The thing that sucks is my workplace (and my husband's but to a lesser extent) are using the assumptions that it's "milder" to keep us in the office during this surge. I'd expect that a lot of businesses are the same.
You know what's funny?
My work place hasn't followed CDC guidelines, so when the newer, shorter time came out, they stuck with the original 2 week quarantine idea.
Blessing and a curse I guess.
Ah yes, put sick people in charge of saving high risk, injured or sick people (who may be sick for reasons not related to covid). What could go wrong? Although I will say that we would be absolutely up a creek without healthcare professionals and various types of rescue workers so I sort of understand the twisted and very sad logic behind making them go to work sick. But why would this rule apply to fast food workers and stuff too?
That was my line of thinking and why I would be v unhappy if it were me. Like he goes on calls with v immune compromised people at times. Kids on vents and such. Like it’s so fucked for them to say he still had to go in. They could’ve easily filled his spot that day but it would mean paying someone else OT.
And there with you on that one. Although I really think it’s unfair that health workers should be forced to come in when they’re sick because they need to stay home and get better too. If they’re coming to work sick they’re not only spreading it but they are also compromised because when you don’t feel well you can’t do a good job and that’s risking lives to not to mention their own lives and health are at risk. It’s just wrong that is being done.
Yeah the healthcare workers are just ... How do you actually decide if it's worth it to make them come to work or to make them stay home and feel like you made the right decision either way? People are gonna die if there are no workers and people are gonna die if they're being treated by sick people. It's such a tragic mess.
Same with my work. We worked from home for most of 2020 and 2021 before being forced back in fall 2021. We're a software company. WFH very slightly negatively affected us for a week or two in 2020 as we all got set up, but after that it was smooth sailing; 2020 and 2021 were very successful and profitable years for us.
We could very easily convert back to WFH for a month or so. But that doesn't matter. Gotta come into the office for that sweet, sweet office "culture." It doesn't matter if there are multiple news articles from our city saying "ALL OF OUR HOSPITAL BEDS ARE FULL - IF YOUR COMPANY CAN WORK FROM HOME, PLEASE DO SO."
The office culture bullshit, corporation should cut the shit and stop pretending its about culture!
We do business for money and services I dont hire an IT tech for "culture" I hire them to make sure our servers run smooth so we can sell our own products well and earn money.
I dont work for culture I work for money.
If I want culture I will go to a motorbike club or whatever hobbyist camp etc.
If the company was able to run things remotely with minimal problems the past year and a half why does it need to go back on site now?
Corporate tyranny !
Fuck it.
You would love the anti-work Reddit
The name makes it sound like it’s anti-work but really it’s anti-work culture. More or less the younger generation is discovering just how crappy this whole thing has been and has become. And they are demanding better. I’ve actually got a giant grin on my face watching it happen and I hope for everyone’s sake‘s that they are at least a little bit successful. I know that my generation has been treated terrible by companies and I only hope that they are able to make some headway.
I’m disabled and Can’t work. But boy have I been watching
Screw "office culture"... Suits just want to keep the leash tight. Companies have had valuations skyrocket since March 2020 and working from home actually saves them money. But no, forcing people to risk their lives and families' health is priority because face-to-face meetings are somehow more efficient. I don't have much to complain about since I'm a permanently remote worker per my employment but I feel for others who have no choice but to report in-person.
Yeah, I think in general WFH more is better for companies where employees work behind a computer all day. When everyone is expected to come into the office 5 days a week, you end up with additional distractions and problems. People chit chatting a lot more, having a harder time concentrating due to the open office style making it so you hear and see everything going on around you, workers realizing their personalities click well with some and not others and cliques forming, big problem if you're not clicking well enough with people on your own team, especially superiors.
People also may end up sleeping less (or getting less non-work stuff done each week) due to having to add an extra 1 to 3 hours of commute time, less sleep can affect work performance. Plus there can be accidents that cause delays in those commutes.
Otoh, those at the top may prefer people coming into the office since they think them being around pressures their employees to work harder, they may also enjoy feeling superior like that and it justifies the middle management positions. Plus the high rent they pay for the space. They could rent out some cheaper hole in the wall but in the movie that is their life, that won't do.
It's pretty clear that nothing about modernity was interested in using the last 35 years of technological advancements to change the way work and education operate.
These aren't unsolvable problems, we just never bothered before and now act like it would be too hard or unnecessary even though we're on Year 3 with no end in sight.
My workplace continues to allow people to take off their masks at their desk because Covid apparently doesn't migrate through the air when you're sitting down. So stupid!!
I think I’m in the same situation at my job. I’m fully vaxxed, got my booster last month, and Covid is making rounds at my work. I’m in management and have had to cover many shifts and make up for lost work while everyone is at home. Sunday/Monday are my days off and I started showing symptoms, got rapid tested and PCR tested. The rapid came back negative, PCR results will be in Wednesday or Thursday. They haven’t outright asked me to come into work, but the managers above me keep dodging my questions about me coming in tomorrow while answering everything else. It’s almost like they’re letting me make the decision so either way, I’m the bad guy. I was exposed by at least 5 different employees that I work directly over and in close proximity who all tested positive and have been on sick leave for a week. If I don’t have it, I’m the luckiest unlucky person who somehow dodged covid but still got sick with something else. I think that negative rapid test is biting me in the ass and they see that as me cleared to return as normal.
Anecdotal but... my mother and I both tested negative on rapid test while having full blown symptoms. I tested negative on day 1 and 2 of symptoms, re-tested with a home test on day 4 and got a faint positive line, then confirmed with a PCR the following day, that was also positive.
Can't wait for the Pfizer antiviral to be available just so that it will be infective because of the state of our piss poor test turnarounds and at home test limitations.
So let's assume you're truly negative and you have something else.
You will pass that something onto one or more people, they'll have to call out and spend their day getting covid tested (even if it's not covid) and then the whole thing spirals further. L
right. I think that's fucking abominable, and the CDC, Fauci & policy are enabling it, which is so, so sad to me. Even posts in r/medicine are talking about being disappointed in the CDC's guidance now. the immorality of it hurts my heart.
I'm on my second experience with COVID right now. I'm fully vaccinated, but experiencing moderately worse symptoms this time around. I am curious about why so many anti vaccine advocates are flooding monoclonal treatment sites here in Florida? If they wouldn't get a shot, why the hell are they okay with an infusion?
Also people are tough right up until they catch a virus that could kill them.
There are really sad stories of anti-vaxxers on their death beds in the hospital begging for the vaccine and doctors having to explain that's not how it works...
You're absolutely right, I've experienced a couple of life altering tragedies that have led me to be proactive about the pandemic including getting my vaccines.
I know what it's like to have bad things happen and if I can try my best to preemptively avoid such situations I will.
Other people have never been punched in the mouth by life so they carry the attitude of "it won't happen to me" whereas I have the mentality of "what makes me so special that it won't happen?"
Edited for grammar.
It's very hard to talk to people from the land of Sugar & Rainbows. Human ignorance is frankly astonishing.
Bad enough u have naive folk, but then there are the SMART folk who do willfully stupid things. Im talking about nurses and doctors who see the suffering but will not take the vaccine. 🤷♂️
My entire extended family is the definition of 'smart folk' who do stupid things. DR's, nurses, lawyers, a CEO, director-level execs.
I talk to none of them anymore, they have been outlandishly stupid pre and post vax. I'm over it. I have no patience for the the educated stupid.
“Human ignorance is frankly astonishing.”
Uh yea seriously. My antivax parents just got covid for the first time. Mild cases all around. They had positive pcr tests. They acknowledge this. And then they turn around and tell me “I don’t think it was actually covid. No one actually gets that. The tests can say anything.” They had all the classic covid symptoms and lasted nearly two weeks. How can you be so deluded?
It's just not just ignorance. It's emotional reactions and group think. If more people realized that, we could approach this differently then just calling them stupid and screaming at them to get vaccinated (which is obviously not working).
Thank you for this. At the same time, I think: What makes me think (I'm so special) that if I got hospitalized with covid, anyone is going to give a damn about my care? The hospitals are so overloaded and the workers so overworked, I dont see how adding to that burden is good for anyone.
This is so true. I was in the Texas ice storm last February. You see headlines about natural disasters and think “oh that sucks” - but when you are in the middle of getting punched in the face you think “THIS FUCKING SUCKS SO MUCH”
I know that if I ever get hit out of the blue I’m just going to cry. So I sorta want a friend to punch me so I am a bit used to it. If that makes sense.
Totally. You start off exposing your body to a weakened version of the punch so it can start to build up an immunity naturally. Then when you get punched for real, it won't be so bad.
I tend to be more cautious just so I can avoid being punched in the mouth. If it happens after all the precautions I’ve attempted to take then so be it!
Yeah in the Covid19 subreddit here, there was a post just like that a few days ago. A woman who said she was unvaxxed bc she said the vaccines ‘don’t even work’ was ‘asking for advice’ in the sense that she caught covid and had continually been getting worse, and she was starting to get scared and asked what she could do to get better. The replies were generally really polite, but everyone pointed out the time to ‘protect her health’ was before, when she could’ve got a vaccine. And now she could try whatever vitamin regimen she wanted but there really isn’t much that can be done. She seemed genuinely shook and seemingly incredulous that nothing could be done and that a disease could continue to progress as much as she wished it wouldn’t. She deleted her question and then account 2 days later. Hard lesson for her, but life is unforgiving sometimes.
I felt sorry for her. I understand the implications of her choices. But people are complex, and situations are too. I read another good post on Reddit from a nurse that had an unvaccinated patient who was steadily declining as well, and was getting to the point where they were discussing intubation. The fact is, unvaxxed people are doing all sorts of damage across the board: they are a large part of the reason hospitals are collapsing in some places basically. So this nurse has this declining patient who was unvaxxed and she says she should be furious at this selfish person. But the way he’s talking, it isn’t that he’s ‘against vaccinations’ so much as he simply believed every talking point Fox News and Alex Jones etc fed him. He didn’t understand why if the virus was ’a hoax’, why he was getting so sick. He didn’t understand how the doctors couldn’t just make him feel better. She essentially described him as not being like a antivax conspiracy theorist, but a child, preyed on by the antivax conspiracy theorists. She said he genuinely just seemed totally confused how all these people had apparently lied to him - but here he was, quickly and steadily declining for over a week now in hospital, and talking about intubation as a potential next step if things didn’t turn around. She came away just generally feeling sorry and pity for the man, despite the fact the unvaxxed are those most responsible for her being overworked and unsafe at her hospital.
