Prior Omicron infection protects against BA.4 and BA.5 variants
nature.com
nature.com
It would be news if this weren’t true. Of course infection from an ancestor virus provides some immunity and a more recent ancestor provides more than an older one.
And we DESPERATELY need to come up with better terms to talk about immunity than just having one word for it.
It really is likely that conserved t-cell epitopes confer life-long immunity against severe disease and death no matter which variant you are infected with or vaccinated against. While there is clear statistical evidence of the virus attempting to evade Nabs there's no evidence that mutations are concentrated around t-cell epitopes (probably one effect and reason why we have multiple tiers of immunity rather than just pumping out NAbs every time?).
Why does it only provide _some_ protection and not full protection? How do we quantify _some_ protection? Why do I know people that have been sick with Covid 4+ times?
When does "of course" come into this?
Like basic microbiology here is being denied or treated like it is surprising when it would otherwise just be basic facts from your first course in infectious diseases.
People keep treating rocket science like it's epidemiology, but it really isn't.
Seeing how the hyper-policization of covid "facts" made common-sense discussion almost impossible has been interesting to me. It's not the first time I've noticed it, but it's probably the clearest example in my experience of how once something becomes politicized and lines are drawn (and/or litmus tests identified), rational public discourse becomes extremely difficult/impossible.
There are a lot of people I know who only eat on outdoor patios, minimize time indoors with others, but end up finally getting covid for the first time when a family member comes over for sunday night dinner and infects the entire household.
It also appears to depend on what blood types the infected and not-yet-infected people have[0]
Which intrigues me greatly, because no-one in my immediate family knows their blood type.
Our middle child had Covid in March (infected at his school) and promptly gave it to my wife. He spent 10 days at home as he kept testing positive, she spent almost as long. Despite the rest of us taking no precautions whatsoever within our home, the other three of us were not infected.
Then our eldest child had Covid in May (over half his school class were positive around that time), and he promptly gave it to me.
The (ex-)scientist in me would now like to have our blood types checked!
>The work, which was posted on the medRxiv preprint server on 12 July and has not yet been peer reviewed
It would be best to wait for this review to be done first, right?
First one was by far the worst - fever, tiredness, sleeplessness, a lot of mucus in the throat, loss of smell and taste (was smelling 52% alcohol and it was like mountain air). Even few months after ie my cologne smelled foul. Smell turned OK in cca 6 months.
Second was only (a lot of) mucus in the throat, and resulting dry cough.
Third now was barely noticeable, again only mucus in the throat. The only reason we did tests were because we got clearly infected from sister-in-law's kids visiting who upon coming home had 40 degrees celzius fever.
I don't mind this level of covid for myself, much more preferable than proper flu or even intense sore throat. But others around me fared less well - some kids having very high fever where you start having concerns about spasms and Kawasaki syndrome. My wife had headaches, developed some sore points in her mouth, from which she got ear aches etc.
Everybody seems to push whole covid saga away from their minds (me including), but its not going anywhere, probably ever. Thanx to Ukraine invasion by russia focus of concerns shifted, it seems its too much to worry about 2 dreadful things in parallel.
You sure it's just two? :)
It is evolving the way it was expected to by everyone but the doomsayers.
It is possible that as it continues to be endemic the rates will tick down and so this will not necessarily be true in 2023, 2024, 2025, etc. I am not proposing any policy change or any lockout or anything. but your position is a little bit like saying "a rocket launcher is a weapon, just like a bread knife".
Put another way: a 9/11 every week, still. It would at least behoove us to be sombre about the bloodbath around us.
2/3 of the deaths are people over 85 now. If a cancer patient gets covid and dies did the cancer or the Covid do it?
Everybody is going to die, i don’t feel too sad about it. It is very slightly more dangerous to be human now that covid is around and sure that sucks but meh, there are better things to give your attention to.
Just to give my personal exposure here, my wife had a stroke during the omicron surge and when the hospital wheeled her away on a gurney to get an emergency thrombectomy, making it clear she had a decent chance of just dying on the table, I could not be with her because the COVID burden in the hospital was too high. After she survived the operation she was admitted to a ward full of 80 year olds. Later that night she had a stroke recurrence and the way I found out is that she didn't reply to my text messages for half an hour. My wife is 35, healthy, yoga, biking, hiking, and she had a stroke on our anniversary. We're in the middle of trying for kids. She lived, but it could easily have been the other way.
One response to this is "the problem here is the COVID restrictions, the hospital should have just let infection disease spread, hospitals have never tried to stop infectious disease before, stop treating COVID as anything special" but another response to this is that the medical system has been more or less in perpetual crisis mode this entire time because of the underlying infectious disease burden that you described as "just another of many diseases". And I believe that the infectious disease specialists are better able to gauge the actual risk to their patients than a SV devops guru.
