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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Anecdotes was precisely the reason why I posted it. See whom I'm replying to.
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.