I won't go into more details on the career change, but it happened. If you want to read more about it, I did a separate blog post for that here. I guess to bring the conversation back to COVID, my new boss prefers when we are in the office to work as opposed to the work from home that most companies are still adhering to. I'm not particularly against it, but I am having to readjust to waking up early, getting showered and ready, and commuting to the office. By the time I get back home, I am exhausted. Certainly, part of it is because I am exercising my brain everyday with new things to learn. But last week, I only had to go into the office twice.

And that's because we are seeing infected numbers rise again. Our new current spike in infections is due to three main reasons that I can see:

1) Easing of restrictions. On May 13, 2021, the CDC announced updated guidance that people fully vaccinated against COVID-19 do not need to wear masks or practice social distancing indoors or outdoors. It was the George W. Bush Mission Accomplished update of the COVID world. People got too comfortable. They got lazy. We re-opened too fast. One week, I went to a Mariners game at T-Mobile Park where I had to show my CDC vaccination card, wear a mask while inside the stadium, and sit at least six feet apart from anyone else. The next week, I could sit immediately next to a stranger with no mask at all. On July 27th, the CDC reversed its indoor mask policy saying that fully vaccinated people should wear masks indoors again. Pretty much all places are not enforcing this and allowing customers to choose whether they want to wear a mask or not. 

2) The unvaccinated. As of the time I'm writing this, the U.S. is about 50% vaccinated. That's a really disappointing number and it should be much higher. What's strange is I've seen hesitancy on both sides of the political or religious aisle. 

3) The variant. In December of 2020, India identified a new variant in the SARS-CoV-2 virus strain that is even more contagious and severe. The CDC states that it is more transmissible than the common cold and the flu. On June 22, 2021, U.S. infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci stated that the Delta COVID-19 Variant is the greatest threat to U.S. pandemic response. Shortly after, on July 7th, the Delta Variant became the dominant coronavirus strain in our country.

The good news is that many people are taking notice, and the 7-day average of newly vaccinated is up 11% from last week and 44% over the past two weeks. It is my belief that these are all the people who were not particularly against the vaccine, but might have been against being some of the first to get it. My worry is that there's still a large proportion of the public that are still hesitant to get the vaccine.

Japan and the Olympic Committee decided to go forth with the Summer Olympics after being postponed last year due to the pandemic. It was weird to see "Tokyo 2020" and "2020 Summer Olympics" all over TV, but I know the games brought comfort to some folks. Still, Japan has been having a tough time, as expected. During the middle of the Games, it was reported that Tokyo surpassed their one-day COVID infection record with 5,000 cases for the first time. The Delta Variant is causing 90% of the infections in the capital city.

So now we are seeing some disturbing news about Tokyo or Japan possibly covering up the arrival of a new strain right before the Olympics called the Lambda Variant. This variant was first discovered in Peru in December 2020 and has shown up in over 1,000 cases in the U.S. already. While it currently does not hold as severe of a rating as the Delta Variant, that could change. It certainly won't be the last variant to spread either. The longer we go without masks and without vaccinations, the more likely additional variants will emerge in the future. This is because as coronavirus continues to jump from person to person, with each new infection, it changes a little bit, just like any virus does. If we stay the course, eventually, one or more of these variants will learn how to evade vaccine-induced immunity. And that would almost put us back at square one.