Senate Pandemics in the Age of Globalization: Coronavirus (COVID-19) Discussion: See OP Warning

There i fixed it.

 

I think it cost me around $75 when insurance wouldn't cover it.

 

It was pretty obvious early on what was happening (not "immunity debt" anti-mitigation BS), but studies are piling up evidence.

 

That doesn’t surprise me one bit. COVID-19 has been found to infect macrophages, antigen-presenting cells that are vital in fighting off viral infections. I would expect that over time, evidence will emerge that COVID increases susceptibility to a whole host of viruses.

 

That sounds really bad. Good thing COVID's over.

 

I wish it was over. A friend of mine tested positive on the morning of Thanksgiving Day. He's fine but it kinda screwed up his holiday break.

 

New variant on the rise, not causing more severe disease so far but also highly-mutated. Glad we have high uptake of easily-accesible, affordable vaccines to help stop the spread of a hyper-mutable pathogen that would probably reach equilibrium with humanity far faster if more people paid attention to science.

 

This Hugo Keith KC fellow is very good at what he does;

https://www.theguardian.com/politic...son-is-forced-to-contemplate-a-moral-universe

 

I had a discussion with a coworker about covid the other day and about our shared futile experience trying to convince other people to take this disease serious. This particular conversation stood out to me because she also shared with me her experiencing peer pressure to participate in the 2020 protests, but ultimately backed out due to not wanting to spread covid.

 

I still consider myself very fortunate (and I think this also reflects a lot of general precautions) that most of my family hasn't had COVID to their knowledge. Lot of mask usage, being more selective about crowds, favoring outdoor areas that are better ventilated, etc.

 

I also, to the best of my knowledge, have never had COVID, and looking back, I'm not sure why. I never took the level of precautions most in this thread took out of a combination of my personal risk tolerance (perhaps foolish) and sensory issues with my autism and the feeling of masks on my face if they weren't juuussst right, which was hard to achieve and led to me constantly reaching up to adjust my masks despite everyone saying to minimize touching your mask.

During initial shutdowns in spring 2020, I continued physically going into grocery stores multiple times a week, and physically going into restaurants to get takeout when possible (or using drive-throughs when the doors were locked), because I didn't trust delivery services, and also I was in a university student apartment that was very anti-delivery configured. (DoorDash and other food delivery services could not enter the building as the front hallway door was locked, but my apartment was on the fourth floor with interior entry, so I would have to go downstairs and meet the driver outside, then carry everything back to my apartment. Amazon and other package couriers were forced by university policy to deliver all packages to a mailroom 3/4 mile across campus that I would have to drive to during extremely limited hours to collect my packages -- if something was delivered at 4:55 PM on a Friday, I wouldn't be able to get it until Monday morning, so I paid UPS and other couriers to redirect all my packages to off-campus pickup points that I could access in the evenings and on weekends, or sometimes just had a package shipped to Mom's house. Anyway, I digress.)

I began wearing a mask (cloth) in early May 2020, but resumed restaurant dine-in as soon as restaurants began to reopen dining rooms (though I did get takeout more frequently). I stopped wearing masks for most of summer 2021 except for crowded indoor spaces like grocery stores, and I only switched from cloth to KN95 masks in late summer 2021 when my university resumed in-person classes for fall semester and my risk tolerance temporarily plummeted due to the nature of that semester (final semester before graduation that included capstone project, job hunting, and apartment hunting). I mostly stopped wearing masks in spring 2022, except for a couple of Pokemon tournaments where event policies mandated them (along with proof of vaccination -- the only times I've ever been asked for such proof) and the two weeks before my vacation that August (again, temporary reduction in risk tolerance).

I haven't touched a mask since that vacation IIRC, and at no point in the entire pandemic did I really make a serious effort to avoid people. So it's really, looking back on it, a minor miracle that I haven't had COVID to the best of my knowledge, despite testing when I felt sick (I never stopped getting my annual colds). Sometimes I wonder if I won the genetic lottery and have some kind of pre-existing natural immunity. I've heard some talk about studies looking into people who have never had it to see if there was some link between them.

 

We're in another winter surge of COVID and flu, with hospitals and ICUs being overwhelmed throughout much of Europe and North America. There are 200+ people dying in the US daily from COVID alone, and it will probably tick up by the middle of this month. The "good" news is that even though this may be the second-biggest surge of the pandemic according to wastewater data (at least in the US; not sure about elsewhere), the rates of hospitalization and death are lower than they were before. The level of needless suffering, disability and death-- not just from COVID but other respiratory viruses-- that we've just decided to accept is still insanely high.

 

I tested positive about 2 and a half months ago, my mother and I were visiting my dad in hospital, on a floor that had a COVID outbreak, so I kept blaming him and he kept blaming us. My dad isn't eligible for Paxlovid but they gave him a drip of something else that worked fine. My mother tested positive and two days later so I did, we both got Paxlovid and were mostly fine, I just bunkered down and played Spider-Man 2 for a week. I coughed like maybe a dozen times total, it was mostly the blowing my nose was messy/felt weird and different. (I've had 4 vax shots of difference vaxes, my last one was Oct '22) The thing was the Paxlovid (which I had to run around a bit, after finding one fine for my mother 48 hours later it started disappearing but got one), which left a bad taste in my mouth about an hour after taking it so I kept eating cookies to make sure my tastebuds weren't out of whack. But I felt fine after like 4 days, and tested negative. And then when the Paxlovid ran out, had a weird sense blowing my nose and that's it and there was a little faint line in the positive side. I didn't test clear until almost 2 weeks after, but I had a negative result a day after the Paxlovid run. None of this was terrible or even very uncomfortable, I chalk that up to all the vax in my system.

