Whatās up everyone? Iām back! Of course I have some thoughts on the current situation in the pandemic and the current situation ITT, that can hopefully get people to talk past each other a bit less and be a bit less accusatory.
One thing that I think a lot of people might be missing in this back and forth is that everyoneās precaution level can (and SHOULD) be changing over time, and that doesnāt automatically mean you got it wrong before.
There are a lot of attempts to go for a āgotchaā on other posters based on what they said months ago. Pre-Omicron was a different world, just like pre-Delta was a different world, just like pre-Vaccine was a different world.
It can be correct to have been pretty damn close to normal 3-6 months ago once boosted (as protection vs Delta was very good), but it is clearly not a good idea to be close to normal right now if you want to avoid Omicron.
I was playing unmasked poker for a while post-booster and pre-Omicron. I felt safe doing so. Now Iām basically treating things the way I would if you dropped me into March 2020 in a time machine with my current knowledge: N95 for trips to the store, only seeing other people who I know have been careful the last 10-14 days before seeing them, nothing in person and unmasked where thereās potential exposure. Iām masking outdoors on the way into stores, mainly because the level of extra inconvenience is inconsequential and it canāt hurt, and there may be outdoor spread of Omicron.
That doesnāt mean I was wrong a couple months ago. I think thereās a significant likelihood that this continues for years, maybe even the rest of our lives (hope not), and the key to maintaining happiness and sanity while minimizing risk is to adjust your behavior/precautions to the data and your current booster status.
One thing we know for sure is that barring a HIGHLY lethal new variant, western society is done trying to prevent the spread of COVID-19. These are individual decisions. Perhaps in some communities, cities, regions, etc there are more precautions being taken - thatās great. In others there will be ~none. We have to decide how to live in the areas we live in and make personal risk decisions. We can criticize society at large for how this is being handled, but that doesnāt change the fact that we have to live within the society we choose to live in and make the personal decisions that society is leaving to the individual.
My primary concern from here on out is avoiding Long Covid, especially after Fauciās latest comments and the data out of Finland. Thus Iām trying to personally mitigate my risk of catching COVID-19 to as close to zero as possible, unless/until we see data that vaccines, Paxlovid, or other treatments prevent most of the risk of Long Covid - especially the cognitive side of it, or anything that would take significant years off of life expectancy. Iāve seen conflicting data, expert opinions, etc on whether severity of case is linked to likelihood of and/or severity of Long Covid. So I feel like we simply donāt know yet.
The other thing about Omicron is that itās so widely prevalent right now that even a highly efficacious vaccine is going to be tested FREQUENTLY. So to pull some numbers out of my ass, if the average unvaccinated person would have a 25% chance of infection in a certain situation, and the vaccine gives you 75% protection over that, you have a 6.25% chance of infection. Thatās significant protection! But if you roll the dice on that type of situation five times a day for a month, guess what? Youāre probably going to catch it, at which point you can rely on the extremely good protection against severe cases.
Iām very curious what others, especially some of our resident medical/science experts, think about the situation right now with Long Covid. How concerned would you be about it, being double vaxxed and boosted? Do you think itās going to end up being strongly correlated to severity of case? In particular the cognitive side of itā¦
Last but not least, I find it absurd that we arenāt doing a massive study somewhere in the world on how the common cold coronaviruses spread. Are we all being infected every year, but the vast majority are asymptomatic? Are they surging in two waves per year and not one? Do they cause any long-term effects?
It seems like a study aiming to track the spread of regular coronaviruses would offer a lot of insight into the eventual end-game of COVID-19. If the regular common colds are spreading asymptomatically and like 90% of us catch them without even realizing it, their R0 is much higher than we previously thought, and we can probably conclude that asymptomatic infections donāt do much of anything to us and proceed accordingly.