I have omicron right now (4-5 months after 2nd jab, so pretty much no effect from that) and it's just like a common cold (certainly wouldn't call it "battling omicron"). I have zero problems with getting this each year.
Both my wife and I (double vaxxed for 5 months, not boosted yet although were just about to do so) caught Omicron-flavoured Covid in the lead-up to Christmas and it wiped us out each for 2-3 days each, with a combination of fatigue, aches, fever, and violent coughing. Certainly worse than any cold or flu we've had up until that point.
I still have a pretty nasty cough and a throat inflammation.
Aren't anecdotes fun?
Anecdotes was precisely the reason why I posted it. See whom I'm replying to.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-setting...
I don't think 1% is "a small minority".
“7. Health/disability status is self-reported by study participants rather than clinically diagnosed. From February 2021 study participants were asked to exclude any symptoms related to COVID-19 when reporting their health/disability status. However, in practice it may be difficult for some participants to separate long COVID symptoms from unrelated exacerbation of pre-existing conditions, so these results should be treated with caution. “
I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.
Would I be of a similar opinion as parent if I had a similarly asymptomatic-to-mild case? I don't know for sure, but I would hope not, because I wouldn't want to draw conclusions or base policy from just my anecdotal experience.
Other replies to me appear needlessly partisan jibes: I neither said nor implied anything about continued lockdowns and any such inference is pure projection.
Many people get sick every year or every other year. Their illness is like you described: 2-3 days of being "knocked out" and about a week to fully recover.
It's not that I "desire" to go through that every year or two, it's just life. I expect that's why people responded incredulously to your post: for them, getting sick occasionally is normal.
Each is likely an endemic version of something that was far more serious and deadly historically. Now it’s a minor or major annoyanace that is part of normal life. i bet eradicating covid would fall into the same bucket S eradicating any of the others. Something to aspire towards, but until then something to simply accept as normal and move on with our lives.
It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
> It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
WWII lasted longer, and IIRC the US was under a restrictive civilian rationing regime that whole time.
I understand that people can get annoyed with various measures required for the public good, but that's not good reason to "move on" from whatever challenge that motivates them.
This is why it has a vaccine. That prevents it, prevent seriousness of symptoms, and deaths. (yet a large percent of the population doesn't get it, and so 50k us citizens die each year)
Fever for 4 days, horrible coughing, vomiting, barely able to get out of bed. Flu vaccines certainly provide some cross-immunity when the vax isn't matched to the strain, but not too much. That's what my doctor told me when I complained to her (when she told me I had tested positive for flu) that I'd gotten the annual flu vaccine the preceding October. Depending on the strain vs the vaccine for that year and how big of a mismatch it is, it can really whip your ass despite the vaccine. That being said, the flu shot is a good idea for anyone, and crucial for seniors.
No, it doesn't. I've never felt "wiped out" from a typical cold.
This whole thread is full of anecdotes from people implicitly claiming that their experience applies to everyone, when in reality everyone's going to have different experiences with everything from colds to covid. Unfortunately, the latter has a much higher prevalence of seriously-worse side-effects (long-haul, ageusia, anosmia, death, etc) compared to the former.
Omicron now is no different. Ended up taking 3 days off work and am now back to normal capacity.
I think it's a fair critique that some lockdown measures go too far (particularly those with low efficacy, or "safety theater"), but it's more helpful to take about specifics, rather than "lockdowns good" or "lockdowns bad".
At some point (and maybe it's now?), we'll need to shift our thinking from "pandemic" to "endemic". COVID is going to be with us from now on, and will start to look more like flu season (viruses tend to evolve to be less deadly over time). And I don't say that to trivialize it; COVID has given me much greater awareness of the impact of the seasonal flu on the elderly and the immuno-compromised.
The 'privileged' comment is 'I got COVID it was just like a cold, I can do this every year ... so there's no more pandemic'.
Conflating their personal anecdote with the range of outcomes.
For now, we're still in a pandemic. Hopefully it will get better.
But, personally, I would like to avoid getting Omicron, as long term effects are still unclear: does "long Omicron" exist, does it affect vaccinated, and if yes how common and severe is it. There are some recent news about long Covid: it could be micro-clots.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787741
Specifically, reporting long covid symptoms correlates with thinking you had covid, and not as much with actually having had covid.
Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t some real severe cases out there, but it’s probably not nearly as widespread as it seems.
This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival.
> It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"
There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes.
Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did.
But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel.
Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
I was amused at the sudden acknowledgement of natural immunity from previous infection in the very publications that have constantly claimed it doesn't exist, the minute it supported their need to keep fear mongering. Same with the younger population point, considering these very organizations have gone out of their way to obfuscate the vast risk stratification by age for most of the pandemic. The terrified 20-somethings wearing respirators in TikTok videos are a result of this.
Can you cite some of these alleged claims?
No it's not. Late November was too early. In mid-December we could start drawing conclusions. At this point things are becoming quite clear - we see similar trends everywhere, not just South Africa.
"The data suggests that three doses of vaccine provided an estimated 68% drop in the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron compared with people who were unvaccinated."
The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here.
Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink).
Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
(it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
Yes, it's called 'Science'.
The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in.
There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
> [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; …
This exactly what we were talking about above.
You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
Getting Covid or not is binary, yes, but the severity of the disease is on a spectrum. I can surely get a 15% less severe disease thanks to a 4-5 month old vaccination. Just like the severity of the disease depends on the viral load you're exposed to.
Of course there's no way of knowing what the exact percentage is for me personally, so in that sense you're right - it's just an average. But it's surely indicative, which is why you should be getting boosters after a specific amount of time, if you're in a risk group.
The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Also, see most of South Africa.
So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated.
I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus.
But let's be honest about this:
The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.
You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu".
The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu.
Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane.
Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
No, that one is particularly weird right now. Vaccines are essentially mandated for many parts of life, and have been for my entire life. At multiple points throughout my development I've had to get required vaccines to do things. I had never even heard of antivaxxers until my late 20s. They used to be laughed at as an insane fringe group on HN.
Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated. I suspect if I predicted on HN that there would be strong resistance to a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic people would have laughed at me as ridiculous.
People don't like vaccines because they don't like the reality we're in and they strangely think resisting wearing masks and resisting vaccines somehow makes it less real. Unfortunately it has made things much worse.
It's so unprecedented and unpopular an idea that everyone - including Biden - were falling all over themselves assuring us they would under no circumstances mandate the Covid vaccine.
Not ones requiring multiple jabs per year, seemingly forever (unless something like Omicron comes along).
Also not experimental ones rushed out with an EUA. Would you accept a mandate of the Chinese or Cuban vaccine, twice per year, for your whole family, for the whole foreseeable future?
> Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated.
You'd be very wrong. I remember very well that people were highly vocal against the H1N1 vaccine a decade ago and would've (rightfully so) lost their minds with mandates. Turned out the vaccine caused narcolepsy in kids[0], among other things. I never had that vaccine. My pregnant partner did (which turned out to be a lucky gamble).
> resisting wearing masks
Barring N95/FPP2+ masks it's mainly theater. It will be interesting to read all about this in a year or three once the heated political agendas have subsided.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_vaccin...
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1
I hope your recovery goes well and you truly have zero issues.
I do apologize if you took that as fear mongering, I have a nephew in a similar situation as you and we are keeping an eye on him just in case anything does come up, not that we expect anything will.
Best wishes to your nephew.
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Current-Research/Coronavirus-and-N...
One of the common long covid symptoms is "brain fog" though. Which I _think_ is probably metabolic or circulatory or something, but definitely affects the brain whatever the actual cause is.
It's mainly that you provided a personal anecdote in one direction and I found it prudent to provide one in the other direction - one that echoes everything we've seen so far, cases skyrocketing, hospitalization rates barely nudging.
That aside, hospitalizations are going up faster than they have at any point prior so not sure where your "barely nudging" comes from.
Statistically, people who are healthy and vaxxed developing severe symptoms from Omicron are outliers. That is no comfort to you, and I can assure you I know how you feel on that front when people like me tell you the stats. My mother-in-law suffered a very rare (statistically) adverse event from her second Pfizer shot in May, which killed her. She was in her early 60s, and healthy, but suffered cardiac arrest 3 hours after her second shot, in the midst of a fever. It was an exceedingly rare event, but it was no comfort to us to be told that.
Atleast here in slovenia, most of the mandates affect mostly the young and healthy... yes, theoretically neither 20yo bobby nor his grandpa can enter nightclubs, due to them being closed, but with such data, we could reopen nightclubs, let bobby party and do all the stupid stuff we were free to do at 20yo, and focus the effort at grandpa, so he gets vaccinated, gets the masks, has somone bring him food, so he doesnt have to go to the stores, subsidize a plan for a smartphone to encourage more videoconferencing instead of live visits, give out free tests at home, to detect the infection early, etc.
So you have milder symptoms because you're vaxxed.
It also sounds like you're not aware of a) the vaning efficacy of the vaccine or b) how little it does against Omicron.