Anyway I WAS going to get the updated shot in October when it finally started to roll out but got COVID so apparently have to wait 6 months, which I'm okay with as there will be a big supply of the good stuff

 

The drug he received is called remdesivir and was originally created to fight the Ebola virus. Glad it helped him.

Antigen testing is a notoriously unreliable gauge of viral clearance once you’re confirmed infected as it can pick up viral debris for weeks or even months afterward and continue to turn the test positive. The gold standard is PCR testing (which gives you something known as a “cycle threshold“ value) but that’s not being universally done even at the hospital level anymore. At my hospital, a cycle threshold greater than 30 shows non-infectious levels of virus, while less than 30 still requires isolation.

 

It's definitely getting hairy out there covid-wise. I know quite a few people who have gotten it in the last week. I will definitely be masking for at least the first few weeks of the new semester coming up. I had a very mild case in February (my first and only bout AFAIK), but it took me nearly a full 5 weeks to get over the fatigue and it was very stressful trying to keep up with my work during that time. Going to be being as cautious as I can right now as I do NOT want it again.

Does anyone know if there's any place to get good local (county-level) data on transmission levels these days? All my go-to sources from (NYT, Covid Act Now, etc.) 2021/22 discontinued posting that kind of info long ago. I checked the CDC (and maybe I was looking in the wrong place) but most of Florida was "green" and I don't see how that can accurately reflect how many people are catching it right now. I'd like to be able to monitor and get a sense of when I can ease up on precautions a bit. But that's probably an unrealistic expectation since probably tons of people don't even bother with testing themselves anymore, and even most of those who do probably don't report their results. I never fully researched whether wastewater data is available for my area--any suggestions of good sites to check for that kind of info?

 

@Pensivia CDC wastewater data by state is available here as well as some other metrics.

 

Let me just say I'm glad I'm boosted recently for flu/covid, and that my new job is mostly remote.

I feel like I'll probably get it again, it's been 2 years since the last time. And the other side of not being in a school almost constantly has probably meant my immocompromised immune system won't have that tolerance I think I somewhat built up when I was there (I actually kept getting little colds until I stopped wearing a mask often last fall).

I don't know, I guess I'll see. Wishing the best for everyone else.

 

So, I didn't get the flu vaccine this year because when I was supposed to do that, I was dealing with kidney stones (And I swear those were caused by a COVID infection I had in June). So of course, I got sick right after Christmas. The irony of course is that I masked up through all public transportation and at work because people were coughing left and right. Made it through small family gatherings where no one was coughing. Made it one day into my vacation perfectly fine- And then bam! On my back.

I swore it was COVID. But I did the rapid test twice and not even a faint positive. So, I think it was the flu. It was going into my airways for an asthmatic bronchitis so I had to call my doctor on New Years and get some meds. Now I feel a lot better. But, that knocked out my entire vacation and I had to take two sick days this week. I'm going to be masking back up again.

While I was recovering, since I live with family, I isolated to my room, wore my KN-95 masks which I have a ton of and took all my meals upstairs to prevent the spread. At least in this area it appears I was successful and no one else got sick thankfully. Not a fun holiday break though.

 

Got the flu vaccine and COVID vaccine booster together three days ago - man, the flu one knocked me for a loop the next day.

But in Florida, it's a necessity.

 

if you got them both together, how can you know it was the flu one?

I got my updated covid booster shortly after it became available back in Sept, but with how covid-y it seems out there right now, I'm wondering if I should have waited until at least pre-Thanksgiving to get it. Hope my vax protection (+increased precautions I'm currently taking) sees me through this winter season without going through covid bout #2.

 

Roundup of recent COVID research

Things that stood out to me:

• Transmission takes hours -- passing by someone at the grocery store is not likely to be a significant risk
• Vaccines are effective against long COVID, and the effectiveness against long COVID increases substantially with more vaccine doses
• Rapid antigen tests are less useful now than early in the pandemic for detecting infection early
• COVID, unlike flu and the common cold, is not affected by temperature and humidity, so is not seasonal like those other two

 

Eh, I call BS on this one. The one time I caught COVID (in 2022), it was most likely during a string of errand running at places like Walmart when I’d forgotten my mask. I hadn’t had hours of exposure to any person the whole week before I got infected.

Even if that’s not the norm, still it is absolutely possible to catch COVID from fleeting contact with (or even just breathing the same air as) an infected person.

 

At the very least I have seen reports of studies that say transmission can be near-instantaneous under the right circumstances (face-to-face). How long does transmission take for the flu, I wonder.

 

Educated guess, but I've had both in the past decade and it definitely made me feel like I did when I had the flu - also, this was the booster, and I haven't really reacted to any COVID shot, whereas it's been a while since I've gotten the flu shot.