Noses are the entrance ramp to COVID-19
Can we talk about your honker?
That’s right, your schnoz.
If you are vaccinated against COVID-19, your beak can nonetheless house large amounts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus Delta variant, as much as an unvaccinated person would have. You could be very infectious despite not being sick.
That’s not good.
It’s pretty different from what we thought a few weeks ago, which was that vaccinated people did not play a significant role in the chains of transmission spreading the virus. Confused?
Let’s back up and remind ourselves of a few things.
SARS-CoV-2 is a virus. COVID-19 is the disease people get when successfully infected by the virus.
Being vaccinated does not keep SARS-CoV-2 from getting in your body and trying to make trouble. Being vaccinated, scientists say, is more like putting a fire extinguisher in your kitchen. It doesn’t mean you will never have a fire. It means you will have a way to fight the fire and, most of the time, put it out.
Back in the bad old days, SARS-CoV-2 would enter your body through your upper airways, and then treat the rest of your body — your lungs, your blood, your heart, your other organs — like a trip to Paris.
If you’re vaccinated, SARSCoV-2 might still enter your body through the upper airways but then find it very difficult to party in any of those other places, which are now armed to repel it. Instead of going to Paris, it gets stuck in French customs for a few days until it decides that life is not worth living, a reaction we can identify with.
The Delta variant seems to allow a lot of obnoxious, noisy, trouble-making viral tourists to cluster up there around the arrival gates, and even though they can’t go pile into your cardiopulmonary spaces as if those were the Champs Elysee, they can mill around the waiting area and maybe catch a Ryan Air shuttle to somewhere else.
And “somewhere else” might not be vaccinated. Or might be unable to fully utilize the benefits of the vaccine because of immuno-suppression.
This is a strong argument for wearing masks more rather than less. It’s a strong argument for restoring some of the caution we threw to the winds after we got vaccinated.
This was put into words very well by Travis Dagenais, a 35-year-old Boston man who was among the people who went to Provincetown over the July Fourth holiday and partied like it was 1999. Or 2019. All indications are that SARS-CoV-2 tourists wearing T-shirts with slogans such as “I’m with Contagious” entered the Charles de Gaulle airport of Travis’s nose, where most of them were stopped.
A few of them slipped through and made a little trouble in his Arc de
I feel like a broken record. This is not over. How can something be over if it’s growing?
Triomphe and a few of his cathedrals. He got sick with flu-like symptoms for a few days. He got better.
It’s probable that some of the tourists in his upper airways caught connecting flights to other people. Travis appears to have been part of a chain that spread SARS-CoV-2 to about 1,000 people, perhaps 75 percent of them vaccinated.
He told the Associated Press. “The dominant public messaging has been that the vaccine means a return to normal. Unfortunately, I’ve now learned it’s a few steps toward normal, not the zero-to-sixty that we seem to have undertaken.”
Bravo, Travis. You got it, and now you get it.
None of this would matter if a lot more Americans got vaccinated. That’s still the biggest problem, not the vaccinated people with tourists in their noses.
The best number to watch is COVID hospitalizations per 100,000, and the states with high rates are the same states with low vaccination rates and governors with crazy mask policies.
The people who will suffer the most are the unvaccinated and the immune-suppressed. The latter group is about 3.6 percent of the population, and the best thing they could do right now is form a movement, design a flag, and get out the old ACT UP playbook.
The best thing you could do — as a vaccinated person — is follow Travis’s advice. Vaccination entitles you to take a few steps toward normal but not all the steps you feel like taking.
Don’t risk becoming an unwitting part of a transmission chain that eventually gets to an organ transplant recipient or a cancer patient. Or even to an unvaccinated person. Granted, they’re pigheaded and annoying, but that shouldn’t come with a death sentence.
I feel like a broken record. This is not over. How can something be over if it’s growing?
Put a mask over that honker.