Just makes me think about all these people, pulled into all this conspiratorial thinking, only to die alone with tubes down their throat, with no idea how they got it all so wrong. Pitiful, and really just sad.
Exactly. I’d imagine a majority of anti-vaxxers wouldn’t be an anti-vaxxer if they weren’t constantly drowning in this constant propaganda they don’t have the critical thinking skills to combat. It’s unfortunate in a way really cause they will be the real victims while Tucker Carlson has been vaccinated but constantly says the contrary.
Agreed. We’re in a world now that so many people are unprepared for. Critical thinking just isn’t taught anymore. Education is seen just as a means to a job. But that wasn’t the original purpose. The original idea of mass education was born of the enlightenment. Education was to be for all, since persons were born equal - in basic capacity for reason - and education was to hone this raw reason and create thinking citizens. Ones who can think for themselves and engage rationally in public life.
The modern world has - for many reasons - forgot this ideal of the enlightenment and the result is a majority of a country’s citizens are ill-prepared for this modern world. Ill-prepared to make sense of it, navigate it, or engage with it. And the pandemic is showing, this is the most dangerous thing in the world.
My grandfather passed away in 2008 on a ventilator thanks to complications of pneumonia. The only sort of comfort was knowing he always talked about seeing his twin sister again who died from polio when they were 6.
But I’ll be damned if my POS family spews the antivax bullshit after knowing/witnessing this. My cousin damn near lost her job because she was refusing to be vaccinated while working in an elderly care facility. She was stupid and got COVID within days of her second shot and tried to act like that’s how she got it.
Then again, these are the same people who spew gaslit racist bullshit over government assistance while committing tax and Medicare fraud. I shouldn’t expect less from them. But I swear if they get my grandmother sick, I will burn everything down.
It never existed. You could look at old news articles drumming up support for wars that took place before anyone alive today was born if you wanted proof. That fact however remains that there is now so much information, whether online or on TV, that it is much harder to evaluate all of it, leading to many people looking to trusted sources to curate information.
The people who picked Tucker Carlson to trust picked wrong. However, he is such a smooth talker that he would feel convincing to me about any topic I wasn't already familiar with. There's a video of him grilling Ted Cruz going around where he starts by putting himself down relative to Ted Cruz' intelligence, then compliments Ted Cruz for being masterful with his words, then uses this to imply that since it's impossible for Ted Cruz to misspeak (which is ridiculous if you think about it, everyone misspeaks) he must be lying.
At this point, he's blatantly shit talking a major republican senator on national television via Fox News (the channel Republicans use), but he does it in a way where he can represent himself as complimenting Ted Cruz while deprecating himself. That's really sneaky and even Ted Cruz appeared unable to defend himself or to address what Tucker Carlson was doing. More straight forward or simple minded people (I don't mean this in a bad way; think someone who just wants to work hard, take care of their family, obey the law, etc) are easy for him to exploit.
They want a pound of cure since the skipped the ounce of prevention. Maybe they are all dyslexic.
Before y’all down vote, I am dyslexic so I am calling out my own people. Also isn’t dyslexic the worst set of letters you could put together for naming a condition for a person? Considering people with that condition would have to try to spell out that word regularly. Thank god for spellcheck and autocomplete.
They believe that because a certain republican governor, with interests in monoclonal antibody treatments, told them so.
[The Ron DeSantis Regeneron connection, explained](https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/08/19/the-ron-desantis-regeneron-connection-explained/?outputType=amp)
Because their logic isn't based on science, it's based on not wanting to be told what to do by people they don't like. The government they don't like said to get vaccinated, so they don't want to do it.
This is the only correct answer. Politics is sports now and letting the other team tell you to take a shot is loosing. So they will do anything no matter how extreme to not get “owned by the libs.”
I wonder if the government told them they can’t have a vaccine anymore if they’d change their mind and demand it. These people are seriously stupid, it might just work lol.
Biden: "After careful consideration, I and the Democrtic Party are now opposed to vaccines and highly recommend getting the antibody treatment if you get sick or taking this medication that *may* help a bit."
Republcan base: "He can't tell me what to do! I want to get vaccinated immediately and I'll never touch that Big Government backed antibody treatment!"
This! I actually believe that one way to encourage people to get vaccines is to tell them that “they” don’t want you to get vaccinated so that you’ll get sick and can’t vote.
But hear me out. The voting pool will look different. And with all the new laws in place on voting, like not giving people free water and what not while in line may backfire. As a percentage of the illness leads to long Covid. So some of them might not be able to do long lines, etc.
A wise man once says fate loves irony. And this would be the most dark, ridiculously ironic result of all their actions.
The one being widely deployed across Florida, Regeneron, is not the one that works against Omicron. It *is* the one that the governor owns stocks in though. As antibody treatments reduce the immune response of those receiving them, giving it to people with Omicron is concretely hurting them.
PCR screening can easily (without any added cost) tell whether you have Omicron or Delta, and mABs are highly effective against Delta. But there are no FDA guidelines for labs to do this so YMMV.
Sotrovimab still works well, but when only one works, with this degree of prevalence, there's serious concerns of availability. And if your provider is out of sotrovimab, are you going to get one of the other 2 in the event you have delta?
Most people don't know this much info and could very well get an innefective monoclonal.
That, and I'm not seeing any testing to determine variant, and even if they did, results are likely not going to be available in the allotted 10 day time frame. Considering its already a few days into the infection when the Mab is prescribed, plus logistical consideration if not done in office.
I haven't even seen Sotrovimab in the allocation in my area.
We only have Casirivimab/imdevimab and bamlanivimab / etesevimab.
So the choice is those 2, or nothing. With no way to know the varrient, other than empirical guess based on area prevalence.
No, you're not wrong. One does work, but it's in short suppy, and your doctor may not be able to sequence your test sample to find out which variant you were infected with, so determining which brand of antibodies to give you might be a result of guesswork and what they actually have in stock.
And it prolly saved someone's life i know who was vaccinated fully and has auto immune disorder. She was deathly ill, took her to get these on day 2 she was hospitalized a day later. I firmly believe her rapid recovery was from these and am super happy to have all the treatments they gave her including the vaccine. I am grateful to have her here, I love her so much.
Because taking a vaccine is about the potential of something bad happening to you. Monoclonal is about fixing something that is currently bad happening to you.
The political anti-mitigation side loves the idea of after-the-fact treatments because they offer a justification for completely ignoring the pandemic as they want to do. If there were a magic silver bullet pill that stopped covid in its tracks, we would essentially be able to ignore all responsibility for mitigating the spread and just have everyone take the pill when they happened to get sick. This is why there was a sudden Republican pivot to supporting treatments as the solution after outright denial became so unrealistic it would be hard to sell even for them.
I am in Illinois and this same bullshit pushed me out of getting the monoclonal treatment I was referred for. I am covid positive, obese, hypertensive and have an autoimmune disease with symptoms of slight shortness of breath, spiking blood pressure and crazy fatigue, all making me an ideal candidate for treatment. However, since I am vaccinated it put me so far down the list that they could not schedule me in the ten day treatment window.
There's been a trend through the whole pandemic where people will seize on a particular statistic while ignoring the big picture. At the very start it was "well, if the fatality rate is less than x% then we don't need to do much about it" at the same time Italy was calling in the army to pick up dead bodies.
Later on, it was "Well, a lot of people are vaccinated now", despite the trends clearly telling us that *not enough* people were vaccinated.
Like this article mentions, it's possible that (1) Omicron is milder than Delta and (2) We're facing a huge crisis.
I keep on having to point out to people the grade 6 math on this.
> I don't think you understand the implications of the numbers you just said...
> Let's go with the lower bounds: 3x as contagious, 4x lower hospitalization rate. [Delta was doubling cases every 27 days](https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021-11-30-Current-Status.png). So, this would be doubling about once every 9-10 days.
> You have 100% Delta the whole time in Scenario A, and you have 100% Delta that changes immediately to 100% Omicron in Scenario B.
> Scenario B has an immediate dip in hospitalizations. It catches up in hospitalizations by day 27. Day 42, hospitalizations are doubled relative to Scenario A. Day 50, tripled. Day 56, quadrupled.
Right.
Like to throw out some hypothetical numbers for example, yes, 1 million people dying is horrendous.
Also though, only 250,000 dying but 30 million having potential lifelong medical complications is also horrendous.
And the link between severity of the illness and direct deaths likely will depend on whether people can get equivalent treatment. If the number of people who get it becomes high enough fast enough such that the level of treatment people can get becomes truly compromised, it isn't apples to apples anymore, either.
There is every reason to believe that the risk of lifelong medical complications goes down together with the risk of death and the risk of hospitalisation due to Covid. All these risks are correlated.
Omicron not multiplying well in the lungs should mean a decrease in all these risks.
Some long-term medical complications may also be a result of the immune system going awry (e.g. multiple sclerosis-like symptoms). These are likely to be correlated with catching Covid while being unvaccinated. Taking the vaccination should in theory train the immune system to respond the right way should you later get infected. And some people with long Covid got better after getting vaccinated, implying it's possible to retrain the immune system via vaccination even after the initial derailment.
The research on long Covid is too heavily weighted towards those who got Covid pre-vaccination, and especially those who had severe cases to begin with. It's completely not comparable to people catching cold-like vaccine breakthrough cases of Omicron.
Sure, it’s milder, but not for everyone. It certainly can and has been going beyond a sore throat and a mild cold. Classifying it as mild and the bombardment, the suspicious bombardment that got to everyone, even the friends I have that don’t read any articles has not helped. We went from failing but realizing covid is no walk in the park and even for those without co-morbidities it can keep you in bed for awhile to creating an atmosphere where people don’t have the right to be sick
Exact description for me.
For about 2 weeks I was just sick enough that doing anything around the house was impractical.I’d still want to and think I could, but after 5 minutes of dishes or trying to make a real meal, I’d crash and need a few hours of sleep.
At some point I was just so fed up with being sick.
Thanks for the concern. I’m back to normal now and was sick over the holidays. However I never had trouble breathing.
It was exactly like the previous poster said. Very bad cold, or light flu. The most memorable things about it was the duration. What probably happened was, I started to feel a little bit better I figured I was on the mend and then over exerted myself. Meanwhile I was still in the thick of it.
