Covid-19: Runny nose, headache, and fatigue are commonest symptoms of omicron
bmj.com
bmj.com
Then a) I won't feel as stressed out, and b) I won't read the article, since it sounds ridiculous.
This plugin would only make sense for people who are vaccinated of course, since for those people, like myself, COVID has been defanged. Isn't it time for those of us who have had two doses, or even three (I have yet another one scheduled a week from now...), to stop worrying and start enjoying life the way it is meant to be lived?
Yes, and I would add, time to stop worrying so much about what other people are doing. People are getting really worked up about how so-and-so hasn't been vaccinated or so-and-so doesn't wear a mask properly. It's one more newly promoted category upon which we can focus our vehement, irrational tribalism.
One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more, and the reason is because we decided basically overnight in March 2020 that catching an airborne virus now has a moral dimension it never had before. You catch a cold, you catch the flu, you catch norovirus, it's just something shitty that happens to you by chance rather than being anyone's fault. When it comes to other diseases people do attach moral judgements; someone gives you HIV or clamydia or syphilis so it automatically has to be someone else's fault that you got sick. Because of the way society has come to see COVID, that disease has been put in the latter category rather than the former which is incorrect in my opinion.
Society will never heal from the wounds of this pandemic until COVID is just something shitty you happen to catch rather than something someone gave to you because of a moral failure.
So you ask for people to accept some hardships in life, but somehow make a big deal with putting mask on your face from time to time?
Isn't that the whole point? Persecuting a neighbour as a witch has no merit. Limiting contact with your neighbour as a pandemic restriction does.
> One social impact of the pandemic is that nobody can mind their own damn business any more
If "mind their own damn business" means "go about daily life as if there weren't a global pandemic" then yes, this is indeed an expected impact of public health crises.
Do people really struggle to understand why acting like that particularly unpleasant brand of judgemental Puritan evangelist might put people off from their message? It's like any discussion around COVID has to come packaged with buckets of tedious moralising or it automatically gets dismissed as conspiratorial.
your posts here that begin with a comparison to supporting witch trials are certainly a fine example of how to put people off a message!
No, I don't support people behaving like that. Doesn't change my response about spreading.
I want to tell my short story with COVID so far, as a double vaccinated individual (last dose 2021-08-18) who took all the precautions and got infected due to an irresponsible person (older than me, didn't get vaccinated simply due to their own laziness and lack of empathy towards others).
I tested positive a couple Tuesdays ago (2021-12-04) on an antigen test, I took the test after waking up with a runny nose.
I didn't experience much of the physical symptoms, no cough, barely had fevers (one instance it broke through 38.3C, otherwise hovering on the lows 37C), no fatigue.
Instead I've been experiencing quite a few cognitive issues, I lost my smell and taste last Thursday, so about a week ago, and since then I've noticed that my thoughts aren't on the same level as before.
It started when I was playing chess with my girlfriend a week ago, I noticed that I simply couldn't string thoughts together, they became "loose" and it was hard to get continuation. I'd start thinking about a strategy and would experience a "brain fart" where it didn't make sense what I was thinking about, then I couldn't figure where my pieces could move and my thought would start spiraling. It is really, really strange.
When I tried reading books I felt similarly to what some of my friends with ADD/ADHD described how their thoughts wander away. I simply couldn't focus enough to finish a paragraph without having to re-read parts of it. Sometimes it would take me 4-5 times reading the same sentence to finally settle it. I don't understand or know the mechanism behind this but it's happening.
I've been also experiencing bouts of anxiety, physically, I do struggle a little with anxiety but never happened this way. I learned to cope through the last week and noticed these bouts come in waves so I just endure the few seconds or minutes while it's happening.
Today was my first day back at work, as a SWE my job is basically to mentally juggle multiple things and considerations about them to find a solution or a way forward. I simply cannot do that at the moment, I still feel these waves of brain fog creeping up where I simply can't make sense of something that was said or shown. I've been trying to pair program but it's been mostly pointless as sometimes I can't finish my train of thought, or remember why I started one.
I believe the same way as you, that my double vaccinated status would protect me from the worst case and it's definitely protected me from the worst (as well as my girlfriend, also vaccinated and who endured the whole quarantine/isolation period with me and never got infected). I didn't feel shortness of breath or other dangerous symptoms but I feel a tight chest and sometimes a burning sensation. Still, it's not all fine and dandy, I cried multiple times from panic attacks (some induced by my psyche, some from COVID); the brain fog is lingering and making me question how and when will I ever get back to "normal", if it stays for long it will impact my job and expectations on me.
