COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[ProudModerate2]

Covid-19 vaccine study links side effects with greater antibody response.

People who reported experiencing side effects to the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines such as fever, chills or muscle pain tended to have a greater antibody response following vaccination, according to new research.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/health/covid-antibody-response-vaccines/index.html

[jamestroll]

https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/26/health/rsv-immunity-gap/index.html

Covid measures not only destroyed our economy but also made people more susceptible to colds and rsv...

[Frodo]

It really helps if you hit the gym, or jog regularly around your neighborhood:

Regular physical exercise could boost the effectiveness of your COVID-19 vaccine

[emailking]

I do the elliptical, hopefully that's good enough.

Anyway I had my bivalent booster. Gave me a sore arm and made me feel pretty sick after about 12 hours, but not as bad as the first booster last year which is the sickest I ever remember feeling. I got Pfizer because it was what they had. My previous shots were Moderna. I feel 100% now and glad to be boosted again.

[It’s so Joever]

Am I the only one who had never had any Covid vaccine side effects?

[Inmate Trump]

Am I the only one who had never had any Covid vaccine side effects?

Aside from slight aching, I didn’t have any with my updated booster.

I also just had covid in July so that might have something to do with my lack of side effects?

[Bandit3 the Worker]

Am I the only one who had never had any Covid vaccine side effects?

I don't think I did. But I only got the two main doses, not the boosters.

[MATTROSE94]

Am I the only one who had never had any Covid vaccine side effects?

I didn’t either other than being a little bit fatigued for a day.

[jamestroll]

I wish more Democrats were like Jared Polis.

It is hard to tell what his exact personal opinion of covid was but..

Locals in Colorado tell me that virtually all the Denver area, except Douglas county. And that many ski counties instituted mask mandates.

Locals in Pitkin County tell me it really was not enforced. It is kind of a latte liberal area, but they had to face the reality of the economic and business circumstances.

Polis did not even criticize Denver metro and the ski counties from implementing localized covid measures. But he was not going to force the rest of rural Colorado, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs to implement any measures.


Irrespective of his personal opinion on covid.. he handled it brilliantly. He kept the states liberal and conservatives happy.

All this was happening in Colorado while I was in Nova where no amount of hospitalization and community spread was ever going to make any local leader take any action. Alexandria may have been the only jurisdiction where it was most viable to happen, but it did not happen there.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

I wish more Democrats were like Jared Polis.

It is hard to tell what his exact personal opinion of covid was but..

Locals in Colorado tell me that virtually all the Denver area, except Douglas county. And that many ski counties instituted mask mandates.

Locals in Pitkin County tell me it really was not enforced. It is kind of a latte liberal area, but they had to face the reality of the economic and business circumstances.

Polis did not even criticize Denver metro and the ski counties from implementing localized covid measures. But he was not going to force the rest of rural Colorado, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs to implement any measures.


Irrespective of his personal opinion on covid.. he handled it brilliantly. He kept the states liberal and conservatives happy.

All this was happening in Colorado while I was in Nova where no amount of hospitalization and community spread was ever going to make any local leader take any action. Alexandria may have been the only jurisdiction where it was most viable to happen, but it did not happen there.

I've read that ski towns were the worst but much of the state wasn't nearly as bad.

I actually went on a road trip to Colorado in October 2020, perhaps the height of mask mania. A motel in Sterling had no masks anywhere in sight. In other parts of the state, we drove past school playgrounds and groups of children walking home from school, and there were also no masks to be seen. Some schools must have already been operating normally, especially in very small towns.

We did go through Glenwood Springs, and I saw a bunch of people wearing masks as they entered a supermarket. But I stayed at a motel that night where maskless people partied on the parking lot. That was the same night as the miserable vice-presidential debate.

[jamestroll]

I wish more Democrats were like Jared Polis.

It is hard to tell what his exact personal opinion of covid was but..

Locals in Colorado tell me that virtually all the Denver area, except Douglas county. And that many ski counties instituted mask mandates.

Locals in Pitkin County tell me it really was not enforced. It is kind of a latte liberal area, but they had to face the reality of the economic and business circumstances.

