How SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines work. https://t.co/5YIhaM1Yud
— Prof. Peter Doherty (@ProfPCDoherty) November 7, 2023
Last night's update: Nearly 160,000 new cases, increasing in 23 states https://t.co/v9vycf38fc
— BNO News (@BNOFeed) November 6, 2023
Are pre-visit patient portal messages emphasizing "how" to get a COVID-19 booster more effective than "why"?
See our trial results (led by @NancyCHaff) from our @NIHAging-funded Roybal Center. @C4HDS @niteeshchoudhry @ideas42 @PunamKeller
??https://t.co/f4SYkVQ7B9 @JournalGIM— Julie Lauffenburger (@jlauffen) November 6, 2023
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Monday it was expanding testing of samples collected from international air travelers beyond COVID-19, to include flu and respiratory synctial virus (RSV) beginning November. https://t.co/KwlEP9uKae
— Reuters Health (@Reuters_Health) November 6, 2023
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Study says mass #vaccination programs cut #COVID19 cases in #Japan by 65%. Mass vaccination campaigns directly prevented 640,000 COVID-19 cases during the sixth wave, & indirectly prevented as many as 8.5 million infections.https://t.co/YHU14L3t1j
andhttps://t.co/nnrTRC2b23— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) November 6, 2023
(link)
Australia enters its eighth Covid wave
In the week ending October 24, 6,550 cases of COVID-19 were reported across Australia.
This marked an increase of 23.6 per cent on the previous week.
ABC report: https://t.co/tcWYaI0qyk
— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) November 3, 2023
New Zealand: Long Covid Survey
People with Long Covid are reporting quality of life scores similar to people who have severe cancer and severe MS."
NZ must prepare for Long Covid implications.
https://t.co/b3VusbbqK3— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) November 7, 2023
Germany, Bavaria: BA.2.86 Pirola jumps from 3.2% of sequences to 15.8% in one week.
Unspecified SARS-CoV-2 recombinant lines also make a big leap, from 6.9% to 13.2%.
EG.5* declining. H/t @ercgauhttps://t.co/2AR23B5ZAG pic.twitter.com/3pppXTNHKT
— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) November 4, 2023
(link)
What we learned from a shocking week of Covid testimony https://t.co/cSCaTOc9Sr
— BBC Health News (@bbchealth) November 4, 2023
Boris Johnson wanted to be injected with Covid live on TV
Covid inquiry also heard how Boris Johnson would rather ‘let the bodies pile high’ than order second lockdown.https://t.co/zH4xpRkGh3
— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) November 7, 2023
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New study: Epidemics caused by zoonotic viruses—spillovers from animals—could become more frequent due to climate change & may kill 12x as many people by 2050. Analysis examined trends for viral types: Floviruses, like Ebola & coronaviruses, among others https://t.co/TMulG1pQmT pic.twitter.com/cnuZC7FPkt
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) November 6, 2023
A new, very good review on #LongCovid https://t.co/oiAreZ1CjE pic.twitter.com/ZO1b0qU5MX
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 1, 2023
All variants of #SARSCoV2 can infect the brain, a new study has found. Variants have the capacity to infect the brain via the olfactory pathway. This means it's possible for even mild infections to result in the virus infiltrating the brain https://t.co/8Y0PRLsex7
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) November 3, 2023
As COVID19 will continue to be a problem for some patients, it is important to continue to explore better treatments. This study used monoclonal antibodies but administered them by inhalation, in animals. hat reduced viral loads and lung pathology. https://t.co/OXtl4pchnd pic.twitter.com/xq13dTpCDo
— Marion Koopmans, virology; emerging infections (@MarionKoopmans) November 6, 2023
What happens with the proteins in blood in people with #LongCovid vs matched healthy controls, with or without recovery, and over time?https://t.co/2MOYqWRkOp pic.twitter.com/wcb8EhSksO
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 3, 2023
mRNA vaccination triggers a robust T-cell response against #Covid in the lungs, new study shows. Although #SARSCoV2 evolution continuously produces immune-evasive variants, mRNA vaccination guards against severe disease & hospitalization via memory T cellshttps://t.co/sGkyTSJM1z pic.twitter.com/fPrfDqn5OK
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) November 7, 2023
Here is a link to the tweet mentioned above https://t.co/MswuGCvbdN
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) November 3, 2023
The biased and distorted recall of the Covid pandemic from the synthesis of 4 studies across 11 countrieshttps://t.co/cEgmOzxgr8 @Nature pic.twitter.com/OY8PNg4H6F
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 1, 2023
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Study: 1 in 7 Americans have had long COVID
"Its incidence varies markedly across the United States – from 11 percent in Hawaii to 18 percent in West Virginia – and is higher for women than men."
