outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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.

if i wanted to protect others around me, would getting vaccinated make any difference?

Short answer: yes.

The vaccine should make a difference at each of the stages of transmission to others that directly involve you. It should raise the threshold of exposure to the virus required to produce a symptomatic infection in you and if you become symptomatic it should allow your immune system to suppress the amount of virus you shed and the length of time you're shedding it. Everything else about transmission is a variable the vaccine cannot influence.

I got a second bivalent jab this morning at CVS. Using my old card that ran out of space after my pre-bivalent booster in June 2022 helped grease the lie. So did realizing the staff member and I shared a birthday.

guess i'm putting this here because it's political and the other thread is "non-political". it's also US-centric. avert your eyes.

the house has a new GOP-led subcommittee on the coronavirus, and the purpose seems to be to increase the pain of those of us who lost someone to Covid, those of us still suffering from long covid, and those who are going to experience those things in the future. the purpose is not to erase our experiences, but instead to gas light us as much as possible so that we start to think that maybe we were the problem, and that instead of the problem being hundreds of millions of cruel dumbasses who refused to do anything to help and in fact actively opposed it, the problem was the people who got sick and the people who were hurt.

i continue to await the subcommittee on cancer in which the GOP will go to every length to make those who suffered from cancer feel like it was all just a big unnecessary trick that led to lots of people being afraid about getting cancer, and that those who had cancer were lying, weak, and selfish.

i think the high water mark of people giving a fuck about covid was in the first month. every single day since then has been in the direction of "covid was nothing, we never should have done anything about it, lots of people die every day, we don't care about people who die from the flu, we've gotten used to people dying in car wrecks, why should we care about covid". (getting any sort of memorial or day of recognition for a million people dying of covid in the US alone, for example, is absolutely impossible and i am a fool for even thinking it would happen, even though it would mean everything to me to go out and be with the other people who lost people, on that day, and to see them and for all of us to be there)

the needle won't move back toward the direction of empathy until the next pandemic

House Republicans presented with a textbook case of the ailment this week. The newly formed select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic met for the first time for what its chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), said would be some “Monday-morning quarterbacking.” It instead became a Tuesday afternoon of false starts and illegal blocks.

Republicans on the panel, some of them medical doctors and others just playing one on TV, offered their predictable assessments. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) kicked off with the unsupported allegation that “covid was intentionally released” from a Chinese lab because “it would be impossible for the virus to be accidentally leaked.”

Rep. Richard McCormick (R-Ga.) advanced the ball by informing the panel that coronavirus booster shots “do more harm than good.”

And then Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) scored with this extraordinary medical discovery: “Researchers found that the vaccinated are at least twice as likely to be infected with covid as the unvaccinated and those with natural immunity.”

But the panel’s greatest contribution to the science of misdirection was to feature as witnesses three scientists who arguably did more than all others to champion a herd-immunity approach to covid. Two of them were co-authors of the “Great Barrington Declaration,” put out by a Koch-backed group, which argued in 2020 for letting the virus run wild through the population while somehow segregating the old and vulnerable.

Had they prevailed in making herd immunity the official policy, hundreds of thousands more Americans might have died. As it was, President Donald Trump and GOP governors used these scientists’ claims disparaging face masks, isolation and vaccines to whip up resistance to public health restrictions.

One of the witnesses, Marty Makary, a Johns Hopkins surgeon and Fox News regular, used the committee meeting to present a new variant of covidiocy. He declared with absolute certainty that the virus came from a Wuhan lab.

“It’s a no-brainer that it came from a lab,” he declared. What’s more, “at this point it’s impossible to acquire any more information, and if you did it would only be in the affirmative.” He even suggested that two of the nation’s top virologists knew this but “changed their tunes” because they were bribed with grant money by Anthony Fauci.

also fuck this washington post op-ed writer. even with selective editing i can't excise his uncontrollable, annoying snark

the needle won't move back toward the direction of empathy until even after millions needlessly die in the next pandemic

But it's probably safe to assume it'll continue moving in its present direction regardless. Monsters gonna monster.

"2200-2900 People Still Die Of COVID Every Week In This Country But I Haven't Been One Of Them (Yet)" is a really weird shirt to want a child you've never met to wear

When the next pandemic sweeps the United States, health officials in Ohio won’t be able to shutter businesses or schools, even if they become epicenters of outbreaks. Nor will they be empowered to force Ohioans who have been exposed to go into quarantine. State officials in North Dakota are barred from directing people to wear masks to slow the spread. Not even the president can force federal agencies to issue vaccine or testing mandates to thwart its march.

Conservative and libertarian forces have defanged much of the nation’s public health system through legislation and litigation as the world staggers into the fourth year of covid.

At least 30 states, nearly all led by Republican legislatures, have passed laws since 2020 that limit public health authority, according to a Washington Post analysis of laws collected by Kaiser Health News and the Associated Press as well as the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials and the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University.

Health officials and governors in more than half the country are now restricted from issuing mask mandates, school closures, and other protective measures or must seek permission from their state legislatures before renewing emergency orders, the analysis showed.

"gift article" link for those who want to read the rest: https://wapo.st/3J0mqN5

“One day we’re going to have a really bad global crisis and a pandemic far worse than covid, and we’ll look to the government to protect us, but it’ll have its hands behind its back and a blindfold on,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. “We’ll die with our rights on — we want liberty but we don’t want protection.”

jeeeeeeez Lawrence, what a downer, lighten up!

a lot of graves are going to require urine when some of these people shuffle off

fucking death cult iirc

Today in fucking-around-and-finding-out: https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3mb89/ivermectin-danny-lemoi-death

Wait, he'd been taking it daily for ... a decade!?

Lemoi began taking the version of ivermectin designed for animals on a daily basis in 2012, after he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, according to a detailed account of his medical history he gave on a podcast last November.

Man, if he'd gotten into shilling essential oils between Lyme exposure and COVID he could have been any number of my high school classmates.

wow, this thread's revived less and less, eh?

With March ending this is the longest span of no COVID cases anywhere in my life since the beginning.

Two hundred people still die a day, though.

A friend got it at the end of Feb, but otherwise, nothing here for a while, either.

currently doing the rounds in the uk.

dad collapsed and when the medics had ruled out all the usual stuff they tested for covid and he was positive (he'd been to skittles 3 days before). uncle, the one who was meant to be sheltering but has mostly been sheltering in the pub also came down with it from the same event. both better now.

i went into central london for only the 2nd time in 3 years on thursday, 45 minutes on public transport total, started coughing on the saturday, sweating, shivering for a couple of days, still coughing 9 days later.

jeez, koogs, best wishes

are UK numbers still bad? a few months ago my friend teaching there on a temporary contract said that people only wore masks when they HAD covid, but that no one else did at all

(i've been jabbed, COVID and flu, but the last one was start of Oct. it's not been bad bad, more of a chore than anything)