Just received my free rapid tests in the mail. Shout out to Jen Psaki for making it happen, and keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t have to use 'em.
This isn’t even the one I was referencing, so there’s another one floating around. The other one showed something like a two day shorter infectious period.
Another 415,000 missing from ‘totsal cases’ in England, let alone the UK (no requirement to have LFT pozz confirmed by LFT in UK)
Schools that ended the requirement for pupils to wear face coverings this month, in line with government guidance, are reinstating it again because of surges in Covid cases.
The government rescinded the requirement for masks in secondary school classrooms in England on 20 January and since 27 January they have no longer been compulsory in communal indoor spaces either. But a number of schools that complied with the change in the rules are having to reintroduce them a week later because of outbreaks in infections.
A total of 415,000 children – just over 5% of the state school intake – were absent on 20 January, up from 3.9% on 6 January. More than three-quarters of absent pupils had tested positive for Covid.
At nearly a quarter of state schools, more than 15% of teachers and leaders were off work. In total, 9% of heads and teachers – 47,000 – were absent on 20 January, up from 44,000 two weeks previously. A similar proportion of teaching assistants and other staff were also out of school.
Thanks. I had actually liked that post back in August when it was posted but forgot about the part about actual average percentages of infectiousness
The averages were 84.9% infectious for unvaccinated and 68.6% for vaccinated (P = 0.005) so being vaccinated makes 1 in 6 COVID-positive people not infectious when they otherwise would have been - obviously on top of making it much less likely to get infected in the first place.
The study also specifically says that asymptomatic breakthrough cases have lower viral loads than in symptomatic breakthrough cases, which answers a question I had in the other thread
Table 1 shows the distribution of Ct-values of the breakthrough infections, as a proxy for the nasopharyngeal viral load. Ct-values were significantly lower in symptomatic breakthrough infections (μ = 23.2) than in asymptomatic breakthrough infections (μ = 26.7), corresponding to higher viral loads (p = 0.022, t-test).
I’m hoping they do the same study with the advent of Omicron shortly. Results should be similar now we’re + Booster but, I think it’s fair to say, many boosters will now be waning hence so many triple vax ‘breakthroughs’ (remember them, we don’t even use the term now)
Today I was going to visit a friend whose immune system is very weak. To be extremely cautious, we took tests at home (cue tests). We have no symptoms so of course they were neg-. Woah, my wife tested positive! We did an immediate retest and it was negative. Now I really don’t know. So we both went out and got PCR tests. They promise results same day, so we’ll see. We cancelled the visit for now.
Good luck. My wife tested positive and had symptoms and I never got it. Also those home tests can be false positive, especially if there was some contamination, so PCR verification is definitely the way to go here given your conflicting results.
Also crazy that we were literally just discussing how the vaccinated might be more likely to be more socially responsible and test (in situtations exactly like you did) than the unvaccinated, and then you had a real life example of it.
I don’t think the speculation was that unvaccinated people are more likely to be responsible and get tested, it was that since they’re more likely to get seriously ill and require hospitalization they’re more likely to show up as officially tested cases from hospital administered PCR tests as opposed to vaccinated people using home tests that end up unreported. For example the official advice from my county is that if I test positive on a home test, I should consider the test results accurate and isolate at home and NOT get a PCR test, and there’s no mention on their website of reporting your positive home test.