Study: https://t.co/GYtTk1BUOs
CIDRAP report: https://t.co/Fs5fjPiYmR
— CoronaHeadsUp (@CoronaHeadsUp) November 3, 2023
(link)
(link)
The Black Death killed 30-40% of everyone in Europe in about a year. I think blaming health care professionals for the fact that our lives were disrupted by Covid is a way of avoiding the reality that nature will happily murder us without a second thought.
— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec) November 2, 2023
The renewed attempts by rightwing disinformation merchants to push #Ivermectin as a "miracle cure" for Covid 🙄 (& now cancer 🙄🙄) are not just medical misinformation
These are deliberate actions to sow distrust in science & institutions to manipulate and mobilize GOP voters
— Philipp Markolin (@PhilippMarkolin) November 7, 2023
Ah, it’s from vaccines falling on them pic.twitter.com/N5zCk4qklB
— Bad Vaccine Takes (@BadVaccineTakes) November 5, 2023
BruceFromOhio
Committed to the Kelce Treatment tomorrow morning (flu & COVID vax together) and leaving the rest of the day open to see what effects the chip programming has on the corpus immaculatum. Pulled out the dozen N95’s still in the package from the manufacturer, and put them by the front door with the coats and hats. I’m seeing more masks out in the wild, and if the numbers kick up we’ll be ready.
My parents have indicated they intend to effectively quarantine this winter, no traveling and no events except for Christmas at their house. I’m a little concerned about them being cooped up and resisting socializing for months, and am scheming of ways to keep them engaged that doesn’t challenge their risk appetite.
Gaia and Darwin still scrubbing the gene pool, one unvaxed Redditor at a time.
Matt McIrvin
The Boris Johnson quotes really get to the heart of something that’s fascinated and horrified me since the early pandemic: the phenomenon of people with “counterintuitive” hot takes about how mass COVID infection is good, actually, and we should encourage it to get it all over with.
Almost all of these people were on or adjacent to the political right. So I think there’s more going on here than just bad folk beliefs about how the immune system works–it’s some kind of politically shaded complex of ideas about moralized “toughness” and the need to be able to make cruel decisions. To a considerable chunk of the population, it makes immediate sense that the right way to deal with a pandemic is to encourage people to get sick and shrug off a lot of them dying. Anything less is some kind of softness.
Donald Trump, of course, embraced this, with all his talk of “letting it wash over us” and people getting back in church by Easter, and how he wanted to do a Superman act after getting out of the hospital.
Erin
Tweets seem to longer be embedding for me, they don’t resolve to the full tweet. Been going on for a few days now, and I’m still unfortunately logged in to Twitter. Is there a setting somewhere? I love these updates but they’re much less useful if I can’t see the whole tweet. Thanks!
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Erin: I have a bad feeling that the only way to solve that problem is to defenestrate the Chief Twit.
NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
25 new cases on 10/29/23
49 new cases on 10/30/23
43 new cases on 10/31/23
49 new cases on 11/01/23
43 new cases on 11/02/23
31 new cases on 11/03/23
25 new cases on 11/04/23
2356 deaths as of 11/06/23, up 3 from last week
Last week’s COVID vaccination was just as hard on me as the first 5. I was a headache-y,
shivering mess for 36 hours. It doesn’t matter which brand either; Pfizer hits me as hard as
Moderna.
Yarrow
@Matt McIrvin:
That’s how Sweden handled the first phase of the pandemic. Retrospective looks at how that worked for them that are being done now show it didn’t work well. Sweden has had a much poorer outcome than countries that locked down more.
hrprogressive
Having had 5 mRNA injections so far, I’m glad to see the headline data that they provide robust memory responses against the disease.
Of course, then I read things like “Australia’s 8th wave”, and you know, I spent all of 2022 calling this a #PermanentPandemic and I have to wonder if the rollercoaster ever fucking stops.
It’s exhausting to say the least.