When we got COVID it was two days of fever and a week of fatigue, worse than a cold, better than influenza. Do you understand how it's possible to be impacted by COVID even if like us, you are at little risk from COVID?
Again, I am not calling for any restrictions, any lockdowns, any infringements on your freedom, or any reaction beyond simply a sombre acknowledgement that a lot of people have died, there's a lot of pain, the deaths continue, there remains a huge burden on our society because of the effects of this disease, and we gain nothing from being glib or pretending the people who died don't matter. You have the capacity for empathy, but you need to use it.
There might not have been a test but it's not like cold & flu deaths weren't being recorded, or that we didn't bother to record the cause of death for old people. If you got a cold or flu and died it'd be recorded as such.
We will need to wait a few years to parse all this data and get the actual number.
It may be true if you consider hospitalizations: sometimes people with mild or no COVID symptoms count as COVID hospitalizations because 1) they do need to be in the hospital for something unrelated but 2) they must be kept in a COVID ward until they're not infectious anymore.
However, death cause is not COVID if the hospital finds that you are positive after a car accident and you die of the injuries the day after.
And if you were already say very very old or with comorbidities, and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
I realize this site has global users but the parent comment was correct. Not sure why he's being downvoted.
This is not at all an accurate summary of the CDC’s Cause of Death reporting guidelines for Covid-19: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
If you die in a car accident with Covid-19 in your system, the UCOD is massive trauma from car accident, not “Covid-19”. The CDC reporting guidelines make it clear that Covid only rises to the level of UCOD if it meets the criteria of “ (a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”
So I bet that California has overreported number of deaths while Florida has underreported.
I also did not believe this.
The claim was specifically about CDC reporting rules, not the rules of how individual states report statistics themselves (which the CDC has no control over).
> and you die of pneumonia with a positive COVID test, then maybe you
> would have died anyway in a couple months, but still the immediate cause of
> death is COVID and nothing else makes sense.
I 100% agree if we go by what is written on their death certificate.
But...
For example in state of Massachusetts the COVID death definition includes anyone who has COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate, and any individual who has had a COVID-19 diagnosis within 60 days but does not have COVID listed as a cause of death on their death certificate [1].
CDC guidelines [2] are 100% clear but the problem is that we started counting also people which do not have COVID listed in certificate signed by doctor. I do not know - kinda crap.
The California rules are kinda interesting also [3]:
• The decedent had confirmatory laboratory evidence for SARS-CoV-2 (i.e. detection of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in a clinical or autopsy specimen using a molecular amplification test) AND at least ONE of the following criteria is met:
- A case investigation determined that COVID-19 was the cause of death or contributed to the death.
- The death certificate indicates COVID-19 or an equivalent term as one of the causes of death, regardless of the time elapsed since specimen collection of the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case.
- The death occurred within 30 days of specimen collection for the confirmatory laboratory test used to define the case and was due to natural causes
In other words, if somebody dies within 30 days of being tested for COVID and death was due to natural causes then the death is counted as COVID death. Even if it is not on the death certificate.
[1] https://www.mass.gov/news/department-of-public-health-update...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf
[3] https://www.co.shasta.ca.us/docs/libraries/shasta-ready-docs...
All I'm seeing is under reporting of covid deaths: Brazil: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1... USA: https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2021/12/22/cov...
We fluked it with Omicron.
I feel like the time to be more nuanced may be upon us. People are generally aware that infection grants some levels of immunity. But it’s not a simple probability distribution or something like a score card or political poll. You can see how many antibodies people produce to BA.4/5 with whatever they had previously. And of course time is a factor. Numbers I saw some time ago were every new lineage seems to halve the number of antibodies produced (per a John Campbell video) as a trendline.
Though I am grateful the medical professionals are still keeping an eye on this despite whatever cultural trends may seem. Wonder if we’ll ever see some retrospectives and changes made so a future pandemic doesn’t hit the globe and nations/regions so unprepared. At least take peoples temperature more often and the sick to stay home. It’d help if it weren’t a personal resource expense to simply not bring a cold/flu to work. Ie don’t have that use personal leave time.
For things like this by the time someone has a fever they've already been spreading their virus for days if not weeks. Temperature check wouldn't be nearly as useful as just letting workers take time off when they're feeling sick without risking losing their jobs or their ability to pay rent.
Shouldn't the numbers for preventing symptomatic infection be better that those for preventing any infection? I wonder if they've got those the wrong way round.
Neutralizing antibody levels are highest after antigen encounter and diminish over time. So, you get the most protection after vaccination or recovery. After some time, T cells play a more prominent role in fighting the disease.
I’d be very careful about frequent vaccinations. We know that chronic antigen encounters could produce exhausted cells incapable of differentiation.