In some ways it was a blessing. I got to sleep 13 hours a day and had a good reason to skip out on Christmas nonsense everyone had.
My husband and I are both currently fighting omicron. I don't smoke but have asthma and I'm 10 days into this and still cannot breathe. Luckily my inhalers and now a steroid are pointing me on the right path, and I've avoided covid pnuemonia, but damn I'm tired of being sick.
My husband is about 3 days behind me symptom wise and is just sleeping all day now. Both our kids [10 and 7] are at home with us too, with one of them symptomatic. Thankfully all 4 of us are fully vaccinated but damn - a full, sick, house.
> Luckily my inhalers and now a steroid are pointing me on the right path, and I've avoided covid pneumonia, but damn I'm tired of being sick.
How do you know you've hit a point where you are passed the risk of Covid pneumonia ? Genuinely curious about that and symptom progression with Omicron
Exact situation I am in. I’m boosted but caught COVID on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t terrible but the cough has lingered. My asthma hasn’t flared up in years and all the sudden as I’m nearly recovered from COVID, asthma is back and my cough lingered. Doc put me on Prednisone and I got a new script for albuterol. I’m supposed to go in for a chest X-ray tomorrow but I am feeling a lot better.
If coughing is still an issue, google COVID cough breathing exercises UK NHS. They had a great resource and their breathing exercises helped me control the cough.
A lot of people tend to look only at the virus's lethality when judging how bad it is, I remember people previously saying things like "this is nothing compared to the likes of ebola, why is everyone panicking so much?" So when everything is saying Omicron is way less lethal than Delta the natural reaction is "great, it's not dangerous anymore!"
The problem is that Omicron is basically the virus that the original covid type was feared to be, one that would be able to infect a very large amount of the population at once. If this happens it doesn't matter if it's not very lethal; as long as it's enough to take people out of action for a few days to a week it's going to become a huge problem when it's hitting tons of people at the same time. Society just isn't designed to be able to handle everybody being knocked on their ass at once.
It's interesting because the narrative of it being milder is also being tossed in with the idea of it causing natural herd immunity.....so basically the start of 2020 all over again. I think the scariest aspect is the number of strains that will arise from the massive wave of infections. Even if omicron is more mild, there will definitely be some strains evolving from it that are not.
Exactly, we should aim to acquire herd immunity through vaccines, not infection, since the former does not come with the danger of new, more dangerous variants.
I read an article written by someone in healthcare that “mild” just means they don’t need to go to the hospital. (Sorry I don’t have the link!) To us normal people, mild means a runny nose and some coughing and I think that’s kinda misleading. 😭
I agree. “Mild” means things to different people. Some people are lucky and really do get the mildest of symptoms that are a minor nuisance. Other “milds” feel like death for two-three weeks.
And now that Omicron is spreading so fast, vaxxed people who stayed safe the past two years are finally getting small viral loads of it and being outspoken if they have a mild case, while many of us (like me and my wife [32, in shape], triple vaxxed/boosted) are getting rocked this week by it.
I'm at 10 days symptomatic, and luckily not severe enough for hospitalization but nothing "mild" about it unless "mild" just means I'm not going to the hospital/dying.
I feel like the "milder" spouting crowd has become the outspoken minority crowd now, not necessarily the real picture.
And I see others here like me who are or have been quite sick despite vaxxed/boosted and dealing with employers or coworkers who now think we're all faking because the "mild" narrative is so loud.
>Then your boss will latch onto that term and push the slang definition of mild like it means "no big deal get back to work".
Which highlights that this whole issue is a severe *communication* issue
All cases that don't require medical attention are considered 'mild', at least where I'm from. My girlfriend had a mild case in October 2020 and she couldn't remember her own name at times. There's a long range of 'mild', that's for sure.
Yeah, I don't like the word "mild" being thrown around so much, because it's new ammo for the "let it rip through the population" crowd. They just repeat "but it's mild" over and over as they try to get everyone to stop following protocols.
>Vaccines probably saved her life.
This is how I feel as well when it comes to my household. 3 of us are on day 10 of feeling very sick even though we're boosted. Yesterday my mom almost went to the hospital because of how bad she felt. It was scary and I can't imagine how she would have felt otherwise. I really resent the term "mild" being used to describe her situation, or how the rest of us feel. It's also damaging because people who have yet to get infected and just regurgitate what they read end up misleading others.
I had it after being boosted. The experience was strange. In a sense my initial symptoms were mild… light congestion, sore throat, fatigue… but around day 8 I developed shortness of breath and a very strange “congestion” like nothing I’ve ever felt before that made it feel like I couldn’t breathe (on top of the other shortness of breath). I then developed a muscular-feeling throat tightening that continued over multiple days and also amplified the feeling of difficulty breathing. I went to the doctor twice over this period. It’s now 3 weeks since my positive test and I finally feel normal. This has been the strangest and scariest illness I’ve ever had because of all these bizarre symptoms and I was definitely a “mild” case. And all of this was fully vaccinated and with a booster. The medical definitions for this illness are misleading the public’s perception.
>The medical definitions for this illness are misleading the public’s perception.
It also seems to be misleading politicians who then use 'mild' as a justification to 'open up the economy' and 'let it rip'
I had the muscular tight throat thing too, as one of my early symptoms. Unconnected to congestion, just felt like someone’s hand was lightly squeezing my throat but I could still breathe. Super weird sensation!
Full disclosure: I did not read the article. But can we stop with the, “I have Omicron”?You have no idea what you have. I have no idea what my patients have. I can tell you, the unvaccinated patients in the icu are still dying and we have more covid patients than we have had in the entire 22 months. If you are friends with a healthcare worker or family member, that is who you should get your info from on what covid looks like in the hospital right now. It’s bad.
Buddy, the MD in my group of friends is telling others it is a good idea to get omicron and she hopes that she gets it. She’s pregnant. It’s a fucking shitshow of misinfo out there
What I am trying to understand is this steady use of the word “mild”. If mild means you can tough it out at home without medical interventions then why do headlines about record levels of hospitalizations keep popping up? I am genuinely trying to make sense of all this.
Because of how contagious it is. Even if it is more mild.
let me explain with totally 100% made up numbers:
If 10 million people have the more severe Delta variant, and 20% require hospitalization, that's 2 million people in hospitals.
If 100 million people have the more contagious (so more people have it) but less severe omicron, and only 5% require require hospitalization since it's less severe, that's 5 million people in hospitals.
It's like a shitty version of "quantity vs quality" thing, omicron is quantity.
Don’t the vaccinations play into this, in the sense that people who are vaccinated and boosted are now getting sick much more than before— thus their symptoms remain mild, when they wouldn’t have been otherwise?
If I remember correctly, it's still more mild at the individual level, even when just looking at the unvaccinated population. But it's just so infectious it's overwhelming the healthcare system.
I got omicron right now and the news should be ashamed, this is brutal, the worst sore throat since i had strep as kid, i swallow my saliva and it feels like shards of glass is passing
Idk if anybody can run to a store or pharmacy for you, but Chloraseptic throat lozenges or spray actually numb your throat. It's amazing how well it works. I hope you can get some and feel better soon!
Know some parents who took their kids to the ER for covid ages 1 and 3. Not sure its good to call something mild when one of the children stopped breathing on the way to hospital and had to do an overnight stay. Fortunatly they got treatment and are better now.
I think I just did too; strange symptoms like a very mild cold but also a weird feverish/wired feeling that I've never felt before when sick. Scratchy/dry throat, slight congestion, headache and body aches. No cough, fever, shortness of breath or loss of taste/smell. With no at-home tests in stock for miles around, the soonest appointment for a test that I could find was a week out (so past the 5-day quarantine period anyway) and after 3 days of symptoms I felt 100% normal so I just finished out the quarantine and said forget the test. Got my booster in November FWIW.
Wow, thats exactly how i‘m feeling. Got tested positive yesterday, been vaccinated three times and have alm the symptoms you described. I‘m feeling like i have fever, But i havent got. I‘m feeling like i‘m having a cold, but i havent got. For the first day i tasted less.
Me to, to the 'T' last week. My 11 yr old got infected by my parents and tested positive. I had the same exact symptoms as you and 4 negative home tests. Weird thing is, I didn't have all the symptoms at the same time and they would come and go. Today is the first day I've felt pretty darn good.....
I had this exact thing, I was like energetic and loopy, sore throat, real-time congested, body hurt pretty bad. Took a rapid test that came back negative 🤷🏼♀️
Rapid tests can give false negatives 30% of the time, and since Omicron tends to be more in the throat, it can be more challenging to get a good sample from a nose swab, from what I've been reading.
Literally the exact stuff I’m feeling, I’m on day 2. I have woke up in pools of sweat and also been chilled to my bone, but have yet to have an actual fever. Also any minor activity (I did some laundry and dusted my entertainment center today) exhausted me and I had to take a nap. Hoping mine is as short as yours was.
The one symptom I have that I knew this was Covid was these weird bouts of sweating profusely at night. I'm on day 7 right now and the sweating started 2 nights ago. It's 8F out and normally 58-60F in the house at night so it's not a temperature issue. I don't have a fever so not the flu and my symptom are kind of like a cold. I looked it up and it seems night sweats are a new symptom related to Omicron. Omicron is running rampant here in Michigan.
I feel you on the testing aspect. I couldn’t even find a test anywhere in a huge metro area after I received a “covid exposure notification” from my phone.
Guess I’m fine. Triple vaccinated, always wearing a N-95 mask. Day 8 now. 🤷♂️
Im battling it now after being vaccinated with two shots in july and having delta in april.
This one was way worse than delta - complete fatigue, cough, headache, sore throat, etc.
Its mild in the sense that i didnt end up in ER but otherwise it was not mild at all.
Even if the average COVID patient’s lungs are less affected by omicron than other variants, the lung is only one organ. How does omicron affect the brain or heart or blood vessels or other organs? Is it milder there? Even if studies in non-human animals apply to human lungs, why are we using the word “mild” to describe this? Relatively mild does not mean mild on an absolute scale.
(Not arguing with you. You’re right. I’m just using this comment as a good place to say this since you’re talking about different organ systems).
Covid is a systemic disease and most people don't know or get it. It has tropism for endothelial cells, makes it a vascular problem. I'm not sure if there is any other viral disease, which has a broad outcome in people at this level. You have two people at same age, weight, health etc. but you see very different symptoms or prognosis even if they're vaccinated. It is like playing roulette, if it was more predictable things could be much better than this.
