outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

btw thank you to whomever turned me onto her substack, I read it all the time now

the one annoying bit is the prevailing statement that mink to mink transmission definitely occurred. this is not known, this is speculated based on what was observed, but a lot more testing is needed. that doesn't make Zeynep's article premature though. problem is readers don't really understand nuance, like everybody talks about the Y2K 'hoax' but don't realize that a lot of why it was such a non-event was all of the work that went into Y2K preparation.

more and more people are saying this

It's almost as if she thinks that information that has appeared in a NYT article isn't already sufficiently known to public health officials, and the best way to inform them is to issue a public call to action on her Twitter account. Glad to know she's on the job!

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Saturday, February 4, 2023 10:49 AM (three days ago)

I don't have a subscription to the NYT and so I don't click on links to the NYT that will just take me to a paywall. If you'd care to name one or two of them I'd be happy to find out what they are.

― more difficult than I look (Aimless), Tuesday, February 7, 2023 4:09 AM (seven hours ago)

I’m not sure what stance was eventually rested on but I’m assured it was correct. The search party to find the goalposts is missing in action.

lol

So how are things looking for y'all?

No new cases reported here among friends and families since late November.

Tons of people I know have had it in the past month— probably around 12 or so.

Calmish for now. Happily masking away still.

I still mask in class, public transportation, libraries, movies, and shopping, but I've resumed indoor dining at lunch if it's not crowded. No complaints about masking.

Some of my friends from NY had it in November. One just came to visit me but had to leave early because his older sister in Kentucky with covid died in her sleep last week and he had to go to her funeral

My trainer friend and his wife got it in El Paso shortly after the New Year. It was not serious thankfully

Hanging with a friend that has never had it. She's part of a study.

Daughter's had Long COVID since September, life sucks

Ugh, so sorry.

sorry to hear

oh my god that's terrible

Long COVID is def becoming one of the scariest things about getting it.

lots of people i know recovering from December/January infections but treating it like a bad flu and mostly frustrated by random issues with smell, taste, endurance

Thank you, all. What alarms us is what happens after infections 2, 3, 4 etc— will it be worse each time?

I'm so sorry.

Covid has definitely fucked with my heart, hopefully not to a very dangerous degree, but I don't really know. I also find myself worrying about the next infection.

Sorry to hear that James, that's rough.

Bit of an uptick lately of cases for folks in my orbit, but so far seems to all be people who've avoided it so far. Lots of the cases seem to be that the one person in the household that avoided it when the rest of the family got it last year are now getting it.

echoing the above, very sorry to hear, James. :(

in regards to people I know, it's weird as I have had a few more friends report the VID in the last week, but wastewater in both of the counties I spend most of my time in are continuing to decline, though not as fast as before. possibly more of a 'plateau'. positivity rate in FL has been steadily decreasing for weeks, albeit not plummeting.

XBB.1.5 finally became the main variant in FL so we'll see how that impacts things.

stay strong folks

Yeah, awful news.

Meantime around here -- so patients at my hospital were down in single digits as mentioned even last week. Today? 16. Honestly think this will just keep oscillating forever.

still have yet to reach endemicity

An incredibly sobering long COVID piece. Most of them have been but this really underscores it.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-now-looks-like-a-neurological-disease-helping-doctors-to-focus-treatments/

Got my second bivalent today. Six months had passed

i should check my numbers there

Got my second bivalent today. Six months had passed

― waiting for a czar to fall (Neanderthal),

wait what?? Can one do this?

You can just book and not tell them. (I also tried for a second bivalent this weekend, but gave up after 40 minutes in the queue.)

I got a second booster in June '22 and lied, so, yeah, I guess so.

27% of the city has had a bivalent booster at all, so getting a top-up (and switching brands) feels more like an action against waste than cheating the system.

anybody that uses the BinaxNOW Abbott tests been noticing any dud tests in your batches?

I never had a single problem prior to a month ago (other than user error once or twice), but on two occasions, the paper failed to change color at all when I closed the booklet, and one or two times big red splotches up and down the paper appeared. I know I did the test right as I've been doing these for 1.5 years and this is the test I use more than often. just wondering if anybody else found bad batches. about 20% of my last 16 tests that i got through insurance have had an issue.

no issues on my end as of yet.

maybe i accidentally pissed on them idk....

you're supposed to piss on the end with the "+" sign

so like… does vaccination actually protect against infection or not?

The bivalent vax keeps from you getting seriously infected/hospitalized as a result of the original omicron variants.

A friend, a research nurse, advised me to get jabbed with a second bivalent vaccine. No harm done, and it may even offer some protection for a couple months.

that’s not quite my question. if i wanted to protect others around me, would getting vaccinated make any difference?

so like… does vaccination actually protect against infection or not?

Yes, although of course that doesn't mean you can't get infected if you're vaccinated.

It also reduces expected severity of illness if you DO get infected, although of course that doesn't mean you can't get severely ill from COVID if you're vaccinated.

Supposedly it's like 40-50% efficacy against infection....until it wanes. Definitely better than the OG boosters

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7205e1.htm

Have a friend who had all the most recent shots and went on trip, only to end up in a covid unit in a foreign country's hospital with Covid pneumonia. friend has lupus, too. not great! but it seems they're on the mend.

This is not to say don't get yr shots, but to say: precautions are better than nothing, but this thing can still get you.

Yep

Immune systems aren't perfect at their job, but a well-educated immune system does better work than a naive one.

i get all that, my question is specifically about whether there is ANY evidence that vaccination slows transmission.

Neanderthal i don’t understand the paper you link to but it sounds like you’re saying it has a huge impact - a 40-50% percent less chance of being infected (and thus transmitting to someone else) - which is great!

If I remember my Emily Oster emails right, the vaccine makes it less likely that you’ll catch covid for the first few months, but after that the effect is negligible. Separately however, the vaccine greatly reduces the risk of having a serious bought of covid for a much longer time that a few months — but that risk is never zero.

right again i totally get that last part. i'm specifically interested in transmission risk. it's dispiriting if the transmission effect only last a few months. i guess the main thing there remains all the other stuff: masks, being outdoors etc? cause i am not going to get boosted every 4 months or whatever! or maybe i should??

The CDC announced we're shifting to yearly vaxes. As for transmission effects, it was ever thus, even the original vaccines in early 2021.

As for frequency, I mean...we're still in a pandemic. My friend, whose advice I trust, didn't hesitate when I asked her about a second bivalent jab.