I have one of the old glass ship mugs that I use regularly. Think it either comes from RL or A&W or a place like that. Pretty good heft.
Someone mentioned the Puerto Rico concert but no link that I remember. Hereâs a link if anyone cares. People going to Mexico for Dead & Co. in a week think it will be fine lmao.
I donât think it is. We are almost two years into the pandemic and few countries have had more than 20% of their population infected. This includes a long time without vaccines and will also heavily skew towards people not taking proper precautions.
Ultimately it will be a math problem, albeit a complicated one. We know Omicron spreads very fast, but we donât really know yet (as far as I know) how much people will adjust their behaviors based on a very complicated set of permutations (unvaxxed, partially vaxxed, vaxxed and booster, previously infected, previously infected and reinfected, and all the permutations of those under all the permutations of the different vaccines that people may have taken). Blending all that with also not knowing how much infection-based immunity/resistance is going to help after we get through the shit show of January. I am not really an expert but my intuition is with this many variable nobody knows what happens. Global infection is on the table. Rolling 25% infection with more variants coming is on the table. I guess that herd immunity (supported by vaccination) is also probably on the table. But this stuff is so complex we probably shouldnât listen to anyoneâs option about it except for the people running the best models with the most rigor. And aunts on Facebook, of course.
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Yeah but even normally conscientious people are getting fatigued from following those restrictions.
Now COVID is becoming another thing to coexist with rather than fight to get rid of. This is because people are coming to the conclusion that it is here to stay and we will always be a step behind covidâs evolution and mutation when trying to protect ourselves from it. As the virus weakens with each mutation, more people will likely think that itâs better to peel off the band-aid rather than swear off family gatherings forever to avoid COVID.
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The conclusion is just we are going to permanently blow up the healthcare system with reduced access to what we now consider standard care. So basically what poor people face now, except expended to all but the ultra rich.
Would also advise caution on weakens with each mutation. This is an Alpha lineage mutation and it Omicron is probably more severe than alpha. Would not count on the next mutation being less severe and wouldnât count on reinfection being less severe either, depending on how all these long-term damage studies play out.
That said, agreed that avoiding gatherings isnât sustainable, so dealing with all bad options here. Spin zone good news, we can probably all retire earlier since we donât have to find those pesky out years.
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Agree with your sentiment, but am not 100% sure how we get to âas it weakens with each mutationâ, as up until now, it has done exactly the opposite of that. Again, do agree that we be 100% done with this nonsense, let 'r rip.
I suppose there is no guarantee that it weakens with each mutation. But omicron appears less likely to require hospitalization when compared to delta.
Of course this is offset by it being way more contagious.
Right, but it seems unlikely that omicron mutated from delta. It seems more likely omicron mutated from Alpha (not a chance Iâll be able to explain the science in detail, but reasonably clear consensus on that). Omnicron is probably more severe than Alpha, so in that sense this isnât a more severe mutation.
The real doomsdayers point out the OG SARS mouse study where after like 15 generations of mutations it killed 100 percent of mice.
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Ordering these tests - anyone have any knowledge of them? Will be here in 3-6 days.
Is there any data yet on the boosterâs ability to prevent infection by Omicron (as opposed to just prevention of serious illness)?
Schedule to travel internationally in a couple of weeks, and my main concern would be testing positive upon return and having to quarantine there for 7+ days. Iâve been delinquent on getting the booster but would probably prioritize it in the next couple weeks if I believed it could lower the chance of infection.
It lowers risk of infection. You should absolutely get it now. Takes 5-14 days to reach max effect
From my understanding theyâre good for positives but not as good as PCR with false negatives.
I think the one youâre looking at is intended to be 2 tests between 24-36 hours apart.
Yep, definitely get boosted. You wonât be bulletproof by any means, but youâll be substantially less likely to get infected, and much better off if you do get infected.
I know I should get boosted. Iâll stipulate to that. The purpose of the question was to satisfy my curiosity if data has shown a reduced risk of infection (whether asymptomatic, symptomatic, mild, serious, etc.) and interest in reading it. If there isnât, it doesnât mean Iâm not going to get boosted. Thereâs so much good info here, that I assume if there is available data on this, this group would know.
Everything I see sort of dances around it - âraises antibody levelsâ âincreases bodyâs ability to fight it offâ âincreases protection against serious diseaseâ âlowers risk of hospitalizationâ, but doesnât actually present data on simple infection/likelihood to test positive.
To some extent this was going to happen anyway as health care continued to grow at a pace faster than GDP growth. People make lots of mistakes extrapolating trends indefinitely, but it has been clear for years to decades that something would have to give as the demand for health care increased faster than the capacity of the economy to provide it. What COVID has done on this specific issue is forced society to unexpectedly immediately deal with the kinds of health care capacity constraints that probably would have arrived eventually anyway.
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At least 12 days after the booster dose, the rate of confirmed infection was lower in the booster group than in the nonbooster group by a factor of 11.3 (95% confidence interval [CI], 10.4 to 12.3); the rate of severe illness was lower by a factor of 19.5 (95% CI, 12.9 to 29.5). In a secondary analysis, the rate of confirmed infection at least 12 days after vaccination was lower than the rate after 4 to 6 days by a factor of 5.4 (95% CI, 4.8 to 6.1).
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This made me chuckle.
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What you describe seems like a reasonable approach, imo.
no one has done an rct on a strain thatâs a few weeks old.