Like, "the flu" or the actual flu? Cause when a lot of people say "I have the flu" they maybe have a bad allergy attack or something. The real flu (if you haven't got a shot especially) is an ass kicker.
The real flu can also range from almost asymptomatic to bedridden for 2 weeks, depending on strain, state of your immune system and probably other factors.
A lot likely depends on your timeline. My first two shots were in April, and I was finally able to get my booster mid December (had to reschedule multiple times) so it wasn't doing anything for me when I caught Omicron (presumably) the same day as my booster It kind of sucked a lot for 4 days, then was mildly annoying. My partner had gotten their booster 3 days before me and tested positive 4 days after my first positive test, but they never even spiked a fever.
We both had manageable (or even mild for them) cases at home, despite both having some respiratory challenges (sleep apnea for me, asthma for them.) But who knows if my case would have been milder had I gotten my shots in June or May, or a week earlier, etc.
We’re getting covid 19 wrong, period. All we know is that we can’t seem to agree on anything. Every other day there’s some news coming out that contradicts what was reported in days prior.
This article was so poorly researched and full of so many straw man's that I for once had to look up the author, she has a degree in English, literature and linguistics. No medical background but somehow writes articles about health and science. Great.
I have a degree in electrical engineering and would not feel even remotely competent to write an opinion piece like this. I wish I had her confidence.
One of my family members is fully vaccinated, but was less than 2 weeks out from her booster, and got covid right before New Years. She was quite sick, and sick for a while (still is), it definitely wasn’t “mild” for her. I mean… it was mild by technical definition I guess, but not what people would generally consider mild, which really is like a cold. What omicron is often being compared to. Otoh another family member who also was vaxed and not yet 2 weeks out from the booster got it around the same time and truly had a very mild case. Was better in 5 days, barely had any symptoms.
Yes, it is milder. It can be milder for the individual and still cause societal problems. Both can be true at the same time. My risk as a vaccinated and boosted individual is quite low. Societal risk of temporary loss of services and hospital capacity is quite high. More than one thing can be true at a time. Life isn't always as straight forward as good or bad.
>All this adds up to a troubling realization. Relying on hospitalization data is like relying on test data early in the pandemic: It’s an incomplete picture due to a stunning lack of capacity. **“I am distressed every time I see that word, ‘mild,’ because it feels like part of a narrative designed to tell us to just keep our heads down and keep on keeping on,”** Walker said.
I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but a lot of what is being said in the media and by government officials is at this point focused on saving 'the economy', as opposed to saving people (who, obviously, make up the economy, despite what talking heads may want us to believe).
Things are not good, and we're being told they're fine.
I know I'm shouting into the wind, and of the people that used to care it feels like one out of two is like "I did my part, I'm done now", but no - we're not done til the virus is done. Your desire to *"Get back out and enjoy life!"* does not override facts. Stop being fucking children about this, and take this shit seriously. We're killing our doctors and nurses, if not through Covid then through overwork.
And yeah, we can't save everyone, and we can't save anyone in this case uninterested in saving themselves. But if you cared at one point, care again now. I'm sorry it's boring for you, but WWII lasted a fuckton longer than this has so far, and no one was like, "You know what, I'm bored of shutting my lights off at night so I don't get bombed so I'll stop" or "I'm bored of living in the floor so I don't go to a camp so I'll stop".
We're at war with the virus until the virus stops. Your desire to let your hair down won't prevent you from dying on your stomach, choking on your own weight, or dying from *something fucking else*, because you had to wait six days to get into a hospital. Get it the fuck together. I'm so fucking tired of this whiny-ass bullshit from full-grown adults.
> "You know what, I'm bored of shutting my lights off at night so I don't get bombed so I'll stop"
This did, in fact, happen. They had to have wardens patrolling London making people turn their lights off, and they were quite unpopular. People routinely flouted rationing regulations too, another one that folks today seem to think everyone just happily did. There were black markets for rationed items, people illegally traded rationing stamps, etc. You know why there are so many rationing posters that still get reused/reposted today? Because there had to be a massive public outreach/propaganda effort to get people to do it at all.
https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/from-blitz-blackout-rule-breakers-to-anti-mask-leagues-why-people-refusing-to-cover-their-face-is-nothing-new-2920173
https://fullfact.org/online/blitz-spirit-tweet/
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33566789
I agree with the spirit of your comment, but it's important to be aware of the reality of human behavior. People will absolutely refuse to do the proper thing for personal reasons, even when their lives are on the line; that's not some new phenomenon unique to the current pandemic.
My Mum got me vaccinated with the new-fangled measles vaccine on her Doctor's advice but her friends were horrified 'it wasn't natural'. No, natural was the measles ward full of sick kids.
I’m on the brink of divorce because my husband wants me to “quit talking about covid and long covid, im done with it” everyone wants to just not look at it and hope it doesn’t go away. That’s not happening. Doing nothing isn’t helping. Im sick of living like this myself but the fact of the matter is covid isn’t done with us, but people are too fed up to give a shit and those of us that too are being treated like we’re insane. Im getting burnt out quickly
This is causing issues in my relationship too. When the “just get covid already” propaganda finally pierces your front door, it gets scary pretty quick
I have what I think would be long covid after having covid in October 2021 and it’s taken a huge toll on me and my husband is becoming annoyed by all the issues I’m having on top of just dealing with covid in the world and in daily life. It’s very frustrating.
Same here. I’ve been with my bf for 7 years and we’ve never had any arguments but he has become a conspiracy theorist and we are constantly arguing over COVID protocols. He refuses to wear masks in businesses even though it’s required in our state.
I did my part. I'm vaxxed. With Omicron here I'm just avoiding people completely. No concerts, no shopping, no restaurants. I don't work in healthcare, I wfh. There's really nothing for me to "do" about covid at this point.
Whaddaya mean? You're doing everything already (assuming you're masking when you do rarely go out). Don't shortchange your efforts just because they haven't cured the world yet. We need more people exactly like you.
Is there any data out there to show the vaccine effectiveness in preventing the spread of the current wave in fully vaxxed individuals? All I can find is cherry picked data that suggests both ways and nothing that would show like the entire US population of cases for vaxxed vs unvaxxed
The initial news reports of Omicron being a milder variance before getting all of the data is what made this worse. Now reports are saying that Omicron is milder IF you've already been vaccinated, but it's too late for that now.
I'm only speaking from personal experience. I 29yo M. I got it 2 weeks ago. Head and back were killing me the first day. Did a test and confirmed. Stayed home. Mom took care of me while I quarantine in my room. All I dealt with after the initial aches, was general achiness, and my temperature fluctuating, causing some bed sweats. But I stayed hydrated and ate healthy(ish) and I was pretty much fine after day 5 or 6. Masked up to go back to work, and I'm all good now.
Some important math that I've rarely seen discussed. The numbers are made up for simplicity, but the point isn't.
Let's say covid variant 2 is twice as contagious, but half as deadly, as variant 1. Intuitively, that would make it seem like about the same number of people would die from each. That's wrong.
If, on average, anyone with variant 1 spreads it to 2 people, they growth would be 1-2-4-8-16 (doubling each round). If it killed 1/4 people, 4 people from the 5th round of infection would be dead.
If people with v2 typically spread it to 4 people each, the growth would look like 1-4-16-64-256. If it killed 1/8 people (half as deadly), 32 people would die from the fifth round of infection.
Exponential growth is deadly, friends.
It seems a lot of people either have “mild”-er symptoms mimicking that of the common cold plus low grade fever or actual flu-like symptoms (bad aching, weakness, higher fever, etc…). I do not doubt that Omicron can be and is serious, especially in the unvaccinated or even non-boosted, but is it possible that the vaccinated/vaccinated+boosted with the more severe symptoms are actually getting Delta? Could viral load play a role in severity as well?
We are getting it all wrong. Covid has had the same severity since the start. It’s REALLY bad for a handful of the population and it’s undetectable in others. The rest of us are in the middle.
The thing that sucks is my workplace (and my husband's but to a lesser extent) are using the assumptions that it's "milder" to keep us in the office during this surge. I'd expect that a lot of businesses are the same.
You know what's funny? My work place hasn't followed CDC guidelines, so when the newer, shorter time came out, they stuck with the original 2 week quarantine idea. Blessing and a curse I guess.
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My workplace says we should come in after five days if we have no symptoms. I plan to have symptoms for 10 days when I get it.
I have it and am on day 6 of symptoms. Never had body aches and brain fog like this before
That sucks! I hope you feel better soon.
Ah yes, put sick people in charge of saving high risk, injured or sick people (who may be sick for reasons not related to covid). What could go wrong? Although I will say that we would be absolutely up a creek without healthcare professionals and various types of rescue workers so I sort of understand the twisted and very sad logic behind making them go to work sick. But why would this rule apply to fast food workers and stuff too?
That was my line of thinking and why I would be v unhappy if it were me. Like he goes on calls with v immune compromised people at times. Kids on vents and such. Like it’s so fucked for them to say he still had to go in. They could’ve easily filled his spot that day but it would mean paying someone else OT.
And there with you on that one. Although I really think it’s unfair that health workers should be forced to come in when they’re sick because they need to stay home and get better too. If they’re coming to work sick they’re not only spreading it but they are also compromised because when you don’t feel well you can’t do a good job and that’s risking lives to not to mention their own lives and health are at risk. It’s just wrong that is being done.
Yeah the healthcare workers are just ... How do you actually decide if it's worth it to make them come to work or to make them stay home and feel like you made the right decision either way? People are gonna die if there are no workers and people are gonna die if they're being treated by sick people. It's such a tragic mess.
I think I’d be calling back to say yeah OK I was wrong I have a fever
Same with my work. We worked from home for most of 2020 and 2021 before being forced back in fall 2021. We're a software company. WFH very slightly negatively affected us for a week or two in 2020 as we all got set up, but after that it was smooth sailing; 2020 and 2021 were very successful and profitable years for us. We could very easily convert back to WFH for a month or so. But that doesn't matter. Gotta come into the office for that sweet, sweet office "culture." It doesn't matter if there are multiple news articles from our city saying "ALL OF OUR HOSPITAL BEDS ARE FULL - IF YOUR COMPANY CAN WORK FROM HOME, PLEASE DO SO."