Polis did not even criticize Denver metro and the ski counties from implementing localized covid measures. But he was not going to force the rest of rural Colorado, Grand Junction, and Colorado Springs to implement any measures.


Irrespective of his personal opinion on covid.. he handled it brilliantly. He kept the states liberal and conservatives happy.

All this was happening in Colorado while I was in Nova where no amount of hospitalization and community spread was ever going to make any local leader take any action. Alexandria may have been the only jurisdiction where it was most viable to happen, but it did not happen there.

I've read that ski towns were the worst but much of the state wasn't nearly as bad.

I actually went on a road trip to Colorado in October 2020, perhaps the height of mask mania. A motel in Sterling had no masks anywhere in sight. In other parts of the state, we drove past school playgrounds and groups of children walking home from school, and there were also no masks to be seen. Some schools must have already been operating normally, especially in very small towns.

We did go through Glenwood Springs, and I saw a bunch of people wearing masks as they entered a supermarket. But I stayed at a motel that night where maskless people partied on the parking lot. That was the same night as the miserable vice-presidential debate.

Glenwood Springs is actually liberal. I live near there.

Garfield County is pretty much 50-50 county at this point. It is Glenwood Springs and Carbondale versus the rest of the county. Rifle is quite a gop vote sink though and formidable.

I think who will win the governor's race in Garfield County tonight. Polis. Senate and House will interesting. Maybe Democrats narrowly win both? But the national environment causing Boebert and  O'dea to carry Garfield would not be shocking.

Glenwood only has like 10,000 and Carbondale around 7,000 people. That is a good chunk out of 62,000 but not enough to make it a reliable democratic county.

New Castle is kind of a swing area.


Locals have told me there was always a mask divide in Garfield. lol

The partying sounds accurate. That is one of the drawbacks of the area for me. Way to much partying, alcohol, and drugs.

But Garfield County Politically in a summary:

West= Very Republican

Rifle= Quite Republican with a good vote total margin.

New Castle= Swing area

Glenwood and Carbondale=Democratic

[Frodo]

New research gives hope that Paxlovid may help prevent long COVID

A new study sheds light on a potential prevention measure for long COVID.

The antiviral drug Paxlovid was associated with a 26% less risk of developing long COVID, a new study this month found. For every 100 people who took the antiviral treatment, roughly 2.3 fewer cases of long COVID were detected 90 days post initial COVID infection, the study concluded.

Paxlovid has been reported effective in reducing hospitalization and death post COVID infection for those eligible to take it, which includes those at high risk for developing severe illness from a COVID infection. This study looked at those with at least one underlying risk for developing severe illness, such as being overweight, a current smoker, having heart disease or diabetes. The study further found that the drug was associated with a 48% lower risk of death and 30% lower risk of hospitalization following initial infection. Little has been known about the drug’s potential effect on developing long COVID, but the study funded by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs—which has not undergone peer review—acknowledged its benefits long term when taken in the initial phase after infection, between one and five days after.

[Frodo]

A public health emergency typically lasts for 90 days, or roughly three months, so this one should expire in early April next year:

U.S. COVID public health emergency to stay in place

The United States will keep in place the public health emergency status of the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing millions of Americans to still receive free tests, vaccines and treatments, two Biden administration officials said on Friday.

The possibility of a winter surge in COVID cases and the need for more time to transition out of the public health emergency to a private market were two factors that contributed to the decision not to end the emergency status in January, one of the officials said.

The public health emergency was initially declared in January 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, and has been renewed each quarter since for 90 days. But the government in August began signaling it planned to let it expire in January.

This might be the last time this is going to be renewed.

[Horus]

Unsticky time?

[Blue3]

Unsticky time?

Last year it spiked again after Thanksgiving and after New Year's. Let's see how things look in February/March, and unsticky on the anniversay in March 2023

[Inmate Trump]

March 2023 sounds like a good unsticky time to me too.

(Assuming we're not bombarded with some new killer variant again.)

