COVID-19 going into 2022: Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.

Lockdowns, quarantines, and global pandemics were once just tales from science fiction and horror films. Now, they have become an omnipresent factor in life, looming over almost every decision we make. 

After almost two years of this you would think we would have some handle over it, yet science, government response, and the virus are changing rapidly. Mask mandates, social distancing, restrictions on indoor gathering, vaccine policy have all changed in the past month at the University of Colorado Boulder and Boulder County.

The different versions of the vaccine have different efficacies against emerging variants, and with variants that are more resistant to the vaccine rearing their heads, masking and social distancing have become public health necessities. Booster shots are being manufactured, but have yet to contain modified messenger-RNA sequences for new variants, and as new data about vaccine immunity longevity, boosters will be a necessity no matter what.

After a summer of maskless gatherings and declining cases, why are things changing now?

We have all lived through the first, second, and third waves of this virus, and the subsequent lockdowns COVID has invoked.

A large portion of students at CU began their education here during the pandemic, with remote or hybrid classes being the only option and masks a necessity. As of Sept. 16, 2021, with around 95% of the student body vaccinated, CU has shifted into mostly in-person classes where masks are still required and social distancing is encouraged. Why, with such a high vaccination rate, is CU still requiring masks?

The short answer: variants. The current strain of COVID-19 most common in the U.S. is the Delta variant. According to a new Nature article, this variant has a mutation on a spike protein responsible for “recognizing and invading cells,” enabling it to infect many cells, replicate, and present symptoms before our vaccine-boosted immune systems have time to react.

Mask effectiveness is solely based on the size of these viral particles and has nothing to do with spike proteins. Barring a massive mutation that changes the physical size of the virus, masks will be just as effective as they have always been in preventing the spread of COVID, regardless of vaccine efficacy or viral spike-protein mutations.

While masks remain as effective as they have ever been, vaccines’ ability to prevent any symptoms has been dropping with the Delta variant (Table 1). The vaccines’ efficacies at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death has remained constant at 95% for this variant. This could change as new variants appear, but a booster shot with a new mRNA sequence could solve that issue.

 Table 1

Table 1: Different vaccine efficacy against different variants. It is important to note that the numbers above are effective at preventing any symptoms, not infection, meaning you are asymptomatic but still testing positive. A new CDC study states that the vaccines’ abilities to prevent any infection at all is around 50%.

The technology surrounding mRNA vaccines has been developed over the past 30 years, but the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the first to implement this process. The mRNA vaccines work by injecting messenger RNA into our system that is coded to create antibodies for a specific spike protein that exists on a virus we want our body to attack.

The greatest fear surrounding these variants right now is that this spike protein our current mRNA vaccines are coded for will mutate. If this happens, the virus will become resistant to the vaccine, and our immune systems will have a much harder time combating it.

This fear has been realized in the Lambda variant. A specific mutation on the spike protein of the virus that our mRNA vaccines target has changed the shape of this receptor. This makes it vaccine resistant and has also increased its lethality and infectiveness over the original virus.

There is a similar mutation in the new Gamma variant, and since both of these variants have been discovered in the past two months there is not enough data to test just how resistant they are to the vaccines. As of now, these variants are located primarily in South America, but if COVID’s past trajectory has taught us anything, it should be that the virus never stays in one place for long.

New data is also coming out about how long our vaccine immunity lasts. The vaccine is most effective for somewhere between four to eight months before beginning to wane. As we approach that eight month mark, vaccine providers are rapidly creating a booster shot to provide us with continued immunity. According to the CDC, the first booster shots will be available to seniors this fall and to everyone else eight months after their second shot.

Many universities around the country are opening with some form of hybrid education. University of Nevada, Las Vegas is opening with about 40% of all courses online. Alamo Colleges (San Antonio) had almost all their courses taught remotely for the first two weeks of the semester. California State University at Stanislaus is offering only online courses until Oct. 1.

According to CU Boulder’s official fall 2021 page, the majority of courses are in-person this semester, while larger lecture classes will be taught remotely. To compensate for this apparent lack of social distancing, CU has enforced both an indoor mask mandate and a vaccine requirement.

Some students are less than pleased with the return to in-person: a second-year graduate student who chose to remain anonymous has been working on campus in relative isolation for the past year and a half.

“I’m generally a pretty strong believer in doing what you want with your own body so long as it doesn’t harm others,” said the source. “That being said, Me getting sick by being in a crowded room doesn’t just affect me: at the very least, it shuts down my entire lab for a month.”

For others, like Kaela Horton a sophomore at CU, the return to campus is worth the potential risk.

“I’m all for wearing a mask if it means I can go to class in person,” said Horton, reflecting about her year of being remote. “Being on campus with so many people is pretty overwhelming.”

Even with CU’s promise to teach all large lectures online, Introduction to Cultural Anthropology is being taught solely in-person inside the Hale 270 lecture hall and currently has 161 students enrolled in the course.

Dr. McGranahan, the course instructor, was unaware that her lecture was one of the largest in-person courses currently offered at CU. Having all 161 students in class at same time raises questions on what the university’s administration considers to be a large lecture. If the City of Boulder limits the number of people who can attend indoor gatherings again, CU may have to rethink their approach to many of these classes that have 40 or more students.

The bad news: COVID is not going away anytime soon. Most experts at CU believe the virus will be around affecting the way we learn and interact at the institution for at least the next 4 to 6 years. More immediately, with winter approaching and new variants popping up, COVID threatens to halt winter vacations again and shut down country borders.

Thankfully, CU Boulder has a pretty good testing system in place, and with high vaccination rates we are miles ahead of other institutions around the US (for example, as of Aug. 23, only 73% of Ohio State University’s academic body has had one or more shots of the vaccine).

Biden’s newly announced federal actions fighting COVID states that all employers with 100-plus employees must require their workforce to be fully vaccinated, or supply a negative COVID test once a week.

According to a statement on Sept. 16 put out by CU, these requirements do not extend to higher education and CU will not be changing their vaccine requirements or requiring regular testing. In the same statement, CU promises to monitor the ongoing booster shot testing and data, and plans to offer boosters once they are approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

As of Sept. 17, the FDA has voted against approving booster shots for people of age 16 and up, citing the need for vaccines to be distributed to other countries, the immunocompromised, and the elderly first. A second vote was also held on Sept. 17 where the FDA approved booster shots for people of age 65 and over.