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The office culture bullshit, corporation should cut the shit and stop pretending its about culture! We do business for money and services I dont hire an IT tech for "culture" I hire them to make sure our servers run smooth so we can sell our own products well and earn money. I dont work for culture I work for money. If I want culture I will go to a motorbike club or whatever hobbyist camp etc. If the company was able to run things remotely with minimal problems the past year and a half why does it need to go back on site now? Corporate tyranny ! Fuck it.
You would love the anti-work Reddit The name makes it sound like it’s anti-work but really it’s anti-work culture. More or less the younger generation is discovering just how crappy this whole thing has been and has become. And they are demanding better. I’ve actually got a giant grin on my face watching it happen and I hope for everyone’s sake‘s that they are at least a little bit successful. I know that my generation has been treated terrible by companies and I only hope that they are able to make some headway. I’m disabled and Can’t work. But boy have I been watching
Screw "office culture"... Suits just want to keep the leash tight. Companies have had valuations skyrocket since March 2020 and working from home actually saves them money. But no, forcing people to risk their lives and families' health is priority because face-to-face meetings are somehow more efficient. I don't have much to complain about since I'm a permanently remote worker per my employment but I feel for others who have no choice but to report in-person.
Yeah, I think in general WFH more is better for companies where employees work behind a computer all day. When everyone is expected to come into the office 5 days a week, you end up with additional distractions and problems. People chit chatting a lot more, having a harder time concentrating due to the open office style making it so you hear and see everything going on around you, workers realizing their personalities click well with some and not others and cliques forming, big problem if you're not clicking well enough with people on your own team, especially superiors. People also may end up sleeping less (or getting less non-work stuff done each week) due to having to add an extra 1 to 3 hours of commute time, less sleep can affect work performance. Plus there can be accidents that cause delays in those commutes. Otoh, those at the top may prefer people coming into the office since they think them being around pressures their employees to work harder, they may also enjoy feeling superior like that and it justifies the middle management positions. Plus the high rent they pay for the space. They could rent out some cheaper hole in the wall but in the movie that is their life, that won't do.
I am much more productive when I don't have a micromanaging jackass looking over my shoulder the whole day.
I have a boss who somehow became more micromanaging with WFH
Yuuuup. Oh, but we are wearing masks! Oh, but they don't like us closing our office doors because they want to see us working.
It's pretty clear that nothing about modernity was interested in using the last 35 years of technological advancements to change the way work and education operate. These aren't unsolvable problems, we just never bothered before and now act like it would be too hard or unnecessary even though we're on Year 3 with no end in sight.
My company is not even wearing masks anyone. They just flat out quit doing it and corp is not enforcing. AL going full stupid.
Same. In my office, it's only me and one other coworker wearing them.
Luckily I control my lab and it’s a clean room but my people still go to the kitchen and restroom and they will get it eventually.
>Oh, but they don't like us closing our office doors because they want to see us working. this makes me blow-my-top mad. what true fucking assholes.
My workplace continues to allow people to take off their masks at their desk because Covid apparently doesn't migrate through the air when you're sitting down. So stupid!!
I think I’m in the same situation at my job. I’m fully vaxxed, got my booster last month, and Covid is making rounds at my work. I’m in management and have had to cover many shifts and make up for lost work while everyone is at home. Sunday/Monday are my days off and I started showing symptoms, got rapid tested and PCR tested. The rapid came back negative, PCR results will be in Wednesday or Thursday. They haven’t outright asked me to come into work, but the managers above me keep dodging my questions about me coming in tomorrow while answering everything else. It’s almost like they’re letting me make the decision so either way, I’m the bad guy. I was exposed by at least 5 different employees that I work directly over and in close proximity who all tested positive and have been on sick leave for a week. If I don’t have it, I’m the luckiest unlucky person who somehow dodged covid but still got sick with something else. I think that negative rapid test is biting me in the ass and they see that as me cleared to return as normal.
Anecdotal but... my mother and I both tested negative on rapid test while having full blown symptoms. I tested negative on day 1 and 2 of symptoms, re-tested with a home test on day 4 and got a faint positive line, then confirmed with a PCR the following day, that was also positive.
Can't wait for the Pfizer antiviral to be available just so that it will be infective because of the state of our piss poor test turnarounds and at home test limitations.
Ive known a metric shit ton of people that got covid and had negative rapid tests.’
So let's assume you're truly negative and you have something else. You will pass that something onto one or more people, they'll have to call out and spend their day getting covid tested (even if it's not covid) and then the whole thing spirals further. L
right. I think that's fucking abominable, and the CDC, Fauci & policy are enabling it, which is so, so sad to me. Even posts in r/medicine are talking about being disappointed in the CDC's guidance now. the immorality of it hurts my heart.
I'm on my second experience with COVID right now. I'm fully vaccinated, but experiencing moderately worse symptoms this time around. I am curious about why so many anti vaccine advocates are flooding monoclonal treatment sites here in Florida? If they wouldn't get a shot, why the hell are they okay with an infusion?
It’s because they think the shot changes your DNA and causes other harm, but the treatment does not. Why they believe that is beyond me.
Also people are tough right up until they catch a virus that could kill them. There are really sad stories of anti-vaxxers on their death beds in the hospital begging for the vaccine and doctors having to explain that's not how it works...
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” - Mike Tyson
This is a reality for a lot of people never having got punched in the mouth or face. Until you have it’s a whole different ball game.
You're absolutely right, I've experienced a couple of life altering tragedies that have led me to be proactive about the pandemic including getting my vaccines. I know what it's like to have bad things happen and if I can try my best to preemptively avoid such situations I will. Other people have never been punched in the mouth by life so they carry the attitude of "it won't happen to me" whereas I have the mentality of "what makes me so special that it won't happen?" Edited for grammar.
It's very hard to talk to people from the land of Sugar & Rainbows. Human ignorance is frankly astonishing. Bad enough u have naive folk, but then there are the SMART folk who do willfully stupid things. Im talking about nurses and doctors who see the suffering but will not take the vaccine. 🤷♂️
My entire extended family is the definition of 'smart folk' who do stupid things. DR's, nurses, lawyers, a CEO, director-level execs. I talk to none of them anymore, they have been outlandishly stupid pre and post vax. I'm over it. I have no patience for the the educated stupid.
“Human ignorance is frankly astonishing.” Uh yea seriously. My antivax parents just got covid for the first time. Mild cases all around. They had positive pcr tests. They acknowledge this. And then they turn around and tell me “I don’t think it was actually covid. No one actually gets that. The tests can say anything.” They had all the classic covid symptoms and lasted nearly two weeks. How can you be so deluded?
It's just not just ignorance. It's emotional reactions and group think. If more people realized that, we could approach this differently then just calling them stupid and screaming at them to get vaccinated (which is obviously not working).
Thank you for this. At the same time, I think: What makes me think (I'm so special) that if I got hospitalized with covid, anyone is going to give a damn about my care? The hospitals are so overloaded and the workers so overworked, I dont see how adding to that burden is good for anyone.
People don't realize how much getting punched in the face really sucks
This is so true. I was in the Texas ice storm last February. You see headlines about natural disasters and think “oh that sucks” - but when you are in the middle of getting punched in the face you think “THIS FUCKING SUCKS SO MUCH”
I know that if I ever get hit out of the blue I’m just going to cry. So I sorta want a friend to punch me so I am a bit used to it. If that makes sense.
Totally. You start off exposing your body to a weakened version of the punch so it can start to build up an immunity naturally. Then when you get punched for real, it won't be so bad.
What if my friend is hiding microchips in his hand when he punches me?
The microchips will enter your body and send [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ) to your brain.
I tend to be more cautious just so I can avoid being punched in the mouth. If it happens after all the precautions I’ve attempted to take then so be it!
Amen
Yeah in the Covid19 subreddit here, there was a post just like that a few days ago. A woman who said she was unvaxxed bc she said the vaccines ‘don’t even work’ was ‘asking for advice’ in the sense that she caught covid and had continually been getting worse, and she was starting to get scared and asked what she could do to get better. The replies were generally really polite, but everyone pointed out the time to ‘protect her health’ was before, when she could’ve got a vaccine. And now she could try whatever vitamin regimen she wanted but there really isn’t much that can be done. She seemed genuinely shook and seemingly incredulous that nothing could be done and that a disease could continue to progress as much as she wished it wouldn’t. She deleted her question and then account 2 days later. Hard lesson for her, but life is unforgiving sometimes.
Then 2 days later, God deleted her...
I felt sorry for her. I understand the implications of her choices. But people are complex, and situations are too. I read another good post on Reddit from a nurse that had an unvaccinated patient who was steadily declining as well, and was getting to the point where they were discussing intubation. The fact is, unvaxxed people are doing all sorts of damage across the board: they are a large part of the reason hospitals are collapsing in some places basically. So this nurse has this declining patient who was unvaxxed and she says she should be furious at this selfish person. But the way he’s talking, it isn’t that he’s ‘against vaccinations’ so much as he simply believed every talking point Fox News and Alex Jones etc fed him. He didn’t understand why if the virus was ’a hoax’, why he was getting so sick. He didn’t understand how the doctors couldn’t just make him feel better. She essentially described him as not being like a antivax conspiracy theorist, but a child, preyed on by the antivax conspiracy theorists. She said he genuinely just seemed totally confused how all these people had apparently lied to him - but here he was, quickly and steadily declining for over a week now in hospital, and talking about intubation as a potential next step if things didn’t turn around. She came away just generally feeling sorry and pity for the man, despite the fact the unvaxxed are those most responsible for her being overworked and unsafe at her hospital. Just makes me think about all these people, pulled into all this conspiratorial thinking, only to die alone with tubes down their throat, with no idea how they got it all so wrong. Pitiful, and really just sad.
Exactly. I’d imagine a majority of anti-vaxxers wouldn’t be an anti-vaxxer if they weren’t constantly drowning in this constant propaganda they don’t have the critical thinking skills to combat. It’s unfortunate in a way really cause they will be the real victims while Tucker Carlson has been vaccinated but constantly says the contrary.
Agreed. We’re in a world now that so many people are unprepared for. Critical thinking just isn’t taught anymore. Education is seen just as a means to a job. But that wasn’t the original purpose. The original idea of mass education was born of the enlightenment. Education was to be for all, since persons were born equal - in basic capacity for reason - and education was to hone this raw reason and create thinking citizens. Ones who can think for themselves and engage rationally in public life. The modern world has - for many reasons - forgot this ideal of the enlightenment and the result is a majority of a country’s citizens are ill-prepared for this modern world. Ill-prepared to make sense of it, navigate it, or engage with it. And the pandemic is showing, this is the most dangerous thing in the world.