Bottom line is: yes, we are protected from the worst, it is still something I don't want to go through again, it's still something I would have avoided as much and for as long as possible because medical research is still in its infancy about long-term side-effects. I have no idea if I will experience issues with clotting later in life (brain aneurysms are one of my worst nightmares), the symptoms on my chest are pretty weird and uncomfortable.
I'm a pretty healthy individual, low 30s, always commute by bike (averaging around 4000 km/year on a bike for the past 6 years), gym-goer and with mostly healthy eating habits (not crazy, still stuff my face with sweets, ice cream, etc. but overall healthy compared to the general population).
Just adding my report because I believe I was misguided in believing this would be a much easier time than it was due to the vaccines.
Vaccines work, they save lives and protect our healthcare system. It is still a fucking nasty bug causing a really strange disease that we know very little about.
If it was this bad with the vaccine, imagine how much worse off he would have surely been without it. He likely suffered the viral equivalent of seatbelt-shaped bruises on his body after a car crash that would have otherwise killed him.
> still think the problem lies in not enough vaccinations
Where does OP say that?
He's blaming his sickness on the unvaccinated guy he got it from with no hint of irony that he got it despite being vaccinated and potentially spreading it as well.
Yes, because all the data shows that infection between vaccinated -> vaccinated is lowered, there is no irony in there. Also because the person in question didn't isolate the moment they felt sick, they continuously wandered around the house and I forced them to isolate after they showed up in front of me, coughing and announcing they "felt sick". So fuck off.
I caught it at home, I stayed home, the person lives in the same house, and so I didn't infect anyone else.
You have a pretty annoying and uncivil attitude, not sure what triggers you about the vaccine talk but you have an axe to grind and you are piling on my anecdote to push whatever view you have without backing it up, I will stop engaging because I surely don't see any point in trying to hold civility towards you.
Have a good weekend, hope you find better ways to spend your energy.
I didn't have any cough or shortness of breath, there was nothing in the sense of "pretty bad COVID", this was a very mild infection. Even more when I compare to the person who infected me, 4 years older than me and still coughing their brains out after 2 weeks with it, including blood in their cough for a couple days.
So I'm not sure where you are drawing this conclusion from... The vaccine was effective, I didn't infect my girlfriend whom I shared rooms, bed and so on, and I attribute that to both me and her being vaccinated, hers was a month later than mine so I believe she has a higher antibodies count going on.
I really, really don't understand what point you are trying to make out of my anecdote, nothing in there draws to your conclusion.
EDIT: I believe you have an axe to grind, don't come soapboxing over my anecdote with your own made-up conclusions about what I said. It's dishonest and crummy.
[1] "In the UK it was described that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to fully vaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated vs 23% for unvaccinated)"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
A study based on data from Singapore found a similar effect[1].
[1]: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanwpc/article/PIIS2666-6...
What a weird argument you are building, suggesting the vaccine wasn't good for him because he got bad covid and didn't die.
Why are vaccines necessary?
A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
Because we don't have a cure ?
> A cure would be just fine; some drug that stopped covid immediately would be very nice.
> For example most forms of malaria _had_ a cure with the discovery of quinine. Newer drugs have taken quinine's place. It's a race between the organism and man in any case, whether cure or vaccine.
So we don't need vaccines because cures - which we don't have so far - are better. Okay.
I didn't say that.
What I'm saying is that we should research treatments (non-vaccine cures) as well as vaccines.
After all, of our current medical solutions that do work for various ailments, what percentage are vaccines and what percentage are treatments found by experiment or accident (like quinine for malaria)?
Long covid, another kind of worse, as in if 10% of the infected population gets it then we'll have a massive generational disability problem, is facing even more denial from people.
The biggest story of COVID that no one is talking about is the absolute failure at all levels (political, medical establishment, etc) to increase hospital capacity.
We are in year 2 of a global pandemic and, at least where I am, there has been a reduction in ICU staff, beds and hospital capacity more generally. Vaccine mandates taking qualified healthcare workers out of the workforce is one of the biggest own-goals I've seen.
Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
Bzzzt. Thank you for playing. Also, you fail to understand that capacity is down because of burnout, so advocating against vaccination, especially for health care workers, is hypocritical in the most cynical way. You are advocating for the onset of chaos.
...and mandates. The stories in the media only capture the firings, but a ton more left before getting fired, simply because they had no desire to be fired.
