Your mom, right? We may see and interpret reality very differently, but we all have a mom. I’m truly sorry for your loss.
My mom had Covid early in 2020. She’s 87 now, epileptic, dementia. She had a shockingly easy time of it. Was in the hospital for 2 nights of oxygen support, but bounced back faster than about anybody I know. Really odd.
She got the first 2 shots but none after that. Living with my sister now. We moved her out of the continuing care place to my sister’s house because of the lockdown horrors - no way were we going to allow that to happen again. It still makes me sick that so many families were kept from seeing a loved one in their last days and hours. Simply barbaric.
Your definition of shockingly easy is quite different from mine.
Now my MIL did have a shockingly easy time with COVID. She had some light sniffles and wanted to drive home (about 2 hours away) but we insisted she quarantine with us until she tested negative which was a couple days later. She’s had all recommended COVID shots. At the time she was 82 and this was well after pandemic restrictions were lifted as she got it on our vacation to Disneyworld.
Well, it was more a precaution than anything. She wasn’t experiencing any visible distress, just low O2 levels. No trouble drawing a breath, no blue nail beds, stuff like that.
This was in early 2020, so Wuhan strain and no shots.
People vary. My husband and I had the same number of vaccines at the same times. He had covid, and it was a mild cold. He didn’t miss a day of work. (He’s fully remote, and works from his home office.) I caught it from him, and was very sick for a couple of days, and didn’t have the energy to function (or the ability to smell) for a week or two after that. I’m still not fully recovered. I’m pretty sure the difference between our outcomes has nothing to do with differences in our vaccination status.
But low O2 levels are a problem in and of themselves, and contribute to problems down the line like dementia and other damage. That’s worth treating.
Thanks. My mom died after the vaccines came out, but I lost a lot of people before that. My uncle and aunt died in the first wave, when it hit NY and north Jersey. I actually learned that they were sick when I tried to call my uncle to see if he’d like to do a Zoom seder, and my frantic cousin answered his phone, assuming I knew he was hospitalized. A close friend in Canada caught covid after everyone in the US who wanted to be vaxxed had done so, but when the vaccines were still only available to elderly people in Canada. He was in his late 40s, and had no obvious health problems. But it killed him. I was friendly with John Conway when my husband was a math graduate student at Princeton. He used to make up games and invite anyone to play with him. He always won. But it was always fun to play with him because he was such a lively and interesting person. I kept in touch, seeing him once a year at an event we both went to. He was old, but the summer before covid he was vigorous and appeared healthy. He, also, died in the first wave of covid. A CAS staffer that I worked with a bit died of covid before vaccines, too. I don’t know exactly how old he was, but he certainly looked young. I can go on.
But yeah, I lost relatives I was close to back when people in the midwest were saying “do you know anyone who caught this? Do you think it’s real?” And my MIL didn’t die of covid, but she died during the peak of covid in NY, and her body sat in a freezer truck somewhere for weeks because there were too many bodies for the morgues to handle them all.
I’m sure all that influences my feelings towards the disease. But you know, “so many bodies they are stacking them in freezer trucks” is an objective measure of “this killed a lot of people”. And it doesn’t, now, because everyone has been exposed, one way or another. But that first exposure? It can be a doozy, even if you were healthy.
Your post reminded me of something. Back when we were being told that everyone was at risk of bad outcomes from Covid, and the reporting cranked up of young people being hospitalized for it, I noticed something about the stories of sick, hospitalized, teens. Of the stories I saw, the teens were described as perfectly healthy before getting Covid. If the story had a photo of the teen in their hospital bed, they were invariably fat. Healthy at every size effect? I don’t know, but the profile of what it means to be “perfectly healthy” is changing.
Like I said, what it means to be “perfectly healthy” is changing. Nobody who is actually healthy looks at fat teenager and thinks, “why, that’s the absolute picture of health!”
If a teenager who is on chemotherapy gets very sick from the flu, that would not surprise me.
If an 80 year old, who is otherwise as healthy as one can expect an 80 year old to be, gets very sick from the flu that also would not surprise me.
A teenager getting extremely sick from the flu would surprise me, regardless of their weight.
In that context, i would expect the claim “a perfectly healthy teen becomes very sick with covid” to apply to an overweight teen.
If the claim were “a perfectly healthy teen couldn’t jog a mile” then i might be more likely to think the description would include the teen as not being overweight.
I would tend to agree in most cases but to play devils advocate the “Spanish Flu” was so deadly in the 19teens primarily because it was so virulent against young seeming healthy individuals.
Yes, the younger people i know who died from covid were both overweight. Being fat is clearly a risk factor for covid. The old people i know who died of covid were mostly not fat. My uncle and aunt were both very fit for their age, including their weight. Bring old is also a risk factor for covid.
I kinda agree with you that those breathless “it can kill anyone!!” articles were not very helpful. A friend who studies these things said that essentially every child who died had an immune system abnormality. (They weren’t all known to have immune problems, but even so, immune problems in kids are unusual.)
Even at my age (i just retired, so I’m not a spring chicken) I’m more worried about being damaged by covid than about being killed outright. Heart disease, lack of energy, diabetes, lack of smell, you know, all the long-term damage it can cause. When i caught it, i declined paxlovid because while that certainly reduces the risk of outright death, it’s unclear whether it reduces the risk of long-term damage. And i felt the odds of my dying immediately from it were low, and i might as well give my immune system the practice fighting it off.
(I would have avoided infection, and that risk of damage, completely if i could have, but once infected decided my best option was to let it play out.)
as i understand it, they were healthy. their immune system would overreact and kill them. i think the belief is that happened to some of the early covid victims.
but in any case, i think it’s accurate to say the spanish flu killed otherwise healthy teens. i don’t think whether those teens were overweight is relevant.
it’s an example of the unjustified fear promotion effort to get more people inoculated. no twisting over backward necessary
President Biden, Nov 2021: "But it’s (Omicron) here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.
Were there not enough deaths among the unvaccinated, or were they too concentrated among older ages for Biden’s comment? Or too many previously infected not mentioned.
COVID death rates for initial infections looked a lot like 1 year population mortality rates by age. I guess Biden could have clarified by breaking out some actuarial tables to give out some real death probabilities.
i think we are approaching these comments with very different background assumptions. i find this sort of thing hard to discuss in a format like this, since messages are relatively short.
I don’t find this problematic. I think it’s similar to saying, “not wearing a seatbelt is reckless”. is it really? well, the vast majority of the time you will still be fine. but i do think it’s still reckless, since the severity is large, and the cost of risk reduction low, the context of the statement, and own risk tolerance, shapes that. these things are hard to communicate in a forum like this.
this is to my earlier point, that it goes to the broader context of how i read these public statements about risk. it’s hard to communicate about that.