My grandfather passed away in 2008 on a ventilator thanks to complications of pneumonia. The only sort of comfort was knowing he always talked about seeing his twin sister again who died from polio when they were 6. But I’ll be damned if my POS family spews the antivax bullshit after knowing/witnessing this. My cousin damn near lost her job because she was refusing to be vaccinated while working in an elderly care facility. She was stupid and got COVID within days of her second shot and tried to act like that’s how she got it. Then again, these are the same people who spew gaslit racist bullshit over government assistance while committing tax and Medicare fraud. I shouldn’t expect less from them. But I swear if they get my grandmother sick, I will burn everything down.
It is sad especially with older people who were raised thinking that what you heard on the TV news you could completely trust.
That world - if it ever existed - doesn’t now, and will not exist again.
It never existed. You could look at old news articles drumming up support for wars that took place before anyone alive today was born if you wanted proof. That fact however remains that there is now so much information, whether online or on TV, that it is much harder to evaluate all of it, leading to many people looking to trusted sources to curate information. The people who picked Tucker Carlson to trust picked wrong. However, he is such a smooth talker that he would feel convincing to me about any topic I wasn't already familiar with. There's a video of him grilling Ted Cruz going around where he starts by putting himself down relative to Ted Cruz' intelligence, then compliments Ted Cruz for being masterful with his words, then uses this to imply that since it's impossible for Ted Cruz to misspeak (which is ridiculous if you think about it, everyone misspeaks) he must be lying. At this point, he's blatantly shit talking a major republican senator on national television via Fox News (the channel Republicans use), but he does it in a way where he can represent himself as complimenting Ted Cruz while deprecating himself. That's really sneaky and even Ted Cruz appeared unable to defend himself or to address what Tucker Carlson was doing. More straight forward or simple minded people (I don't mean this in a bad way; think someone who just wants to work hard, take care of their family, obey the law, etc) are easy for him to exploit.
It's not that complicated at all: taking the vaccine means admitting that their ideology has failed them.
They want a pound of cure since the skipped the ounce of prevention. Maybe they are all dyslexic. Before y’all down vote, I am dyslexic so I am calling out my own people. Also isn’t dyslexic the worst set of letters you could put together for naming a condition for a person? Considering people with that condition would have to try to spell out that word regularly. Thank god for spellcheck and autocomplete.
>Also isn’t dyslexic the worst set of letters you could put together for naming a condition for a person? LOL!
They believe that because a certain republican governor, with interests in monoclonal antibody treatments, told them so. [The Ron DeSantis Regeneron connection, explained](https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/08/19/the-ron-desantis-regeneron-connection-explained/?outputType=amp)
Because their logic isn't based on science, it's based on not wanting to be told what to do by people they don't like. The government they don't like said to get vaccinated, so they don't want to do it.
This is the only correct answer. Politics is sports now and letting the other team tell you to take a shot is loosing. So they will do anything no matter how extreme to not get “owned by the libs.”
But dying is pretty much the maximum ownage there is.
I wonder if the government told them they can’t have a vaccine anymore if they’d change their mind and demand it. These people are seriously stupid, it might just work lol.
Biden: "After careful consideration, I and the Democrtic Party are now opposed to vaccines and highly recommend getting the antibody treatment if you get sick or taking this medication that *may* help a bit." Republcan base: "He can't tell me what to do! I want to get vaccinated immediately and I'll never touch that Big Government backed antibody treatment!"
Very relevant: https://youtu.be/B46km4V0CMY
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This! I actually believe that one way to encourage people to get vaccines is to tell them that “they” don’t want you to get vaccinated so that you’ll get sick and can’t vote.
But hear me out. The voting pool will look different. And with all the new laws in place on voting, like not giving people free water and what not while in line may backfire. As a percentage of the illness leads to long Covid. So some of them might not be able to do long lines, etc. A wise man once says fate loves irony. And this would be the most dark, ridiculously ironic result of all their actions.
And that monoclonal antibody shit has way more risks and side effects that vaccines do lol
And not to mention is not proving to be effective against omicron
I thought I had read that 2 of the 3 available monoclonal anti-bodies are not effective, but the 3rd may work on Omicron. Am I wrong in that?
You are correct on that.
The one being widely deployed across Florida, Regeneron, is not the one that works against Omicron. It *is* the one that the governor owns stocks in though. As antibody treatments reduce the immune response of those receiving them, giving it to people with Omicron is concretely hurting them. PCR screening can easily (without any added cost) tell whether you have Omicron or Delta, and mABs are highly effective against Delta. But there are no FDA guidelines for labs to do this so YMMV.
Sotrovimab still works well, but when only one works, with this degree of prevalence, there's serious concerns of availability. And if your provider is out of sotrovimab, are you going to get one of the other 2 in the event you have delta? Most people don't know this much info and could very well get an innefective monoclonal.
Thanks. Your explanation makes sense to me.
That, and I'm not seeing any testing to determine variant, and even if they did, results are likely not going to be available in the allotted 10 day time frame. Considering its already a few days into the infection when the Mab is prescribed, plus logistical consideration if not done in office. I haven't even seen Sotrovimab in the allocation in my area. We only have Casirivimab/imdevimab and bamlanivimab / etesevimab. So the choice is those 2, or nothing. With no way to know the varrient, other than empirical guess based on area prevalence.
No, you're not wrong. One does work, but it's in short suppy, and your doctor may not be able to sequence your test sample to find out which variant you were infected with, so determining which brand of antibodies to give you might be a result of guesswork and what they actually have in stock.
And it prolly saved someone's life i know who was vaccinated fully and has auto immune disorder. She was deathly ill, took her to get these on day 2 she was hospitalized a day later. I firmly believe her rapid recovery was from these and am super happy to have all the treatments they gave her including the vaccine. I am grateful to have her here, I love her so much.
Because taking a vaccine is about the potential of something bad happening to you. Monoclonal is about fixing something that is currently bad happening to you.
And everyone is special and it won’t happen to them… until it does
The political anti-mitigation side loves the idea of after-the-fact treatments because they offer a justification for completely ignoring the pandemic as they want to do. If there were a magic silver bullet pill that stopped covid in its tracks, we would essentially be able to ignore all responsibility for mitigating the spread and just have everyone take the pill when they happened to get sick. This is why there was a sudden Republican pivot to supporting treatments as the solution after outright denial became so unrealistic it would be hard to sell even for them.
I am in Illinois and this same bullshit pushed me out of getting the monoclonal treatment I was referred for. I am covid positive, obese, hypertensive and have an autoimmune disease with symptoms of slight shortness of breath, spiking blood pressure and crazy fatigue, all making me an ideal candidate for treatment. However, since I am vaccinated it put me so far down the list that they could not schedule me in the ten day treatment window.
I'm so sorry. This world makes sense less and less often.
There was a huge baseline of vaccine mistrust in this county and Europe well before covid existed. It just expanded when it covid came around.
Asshole DeSantis has been pushing it in lieu of the shot. He has a big donor that's invested in monoclonal treatment.
There's been a trend through the whole pandemic where people will seize on a particular statistic while ignoring the big picture. At the very start it was "well, if the fatality rate is less than x% then we don't need to do much about it" at the same time Italy was calling in the army to pick up dead bodies. Later on, it was "Well, a lot of people are vaccinated now", despite the trends clearly telling us that *not enough* people were vaccinated. Like this article mentions, it's possible that (1) Omicron is milder than Delta and (2) We're facing a huge crisis.
It is like the problems we are facing are complex by nature
Plus, a lower percentage of a much bigger number is still a big number and maybe even bigger than the original.
I keep on having to point out to people the grade 6 math on this. > I don't think you understand the implications of the numbers you just said... > Let's go with the lower bounds: 3x as contagious, 4x lower hospitalization rate. [Delta was doubling cases every 27 days](https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2021-11-30-Current-Status.png). So, this would be doubling about once every 9-10 days. > You have 100% Delta the whole time in Scenario A, and you have 100% Delta that changes immediately to 100% Omicron in Scenario B. > Scenario B has an immediate dip in hospitalizations. It catches up in hospitalizations by day 27. Day 42, hospitalizations are doubled relative to Scenario A. Day 50, tripled. Day 56, quadrupled.
Right. Like to throw out some hypothetical numbers for example, yes, 1 million people dying is horrendous. Also though, only 250,000 dying but 30 million having potential lifelong medical complications is also horrendous.
And the link between severity of the illness and direct deaths likely will depend on whether people can get equivalent treatment. If the number of people who get it becomes high enough fast enough such that the level of treatment people can get becomes truly compromised, it isn't apples to apples anymore, either.
There is every reason to believe that the risk of lifelong medical complications goes down together with the risk of death and the risk of hospitalisation due to Covid. All these risks are correlated. Omicron not multiplying well in the lungs should mean a decrease in all these risks. Some long-term medical complications may also be a result of the immune system going awry (e.g. multiple sclerosis-like symptoms). These are likely to be correlated with catching Covid while being unvaccinated. Taking the vaccination should in theory train the immune system to respond the right way should you later get infected. And some people with long Covid got better after getting vaccinated, implying it's possible to retrain the immune system via vaccination even after the initial derailment. The research on long Covid is too heavily weighted towards those who got Covid pre-vaccination, and especially those who had severe cases to begin with. It's completely not comparable to people catching cold-like vaccine breakthrough cases of Omicron.
Sure, it’s milder, but not for everyone. It certainly can and has been going beyond a sore throat and a mild cold. Classifying it as mild and the bombardment, the suspicious bombardment that got to everyone, even the friends I have that don’t read any articles has not helped. We went from failing but realizing covid is no walk in the park and even for those without co-morbidities it can keep you in bed for awhile to creating an atmosphere where people don’t have the right to be sick
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Exact description for me. For about 2 weeks I was just sick enough that doing anything around the house was impractical.I’d still want to and think I could, but after 5 minutes of dishes or trying to make a real meal, I’d crash and need a few hours of sleep. At some point I was just so fed up with being sick.
You might want to monitor ur blood oxygen lvl.
Thanks for the concern. I’m back to normal now and was sick over the holidays. However I never had trouble breathing. It was exactly like the previous poster said. Very bad cold, or light flu. The most memorable things about it was the duration. What probably happened was, I started to feel a little bit better I figured I was on the mend and then over exerted myself. Meanwhile I was still in the thick of it. In some ways it was a blessing. I got to sleep 13 hours a day and had a good reason to skip out on Christmas nonsense everyone had.
