Houston Chronicle by Lisa Gray 4/9/2021
During the coronavirus crisis, vaccine researcher Peter Hotez has become one of the country’s most trusted explainers of science — and so beloved in Houston that Antone’s recently named a po’boy after him. At the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, he and his team have developed a COVID-19 vaccine set to be manufactured in India. He’s also dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.Could you give us an overview of the situation now with COVID-19, the variants and the vaccines?
In the U.S., we’re seeing a mixed picture. In some parts of the country, we’re seeing what some are calling “the fourth wave.†It’s hitting the upper Midwest pretty hard. Michigan is the worst-affected state. Also up in the northeast — New York, New Jersey, New England — those numbers are starting to go up. We might be beginning to see that in Florida now. There’s been about a 20% increase in cases over the last 14 days.
Most of that is due to one of the variants of concern, the B.1.1.7 variant that first arose in the United Kingdom. We all predicted this was going to happen; we just didn’t know how extensive it’s going to be.
The good news is we’re also vaccinating the American people. I think we’ll be vaccinated fully or close to it by the summer. So we know there’s an end to this fourth peak. It’s just a matter of how big the amplitude is — whether the peak is a small hill or whether it’s a mountain.
With the B.1.1.7 variant, we’ve heard alarming news lately about children. Could you talk about that?
The B.1.1.7 variant first arose in southeast England in September. By December it dominated the British Isles. It’s a bad actor. It’s more transmissible than anything we’ve seen before, with higher hospitalization rates and higher mortality rates.
To make things worse, we’re starting to see now, in the upper Midwest, a number of young adults getting very sick. The COVID-19 narrative has always been that it affects older individuals. That was never entirely true, especially among African American and Hispanic populations. But we’re seeing now a lot of young adults get sick. That gives me pause for concern — as does its transmissibility among young people.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/health/article/Dr-Peter-Hotez-return-to-normal-covid-summer-gray-16087488.php