OR, we've filtered to the people that actually believe in medical science, ones that are willing to do what needs to be done to prevent the spread of contagious disease.
> Why haven't we increased hospital capacity to deal with a highly transmissible disease we knew was never going away? Lockdowns, mandates, personal freedom restrictions are all just cover for not handling the basic blocking and tackling of fortifying our medical systems. All that money and none of it increased the ability to care for COVID patients. What a shame.
Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain". The trial participants had to report adverse events using an app that had a pre-set list of possible side effects, with no way to enter any others. The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market. The trials didn't measure hospitalization and couldn't show any improvement in mortality. Etc.
Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
Please, provide some sources. A quick google search led me to https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ but this excerpt is in moderna's favor:
> But the Crigler-Najjar treatment has been indefinitely delayed, an Alexion spokeswoman told STAT. It never proved safe enough to test in humans, according to several former Moderna employees and collaborators who worked closely on the project. Unable to press forward with that technology, Moderna has had to focus instead on developing a handful of vaccines, turning to a less lucrative field that might not justify the company’s nearly $5 billion valuation.
> “It’s all vaccines right now, and vaccines are a loss-leader,” said one former Moderna manager. “Moderna right now is a multibillion-dollar vaccines company, and I don’t see how that holds up.”
Considering work on mRNA vaccines started in 1989 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MRNA_vaccine#Early_research I'd say you are wrong. 2004 and 2008 saw the first use in a humane body of mrna transfer into the cell. Moderna may have hit a roadblock for their cancer therapy in 2017 but that doesn't mean they started working from scratch on mrna vaccines in 2017.
> As for trials, there were a lot of serious problems with the trials. A girl in the children's Pfizer trial who was maimed so badly she's now confined to a wheelchair was recorded as having "abdominal pain".
I am surprised antivax aren't running with this story. I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?
> The trials reported 95% effectiveness and no need for any boosters, which turned out to be false almost immediately once the trials ended and the vaccines went to market.
Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there ?
> Maybe you have doubts and you'd like to review the underlying data? FDA only needed 100 days to read it and approve, but to release those docs to the public will take more than 50 years.
> Reality is that signing up to be a healthcare worker, now means you are at the mercy of government agencies that have a track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it. Not a pleasant place to be.
I don't know what track record of bad medical practices like vaccinating people who don't need it you are referring to. Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?
Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies.
Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
"I read a bit about it and among major outlets only Fox News ran the story. But here's the thing: one case ?"
No, one case that you know of. But as you just realized, information about such people is systematically suppressed. The media refuses to cover it (outside of Fox), tech companies systematically erase mentions of it and ban people who try to link to it. And the worst is, doctors deny any connection.
The reality is, nobody has any idea how many people like that girl are out there.
"Are you referring to the second dose as a booster ? I seem to remember moderna and pfizer always were 2-doses vaccines. And there were headlines and talk about whether or not it would provide a lifetime protection or regular doses. Against wuhan strains the vaccines held up their 95% protection. So what exactly is false there?"
No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
"Previous vaccination campaign or covid vaccination campaign ?"
This one. Vaccination of children. Or really, people under 55 or so. That seems to be a common threshold at which the cost/benefit ratio goes negative.
"Anyway, there are other vaccines if you rather go with J&J and Az which are traditional technologies."
None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
Because it doesn't mean they didn't work on them. RNA platform has been in the making for decades, the fact they used it for vaccines and not for something else doesn't mean it's completely unsafe.
> Well that's great, except now we're up to 3 or 4 doses and the trials for boosters were a joke. Not real trials at all. So, we're flying blind with a tech that was known to be dangerous if you do what our society is now doing.
I disagree, we have big numbers:
> Researchers reviewed data from 728,321 individuals aged 12 or above who had received the third dose of the BNT162b2 vaccine. These individuals were carefully matched 1:1 with 728,321 individuals who had received only two shots of the BNT162b2 vaccine at least five months prior. The matching was based on an extensive set of demographic, geographic and health-related attributes associated with risk of infection, risk of severe disease, health status and health seeking behavior. Individuals were assigned to each group dynamically based on their changing vaccination status (198,476 individuals moved from the unvaccinated cohort into the vaccinated cohort during the study). Multiple analyses were conducted to ensure that the estimated vaccine effectiveness was robust to potential biases. The study included a total of over 12,000,000 person-days of follow-up.
