It does seem wise to do another PCR test.
You might also have RSV as that’s still going around too
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Do adults get that? I thought that was a kid thing. Maybe I should read up on this some more.
Yes. It’s just that the consequences of it in adults is less intense (for the most part) than for young children.
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Glad to have some at home tests we bought for our vacation last month.
I saw a story that the binaxnow manufacturer destroyed supply a few months back before the surge due to lack of demand…
Oh man! What a bad decision!!!
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Yup, destroyed stock and laid off half their workers, as per an article i can’t find but could swear i read in the wsj.
Here’s a similar article in the nyt
Less safe today 
my youngest (19) has it, been fully vaccinated since early April. She’s had in person classes, and more exposure than me, but still makes me feel less safe when it hits so close to home
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I hope she’s doing okay. May I ask if she had/has symptoms or was she tested as part of contact tracing or routine screening for school?
She started not feeling well Tuesday, and lost her sense of smell yesterday. She’s congested, coughing, and achy.
Oh man, that stinks Celalta; I’m sorry. Hope she recovers quickly / has a mild case.
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4th vaccine shot in Israel
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She’s down to a neck ache and a lesser cough. So 6 days of crud, and now however long it takes to get past the rest of it. She’s not allowed (expectedly) to go back to class until next week, but I don’t know how that works if she’s still having symptoms. I would assume not, but who knows. She has Ochem this semester, so missing two weeks of labs isn’t ideal.
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Although not being able to smell the organic chem lab might be a benefit.
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Again reality seems a little less scary than what you might read in the news.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a terrifying fact in July: Vaccinated people with the delta variant of the COVID virus carried roughly the same viral load in their noses and throats as unvaccinated people.
The news seemed to suggest that even the vaccinated were highly vulnerable to getting infected and passing the virus to others. Sure enough, stories about vaccinated people getting COVID — so-called breakthrough infections — were all around this summer: at a party in Provincetown, Massachusetts; among the Chicago Cubs; on Capitol Hill. Delta seemed as if it might be changing everything.
In recent weeks, however, more data has become available, and it suggests that the true picture is less alarming. Yes, delta has increased the chances of getting COVID for almost everyone. But if you’re vaccinated, a COVID infection is still uncommon, and those high viral loads are not as worrisome as they initially sounded.
How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting COVID? Probably about 1 in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.
Summary
Or Maybe 1 in 10,000
The estimates here are based on statistics from three places that have reported detailed data on COVID infections by vaccination status: Utah; Virginia; and King County, which includes Seattle, in Washington state. All three are consistent with the idea that about 1 in 5,000 vaccinated Americans have tested positive for COVID each day in recent weeks.
The chances are surely higher in the places with the worst COVID outbreaks, like the Southeast. And in places with many fewer cases — like the Northeast, as well as the Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas — the chances are lower, probably less than 1 in 10,000. That’s what the Seattle data show, for example. (These numbers don’t include undiagnosed cases, which are often so mild that people do not notice them and do not pass the virus to anyone else.)
Here’s one way to think about a 1-in-10,000 daily chance: It would take more than three months for the combined risk to reach just 1%.
“There’s been a lot of miscommunication about what the risks really are to vaccinated people, and how vaccinated people should be thinking about their lives,” as Dr. Ashish Jha of Brown University told my colleague Tara Parker-Pope.
For the unvaccinated, of course, the chances of infection are far higher, as Dr. Jeffrey Duchin, the top public-health official in Seattle, has noted. Those chances have also risen much more since delta began spreading.
Another way to understand the situation is to compare each state’s vaccination rate with its recent daily COVID infection rate. The infection rates in the least vaccinated states are about four times as high as in the most vaccinated states.
If the entire country had received shots at the same rate as the Northeast or California, the current delta wave would be a small fraction of its current size. Delta is a problem. Vaccine hesitancy is a bigger problem.
The Science, in Brief
These numbers help show why the talking point about viral loads was problematic. It was one of those statements that managed to be both true and misleading. Even when the size of the viral loads are similar, the virus behaves differently in the noses and throats of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated.
In an unvaccinated person, a viral load is akin to an enemy army facing little resistance. In a vaccinated person, the human immune system launches a powerful response and tends to prevail quickly — often before the host body gets sick or infects others. That the viral loads were initially similar in size can end up being irrelevant.