MattF
@Matt McIrvin: Maybe it’s a version of the magic of the marketplace— ‘creative destruction’ of anyone with a weak immune system. And getting sick is due, as everyone knows, to moral weakness.
Yarrow
Maybe NZ does this sort of thing better than other countries but for the most part anyone with a chronic debilitating disease gets poor support and society doesn’t want to know much about them.
EarthWindFire
If all those unvaccinated folks are worried about vaccines being shed on them, they should just stay home.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
Sigh. I went for my booster yesterday (I wanted at least 2 full weeks before being inundated at Thanksgiving). Then in the afternoon my younger son texted to ask if he could nap in his old room. Seems he was feeling terrible, and couldn’t face driving home in rush hour. Sure! I said. By dinnertime he was feeling bad enough that he thought he’d better see a doctor, so my husband took him. Sure enough, it’s covid. At least they both wore their masks the whole time they were around each other, & my husband had his booster a little over a week ago.
He wanted to go home & isolate alone (his GF is caring for nephews this week), but he’s pretty sick so we don’t feel comfortable with that. We brought in snacks & Gatorade and he’ll hang out in an upstairs room where we can get to him quickly if he takes a turn for the much worse.
New Deal democrat
According to Biobot, which has (thankfully!) started updating its data again, Covid particles per mL increased from 376 two weeks ago to 424 this week. The high at the end of August was 648. The low in June was 165. There were increases in all Census regions except for the Northeast.
We are probably about to begin whatever will be our winter wave, so this is probably going to be the low for a few months.
The CDC reported that hospitalizations were virtually unchanged last week at 15,750, vs. the early September high of 20,700 and the June low of 6,300. Deaths as of the first week of October declined from 1,370 (their recent peak) to 1,260. The low in early July was 485.
The good news is that the paradigm that wastewater levels (a proxy for infections) lead hospitalizations by several weeks, which in turn lead deaths by a few more weeks remains intact. And that the number of hospitalizations and deaths all this year have run consistently below their numbers at any time during the 2020-22 periods, except for a couple of months. In other words, the virulence of the pandemic continues to decline. But older people should absolutely get their booster shots, and continue to mask indoors in crowded settings, because seniors are still the large majority of hospitalizations and deaths.
eclare
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)):
Sounds like a good plan. I hope he feels better soon and no one else gets sick.
New Deal democrat
@hrprogressive: In re:
It won’t stop, but just like a roller coaster, it will keep having lower and lower peaks.
Hope that helps.
lowtechcyclist
@MattF:
I think of it as ‘antisocial Darwinism.’
Soprano2
@Yarrow: Try having chronic pain, it’s the same thing. I’ve learned how to manage it on my own, because honestly the medical field doesn’t have many answers. There is a treatment for the nerve in my spine that could help, but since I have osteopenia the doctor wants to wait until after my next bone scan to see if I can have it or not, because she’s afraid if my bones aren’t strong enough it will shatter my vertebra, which would be bad.
We had our latest Covid shot on Sunday. I still have a sore arm, even though the shot itself didn’t hurt at all! I also think the general “blah” feeling I had on Monday probably came from it.
I will always wonder if having Covid in December 2020 had a bad effect on my husband’s brain and hastened the dementia. The first time I thought anything was wrong was in August 2021, but it’s possible there were other more subtle signs I missed.
Soprano2
@New Deal democrat: Our local numbers for both plants are trending down for this week. I hate that they changed their methodology for the testing, because that makes it impossible to compare to earlier periods. It looks like Covid overall is higher than it used to be, but I have no idea if that is true or not.
Yarrow
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): Is he able to get Paxlovid? I hope he’s okay and recovers quickly.
Yarrow
@Soprano2: I’m sorry you’re struggling with pain. It’s all awful. People don’t get much support if they’re not sick with something that’s easy to fix.
I’m sorry you’re stuck wondering if Covid affected your husband’s brain. That’s tough. It may have, just based on current research findings. Another reason to avoid it if at all possible.
gvg
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): You might try building one of those room filters they recommend for classrooms. 5 Hepa filters taped together in a cube around a fan. Supposed to cut down airborne transmission in crowded areas, seems like it would be even better in a house.
The Other Steve
Yeah, that doesn’t work… And I’m not sure I’d want it to work.
