Science had an informal survey a while ago asking virologists where we are headed. Majority predicted it becoming endemic, but it wasn’t unanimous by any means. If you’re searching for good news, COVID seems to mutate much more slowly than most RNA viruses.
Im not really disagreeing with this, there is going to be some personal risk involved and everyone is going to have to make choices and there isnt a COVID “all-clear” coming. But I would say that at least here in USA there is an understandable, but possibly misguided, push to be beyond COVID and I think it is 1) preventing some relatively basic mitigation that we could be doing at a population level and 2) that we could be skewing people’s risk calculations by ignoring the long-term effects of COVID. Still a lot to learn on that front, but I wouldnt say the data is super good from what we know so far in terms of both potential long-term effects and the severity of reinfections.
I don’t see endemic covid being that much worse than the flu - at least for the vaccinated. Kids 0-5 is still an issue, but the risk is tiny for most of them.
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Maybe Im being a bit pessimistic. I do think eliminating COVID is going to need a combination of better vaccines and therapeutics, so I will amend to say endemic barring tech improvements that likely will take years to decades to perfect and fully roll out.
Viral load in the upper respiratory tract is a measure of immediate infectiousness. It’s not a lagging indicator like symptom onset.
I dont really feel comfortable saying that given we dont know the potential long-term effects of COVID infections, some of the neurological stuff in particular is a bit scary, but I might be skewed in my views given that I have young unvaccinated children at home.
Theres also immunocompromised people who, hopefully, can have a path back to participating somewhat safely in society at some point.
I fully agree with this and it was this thought was a large reason I became a hermit for a year. To not kill the vulnerable people around me. In a vaccine plentiful environment it isn’t getting much better than now though right? Especially in USA #1 where there will always be a large amount of unvaccinated people and people unwilling to get boosters?
Forget the restaurants. At what point do we resume regular life activities? Never?
Maybe. It really doesn’t seem like that big a deal if I get it now or wait until more people in the world have had it. Does anyone even have any idea how much (if) vaccines are fading? How much or (if) boosters change that? Specifically for Moderna? Indications seem to be that the expectation for my immunity level is very high right now. “There’s a tiny chance that your vaccine has faded a modest amount”. Is that what we’re looking at here? Is someone going to tell me that there’s a fair chance that my Moderna vaccine has faded a significant amount?
JT is living life. He’s talking about things like wearing a mask and I don’t think he equates wearing a mask to not living life.
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Almost killed my sister two years ago. The flu is no joke.
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I dont really know of many people, if any, that havent resumed regular life activities outside of really immunocompromised people who really have little choice. Id call myself resuming regular life activities even though I havent returned to 2019 yet. I dont eat in restaurants when community transmission is high, I dont take my kids to indoor activities, and I mask and work from home some. Kids are back in school and we’ve resumed leisure travel, albeit in a slightly different form. Its not May 2020 or anything. When my kids are both vaccinated, I’ll expand some activities. Everyone is going to make their own choices what to do, Im not trying to shame anyone doing more "normal’ things. I dont think adding rapid tests to many activities or upgrading masks would really prevent many things that people enjoy.
I agree with your basic premise that, yeah, its gonna be like this for awhile. I, personally, dont know when I will act like it is 2019 again. Just have to sort of take that as it comes. I think, at least in USA, the current approach to COVID is suboptimal for reducing death and illness, probably suboptimal for the economy, and is taking way too much tail risk for my liking (a vaccine evading variant and we would be back to April 2020, at least for awhile, or we’d ramp up death from the current highly uncomfortable like 300K+ a year run rate plus w/e long COVID issues there are).
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I got both doses of Pfizer this spring. Started feeling pretty sick yesterday and went to the doctor. Tested positive for COVID. Last night was the sickest I’ve been in many years. Cold, hot, nauseous, achy, nightmares, pounding headache etc. I’m not quite so bad today but can’t walk very far because I’m so weak. I also still have a debilitating headache.
I’ve done a ton of traveling lately so who knows where I got it or who I’ve spread it to. The timing is horrible because we were just out of work for a week for SEMA in Vegas and one of my coworkers didn’t make it back yet. He had a massive stroke the first night we were there. I’m supposed to be covering for him at work and now I’m out too. ****…
One note is that last Thursday I developed a rash on both arms. It wasn’t like a rash I’ve ever had before and there was no obvious reason. It went away after a few days. A Google search indicates that plenty of people get a rash as their first symptom of COVID.
From Chiefsplanet. This is the kind of stuff that pushed me to get the booster. You’re probably a lot healthier than me though.
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If they are, come at me folks!
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More evidence that its faded for transmissibility than for severity.
Unfortunately I don’t think there is consensus on this other than that it’s nonzero. Some studies have shown large decreases, like the one below, though some of our healthcare / microbiology folks have shed doubt on numbers like these. I’m sure the study cited below has been discussed upthread (is it the one Churchill posted numbers from a YouTube?) but I can’t recall what the consensus was.
As the Delta variant became the dominant strain of the coronavirus across the United States, all three COVID-19 vaccines available to Americans lost some of their protective power, with vaccine efficacy among a large group of veterans dropping between 35% and 85%, according to a new study.
Researchers who scoured the records of nearly 800,000 U.S. veterans found that in early March, just as the Delta variant was gaining a toehold across American communities, the three vaccines were roughly equal in their ability to prevent infections.
But over the next six months, that changed dramatically.
By the end of September, Moderna’s two-dose COVID-19 vaccine, measured as 89% effective in March, was only 58% effective.
The effectiveness of shots made by Pfizer and BioNTech, which also employed two doses, fell from 87% to 45% in the same period.
And most strikingly, the protective power of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine plunged from 86% to just 13% over those six months.
quote from here:
I’m totally fine with wearing a mask. But it’s irrelevant at restaurants.
Ban Churchill for posting the same study was the concesus (question ‘where the screenshot graphic came from’ debacle) Original post was deleted though - woof woof
Ok. I officially promise to get a flu shot.
Even the study posted here that was so well refuted didn’t have Moderna fading that much. Can anyone put any kind of super wild guess even on how and how much vaccines are fading? Is it supposed to make no difference at all here if it’s 1% less effective or something? It just is or isn’t?
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Haha I ninja-edited my post because I thought it might have been that one. Unfortunately all I remember is the argument over the YouTube screenshot and not the critiques of the study itself.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02261-8
The Pfizer–BioNTech and Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines are effective against the highly infectious Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 — but their protection drops away over time, a study of infections in the United Kingdom has concluded.
Researchers at the University of Oxford, UK, and the country’s Office for National Statistics analysed a vast data set comprising the results of 2,580,021 PCR tests to check for SARS-CoV-2 from 384,543 UK adults between 1 December 2020 and 16 May 2021 — when the Alpha variant was dominant — and 811,624 test results from 358,983 people between 17 May and 1 August 2021, when the Delta variant was more prevalent.
The results, published in a preprint on 19 August1, suggest that both vaccines are effective against Delta after two doses, but that the protection they offer wanes with time. The vaccine made by Pfizer in New York City and BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, was 92% effective at keeping people from developing a high viral load — a high concentration of the virus in their test samples — 14 days after the second dose. But the vaccine’s effectiveness fell to 90%, 85% and 78% after 30, 60 and 90 days, respectively.
The vaccine developed by Oxford and the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca in Cambridge, UK, was 69% effective against a high viral load 14 days after the second dose, falling to 61% by 90 days.