Strep is hell.
1 Like
I’ve been using Tylenol that expired 2 years ago complaining that it’s not doing shit, that’s on me, the active ingredients degrade over time…
1 Like
I wish we could buy home strep tests, like the home covid tests.
4 Likes
First of all, how? You don’t use it enough to look at the expiration date?
Second of all, your wife or someone else can’t get you unexpired meds?
1 Like
Huh? I use expired meds all the time. Most of if them are fine. I keep aspirin until i smell vinegar, for instance.
There are a couple of meds that either stop working or develop a weird flavor when they get old, and those i refresh more often. But companies have no motive to test for a real expiration date, so they just pick something that’s long enough for their supply chain.
3 Likes
I truly don’t know if getting COVID is more dangerous now than the flu. I’ve heard now that long flu exists and I don’t have a frame of reference to long COVID. Hell, I don’t even know if the vaccine helps prevent long illness.
Either way, I don’t mind a booster that helps me get over it should I get either illness again.
1 Like
Well, according to this graph i got from “your local epidemiologist”
Covid is currently responsible for about 2% of all deaths in the US, and flu barely registers. Also, last winter, flu got up to 1% of deaths at its worst, and covid was responsible for 4-5% of all deaths during peak respiratory illness season.
Long flu does exist. It’s one of the reasons doctors were prepared for the idea of long covid. But it’s a lot less common than long covid, which may affect as many as 1% of young adults.
Yeah, covid is still more dangerous than flu. Hopefully, we don’t get another really nasty flu (the 1918 flu was a hell of a lot more dangerous than what he have floating around now) and covid will do down to something similar.
1 Like
The data may be too lagged to be conclusive, but where it is complete, there does not seem to be much material excess mortality. “Associated with” seems to be an increasingly accurate description compared to “responsible for”. I am sure COVID is still killing many people, I am just skeptical that 2% excess mortality (2023 average) is being caused by it. Prior to COVID, the flu killed between 20k and 100k people a year…2% from COVID would be right in the middle of that, in other words we should have seen mortality equivalent to a moderately bad flu season so far this year. I don’t think life company results support this.
Only it didn’t. That 20k-100k was all deaths associated with flu-like illness. The number actually demonstrated to be flu was tiny.
Anyway, 2% excess mortality during “flu season” would only be about half a percent averages over a full year. So maybe it was 1% excess mortality last year.
Your chart shows an average of 2% of deaths due to COVID on average for 2023. IF COVID was a cause of actual deaths above a baseline, I would expect this to translate into material observable excess mortality in the same way that a “moderately bad” flu season would produce. That does not seem to be happening, at least not yet this year.
Now a moderately bad flu season would be something more like an 8% excess mortality over a 3 month period averaging out to 2% for the year…We have something like 3M deaths a year, so this would be 60k due to the “flu like” illnesses.
On flu vs “flu like”…my only thought there is that bad flu seasons are typically associated with strains of the flu that have less population immunity and are poor matches with the vaccines offered. This would suggest that even if a fraction of the deaths are confirmed to be influenza that a large part of the annual variation (20k vs 100k) is actually the flu.
Could be. Or it could be a bad RSV year, or a bad colds-that-develop-into-pneumonia year.
I don’t have a good sense of how much mortality fluctuates year-to-year. Would an increase of a percent jump out?
My dad was talking about boosters every 3 months the other day, seems a tad excessive. I’m on shot 5, booster 3, feel like that’s probably enough.
1 Like
Gonna make an appointment for booster #2 in the new year.
Is your dad immune compromised? Can he even get boosters that often?
I’m seeing that immunocompromised who’ve already been boosted only need 1 booster in 2023.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recommendations/immuno.html
I’m compromised and have had like… 7 total, including the initial 2? They stopped filling out my card at least by my last booster. I was the first person at my Walgreens to get a second card. They had to call somebody to figure out what to do! Well, first I had to convince them via cdc.gov that I was eligible as they didn’t believe me.
It’s like the flu shot at this point where you don’t call the annual shots a booster
Is there any benefit carryover from the original Covid vaccine for these variants? I haven’t gotten any since the first two and absolutely got my ass handed to me by the omicron and alpha variants - I did just as poorly as my entirely unvaxxed friends/family. But maybe I’m just built different
1 Like