JaneE
I got my booster (annual?) Covid shot a couple of weeks ago. That’s #5. So far as I know, I have not had the disease itself, but with my allergies I might not have noticed a mild case. On Medicare with my health provider it was still free.
hrprogressive
@New Deal democrat:
No, it really doesn’t.
At a bare minimum, I need us to get to COVID behaving like flu in the sense that it gets low enough that it fucking vanishes for 9 months out of the year.
And/or, we need to speed “next gen vaccines” that stop the damn thing in its tracks.
I might not be quite as consumed by panic about it as I was in 2020-2021, but I absolutely would like to avoid getting it – more or less at all costs, still – because I don’t really wish to be dead via a heart attack or stroke before or not long after I turn 40, which is still a few years away.
I can make peace with the idea it’s never going away, but, this idea of semi-quarterly or quarterly waves is fucking ridiculous, and should not be an acceptable status quo for anyone.
Matt McIrvin
@hrprogressive: COVID’s simply not “seasonal” in that sense–I was confused by the medical discourse on this for a while, but “seasonal” seems to be a specific term of art not referring to just any periodic behavior, but meaning, as you said, “it fucking vanishes for 9 months”.
Coronaviruses don’t work that way, apparently. It is seasonal in the sense that there’s a bad wave every winter. But there’s this low continuous background during the rest of the year and there can be smaller waves at other times.
One thing we are seeing is way less immediate impact. The early-fall wave that’s receding now, in terms of the amount of virus around, was as bad as the first wave in 2020 here in Massachusetts. But that first wave had a gigantic butcher’s bill and this one is killing very few people. The virus actually got way more contagious, but humans also got more resistance one way or another.
glc
“Death of public health”
(Repeating – tossed this in an open thread the other day.)
Matt McIrvin
(I also find that it’s very hard to tell “how bad things are right now” from, say, doctors’ statements on social media. Wastewater counts give a much better idea, but the disruption from the CDC switching from Biobot to Google’s thing really threw a monkey wrench into any effort to get continuous data.)
StringOnAStick
@Matt McIrvin: At the beginning of the pandemic here in the US, the poor and POC were disproportionately infected and dying at higher rates; that right there is why the Right was fine with letting it wash over us and “kill the weak”. As the pandemic deepened, there was less of this difference in who was infected, but the initial impressions stuck. Remember the rat fornicators who tried to get a young woman to accuse Dr Fauci of sexual harassment? They told her she would be doing the world a favor by taking him down; I’m sure they were hoping to kill more POC and D voters in general. I guess that’s why I take an evil pleasure in seeing it kill more R’s than D’s, because if you still think the vaccines are a deep state plot (or worse), the planet is better off without you on it. EF Goldman was right.
StringOnAStick
@NeenerNeener: All the vaccines I had before I got Covid left me feeling crappy for a day or two. I’ve had one dose since I had Covid and I didn’t feel it at all. It’s all so new so who knows.
StringOnAStick
@hrprogressive: Well, typical colds and even the flu don’t entirely vanish for 9 months of the year; we’ve all had “summer colds” and even flu shows up but at a low level and mostly impacts people in congregate care settings.
Putting the entire country in the same category for discussion of seasonality doesn’t make sense because we are such a large country with so many different seasonal variations. In all but the summer, most people in FL are outside but when it gets too hot, they are inside with the AC going and that’s when their Covid numbers go up. It’s the opposite in the northern tier states. We do a weekly music thing, and all summer we can keep the doors open and have great air flow, but last night it was damned cold in there so no open doors. I’m thinking about building the HEPA filter box fan setup and bringing it to the performance space every week.
MountainBoy
Just recovering from my first case of Covid that manifested during a two week road trip from Colorado to the Central and Southern coast of California.
My wife and I are both 62, active, fit and healthy. We had all of the vaccinations (4 or 5?), except the current one-which we were unable to schedule prior to the trip. We departed CO on Thursday 10/19 driving, camping and mtn biking along the way.
We did not take any masking precautions along the way.
Our trip was mostly spent outdoors (camper van) with a few exceptions: a wine tasting at a vineyard, a few meals at indoor restaurants with a family member and one musical event in a large indoor venue where we avoided the crowd upfront (10/27).
The symptoms came on very quickly (Monday 10/30), beginning with a persistent dry cough during the night, then fever, sore throat, malaise, headache, muscle pain, and congestion by mid-morning.
