581–590 of 1001 posts
I'm vaxxed and mostly done. Already contracted Covid, have 2 vaccines, I'm down to get a booster every year or two, at my own leisure. Having vaccines mandated every 6 months is not something I'm OK with and to be honest, it feels a lot like the government trying to deflect from the fact healthcare isn't OK (at least in my home country, Canada). There's always been risks to life and this feels more like governments a…
Tangentially, I recently moved to Canada and was surprised by the lack of quality healthcare.. Literally could not believe some walk ins have paper files and use fax, plus finding a GP apparently is a months long quest. Visiting a specialist took ages, and I wouldn’t say it was the best / most modern infrastructure there either. (And I went in downtown Toronto, must be so much worse for more remote places I guess). I…
My friend's mom lost her legs because the hospital didn't keep her in the right position after a surgery and circulation was cut off while she was recovering from the surgery. Huge lawsuit, but that doesn't take back the irreversible damage and lifelong disability.
Recently a doctor lied to our face and said there's no alternative to surgery, then lied to our face again when he said "that medication doesn't work for that", until we cited multiple studies and how the medication is used worldwide for the purpose we are asking for. It's just disgusting and unacceptable.
Also recently another family member nearly died in hospital as they let his weight get down to ~80lbs. They incorrectly thought he had cancer (he didn't), and they were just going to let him die because his time was limited, suggesting to the family not to bother with a feeding tube. The family insisting on trying the feeding tube saved his life, _against_ the suggestions of the doctor(s). He would be dead right now, and a family would have lost their dad, if they hadn't insisted on doing it. I'm pushing the family to sue the hospital and report this malpractice because his health is so badly harmed by having gone to such a low weight and nearly dying from it.
Honestly I can just go on all day. When I got in a car accident my broken wrist/finger were secured in place with a fucking tongue depressor and some gauze. This was the official solution because they didn't have time to put my wrist in a cast, so I went numerous days with this ridiculous solution, reducing the quality of my bone/joint healing. My pinky finger is still, forever, crooked. Really nice for someone whose career requires typing (programmer).
Similarly, another family member of mine has a permanently-deformed arm because they didn't cast the arm correctly and the bone healed crooked.
I'm vaxxed. I'm boosted. I'd very much like to be done. But my children cannot be vaccinated. As a parent of a young kid it kind of feels like everyone has just moved on. I know folks in here will tell me that statistically speaking my children are unlikely to be hospitalized and so on, and I agree. But I know enough kids who got COVID and suffered the symptoms (e.g. a months-long scratchy cough) that I'm not going t…
RSV is more dangerous than COVID-19 for most small children. We don't shut down society because of RSV. https://www.medscape.com/answers/971488-177692/what-is-the-p...
(1) Circuit-breaker criteria for interventions (vax mandates, mask mandates, indoor gathering restrictions, etc): https://alexanderjxchen.github.io/circuitbreaker/
This chart has helped me understand how public-health entities could explain future interventions.
The major issue it illustrates is the choices of the voluntarily unvaccinated can affect everyone by clogging hospital availability for everyone. Targeted interventions can reduce this impact.
This is, notably imho, different from attempting to protect medically at-risk people who cannot be vaccinated.
(2) Ian Mackay's recent post has helped me imagine what the shift to SARS-CoV-2 as an endemic illness will feel like: https://virologydownunder.com/living-next-door-to-alice/
Mackay says that, whether or not we want this outcome, the world is making public-policy choices that will lead to humans living alongside endemic SARS-CoV-2 forever.
He says the turning point will come when there is no longer a number to put on the wall:
> And at some point soon, testing levels will drop as the public realise there is little point in queueing and getting swabbed or paying for rapid antigen tests (RAT) when there are few conditions in place to do anything with those results. Slowly those who are sick “enough” or need evidence that they are infected will get tested. Fever clinics and drive through testing will slow down and pack away. We will know only very approximately how many cases are in the community from at that point. This is a significant shift from the super intense scrutiny of case numbers we’ve had in Australia. Then the media will also stop caring as much.
While he's writing about Australia, and I think writing in the context of a public-health expert who is dispirited by seeing a case explosion accompany the lifting of restrictions, his point resonates -- my feeling is that the pandemic will be "over" in the US when nytimes.com no longer has the little sparklines with covid case counts.