> No. I'm using the term in the same way everyone does. They were advertised from the start as needing two doses, but not three or four. And they weren't advertised as "Wuhan SARS-CoV-2 vaccines" but "COVID vaccines" that provided 95% protection against "symptomatic disease". Clearly, they have failed to do that. You can argue that COVID should be defined differently, but it's not.
That's really unfair. There's no way you could have taken at face value that first generation covid vaccines would protect against any future variants of covid, especially variants with so many changes as omicron. Even so they still hold against severe hospitalizations. Dismissing vaccines entirely on that is like refusing to wear a seat belt because it doesn't always work. There also always were talk about how long would the protection against mild symptoms hold. Now we know.
They never promised magic pills (if you listen to scientists, not politicians, which is another conversation we should also have).
> None of them are all that traditional, and AZ has now been pulled. It isn't available where I live. It's mRNA or else.
Well, that I don't have anything to say. We didn't have much choice in my country (although if you tried to reschedule or chose a specific vaccination center you could increase the odds of getting what you wanted) (I know I did).
> Your freedom ends where my nose begins.
I know where your nose is. I don't know where this pandemic ends. Diseases are not free license for governments to do whatever they want for as long as they want.
20 years after 9/11 we still live with the consequences of the "war on terror". Let's make sure that doesn't happen again.
Excuse me, but governments have the power to suspend individual rights during major disasters, like war, insurrection, terrorism, etc... oh wow, look, epidemics too!
Feel fortunate, at least they didn't decree martial law, or better, hefty fines.
I feel gratitude for those who fought to make it possible.
I hope our descendents get to feel the same way.
If you so love human rights and freedom, you could start by supporting real government overreach like abortion outlawing, inhuman treatment of immigrants, offshore prisons where human rights are ignored, gerrymandering to twist votes towards a single party, insider stock trading from senators, and a long etc.
Fighting vaccines and hygienic measures during a global pandemic won't make you an American hero.
And while I hate to indulge whataboutism, you should know I do care about and have opinions on all of those things. It remains to be seen whether or not you care about rushing to judgements about others. This is a thread about covid, and the usual internet edicit is to stay on topic, so I'm not going to discuss those things here.
I'm not fighting doctors or medical science.
I'm opposing bad policies made by non experts, and/or experts with conflicts of interest.
I completely understand that governments have eroded their reputation by their own actions, but in this case I'm supportive of vaccination and sanitation. This is not a terrorist attack, this is a very contagious disease that hasn't ceased to evolve because people keep hosting it and giving it chance to mutate. You don't have to trust the government to understand that their actions are reasonable and supported by science in this topic.
If we take current events at face value, then yes covid is a real problem, the vaccine really helps, and governments are acting in the interest of the public with health and safety measures.
But if you look behind the curtain, there is so much more going on. It remains to be seen just how much manipulation is involved.
My analogy to the war on terror is meant to have layers.
After the initial attack there was a patriotic fervor and an outcry for retribution. The "war on terror" was a justified response to the demand for national security.
It's not until years later that much of the story we were told at the time had been revealed to contain false truths.
The WMDs never existed. The Saudis were connected to the attackers. Our prolonged engagement in Afghanistan, a means to funnel billions (trillions?) to security contractors. The pentagon. Tower 7. Etc.
There's a enough information to confound the official narrative, and we still don't have all the answers. I doubt we ever will.
The pandemic mirrors this in many ways already. The global outcry, the unprecedented scale of government intervention. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists" parallels today's divide. It wasn't something you could say no to then, and it's not something you can say no to now.
To say these thing simply erode trust is a pittance. This plants a seed in one's mind that there are in fact manipulators at the highest levels of our institutions. There is even more evidence of this in the world today ex. Jeffery epstein and the ongoing maxwell trials.
But maybe none of that applies to the current events. Perhaps my speculation is unwarranted. Sometimes the world simply is what it seems, and you have to take it at face value.
But more often than not I've found the world is a lot like poker, and by the time you have all the information it's already too late.
The WHO is very different than the military industry complex, they're not taking over the world, they making recommendations based on evolving scientific data, and the governments of the world are free to ignore them because not even the UN has enough authority to force them. That so many shitty governments have accepted those recommendations to some degree is a miracle, owed much in part to the effort of their own scientists.
No analogy is perfect. But the parallels are too strong to ignore. Studying history is about using the past to make sense of the present, and possibly even predict the future.
Saying the USA was obviously overreacting from the start is just hindsight, and not representative of the sentiment at the time. Further I'm sure years from now we'll say the same, that many things we did during this pandemic were overreactions, and that it was obvious at the time.
