Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I had it, before a vaccine was available, and it was a nothing burger, like it was for most 30-somethings. If you already have natural immunity, or 1-2 doses of the vaccine, there’s no point worry about it.

View on HN

I had the original strain and then delta 9 months later. I was 33-ish, decent BMI and I get more exercise than 99% of people.

Both times I had two full weeks of extremely high fevers and I was the most fatigued I’ve ever been in my life, to the point where it was an incredible challenge to feed myself or go to the bathroom. The first time my around my lungs hurt enough where I could barely take a full breath and I developed a cough so bad I couldn’t really talk for at least a few weeks after the infection waned.

Granted, I have a really crappy immune system and I always get colds when exposed to someone sick and they hit me hard for at least a week with another week or two of symptoms. That said, your experience isn’t everyone’s.

Am curious what blood test showed for antibodies after your first infection.

I had it 1.5 years ago. I just got another blood test and the IgG antibodies are still strong.

You might have had a more recent non-symptomatic infection.

All kinds of possible explanations.

I had it about 2 weeks before I was eligible to get a vaccine, in my 30s. As an active Crossfitter, I am (was?) much healthier than the majority of my peers. Yet it nearly killed me with double pneumonia, and I couldn't taste or smell for 7 months. Even so, I hate masks and haven't gotten any booster shots. I'm just so weary from everything covid related. I'll get an annual shot along with the flu shot, but otherwise I'm done with covid forever.

Unless you give it to someone else and they die.

Two JJ vaccines. Two years I get by without getting it and living with someone who had it.

Got it this week, in my 40’s, it sucks and I haven’t been sick for 3 years.

No, stop staying this foolishness. In dense cities like NY, I would say at least 20% of the city is infected right now. Workers. People on the street. The subway is disgusting, there is at least one infected person per carriage coughing over everyone and refusing to wear a mask. You walk around and hear that infected lung with light mucus cough. It’s everywhere. Unless we get proper proper sterilizing vaccines, the world is going to be in a cycle of getting sick from it every few months. This is serious and infectious like nothing on earth. I am tired of the selfishness of people having an attitude that it’s not a big deal.

At this point the vax we had is for something that doesn’t exist anymore. There is no long lasting natural resistance. We need new tech and widespread adoption. If people are going to go out symptomatic and infected and spread an r=17.5 virus, and there really is nothing we can do to stop them, we need much better tech to save us.

Immunity is likely long term. There was evidence of a bone marrow compartment formation after primary infection in the early days of the pandemic, maybe even as early as 2020. It continues to be supported.

Latest: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

"This work provides further evidence of sustained immune response in children up to 1 year after primary SARS-CoV-2 infection."

More details on the mechanism: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34030176 "Overall, our results indicate that mild infection with SARS-CoV-2 induces robust antigen-specific, long-lived humoral immune memory in humans."

Follow the science. There is no need to panic.

Yes, however BA.5 is another beast. Post infection immunity lasts in the order of weeks it would appear.

Immunity to infection ≠ immunity to serious disease. The epitopes that drive long-lived memory are fairly well conserved.

I just wanna go out in public and not get sick. It’s happened too many times now.

If the vaccine isn't stopping you from getting sick now, why would it stop you from getting sick if more people took it? Does not compute.

If more people took the same vaccine, sure. But GP said we need new tech. The universal vaccine in the article, for example.

Because the vaccines still slow transmission and more people getting vaccinated would slow transmission even more, lowering one's risk of getting infected as well as the severity of the infection.

Were you not getting sick before Covid? Lucky you, I got colds a couple times a year, even more often after my kids started attending school. Covid is just another cold for me, why should I care?

No not really. And I am childfree forever so I don’t have to put up with the little pestilence beasts and their Petri dish school crud. Very lucky!

Some occasional subway crud but when you catch COVID over and over again you lose weeks of your life. Also Because colds don’t cause long term damage, blood clots, etc.

This isn’t another cold. It could be mild, or you could wind up with complications from blood clots and inflammation for the next year, more…

That losing your taste? That’s brain damage, buster. Yeah just a cold…

> In dense cities like NY, I would say at least 20% of the city is infected right now. Workers. People on the street. The subway is disgusting, there is at least one infected person per carriage coughing over everyone and refusing to wear a mask. You walk around and hear that infected lung with light mucus cough. It’s everywhere.

If you are to insult people's intelligence then don't use your own germophobic anecdotal perception of the world as a credible epidemiological source.

> Unless we get proper proper sterilizing vaccines, the world is going to be in a cycle of getting sick from it every few months.

I get it that you're not familiar with most respiratory viruses.

> I am tired of the selfishness of people having an attitude that it’s not a big deal.

Imposing a medical procedure for your own safety is also a form of selfishness that lead to abuse in the recent past (see Jacobson v. Massachusetts and how it lead to Buck v. Bell)

> There is no long lasting natural resistance. We need new tech and widespread adoption.

Coronaviruses are know to change very quickly and this is why they escape immunity. Tech is not magic and won't change that fact of life. A universal coronavirus vaccine is a pipe dream.

I’d say virusaphobic. I have been sicker from others in the last year than in 2020 and earlier. I’ve lost a lot of life this past year.

So what are we going do? Big city life is going to be unbelievably poor unless we solve this problem.

Bob Wachter, who is the chair of medicine at UCSF periodically publishes the UCSF asymptomatic test positive rate. Everyone who is admitted to UCSF takes a Covid test. This rate is the fraction of people who are admitted without Covid symptoms, that test positive. IMO this is a very good number because it's a somewhat randomized population that is being tested in a controlled way, without too much bias.

The latest number he posted, from July 3, was 6.5% [1]. This means roughly 1 in 15 people you come across in San Francisco is positive for Covid. If you're on a crowded bus or train car, there will be multiple Covid positive people on it, and likely one that is contagious. If you regularly take transit and aren't wearing a really excellent mask, it's pretty likely you'll catch it over the course of a month or two.

Back to anecdotes, about 70% of the people I know that fit this description and ride transit in a big city without a mask have gotten symptomatic Covid in the past 3 months. All of them boosted btw.

[1] https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1543780608744165376

And that’s asymptomatic! I caught 3 trains today, and in all of them someone was visibility sick and didn’t care. Someone was having a coughing fit on the platform, no mask of course. I went shopping, and several of the staff and shoppers were also visibility sick. One shopper started coughing in front of everyone and they completely ignored it and carried on. At a fast food restaurant (outdoors) there were at least 2 tables with people visibly sick eating their food.

Really, going out in public is quite a risk these days. The sheer number of infected all around you is quite troubling.

Well maybe try moving out of such a densely packed disease trap? Out here in the exurbs I don’t know a single person for whom covid has been any more inconvenient than a cold (since vaccines became widely available).

I’m no anti-vaxxer. I had it, got vaxxed anyway just in case, wore my masks, etc. Like most people, I’m done now. If you want to go live in a bubble be my guest.

I don’t not have that luxury to move. It’s not about me in a bubble.

It’s about humanity and a painful existence of pestilence. You might be “done” with it. Humanity is not. Virus is not.

A bubble is ignoring one of the greatest threats to our civilization today.

That implies we should simply empty the world's cities which I hope you recognize is not a serious or pragmatic alternative to simply vaccinating more.

We could just vaccinate our way until Covid transmission rates fall enough that we don't have to worry about it. Congrats on living in the middle of nowhere, but that's a bubble of a different sort.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com