Mackay suggests that the shift to endemic illness means some people who are currently being protected will die:
> Even with a great vaccine, there will be those with waning immunity. There will be new birth cohorts with no immunity. There will be those who don’t get vaccinated. There will be those with immune systems that don’t work as well as needed. There will be some with risk factors that may override the protection afforded by vaccine immunity, subjecting them to a baseline of worse outcomes. Together these people will likely see more severe COVID-19. This is a tale that can also be told about other infectious diseases. There is always a proportion we can’t protect.
He highlights post-covid conditions as the remaining wild card. What fraction of people who are infected and recover will have long-term health impacts? Will we have to adjust society to accommodate those people?
I found Mackay's early 2020 blog posts helpful in wrapping my head around what we were about to experience and thought they held up pretty well ( https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-i... , https://virologydownunder.com/so-you-think-youve-about-to-be... ).
I also thought his "Swiss cheese" diagram ( https://virologydownunder.com/the-swiss-cheese-infographic-t... ) did a good job of communicating why classrooms should have 5-6 air changes per hour of MERV13 filtered or outdoor air and how that fits in with other ways of reducing all sorts of respiratory illness (even beyond covid).
I feel like COVID has become like a marshmallow test for adults, where those who can manage their emotions and make rational decisions can set themselves up for greater long-term rewards. It looked for a while there like this could be a thing that gets “done”—that we would get a good vaccine into enough people, then incidence would decline so far it just goes away. That didn’t happen. We’re stuck with it for a forese…
Coronaviruses in general are endemic to humans, and SARS-CoV-2 in particular appears to infect animals. Even if at some point no humans carried the disease, it'd still come back from some cross-species transmission. The only "done" state I ever expected is/was the same situation we have with influenza -- annual vaccine and seasonal waves of illness.
I feel like COVID has become like a marshmallow test for adults, where those who can manage their emotions and make rational decisions can set themselves up for greater long-term rewards. It looked for a while there like this could be a thing that gets “done”—that we would get a good vaccine into enough people, then incidence would decline so far it just goes away. That didn’t happen. We’re stuck with it for a forese…
I think the marshmallow test is pretty flawed itself. But maybe the marshmallow test is actually a good analogy. I suspect many of the test "failures" were caused because the test subject (kid) didn't trust the authority figure (test administrator). When you can see a marshmallow with your own eyes, it's more believable. I think it's quite reasonable to factor in some probability that an untrusted stranger would "alt…
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>> That’s why we are still in this pandemic. Too many selfish assholes. Are you really saying that 'suggesting optimism' is equivalent to being a "selfish asshole"? I do not understand your application of logic here. Are you also saying that a particular course-of-action would have resulted in an "end to the pandemic" by this point in time?
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I encourage everyone eligible to protect themselves by getting vaccinated but vilifying people who make unhealthy choices is never an effective public health measure. We should have learned that from the HIV/AIDS pandemic.
You can't compare HIV/AIDS to COVID in this simplistic way, including the attitudes and public debate around them, and this comment is dangerously close to some sort of public health version of a Godwin's Law violation. What I remember about HIV in the early 80s was that fear of it fueled a lot of homophobia from those who were ignorant about the disease, certainly to begin with. In fact I remember it originally bein…
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You've got your anecdotes, and I've got mine. My 3 young kids all caught omicron last week. Each were lethargic for a day, had a minor sore throat, and were back to normal in a day or two. The flu last month was way scarier with high fevers. There's a lot of reason to be optimistic about omicron.
45 years old and I've had Omicron since Christmas, still sick, still tired. I miss the flu.
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You've got your anecdotes, and I've got mine. My 3 young kids all caught omicron last week. Each were lethargic for a day, had a minor sore throat, and were back to normal in a day or two. The flu last month was way scarier with high fevers. There's a lot of reason to be optimistic about omicron.
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The best option is early treatment by stocking up on one out of several early treatments that exist and locating a hospital that will give monoclonal antibodies in case your kid gets Delta. Learn more about early treatment options and the science around them here [1]
[1] https://open.spotify.com/episode/0aZte37vtFTkYT7b0b04Qz?si=-...