[Frodo]

Updated COVID vaccines offer better protection than original -U.S. study
-----------------------------------

And for anyone worried about all the new COVID variants out there, take a deep breath and relax:

Why the new XBB COVID ‘nightmare variant’ may be less scary than it sounds
Although a holiday spike in COVID cases is still likely, data about new Omicron variants gives health experts hope.

It helps that all the new variants out there (so far) are descended from Omicron.

[It’s so Joever]

New research gives hope that Paxlovid may help prevent long COVID

A new study sheds light on a potential prevention measure for long COVID.

The antiviral drug Paxlovid was associated with a 26% less risk of developing long COVID, a new study this month found. For every 100 people who took the antiviral treatment, roughly 2.3 fewer cases of long COVID were detected 90 days post initial COVID infection, the study concluded.

Paxlovid has been reported effective in reducing hospitalization and death post COVID infection for those eligible to take it, which includes those at high risk for developing severe illness from a COVID infection. This study looked at those with at least one underlying risk for developing severe illness, such as being overweight, a current smoker, having heart disease or diabetes. The study further found that the drug was associated with a 48% lower risk of death and 30% lower risk of hospitalization following initial infection. Little has been known about the drug’s potential effect on developing long COVID, but the study funded by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs—which has not undergone peer review—acknowledged its benefits long term when taken in the initial phase after infection, between one and five days after.

But I was told by our resident medical experts that long Covid doesn’t exist…

[jamestroll]

March 2023 sounds like a good unsticky time to me too.

(Assuming we're not bombarded with some new killer variant again.)

NO! Never unsticky this!!!!

New research gives hope that Paxlovid may help prevent long COVID

A new study sheds light on a potential prevention measure for long COVID.

The antiviral drug Paxlovid was associated with a 26% less risk of developing long COVID, a new study this month found. For every 100 people who took the antiviral treatment, roughly 2.3 fewer cases of long COVID were detected 90 days post initial COVID infection, the study concluded.

Paxlovid has been reported effective in reducing hospitalization and death post COVID infection for those eligible to take it, which includes those at high risk for developing severe illness from a COVID infection. This study looked at those with at least one underlying risk for developing severe illness, such as being overweight, a current smoker, having heart disease or diabetes. The study further found that the drug was associated with a 48% lower risk of death and 30% lower risk of hospitalization following initial infection. Little has been known about the drug’s potential effect on developing long COVID, but the study funded by the United States Department of Veterans Affairs—which has not undergone peer review—acknowledged its benefits long term when taken in the initial phase after infection, between one and five days after.

But I was told by our resident medical experts that long Covid doesn’t exist…

No, it really does not exist.

[emailking]

No, it really does not exist.

You literally recced this.

You don't want to get long covid. Get your boosters!

[Former Dean Phillips Supporters for Haley (I guess???!?) 👁️]

No, it really does not exist.

You literally recced this.

You don't want to get long covid. Get your boosters!

A lot of people (none more than jamestroll) are being very cavalier about their long term health with regards to long covid.

If you are 20-30 years old, I think it is probably hard to truly imagine what it means to live to age 80 or so. Naturally, you tend to value the present, and undervalue the future (especially the far off future which does not quite seem real).

If the general public keeps getting COVID as often as currently, and if nothing else changes, people who are young today will get COVID 30, 40, 50, or maybe even more times in their life.

Even if any individual infection (in particular the earlier ones, when you are also younger) is likely to be mild, what are the cumulative effects over a long period of time of being infected, and then re-infected, and re-infected again and again? If your 4th infection is "mild" but does some small damage to your cardiovascular system which you would not really notice other than being a bit tired for a month, what effect does that cardiovascular damage have on the severity of your 26th re-infection which you get 2 decades later? Accumulating damage both to your cardiovascular system and to your brain/nervous system (2 areas where even mild COVID has been shown to do detectable damage) over an extended time seems like it can't be good.

Studies so far do not seem to be showing that risk of either long COVID or of serious illness/hospitalization goes down with repeated infections, and if anything it may even go up as some studies have found.