Comparing the MIC to the WHO is a false dichotomy. The WHO is historically an institution for the USA to project power internationally.
The question of who is "taking over the world" is the territory of speculation. I said originally it remains to be seen how much manipulation is occurring. For example, the lab-leak hypothesis, once the ramblings of a mad man, has gained traction among officials as a likely source for the disease.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/17047986/wuhan-lab-leak-most-l...
If this proves to be true, it will have radical implications on the past 2 years.
Sep 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-plan-nursing-...
> The Quebec government has announced it will provide nurses with financial bonuses of up to $18,000 as part of its emergency plan to fix the staffing crisis in the province's health-care network ... the plan would cost close to $1 billion
Nov 2021, https://globalnews.ca/news/8346947/quebec-drops-vaccine-mand...
> Quebec is backtracking on its enforced COVID-19 vaccination mandate for health-care workers, government officials announced Wednesday. After pushing back its deadline multiple times, Health Minister Christian Dubé said the province will abandon the measure altogether, as the health-care network can’t afford to lose the thousands of non-vaccinated employees. The loss of unvaccinated staff would have had a “devastating effect on the system,” according to the health ministry.
Maybe because they set up the incentives poorly?
> One nurse, who CBC agreed not to name because she is not authorized to speak to media, said the announcement will do nothing for her.
The woman works part-time as an emergency room nurse on the night shift, but says she cannot afford to take on full-time work overnight because she is a single mother.
"I'm penalized either way," she said, explaining that part-time nurses expect that they will still be forced to work overtime.
With things like masks we were able to free up supply by allowing N95 construction masks to be used until other production can get up to speed. We don't exactly have a hidden cache of nurses and doctors that can be rallied upon a moment's notice.
Now getting rid of the ones that can, and probably contracted COVID already does make zero sense.
Immunity from exposure and s highly variable, it could be 3 months, it could be 3 weeks. Immunity from vaccine is more deterministic, but still limited. We will probably need at a yearly booster.
COVID is burning out workers everywhere, especially in the medical field. A lot of the quitting isn’t related to vax status, people are just tired and they don’t feel they get paid enough for the job they are doing.
Hospital capacity will take years to increase. At least 4 to raise nurse/doctor class sizes, probably longer since you need to expand the training programs as well. We also already spend 18 percent of our GDP on healthcare, going to 30 percent is going to hurt, but if people don’t want to get vaccinated, maybe we can just charge them higher insurance premiums to make up for it?
No, not really. With trillions of dollars and 2 years there was absolutely plenty of time and resources to train more people and find new COVID-specific spaces. Nurses and PAs can be done in as little as two years with the current system, and people can be trained to handle just COVID patients much faster.
The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
Nursing programs were already at capacity before COVID started, and doing a 2 year program is preconditioned on previous education (a 2 year AS degree in my state).
> The problems are easily tractable, it's just poor leadership.
Said by every arm chair general ever.
Do you think in World War 2 the generals sat around saying "there's no possible way we can increase the size of our air force, it takes years to train pilots and engineers". No, they didn't. They found ways to make it work, because it was a crisis. The absolute refusal by the health sector to do this in any way speaks volumes.
Natural immunity is better than current vaccines for effectiveness and longevity.
Vaccines are for the vulnerable.
We are likely now constantly being exposed to the virus. Although we are "immune" (thanks to boosters, immunizations, getting ill, natural immunity or blood transfusion), any subsequent exposure to covid will garner a response from our immune system. So we'll effectively be "re-inoculated" against whatever variant we are exposed to.
So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
You'll be re-inoculated if you have an immune reaction, which has a chance of getting sick...and it isn't a given that you'll live to take advantage of the inoculation.
> So long-term the need for a booster may wane, the exception being for highly-infectious variants that pose a threat to an already-immunized and exposed population.
It is just like the flu, but a bit worse. Yes, you might be able to survive getting it every year until you get old or develop co-morbidities. But getting a yearly booster is probably a smarter choice (for the flu and COVID).
I suspect this is in part driven by more acute cognizance of even minor potential symptoms, combined with greater testing capacity, but if the strain is in fact causing different, less visible (but still highly contagious!) symptoms, that's somewhat concerning (although may be balanced out if it is actually accompanied by much less severe disease).
For reference:
Omicron (from the OP):
> the top five symptoms reported in the app for omicron infection were runny nose, headache, fatigue (either mild or severe), sneezing, and sore throat.