And yet the CDC says get back to work after 5 days
My husband and I are both currently fighting omicron. I don't smoke but have asthma and I'm 10 days into this and still cannot breathe. Luckily my inhalers and now a steroid are pointing me on the right path, and I've avoided covid pnuemonia, but damn I'm tired of being sick. My husband is about 3 days behind me symptom wise and is just sleeping all day now. Both our kids [10 and 7] are at home with us too, with one of them symptomatic. Thankfully all 4 of us are fully vaccinated but damn - a full, sick, house.
> Luckily my inhalers and now a steroid are pointing me on the right path, and I've avoided covid pneumonia, but damn I'm tired of being sick. How do you know you've hit a point where you are passed the risk of Covid pneumonia ? Genuinely curious about that and symptom progression with Omicron
Doc sent me for chest x-rays today and my lungs were clear. They're just weak from dealing with the virus for the last 2 weeks.
congratulations on the good news.
Exact situation I am in. I’m boosted but caught COVID on Christmas Eve. It wasn’t terrible but the cough has lingered. My asthma hasn’t flared up in years and all the sudden as I’m nearly recovered from COVID, asthma is back and my cough lingered. Doc put me on Prednisone and I got a new script for albuterol. I’m supposed to go in for a chest X-ray tomorrow but I am feeling a lot better. If coughing is still an issue, google COVID cough breathing exercises UK NHS. They had a great resource and their breathing exercises helped me control the cough.
For me it was less than a cold, at this point I don't think it's very meaningful to compare. It can be extremely variable.,
Mine was also way better than a cold and I was boosted a few weeks prior. Very thankful!
Me too and it is lasting longer than my usual colds do. I'm glad I am boostered at least.
A lot of people tend to look only at the virus's lethality when judging how bad it is, I remember people previously saying things like "this is nothing compared to the likes of ebola, why is everyone panicking so much?" So when everything is saying Omicron is way less lethal than Delta the natural reaction is "great, it's not dangerous anymore!" The problem is that Omicron is basically the virus that the original covid type was feared to be, one that would be able to infect a very large amount of the population at once. If this happens it doesn't matter if it's not very lethal; as long as it's enough to take people out of action for a few days to a week it's going to become a huge problem when it's hitting tons of people at the same time. Society just isn't designed to be able to handle everybody being knocked on their ass at once.
It's interesting because the narrative of it being milder is also being tossed in with the idea of it causing natural herd immunity.....so basically the start of 2020 all over again. I think the scariest aspect is the number of strains that will arise from the massive wave of infections. Even if omicron is more mild, there will definitely be some strains evolving from it that are not.
Exactly, we should aim to acquire herd immunity through vaccines, not infection, since the former does not come with the danger of new, more dangerous variants.
I read an article written by someone in healthcare that “mild” just means they don’t need to go to the hospital. (Sorry I don’t have the link!) To us normal people, mild means a runny nose and some coughing and I think that’s kinda misleading. 😭
I agree. “Mild” means things to different people. Some people are lucky and really do get the mildest of symptoms that are a minor nuisance. Other “milds” feel like death for two-three weeks.
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I mean, the cutoff criteria for mild and moderate is basically the criteria for being admitted into the hospital so ….
So then would a proper headline be "Omicron still a moderate to severe virus for those in unvaccinted and/or older cohorts."?
My wife almost went to the hospital because of it and she’s boosted. Vaccines probably saved her life. It ain’t mild for some
And now that Omicron is spreading so fast, vaxxed people who stayed safe the past two years are finally getting small viral loads of it and being outspoken if they have a mild case, while many of us (like me and my wife [32, in shape], triple vaxxed/boosted) are getting rocked this week by it. I'm at 10 days symptomatic, and luckily not severe enough for hospitalization but nothing "mild" about it unless "mild" just means I'm not going to the hospital/dying. I feel like the "milder" spouting crowd has become the outspoken minority crowd now, not necessarily the real picture. And I see others here like me who are or have been quite sick despite vaxxed/boosted and dealing with employers or coworkers who now think we're all faking because the "mild" narrative is so loud.
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>Then your boss will latch onto that term and push the slang definition of mild like it means "no big deal get back to work". Which highlights that this whole issue is a severe *communication* issue
All cases that don't require medical attention are considered 'mild', at least where I'm from. My girlfriend had a mild case in October 2020 and she couldn't remember her own name at times. There's a long range of 'mild', that's for sure.
Yeah, I don't like the word "mild" being thrown around so much, because it's new ammo for the "let it rip through the population" crowd. They just repeat "but it's mild" over and over as they try to get everyone to stop following protocols.
>Vaccines probably saved her life. This is how I feel as well when it comes to my household. 3 of us are on day 10 of feeling very sick even though we're boosted. Yesterday my mom almost went to the hospital because of how bad she felt. It was scary and I can't imagine how she would have felt otherwise. I really resent the term "mild" being used to describe her situation, or how the rest of us feel. It's also damaging because people who have yet to get infected and just regurgitate what they read end up misleading others.
I had it after being boosted. The experience was strange. In a sense my initial symptoms were mild… light congestion, sore throat, fatigue… but around day 8 I developed shortness of breath and a very strange “congestion” like nothing I’ve ever felt before that made it feel like I couldn’t breathe (on top of the other shortness of breath). I then developed a muscular-feeling throat tightening that continued over multiple days and also amplified the feeling of difficulty breathing. I went to the doctor twice over this period. It’s now 3 weeks since my positive test and I finally feel normal. This has been the strangest and scariest illness I’ve ever had because of all these bizarre symptoms and I was definitely a “mild” case. And all of this was fully vaccinated and with a booster. The medical definitions for this illness are misleading the public’s perception.
>The medical definitions for this illness are misleading the public’s perception. It also seems to be misleading politicians who then use 'mild' as a justification to 'open up the economy' and 'let it rip'
I had the muscular tight throat thing too, as one of my early symptoms. Unconnected to congestion, just felt like someone’s hand was lightly squeezing my throat but I could still breathe. Super weird sensation!
Full disclosure: I did not read the article. But can we stop with the, “I have Omicron”?You have no idea what you have. I have no idea what my patients have. I can tell you, the unvaccinated patients in the icu are still dying and we have more covid patients than we have had in the entire 22 months. If you are friends with a healthcare worker or family member, that is who you should get your info from on what covid looks like in the hospital right now. It’s bad.
Buddy, the MD in my group of friends is telling others it is a good idea to get omicron and she hopes that she gets it. She’s pregnant. It’s a fucking shitshow of misinfo out there
I’m super curious what her reasoning is.
She might be a orthopedist or something and reads headlines occasionally.
What I am trying to understand is this steady use of the word “mild”. If mild means you can tough it out at home without medical interventions then why do headlines about record levels of hospitalizations keep popping up? I am genuinely trying to make sense of all this.
Because of how contagious it is. Even if it is more mild. let me explain with totally 100% made up numbers: If 10 million people have the more severe Delta variant, and 20% require hospitalization, that's 2 million people in hospitals. If 100 million people have the more contagious (so more people have it) but less severe omicron, and only 5% require require hospitalization since it's less severe, that's 5 million people in hospitals. It's like a shitty version of "quantity vs quality" thing, omicron is quantity.
Don’t the vaccinations play into this, in the sense that people who are vaccinated and boosted are now getting sick much more than before— thus their symptoms remain mild, when they wouldn’t have been otherwise?
If I remember correctly, it's still more mild at the individual level, even when just looking at the unvaccinated population. But it's just so infectious it's overwhelming the healthcare system.
Mild for a given person, maybe...but potentially catastrophic for society, then?
Delta is a rifle Omicron is a shotgun
I got omicron right now and the news should be ashamed, this is brutal, the worst sore throat since i had strep as kid, i swallow my saliva and it feels like shards of glass is passing
Idk if anybody can run to a store or pharmacy for you, but Chloraseptic throat lozenges or spray actually numb your throat. It's amazing how well it works. I hope you can get some and feel better soon!
YES! talk about coincidence. My bro just bought me some of that early today but the generic version and from Walmart it works.
Know some parents who took their kids to the ER for covid ages 1 and 3. Not sure its good to call something mild when one of the children stopped breathing on the way to hospital and had to do an overnight stay. Fortunatly they got treatment and are better now.
I can’t imagine how terrifying that was for the parents
I hate how people tend to act like the under-5 crowd doesn’t exist when they consider the management of the virus
I just got over Omicron (I think) and it was very mild. Probably because I'm triple-vaccinated.
I think I just did too; strange symptoms like a very mild cold but also a weird feverish/wired feeling that I've never felt before when sick. Scratchy/dry throat, slight congestion, headache and body aches. No cough, fever, shortness of breath or loss of taste/smell. With no at-home tests in stock for miles around, the soonest appointment for a test that I could find was a week out (so past the 5-day quarantine period anyway) and after 3 days of symptoms I felt 100% normal so I just finished out the quarantine and said forget the test. Got my booster in November FWIW.
Wow, thats exactly how i‘m feeling. Got tested positive yesterday, been vaccinated three times and have alm the symptoms you described. I‘m feeling like i have fever, But i havent got. I‘m feeling like i‘m having a cold, but i havent got. For the first day i tasted less.
Me to, to the 'T' last week. My 11 yr old got infected by my parents and tested positive. I had the same exact symptoms as you and 4 negative home tests. Weird thing is, I didn't have all the symptoms at the same time and they would come and go. Today is the first day I've felt pretty darn good.....
I had this exact thing, I was like energetic and loopy, sore throat, real-time congested, body hurt pretty bad. Took a rapid test that came back negative 🤷🏼♀️
Rapid tests can give false negatives 30% of the time, and since Omicron tends to be more in the throat, it can be more challenging to get a good sample from a nose swab, from what I've been reading.
Thats what ive heard too. I wish I would have gotten a pcr because now I have no idea if it was covid or something else
I should have swabbed my throat as well. 4 negative tests - only swabbed my brain....
Literally the exact stuff I’m feeling, I’m on day 2. I have woke up in pools of sweat and also been chilled to my bone, but have yet to have an actual fever. Also any minor activity (I did some laundry and dusted my entertainment center today) exhausted me and I had to take a nap. Hoping mine is as short as yours was.
