Rod and Karen discuss Coronavirus News, Super Bowl random odds and ends, Kevin O’Leary hating on the stimmy, driver survives 70 foot plunge onto highway, another gender reveal death, Gorilla Glue woman wants to sue, former police points gun at air conditioner repairman, man found asleep in car blocking traffic, men lead police on high speed chase and sword ratchetness.
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Karen you are spot on about dental health and insurance coverage! There’s a lot of data that shows similar patterns where oral health is predictive of a host of other health/disease outcomes. Long story short, quality of oral care and oral health strongly correlate with *ding ding ding* income and access. It costs money to take proper care of your teeth and if you don’t make enough money or your job doesn’t provide dental benefits, you’re stuck with whatever you can get by with. Also, an often underappreciated part of this story is that a lot of education around oral health and preventative home care (e.g. proper flossing, brushing technique, etc) happens *at the dentist’s office*, which is why I don’t fault folks too much if they don’t know how to take care of their teeth in the absence of that education. When my wife was teaching in Baltimore one of her elementary aged students actually died because what started out as a simple cavity became an oral infection that eventually reached her brain. Sorry to get all grim at the end there, but this shit is real and if COVID is running through our community and laying bare the inequities of the healthcare system, we gotta be willing to talk about all of it for things to start to change.
On the duration of resistance after the first dose. There is little to no data for the efficacy of the NIH (Moderna) or BioNTech (Pfizer) vaccine beyond 21 days. It is not that it is necessarily ineffective, they simply did not test it yet. The Oxford (AstraZeneca) vaccine did do testing on alternate timing and, although sample sizes were limited, findings suggest that a longer time between doses (6 weeks+) may be up to a dozen percent more effective.
That being said, maintaining a two-dose regime with half the dosage of the NIH (Moderna) vaccine has been tested and appears to be as effective as the current dosage. Some vaccine experts are supporting this approach to double the supply without risks to efficacy.
Thanks for your good coverage of the CoViD pandemic and for reinforcing the need for masks even if you are vaccinated.