outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I still can't tell if my carefulness or luck is responsible, or if I'm one of those rare weirdos with pre-existing immunity somehow. there was the false-positive infection where I had actual symptoms for a day (my voice was scratchy and wrecked), only for them to disappear overnight and 11 tests over 6 days turning up negative (including PCR).

I had one point blank exposure to a friend who was already symptomatic - I hugged them, and sat next to them for several hours unmasked (and this was Omicron), and didn't get it at all. whereas a friend who merely saw her for 5 minutes and hugged her got it within 2 days of seeing her.

obviously I'm going with the assumption that this isn't the case, so I've been mega careful. even got ripped on for my mask last night by some fuckboy (who I ignored). half afraid one of these assholes will just intentionally cough on me and be like "btw I have it!".

You know how I mentioned 32 COVID patients in my hospital yesterday? Today: 37.

Sorry for potentially dumb question that was answered in one of your previous posts Ned, but does that mean 37 additional patients in the hospital today? Or 32 patients yesterday, now there are 37 patients? Assuming the latter, but second guessed myself.

The latter, just reporting overall numbers. So it could be 5 new admissions, or it could be 6 new admissions but one person got to go home, etc.

Wtf

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/pfizer-says-paxlovid-doesnt-help-covid-19-patients-unless-they-are-high-risk-11655315039

i only read the headline, but that's not what the study says. see https://www.statnews.com/2022/06/14/pfizers-paxlovid-study-fails-to-answer-key-questions-over-benefit-for-broader-populations/ for a more useful take.

and remember the list of risk factors for which there is clearer evidence covers like 80% of US adults (bmi > 25, current or former smoker, etc.).

That study makes Paxlovid sound pretty good actually!

Basically "in our sample, Paxlovid cut the risk of hospitalization in half, but hospitalization in this group is so rare that we can't be sure the difference wasn't just chance" -- sure, I'll take it

Ok thanks for keeping me at bay there!

I read the article but I was having trouble parsing it

Among adults vaccinated against COVID-19, the odds of developing long COVID amid the omicron wave were about 20 percent to 50 percent lower than during the delta period, with variability based on age and time since vaccination.

The finding comes from a case-control observational study published this week in The Lancet by researchers at Kings College London. The study found that about 4.5 percent of the omicron breakthrough cases resulted in long COVID, while 10.8 percent of delta breakthrough cases resulted in the long-term condition.

While the news may seem a little reassuring to those nursing a breakthrough omicron infection, it's cold comfort for public health overall since the omicron coronavirus variant is much more transmissible than delta.

"Far more people were infected first with omicron than with delta," Kevin McConway, an emeritus professor of applied statistics at the Open University, said in a statement. "So even if the percentage of infected people who got long COVID during the two waves is on the scale that these researchers report—and it may well be—the actual numbers of people reporting long COVID after first being infected during omicron is still far larger than during delta."

Seems like good news… I mean, my personal calculation of acceptable risk no longer revolves around the chance of hospitalization or death, which has become pretty distant, but instead the chance (I’ve seen the CDC [or maybe the nih?] say 1 in 5) of experiencing long term/lingering complications. I’m masking in pretty much every indoor situation and avoiding crowds, shows, restaurants, parties etc, and that’s why.

If in the omicron era that’s more like 1 in 20, I’ll take some heart from it.

Still never had it (that I know of), still wearing an N95 everywhere and will keep doing that.

My family wants me to stay at my sister's house next week and her husband is an anti-vaxer who refuses to be tested. Umm.......guys?

I would have a problem with that, straight up. Refusing to be tested is next- level assholery.

"I have cold like symptoms but I refuse to get tested, you will assume I merely have a cold, and I will spread my germs freely"

Don’t do it IMO

do it but wear a mask at all times and when you eat switch to a mask with a hole in it and eat through the hole

and keep saying “i wish i didn’t have to do this” every so often while staring at the guy

refuses to be tested? is he having some symptoms? or just hypothetically wouldn't test if he did?

if he developed symptoms with you there it would be too late for you to avoid him by the time he tested?

the unvaxxed thing would be enough for me to stay someplace else i guess.

Seems like good news… I mean, my personal calculation of acceptable risk no longer revolves around the chance of hospitalization or death, which has become pretty distant, but instead the chance (I’ve seen the CDC [or maybe the nih?] say 1 in 5) of experiencing long term/lingering complications. I’m masking in pretty much every indoor situation and avoiding crowds, shows, restaurants, parties etc, and that’s why.