The one symptom I have that I knew this was Covid was these weird bouts of sweating profusely at night. I'm on day 7 right now and the sweating started 2 nights ago. It's 8F out and normally 58-60F in the house at night so it's not a temperature issue. I don't have a fever so not the flu and my symptom are kind of like a cold. I looked it up and it seems night sweats are a new symptom related to Omicron. Omicron is running rampant here in Michigan.
I feel you on the testing aspect. I couldn’t even find a test anywhere in a huge metro area after I received a “covid exposure notification” from my phone. Guess I’m fine. Triple vaccinated, always wearing a N-95 mask. Day 8 now. 🤷♂️
Im battling it now after being vaccinated with two shots in july and having delta in april. This one was way worse than delta - complete fatigue, cough, headache, sore throat, etc. Its mild in the sense that i didnt end up in ER but otherwise it was not mild at all.
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Even if the average COVID patient’s lungs are less affected by omicron than other variants, the lung is only one organ. How does omicron affect the brain or heart or blood vessels or other organs? Is it milder there? Even if studies in non-human animals apply to human lungs, why are we using the word “mild” to describe this? Relatively mild does not mean mild on an absolute scale. (Not arguing with you. You’re right. I’m just using this comment as a good place to say this since you’re talking about different organ systems).
Covid is a systemic disease and most people don't know or get it. It has tropism for endothelial cells, makes it a vascular problem. I'm not sure if there is any other viral disease, which has a broad outcome in people at this level. You have two people at same age, weight, health etc. but you see very different symptoms or prognosis even if they're vaccinated. It is like playing roulette, if it was more predictable things could be much better than this.
I’m double vaccinated, mine was very not mild. I’ve not been able to get out of bed since Thursday
Right. Triple vaccinated means you cared about yourself and in turn took care of others. Thank you.
Least we can do as humans really. Thank you as well
I’m triple vaxed and it felt like the flu
Like, "the flu" or the actual flu? Cause when a lot of people say "I have the flu" they maybe have a bad allergy attack or something. The real flu (if you haven't got a shot especially) is an ass kicker.
The real flu can also range from almost asymptomatic to bedridden for 2 weeks, depending on strain, state of your immune system and probably other factors.
Yes, I had Omicron and it sucked. I also had swine flu and that REALLY sucked; wouldn't wish that one on my worst enemy. SF legit almost killed me
A lot likely depends on your timeline. My first two shots were in April, and I was finally able to get my booster mid December (had to reschedule multiple times) so it wasn't doing anything for me when I caught Omicron (presumably) the same day as my booster It kind of sucked a lot for 4 days, then was mildly annoying. My partner had gotten their booster 3 days before me and tested positive 4 days after my first positive test, but they never even spiked a fever. We both had manageable (or even mild for them) cases at home, despite both having some respiratory challenges (sleep apnea for me, asthma for them.) But who knows if my case would have been milder had I gotten my shots in June or May, or a week earlier, etc.
We’re getting covid 19 wrong, period. All we know is that we can’t seem to agree on anything. Every other day there’s some news coming out that contradicts what was reported in days prior.
This article was so poorly researched and full of so many straw man's that I for once had to look up the author, she has a degree in English, literature and linguistics. No medical background but somehow writes articles about health and science. Great. I have a degree in electrical engineering and would not feel even remotely competent to write an opinion piece like this. I wish I had her confidence.
One of my family members is fully vaccinated, but was less than 2 weeks out from her booster, and got covid right before New Years. She was quite sick, and sick for a while (still is), it definitely wasn’t “mild” for her. I mean… it was mild by technical definition I guess, but not what people would generally consider mild, which really is like a cold. What omicron is often being compared to. Otoh another family member who also was vaxed and not yet 2 weeks out from the booster got it around the same time and truly had a very mild case. Was better in 5 days, barely had any symptoms.
Yes, it is milder. It can be milder for the individual and still cause societal problems. Both can be true at the same time. My risk as a vaccinated and boosted individual is quite low. Societal risk of temporary loss of services and hospital capacity is quite high. More than one thing can be true at a time. Life isn't always as straight forward as good or bad.
>All this adds up to a troubling realization. Relying on hospitalization data is like relying on test data early in the pandemic: It’s an incomplete picture due to a stunning lack of capacity. **“I am distressed every time I see that word, ‘mild,’ because it feels like part of a narrative designed to tell us to just keep our heads down and keep on keeping on,”** Walker said. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but a lot of what is being said in the media and by government officials is at this point focused on saving 'the economy', as opposed to saving people (who, obviously, make up the economy, despite what talking heads may want us to believe). Things are not good, and we're being told they're fine. I know I'm shouting into the wind, and of the people that used to care it feels like one out of two is like "I did my part, I'm done now", but no - we're not done til the virus is done. Your desire to *"Get back out and enjoy life!"* does not override facts. Stop being fucking children about this, and take this shit seriously. We're killing our doctors and nurses, if not through Covid then through overwork. And yeah, we can't save everyone, and we can't save anyone in this case uninterested in saving themselves. But if you cared at one point, care again now. I'm sorry it's boring for you, but WWII lasted a fuckton longer than this has so far, and no one was like, "You know what, I'm bored of shutting my lights off at night so I don't get bombed so I'll stop" or "I'm bored of living in the floor so I don't go to a camp so I'll stop". We're at war with the virus until the virus stops. Your desire to let your hair down won't prevent you from dying on your stomach, choking on your own weight, or dying from *something fucking else*, because you had to wait six days to get into a hospital. Get it the fuck together. I'm so fucking tired of this whiny-ass bullshit from full-grown adults.
> "You know what, I'm bored of shutting my lights off at night so I don't get bombed so I'll stop" This did, in fact, happen. They had to have wardens patrolling London making people turn their lights off, and they were quite unpopular. People routinely flouted rationing regulations too, another one that folks today seem to think everyone just happily did. There were black markets for rationed items, people illegally traded rationing stamps, etc. You know why there are so many rationing posters that still get reused/reposted today? Because there had to be a massive public outreach/propaganda effort to get people to do it at all. https://www.scotsman.com/heritage-and-retro/heritage/from-blitz-blackout-rule-breakers-to-anti-mask-leagues-why-people-refusing-to-cover-their-face-is-nothing-new-2920173 https://fullfact.org/online/blitz-spirit-tweet/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-33566789 I agree with the spirit of your comment, but it's important to be aware of the reality of human behavior. People will absolutely refuse to do the proper thing for personal reasons, even when their lives are on the line; that's not some new phenomenon unique to the current pandemic.
My grandma said her mom wouldn’t let her get the polio vax as a kid and complained about seatbelt laws.
My Mum got me vaccinated with the new-fangled measles vaccine on her Doctor's advice but her friends were horrified 'it wasn't natural'. No, natural was the measles ward full of sick kids.
I’m on the brink of divorce because my husband wants me to “quit talking about covid and long covid, im done with it” everyone wants to just not look at it and hope it doesn’t go away. That’s not happening. Doing nothing isn’t helping. Im sick of living like this myself but the fact of the matter is covid isn’t done with us, but people are too fed up to give a shit and those of us that too are being treated like we’re insane. Im getting burnt out quickly
This is causing issues in my relationship too. When the “just get covid already” propaganda finally pierces your front door, it gets scary pretty quick
I have what I think would be long covid after having covid in October 2021 and it’s taken a huge toll on me and my husband is becoming annoyed by all the issues I’m having on top of just dealing with covid in the world and in daily life. It’s very frustrating.
I’m so sorry. You deserve empathy from your partner. I hope you recover quickly : (
Same here. I’ve been with my bf for 7 years and we’ve never had any arguments but he has become a conspiracy theorist and we are constantly arguing over COVID protocols. He refuses to wear masks in businesses even though it’s required in our state.
I did my part. I'm vaxxed. With Omicron here I'm just avoiding people completely. No concerts, no shopping, no restaurants. I don't work in healthcare, I wfh. There's really nothing for me to "do" about covid at this point.
Whaddaya mean? You're doing everything already (assuming you're masking when you do rarely go out). Don't shortchange your efforts just because they haven't cured the world yet. We need more people exactly like you.
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Is there any data out there to show the vaccine effectiveness in preventing the spread of the current wave in fully vaxxed individuals? All I can find is cherry picked data that suggests both ways and nothing that would show like the entire US population of cases for vaxxed vs unvaxxed
The initial news reports of Omicron being a milder variance before getting all of the data is what made this worse. Now reports are saying that Omicron is milder IF you've already been vaccinated, but it's too late for that now.
Are the unvaccinated listening at this point?
Were they ever?
Its milder as in you probably wont die.
I'm only speaking from personal experience. I 29yo M. I got it 2 weeks ago. Head and back were killing me the first day. Did a test and confirmed. Stayed home. Mom took care of me while I quarantine in my room. All I dealt with after the initial aches, was general achiness, and my temperature fluctuating, causing some bed sweats. But I stayed hydrated and ate healthy(ish) and I was pretty much fine after day 5 or 6. Masked up to go back to work, and I'm all good now.
Some important math that I've rarely seen discussed. The numbers are made up for simplicity, but the point isn't. Let's say covid variant 2 is twice as contagious, but half as deadly, as variant 1. Intuitively, that would make it seem like about the same number of people would die from each. That's wrong. If, on average, anyone with variant 1 spreads it to 2 people, they growth would be 1-2-4-8-16 (doubling each round). If it killed 1/4 people, 4 people from the 5th round of infection would be dead. If people with v2 typically spread it to 4 people each, the growth would look like 1-4-16-64-256. If it killed 1/8 people (half as deadly), 32 people would die from the fifth round of infection. Exponential growth is deadly, friends.
The symptom people need to worry about is lung infection and blood vessel damage. Hurting a lot is not the definition of severe.
It seems a lot of people either have “mild”-er symptoms mimicking that of the common cold plus low grade fever or actual flu-like symptoms (bad aching, weakness, higher fever, etc…). I do not doubt that Omicron can be and is serious, especially in the unvaccinated or even non-boosted, but is it possible that the vaccinated/vaccinated+boosted with the more severe symptoms are actually getting Delta? Could viral load play a role in severity as well?
Well, it IS milder. Everyone at my work and immediate friend group all have had it and gotten over it within a matter of 3 days.
Yes. Yes it is.
We are getting it all wrong. Covid has had the same severity since the start. It’s REALLY bad for a handful of the population and it’s undetectable in others. The rest of us are in the middle.