Suppose the probability of getting some significant form of long COVID is 5% (a reasonable conservative estimate, based on what I know). That means if you are infected once, there is a 95% chance that you will have no issues. Sounds like pretty good odds!

But if you get infected twice, and you have an (independent) 5% chance both times, you have a 9.75% chance of getting long COVID from at least one of the two infections.

The math can be hard to get intuitively (people are naturally not suited to understanding probabilities), so here are some specifics calculating that out for repeat infections.

Get infected 5 times - 23% chance of long COVID
Get infected 10 times - 40% chance of long COVID
Get infected 20 times - 64% chance of long COVID
Get infected 50 times - 92% chance of long COVID

92% chance is close to certain. Of course, this does assume that the probabilities of long COVID (or whatever other consequences) of infection are independent for each particular infection, but based on what is known so far, we don't really have any better hypothesis than that.

So the more you repeat something with a small (maybe even negligible?) chance of a bad outcome, the more certain it becomes that you will experience the bad outcome. In other words, you can only play Russian roulette so many times before something bad happens.

If we had vaccines that actually stop infection and transmission (supposedly nasal vaccines might do this, though even that is not certain), that could make a massive difference in avoiding these potentially devastating long term health effects, but Congress has stopped funding anything related to this thanks to Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans (all of whom are old, so do not need to worry about the possible cumulative effects of 50 lifetime reinfections since they will be dead long before they can be re-infected that many times).

Private pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna also have 0 real incentive to develop vaccines that actually stop infection and transmission on their own without government support, because with the status quo they can make more money by constantly re-selling booster vaccines. Vaccines that are (relatively) effective against hospitalization but not against infection are the best possible business plan they could ever hope for.

Despite the fact that young people are more blase about COVID in general, it seems to me that in reality this is actually a much bigger problem for young people than for old people. Young people are being irrational and ignoring the future by pretending this problem does not exist rather than trying to do anything to deal with it.

Bottom line, if you care about your long term health and if you are a young person, you should really be wearing a high quality N95 or better mask any time you are in a public place indoors.

Ironically, if you are an old person, it is actually less important to wear a mask and protect yourself from repetitive re-infections, since you will be dead relatively sooner (compared to young people) regardless and the "long term" health effects you could potentially suffer will be less long than for young people. And as a society/government we should be requiring that air quality in all public indoor spaces be improved up to safer standards of ventilation and air filtration. This could avoid lots of infections, and hence could reduce the average number of infections the average person might get over the course of their life from 50 to 20 or 10 - which would make a tremendous difference if my math is even approximately right.

[soundchaser]

92% chance is close to certain. Of course, this does assume that the probabilities of long COVID (or whatever other consequences) of infection are independent for each particular infection, but based on what is known so far, we don't really have any better hypothesis than that.

I don't think this is scientifically accurate or a good way of looking at probability.

[emailking]

Well it follows from the premises but who knows if that's true. My guess is some people are more at risk for long covid than others. But the chance of getting it probably does increase with infection.

[100% pro-life no matter what]

It seems like the flu might be "winning" the battle of viral interference this year.  The last two years, the flu was virtually non-existent (even in areas without covid restrictions and where masks were rare).  A popularized theory was the idea of "viral interference", where one highly contagious respiratory virus could crowd out another one.  This year, it seems like the reverse might be true.  The flu- which virtually no Americans have had in nearly three years- is spiking.  Covid cases are not increasing, and are way lower than in previous years.  In Tennessee, syndromic surveillance says that ILI (influenza-like illness) is three times as high as CLI (coronavirus-like illness).  At no point since early 2020 has ILI even been above CLI, except for a few weeks in the spring of 2022 when they were both virtually non-existent.

I don't think it's likely we get a major winter covid wave this year.  But, of course, the flu isn't really any less severe than the Omicron variant of covid.  And, we appear to be getting an early and severe flu season.

[Bandit3 the Worker]

As of a week ago, the 7-day average of new COVID cases in the U.S. is 40,438. A year earlier, it was 93,443. The year before that, it was 172,700. (I'm using data from a week ago because some states only release data once a week.)