If in the omicron era that’s more like 1 in 20, I’ll take some heart from it.

― covidsbundlertanze op. 6 (Jon not Jon), Saturday, 18 June 2022 17:15 (two days ago) link

Long COVID is not distributed evenly across age groups, health conditions, severity of COVID, etc., even though a young, healthy person with a mild case certainly *can* get it. I don't know your personal characteristics, but, e.g. a 35yo otherwise healthy person probably never had a 1/5 risk of long COVID and probably doesn't have a 1/20 risk from Omicron. And then Long COVID certainly has a range of outcomes, so the odds of something severe/debilitating and/or prolonged is also going to be lower than 1/5 or 1/20.

This is just one study, so always take one study with a grain of salt, but just as an example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y -- 13% had symptoms lasting more than 28 days, but only 4.5% for more than 8 weeks and 2.3% for more than 12 weeks. Odds also rose with age: symptoms past 28 days were "significantly associated with age, rising from 9.9% in the individuals aged 18–49 years to 21.9% in those aged ≥70 years. Most common symptoms were fatigue, intermittent headaches, anosmia, respiratory symptoms. The most severe and scary ones like memory loss and neurological issues were only a small percentage of the people who had long COVID symptoms.

Long COVID is real, and the most severe forms of it are real too. I'm just saying that in one's personal risk calculation, it's possible to have an exaggerated sense of how likely an otherwise healthy/youngish person is to wind up with any kind of severe long term effects. It's not like 4-6 weeks of fatigue/headaches is so great either, and even a 10% chance of that if you get COVID might seem like enough reason to want to be pretty careful, it's just pretty unlikely that you wind up debilitated.

Maybe so but I find the merest prospect of debilitation really spices up what might otherwise be a pretty normal family get together so kudos, that cousin

my bf got it beginning the end of may and had "mild" pneumonia and now has weird eczema on his face. not hospitalized and too early to tell about the long covid obv but if someone refuses to acknowledge it at all i would not stay at their house.

sorry to hear that about the bf, harbl

I'm sorry to hear as well. Everyone has to make their own risk calculations. I just meant that if you are a vaccinated, boosted, say 40yo with no health issues, the odds of a legit, severe or long-term complication from COVID are very very small based on what we know so far. That said, even the short to medium term complications can suck and I can understand wanting to avoid them as much as possible. We have a friend (some prior health issues) who had a persistent cough for a couple months. We know one young, healthy person who was previously very fit and struggled to do his exercise regimen for a couple months after COVID but ultimately fully recovered. These aren't small problems to be sure.

I’m not otherwise healthy and not youngish, for the purposes of personal risk assessment

Xposts

xp oh so me

Happy update that the amount of active patients at my hospital has notably dropped to 17. We'll see where it goes from there.

I seemed to be a week ahead on Florida's decline - it appears last week was actually just the plateau, which became evident when the numbers changed later in the week. this is somewhat the problem with very low testing, as it makes it more difficult to tell.

hospitalization admissions still going up per week but more slowly, which seems to back that up, since that trails cases by a few weeks. nowhere near our January/February hospitalization totals thankfully. but still concerning.

Here in MDC numbers and positivity rates have plateaued.

NYC % got to 9+, fell to about 8 and has been parked there for what seems like forever. Really seems like it should have fallen further by now but each wave has been its own thing kind of.

positivity rates may fall slower as less and less people get tested publicly and rely on home antigen tests.

I know the CDC also only counts PCR tests in their positivity rates and don't include antigen, even if you had it done at a facility and the results sent to your Department of Health. that seems...odd. sure, false positives abound, but seems weird to not use them in the calculation.

(this is why FL DOH's positivity rate is so much lower than what the CDC reports)

this wave has been weird and sloggish. i was hoping for cases to back off in FL *before* the Fringe Festival started (which for me was 5/18), and we're a month past that now and just seeing signs.

my state’s positivity rate is 100% because they no longer report total tests or negative results. lol?

I’m also pretty sure false negatives far outweigh false positives

my workplace, having the right equipment, had a volunteer-staffed temporary pcr covid test lab during the early pandemic and they didn’t do a binary pos/neg result, but had an inconclusive/retest result as well. not so many of them, but probably the right methodology

oops, I meant false negatives, not false positives.