Delta [0]:
> the most commonly reported covid-19 symptoms were now headache, runny nose, and sore throat and not fever, cough, and loss of sense of smell or taste, as listed by the government.
[0] This paper was cited in the OP: https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1654?ijkey=7f296b9905d4...
So yes, if the symptoms are now different from before then it's news worthy.
Also, why complain that an article about covid deals with covid?
> The omicron outbreak at an Oslo Christmas party seen as "the biggest in the world outside of South Africa", is so far only causing mild disease, with Norway's state epidemiologist expressing hope it might mark the beginning of the end for the pandemic ... They have symptoms like fever, cough, headache, muscle pain, fatigue, but for now, none of them has become severely ill, and none of them have been treated in hospital ... one of his agency's three scenarios for omicron was that it would be both very mild and very transmissible. "That is the hope. That is the best scenario we can have," he said. "That it's getting minder, most people will get it, and they will get a natural immunity."
Dec 16, https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/wireStory/omicron-dominant...
> wastewater samples show that the new omicron variant is now the dominant strain of COVID-19 in the Florida county that is home to the nation's largest theme park resorts ... It's a different story when it comes to people seeking treatment for COVID-19, officials said. “Those who are hospitalized are being primarily infected by the Delta variant,” Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said Wednesday.
just think about your life necceseties (food, water, waste, security...) who is gonna care for that?
That would be tyranny and be exactly what I feared. That would mean anyone with allergies, a bad nights sleep, a headache caused by many other things etc is classed a persona non grata and denied travel and entry in to their place of work, pubs etc.
And Ryanair make you declare you have no symptoms when checking in (change of taste, smell, diarrhoea, high temperature, sore throat, headache etc etc)
Negative test already doesn’t count for much
Who comes in actively sick with symptoms?? Spreading disease at the workplace was never a good idea, even before Covid.
> Negative test already doesn’t count for much
They're still the main thing.
The entire point of my comment was about expanding the definition to mild and non contagious things like a headache and tiredness
> They're still the main thing.
Except for airlines and a lot of companies. Are you being obtuse on purpose?
By Monday my wife and another one of the wives was feeling symptoms. Tuesday my son stayed home from school with sore throat and by bedtime we were rushing him to the hospital with a 103 fever. He tested positive while at the hospital. Since then every single person in that car has also tested positive through PCR.
I thought I escaped it by isolating from my wife/son in our home but I started to show early symptoms Wednesday morning waking up with splitting headache. I went and got tested that afternoon. By Thursday night I was having itchy throat, chills, fatigue and body aches. Feeling pretty crappy and a crazy symptom I also have been having is uncontrollable hiccups past 24 hours that come and go.
The test I took Wednesday came back negative but the OTC Rapid I did today was positive. I am going for another PCR tomorrow to confirm as the first one was done possibly too early after exposure with no symptoms.
IF this is the Omicron that went through our vaccinated group like butter, we are going to be in a very bad spot by mid-january.
Here is some recent information release 3 days ago: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/pfizer-s-paxlovid-...
The PCR-test measures the existence of virus RNA. Not when you were infected, if you are sick of that virus and also not if you are contagious.
Because the symptoms are now similar to almost all other virus infections there is no way of knowing if you are sick of Omicron after a positive PCR-test.
Edit: For some confused people an example. You came in contact with Omicron but didn't get sick of it. 2 weeks later you came in contact with the RS virus and this time you got a runny nose so you get a PCR-test. The result is positive from the Omicron contact 2 weeks earlier. So they say you are sick of Omicron. But in fact you are sick of RS.
Huh? I though Omicron was particularly obvious on a PCR test (spike-negative but virus-positive).
Common symptoms being less specific doesn't make PCRs unreliable.
> asymptomatic people may test positive for 1-2 weeks, while those with mild-to moderate disease often continue to test positive for a week or more after this.
Per https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/false-negative-how-long-do...
Three weeks is a stretch in an asymptomatic case, let alone three months.
As for whether you have omicron - that depends on the precise test the lab runs. Many UK labs test for three covid genes - S, N and Orf. Delta was S-gene positive. Omicron is S-gene negative but N and Orf positive. If the test is S-gene negative (often reported as S-gene target failure, SGTF), you can be pretty sure it's Omicron at the moment. Alpha was also SGTF, but isn't really circulating anymore.
Obviously the set of "commonest" systems is not the thing to base such a decision on (e.g. for a hypothetical disease where 90% get a mild cough and 10% drop dead, cough is the most common symptom, but the death symptom is what should drive policy).