In Soviet Russia, COVID rounds you!
Talking to my ex about some medical bills for my daughter - she said that she’s sending multiple kids home with Covid this week. Uh oh! Anyone else seeing their covid cases rise?
Not seeing them around me but I’m not that exposed.
That said my daughters Chemistry professor taught class while actively testing positive for COVID can’t imagine that meets the schools stated COVID policy but ok.
And wife’s ex-boss who just retired is stuck in Borneo for an extra week with COVID. Sounds like he’s having a rough time of it so hope he’s ok.
It might just be a localized outbreak related to back-to-school. According to the CDC Community Levels tracker, the number of counties “in the red” are trending down.
Alaska just doesn’t count.
Looks like my ZIP Code is dropping, though its is the highest rate in my city. Lower than the County, so that’s good, and lower than the MAGA town next door.
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COVID seasonal rhythm sounds almost pleasant.
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In the last week I know 3 people with COVID. I don’t know if I’ve known 3 people in a season with the flu much less 3 simultaneously sick.
Another reminder that in certain places, the pandemic isn’t over yet. My gf has an elective surgery scheduled for next month. Yesterday the scheduler called her and said they had to move to a different hospital because the original hospital isn’t ready to accept elective day surgery patients.
https://twitter.com/gameremdoc/status/1573748898451054593?s=46&t=9yKzXxZf_mjAoAc4u-VpVg
It’s amazing to me that the public perception is that hospitals are overwhelmed with COVID when the reality is, inpatient cases are easily manageable now, but hospitals are overwhelmed bc a huge portion of the workforce died or quit and theres noone left to take care of anyone.
So not with covid but from covid.
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Oh I hadn’t considered that was the reason they had to rescheduled her surgery was being short staffed. We’ve all seen the same thing at grocery stores, restaurants, etc. Although I’ve never head it phrased as “Sorry there is a long wait today. Some of our checkers died.”
I think something like 3m people in the US left the workforce during covid and 250k under 65 died… maybe 150k of them were in the workforce? So 5% died and 95% just quit.
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I’d like to see that 95% broken down by quit voluntarily and laid off due to COVID restrictions.
Just saw this article in Salon.com. No paywall, just a bunch of adds.
Maybe we aren’t around the corner just yet.
There’s always going to be new strains. That’s not really news.
Well the article states that the new strains are pretty difficult to control with the vaccinations we have today. They are predicting quite a bad winter.
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I’m more concerned about hospitalizations. If people get these new strains of COVID (and spread it) but are not sick enough to be hospitalized in large numbers (squeezing out non-COVID patients), then that doesn’t seem like as big of a deal.
The new vaccines may still protect some against these variants, such as preventing hospitalization or death, but it may not be enough to stop an infection. How that will translate to rates of long COVID has yet to be seen, but already the debilitating condition has put millions out of work.
“Millions” from long COVID? After Googling, results seem to confirm. Again, if it’s just an inconvenience, NBD, but having it be debilitating (hospitalized, cannot work, etc.) is the issue. And Long COVID runs that range.
from
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01702-2
For Al-Aly, the discrepancies among study results are not surprising, nor are they damning. Epidemiologists often weave together evidence from multiple sources of data and methods of analysis, he says. Even if it is difficult to precisely quantify vaccination’s effect on long-COVID risk, for example, researchers can look for trends. “You search for the common thread,” Al-Aly says. “The common thread here is that vaccines are better than no vaccines.”
Hospitalizations don’t really matter when 20-40% of people that get COVID end up long term disabled with long COVID, and it’s not really correlated with the severity of the illness.
Sounds like BA2 and BA5 (pre-new booster). Both had infection levels that were quite high this summer and infection-wise pretty much evaded vaccines and prior infection antibodies. But hospital numbers remained low, so it wasn’t a big deal.