I will confess to one bit of hesitation about walking you through the data on breakthrough infections: It’s not clear how much we should be worrying about them. For the vaccinated, COVID resembles the flu and usually a mild one. Society does not grind to a halt over the flu.
In Britain, many people have become comfortable with the current COVID risks. The vaccines make serious illness rare in adults, and the risks to young children are so low that Britain may never recommend that most receive the vaccine. Letting the virus continue to dominate life, on the other hand, has large costs.
“There’s a feeling that finally we can breathe; we can start trying to get back what we’ve lost,” Devi Sridhar, the head of the global public health program at the University of Edinburgh, told The Times.
I know that many Americans feel differently. Our level of COVID anxiety is higher, especially in communities that lean to the left politically. And there is no “correct” response to COVID. Different people respond to risk differently.
But at least one part of the American anxiety does seem to have become disconnected from the facts in recent weeks: the effectiveness of the vaccines. In a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, nearly half of adults judged their “risk of getting sick from the coronavirus” as either moderate or high — even though 75% of adults have received at least one shot.
In reality, the risks of getting any version of the virus remain small for the vaccinated, and the risks of getting badly sick remain minuscule.
In Seattle on an average recent day, about 1 out of every 1 million vaccinated residents have been admitted to a hospital with COVID symptoms. That risk is so close to zero that the human mind can’t easily process it. My best attempt is to say that the COVID risks for most vaccinated people are of the same order of magnitude as risks that people unthinkingly accept every day, like riding in a vehicle.
The Bottom Line
Delta really has changed the course of the pandemic. It is far more contagious than earlier versions of the virus and calls for precautions that were not necessary a couple of months ago, like wearing masks in some indoor situations.
But even with delta, the overall risks for the vaccinated remain extremely small. As Dr. Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote on Friday, “The messaging over the last month in the U.S. has basically served to terrify the vaccinated and make unvaccinated eligible adults doubt the effectiveness of the vaccines.” Neither of those views is warranted.
Wait: isn’t this news??
Spend all that cyber-ink on P(getting COVID|Vaccinated) and not once mentioning P(getting COVID|Unvaccinated).
And very little on Severity(COVID|Vaccinated) versus Severity(COVID|Unvaccinated).
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Just some quick, back-of-the-envelope math here:
According to Johns Hopkins covid resource center, the first confirmed case in the US was 1/21/20, or about 593 days ago, and we’ve just recently cracked 40M confirmed cases. That works out to about 67500 cases per day, or about 1 in ~5000 people in the US per day over the course of the pandemic.
(Yes, I’ve taken some immaterial liberties with rounding, nerds)
That’s certainly “far higher” than…[checks notes]…1 in ~5000 vaccinated people.
Wait…what?
I may be young, but I’m old enough to remember when Dr Fauci said states with 50% of adults fully vaccinated would not have surges like they did in the past. Ron DeSantis & the internet remember, too:
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I’m not sure it’s reasonable to include the first couple of months in that calculation when most of the country (let’s say most counties in the country if you want a more specific metric) didn’t have a single case.
What if you looked at the most recent 12 months? Guessing you get to much worse than 1 in 5,000.
With minimal digging, it looks like it was roughly 5.8 million cases total a year ago and latest says 40.4 million confirmed cases.
So 40.4 - 5.8 = 34.6 million in the last year.
Divide by 365 and assuming there’s 320 million people in the country that’s about 1 in 3,375 a day.
And that’s only confirmed cases. I think the 1 in 5,000 if you’re vaccinated is total cases because they did 100% testing, right?
Since we don’t have a total case count in the US, even that is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
In April the CDC estimated the true case count was between 98.5 - 134.3 million. Take the midpoint and call it 116.4. If we assume that 85% of those were in the last year (same proportion as confirmed cases… possibly not an accurate assumption but I’m not sure what else to use) then that works out to 98.94 million in the last year.
That works out to 1 in 1,180 infected per day among everyone… including the vaccinated folks.
Also for those who did have cases back then, it wasnt as easy to get a covid test to confirm you were infected as it is now.
That 1 in 5000 figure smells like desperate spin to me. It doesn’t seem to reconcile with the 95% effectiveness rate the vaccine was supposed to have.
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