I could barely get out of the van at our campground on the coast to look out at the ocean. My wife went out and bought some rapid tests:
I tested positive around noon.
My wife tested negative.
We packed up the van immediately and started the drive home. We both masked up for the trip home, stopping in UT for about 8 hours, she in a hotel room and me sleeping in the van.
We got home the next evening (Wednesday) and continued to mask and “isolate” from each other.
By the next morning (Thursday) she was symptomatic and tested positive.
I have gradually improved some each day, but am far from healthy yet (maybe 60% after 8 days). I however tested negative on Monday and again yesterday (Tuesday).
My wife was just starting to feel a little better yesterday afternoon but still tested positive(Tuesday). Seems that she is 2-3 days behind me in all aspects.
We just cancelled our plans to visit with her aging parents in NJ for Thanksgiving.
I share this first hand experience here as it seems that reporting on the current “wave” of covid appears to be muted.
Surprisingly, my state/county’s health dept. is no longer accepting or keeping tallies of infections except those generated by the health care industry and that from the limited wastewater studies (seems to be the norm for most states now)?!?
I hope this contemporary first hand account may offer insights to those of you who also become infected or inform others as you make your own decisions about risk of exposure, masking, holiday visits, etc.
From what we have researched-over the last week (and that is a LOT of info), we are both experiencing “mild” covid.
I cannot imagine what moderate or severe covid is like.
In hindsight, I wish that I had tried harder to get the new covid (and flu) vaccine before this trip as we had intended.
1-2 days of vaccine side effect suffering would be nothing compared to all of the impacts we have now experienced!
Try to stay healthy out there everyone!
Bill Arnold
@EarthWindFire:
Surely they realize that the (uhm) shed vaccine particles cannot harm them unless they are inhaled, and that they should wear high-effectiveness masks when in danger of breathing the exhalations of the vaxxed?
Bill Arnold
@hrprogressive:
Not gonna happen. The currently-circulating strains have an R0 of like 8.
That gets knocked down by any sterilizing immune response, which can happen with a low-dose exposure, or with NPIs like masks or varying levels of social isolation.
But not below 1.
Even a brand new strain of influenza, with limited immunity in the population, has an R0 of like 1.6, so NPIs can easily knock it below 1, like happened to influenza in 2q2020 and all of 2021.
Normal influenza is more like 1.2-1.4.
luc
Anybody tried the Novavax vaccine? – a protein vaccine.
In our place they only had Pfizer.
Matt McIrvin
@StringOnAStick: I know that in the early days, spring 2020, much of the country saw this as a problem exclusive to crowded coastal Democratic-voting cities. There was speculation about how we needed to get rid of dense cities to control pandemics. Jared Kushner’s buddy task force actually came up with a list of possible COVID interventions and the Trump administration rejected all of them because COVID was just a political problem for blue-state governments.
The problem flipped from being worse for Democrats to being worse for Republicans right around the time Biden entered office. In fact, I think the reason much of the country doesn’t blame Trump for mishandling COVID is that when Trump was in office, COVID simply wasn’t a big problem for them yet. It was a problem for us here in the urban Northeast.
OGLiberal
Since getting COVID my son (the entire family got it, of course) had a Crohn’s flare up (he was diagnosed well before the pandemic but hadn’t had a flare-up 6+ years), has lost 3/4 of his hair (he had a minor bout with Alopecia a few years ago but this is way worse and way more aggressive – he’s been seeing a dermatologist for almost year and nothing, so far, has worked), and recently developed two styes in his eye that won’t go away. We are fully vaxxed and boosted, rarely go to public places, and always – always – wear masks when we do. Kids are homeschooled so no risk of exposure there. (I have to say, we didn’t miss a beat when the pandemic started re: our kids education – one benefit this atheist, liberal homeschooling dad really appreciated.)
Unrelated? Maybe. But none of this crap was happening before he got COVID.
He’s lost 3/4 of his hair. He’s 17 and he is absolutely miserable about it. We got COVID from a downstairs cop neighbor who knew she had COVID and was still gallavanting around with no mask. Fuckers.
currawong
I think these two statements may be linked:
I believethey are completely underestimating the accumulating damage the virus is causing to the younger generations including children.
glc
And: we don’t need no stinking vaccines.