Think it’s finally happened. Fever. Headache. Sluggish. Or maybe it’s just a normal flu. Who can tell these days?
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Lots of stuff going around. Friend of mine in NY just had HPIV-3.
Had never heard of this before now, and initially thought you just portmanteaued three different diseases together.
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What is the vaccination policy in China? I would have assumed they would have been mass producing a vax during the lockdown but doesn’t sound like that is the case.
Edit: I see churchill’s post about the vax rate in the elderly.
Their vaccine sucks iirc.
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That looks like exactly the vax rates if you wanted to thin the herd of the old people. Like you know Texas Lt Gov Dan Patrick.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/12/20/china-covid-policy-endanger-world/
China’s “zero covid” policy was unsustainable and abruptly scrapped, but the absence of a coherent fallback strategy threatens a fresh set of nightmares for its population, its economy and the Communist Party leadership. A new crisis could shake the whole world. As the Wuhan outbreak demonstrated three years ago, what begins in China does not necessarily stay there.
China has troubled days ahead. Among those 60 years and older, only about 69 percent have received booster shots, and the uptake is even less among those over 80 years old. They are extremely vulnerable to omicron, and reports from China have indicated that a surge of deaths has already started, with crematoriums working around the clock. Mathematical models predict 1 million or more deaths early next year. China’s government has announced a plan to accelerate vaccination campaigns for the elderly, who have been hesitant to get the shots. For a long while, China has grossly underreported deaths due to covid and probably will continue to do so.
China unwisely eschewed the effective mRNA vaccines for less-effective Chinese-made shots. The population has not been widely exposed to omicron, and thus lacks natural immunity. A potential lifeline is an aerosol vaccine developed by CanSino Biologics. It is being offered as a booster, in the form of an inhaled mist taken in through the mouth, after studies show it triggered an immune system response in people who had previously received two shots of a Chinese vaccine. The best strategy is pressing this vaccine and importing millions of mRNA shots, too.
Mostly just sharing but also this last sentence jumped out.
What are you supposed to do when your covid swab pulls out a booger the size of a grasshopper? I wiped the bulk of it off onto a paper towel. It was the first nostril and I didn’t really feel like shoving the giant booger up the second nostril.
You are supposed to blow your nose before you swab to avoid that.
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In a letter to all states, federal health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said it was important to track new variants through genome sequencing due to the “sudden spurt of cases being witnessed in Japan, United States of America, Republic of Korea, Brazil and China”.
That’s our Pfizer?
Yes
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Baby vaccinated. Also:
https://twitter.com/erictopol/status/1605684788291112960?s=46&t=cLff2-K8kDk-g-ZVWkn2_g
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Well it should say that on the package then. 
It does in the instructions, at least for Binax. Tbh I hadn’t fully understood why, but now it makes sense.
I only skimmed this, and I don’t think I fully understand how the research design, but the summary seems like a real good news/bad news situation:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e2.htm?s_cid=mm715152e2_w
Good news is straightforward: “Among immunocompetent adults aged ≥65 years hospitalized in the multistate IVY Network, a bivalent booster dose provided 73% additional protection against COVID-19 hospitalization compared with past monovalent mRNA vaccination only.”
Bad news that I’m inferring: It seems like protection against hospitalization is super low for the multiple-mRNA-shots-but-no-bivalent-booster population. “When compared with unvaccinated persons, VE of a bivalent booster dose received ≥7 days before illness onset (median = 29 days) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was 84%. Compared with persons who received ≥2 monovalent-only mRNA vaccine doses, relative VE of a bivalent booster dose was 73%.” Maybe I shouldn’t be interpreting things this way, but if vaccine effectiveness only increases from 73% to 84% when the comparison group shifts from the mono-vaccinated to the unvaccinated group, that says not great things about the current effectiveness of the mono-vaccination.
Given the low bivalent vaccine uptake, I assume COVID deaths will somehow continue at high levels through 2023. Sigh.
Semi-related question/thought I had: When the CDC calculates excess deaths, they’re relying upon an estimated number of normal deaths. One approach to estimating this death rate would be to use a rolling X-year period, but the problem with that approach is that you’d be including the early years of the pandemic in your baseline estimate, which would bias towards abnormally high “normal” death rates and correspondingly low abnormal deaths.
If I understand this correctly, the CDC is excluding 2020 and later from their baseline rate calculation, which is good if you want ongoing estimates of overall COVID deaths. But at some point, excluding the 3 most recent years of data (or more) is going to leave you with noisier and noisier measures of baseline deaths. I don’t think there’s a good way to fix this, but it’s just one more complication in trying to estimate total effects.
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Did that once when doing a self test. I skipped the second nostril and figured if anything has COVID, a booger will and deposited it in the testing dropper thing. Came back negative
I think I might have gotten my first flagged post on Unstuck. At least the first I’m aware of.
Achievement unlocked!
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