I actually got an "inconclusive" result on one of my PCRs a few months ago, but it turned out to be a proper negative when I retested twice over the two days following thankfully

asking for a friend (no really, I haven't had it as far as I know). First tested positive on a rapid test 8 days ago, still showing a line on tests. Is she contagious?

In the UK she is legally allowed to go about her normal life after 5 days, but she's trying to figure out whether she should wait until the line disappears or if that's meaningless at this point.

Any insights welcome

Iirc there is a difference between infected and infectious, but solely based on my own experience I’d tell her to go easy just because I ended up very tired after because my case was mild and I didn’t really rest enough. So tl;dr she’s probably not infectious but I’d tell her to give it another couple of days and take it easy.

Our pediatrician told us you can test positive for weeks after you're actually contagious.

Yep. A good friend in January didn't get a negative PCR until three weeks after her first test, though she'd seen her doctor in the interim, who also made the distinction between infectious and infected, i.e. she was no longer contagious after about a week, give or take.

First, make sure you understand which kind of test you are taking. A PCR test is very accurate at the start of an infection because it can detect and amplify even trace amounts of virus DNA. But a PCR is not the right choice to figure out when you are no longer infectious, because of its sensitivity, Grad explains.

"There are some people who have little blips of being PCR positive for weeks, or in some cases even months, after an infection" – even though they're no longer contagious, Grad says.

A better bet is to use a rapid antigen test, because they're "positive when your viral load is high," corresponding to levels when people are likely to be infectious, says Landon. So if you're negative on a rapid test and you don't have any symptoms, consider yourself in the clear, says Chin-Hong.

What if 10 days have passed and you're still testing positive on a rapid test? "That definitely happens, and we don't have a good answer" as to why, says Landon. One thing to look at is how faint the positive line is on the rapid test, she says, because research has shown that the darker or more intense the line is and the more quickly it shows up, the more virus is present in your nose. So if you're past day 10, you feel better and you're not immunocompromised, and the rapid test line "isn't very dark or it's taking longer to turn positive each day, you're probably safe to be out in the world," she says.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/17/1081510375/isolation-testing-omicron-infection

I’d concur with that: I spoke to a UCLH virologist when I was ill, and he said the Omicrons normally tail off after day 5 with negative LFTs a few days after that. I was testing negative on the 8th day.

thanks all, yes she isn't going to push herself but is trying to work out if a visit from her parents can go ahead-- they aren't especially vulnerable but are super nervous about getting it, so were considering cancelling a long-planned visit. It sounds like they should probably be OK, they're already on day 9 I think and the visit is later this week.

And here we are

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/06/pandemic-protections/661378/

And in early 2021, the sociologist Elizabeth Wrigley-Field and a small group of volunteers

also such a noted Cubs fan that they married in just to make it clear!

seriously, thanks for the link Ned!

I went to summer camp with Elizabeth!

I wonder why/how I haven't gotten it yet? I should say why/how/whether, I guess, there's no way to know for sure, really, but at no point have I had characteristic symptoms.

I guess I am in a weird state where I feel like I'm not trying very hard not to get it -- I'm traveling a lot, I'm seeing people, I'm in lots of crowded rooms. But then again, I wear an N95 on the plane and when I go in a store, which I feel like almost no one else is, and I certainly eat outside when it's convenient, which it usually is this time of year. So... I'm not trying very hard not to get COVID, but maybe I'm nonetheless trying harder than the median person? I guess by "not trying hard" I mean "I'm not taking any actions that would be annoying or difficult for me."

So... I'm not trying very hard not to get COVID, but maybe I'm nonetheless trying harder than the median person?

Ha, this.

I mask when teaching at the store, library, basically any public interior space...yet I've eaten inside restaurants and hung out in trusted homes.

I had an exposure recently where the person I hung out with indoors, unmasked tested positive the next day, and 5 days after, 10 tests (combo of PCR and antigen), all negative, no symptoms. this was after an exposure to Omicron earlier in the year 2 days before someone tested positive, same thing.

the most recent incident, nobody else has tested positive yet, so it could have been "she wasn't very contagious", but I've survived about 5 direct exposures in a 1.5 year period now. as has my brother's girlfriend.

there’s also the possibility you’ve had a very tiny infection where your immune system cleared an unnoticeable amount of virus

I've considered that too.

xpost that's definitely possible.

in either case I'm glad my more comfortable N95s arrived cos the ones I had previously left a semi-permanent indentation on my nose