COVID Booster & Cases Update

Since December of 2019, the world has altered the way we live due to a Corona Virus outbreak that began in Wuhan, China. It has reorganized the way we live our day to day lives in an attempt to not get ourselves or anyone sick. Since December of 2019, COVID has appeared on every continent in the world. Vaccines were developed to resist against the Alpha strain, which was the original variant. Since then, the virus has mutated to the Delta variant and the now the Lambda variant. The Delta variant has more data because it's further spread across the world than the Lambda variant. The Delta variant can still be contracted to fully vaccinated individuals and they can still spread the virus, but the vaccine has proven to decrease the severity of the case and drastically reduce the chance of hospitalization and death from the virus. The Lambda variant was recently discovered in Peru, and their CoronaVac vaccine, which was manufactured in China, does not appear to be very effective against the Lambda variant and it could be the scariest variant thus far.

Across the world, COVID has had a major impact to many countries. Medical News Today states, "the virus has resulted in more than 205 million infections and more than 4 million deaths." That is nothing short of dumbfounding. Most of the deaths did come rom pre-vaccine, but unvaccinated individuals that get COVID are at a higher risk of deaths, and still about 30% of America's population is unvaccinated, and we are still seeing deaths consistently from COVID in America.

Last week, there was some talk of a third booster shot and if it would be effective for individuals to get a third booster shot. MNT states, "Today, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has authorized the distribution of third booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for those who are immunocompromised." It's not surprising that the vaccine requires a booster, there was some data to show that getting a third booster increases the antibodies needed to defeat the variants. I also wrote about it in a previous article, and young healthy people are expected to have effective vaccines for about 12 months. Hopefully with a third booster, we will have more reliable data to see how effective it is against all the variants.