The pandemic is 18 months old in most places and waning immunity is a thing with Covid. So it’s probably some combination of re-infection and people who never got Covid in the first place.
Isn’t this almost everybody? What is a reasonable assumption for the % of people that have not had Covid? Its got to be way up there. We are still very vulnerable without mandatory global vaccination.
Once you factor in 50-70% vaccination plus the amount of people who got Covid probably 80%+ of people have had some opportunity to get immunity to Covid. In the US we have had nearly 15% of the population test positive and asymptomatic/untested cases make the number of people who had Covid here much higher.
The point I was trying to make is we are far enough into this thing that waning immunity (both natural and through vaccination) is an issue that will continue to provide enough vulnerable people to have waves like this. We are never ever getting to enough immunity to fully squash Covid as a result. It’s one of the things I fear about the US right now. Not enough people are bothering to get booster shots and so people vaccinated back in March are going to be much more likely to get infected and transmit the virus.
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Also, at home tests that don’t get reported to the health department.
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This isn’t wrong, but it’s an odd framing of a problem that health officials were screaming and yelling about long before COVID. MRSA has been a huge issue for a while now.
Some good news for the rest of the world
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I am surprised it hasn’t already happened. When I was growing up doctors would prescribe antibiotics for every little cold if just for the placebo effect.
Looking back it’s crazy. I was sick a lot and probably took antibiotics a half dozen times a year at least, for no good reason.
That doesn’t include the times when I needed them like when I was hospitalized for a month w iv antibiotics when I had osteomyelitis
It has! MRSA kills like over 10,000 people a year in the US.
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This is a question maybe a medical professional can answer:
When I was in the hospital a while back I was told I was colonized for MRSA. Not clear what that means. I think it means I don’t have MRSA but could spread it? 
Previously the advice was to leave a four-week gap.
The UK Health Security Agency said the change was a precaution against the small risk of heart inflammation.
UK vaccine advisers recommended a 12-week gap between doses when they gave a green light on Monday for 16 and 17-year-olds to get a second jab.
Evidence is emerging that this length of gap may reduce the already low risk of heart inflammation after a vaccine in children whose risk from the virus is also very low.
I find these extra cautious government proclamations on vaccines very incongruous with the policy of doing basically nothing to stop exploding spread among the population.
Control what they can, no matter how trivial. Wash their hands of what they can’t. Standard.
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Funny, I’ve never seen it - though I don’t watch ITV or Sky - C4 a little
I think the Beeb is right to publish the article on the basis that not many colds were circulating last year, so the antibiotic issue could have more of an impact this year, when colds and mingling are back in semi-full force. And knowing how many randoms view the most important thread on the interwebs, some will learn through posting it here.
As several doctors and researchers have pointed out (h/t especially Avi Bitterman and David Boulware), the most impressive studies come from places that are teeming with worms. Mahmud from Bangladesh, Ravakirti from East India, Lopez-Medina from Colombia, etc.
Here’s the prevalence of roundworm infections by country (source). But alongside roundworms, there are threadworms, hookworms, blood flukes, liver flukes, nematodes, trematodes, all sorts of worms. Add them all up and somewhere between half and a quarter of people in the developing world have at least one parasitic worm in their body.
Being full of worms may impact your ability to fight coronavirus. Gluchowska et al write:
Helminth [ie worm] infections are among the most common infectious diseases. Bradbury et al. highlight the possible negative interactions between helminth infection and COVID-19 severity in helminth-endemic regions and note that alterations in the gut microbiome associated with helminth infection appear to have systemic immunomodulatory effects. It has also been proposed that helminth co-infection may increase the morbidity and mortality of COVID-19, because the immune system cannot efficiently respond to the virus; in addition, vaccines will be less effective for these patients, but treatment and prevention of helminth infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19. During millennia of parasite-host coevolution helminths evolved mechanisms suppressing the host immune responses, which may mitigate vaccine efficacy and increase severity of other infectious diseases.
Treatment of worm infections might reduce the negative effect of COVID-19! And ivermectin is a deworming drug! You can see where this is going…
Btw, this is the analysis of the Slate Star Codex guy (now Astral Codex Ten) who I’ve occasionally defended as genuinely smart (because he is). Ivermectin: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Ivermectin supporters were really wrong. I enjoy the idea of a cosmic joke where ivermectin sort of works in some senses in some areas. But the things people were claiming - that ivermectin has a 100% success rate, that you don’t need to take the vaccine because you can just take ivermectin instead, etc - have been untenable not just since the big negative trials came out this summer, but even by the standards of the early positive trials. Mahmud et al was big and positive and exciting, but it showed that ivermectin patients recovered in about 7 days on average instead of 9. I think the conventional wisdom - that the most extreme ivermectin supporters were mostly gullible rubes who were bamboozled by pseudoscience - was basically accurate.
Mainstream medicine has reacted with slogans like “believe Science”. I don’t know if those kinds of slogans ever help, but they’re especially unhelpful here. A quick look at ivermectin supporters shows their problem is they believed Science too much.
lol, these dudes just can’t help themselves.
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I think he’s being a bit tongue in cheek here, but he spends the next few paragraphs supporting the argument. At least the tip of the spear of the pro-Ivermectin crew was influenced by the studies, just that most were shit.
I think it’s important to address ivermectin support on its own terms - as a potentially plausible scientific theory in a debris field of confusing evidence, which should be debated to the usual standards of scientific debate. I’ve tried to do that above. But this picture wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging the overlap with vaccine denial - a segment of people who are completely crazy and wrong and who happen to have fixated on this mildly interesting question as opposed to some other one with even less evidence.
It doesn’t help that there are massive influential “doctors” that are now saying that ivermectin works similarly to new Covid antivirals either. The amount of misinformation out there is staggering, and people like a clean easy answer that the ivermectin people were giving.
Right, but it’s not really “believing the science” when you cherry-pick studies and toss out the science you don’t like. It’s a good article that didn’t need a contrarian-bro zinger to punch it up.
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