outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

Maybe so but I find the merest prospect of debilitation really spices up what might otherwise be a pretty normal family get together so kudos, that cousin

my bf got it beginning the end of may and had "mild" pneumonia and now has weird eczema on his face. not hospitalized and too early to tell about the long covid obv but if someone refuses to acknowledge it at all i would not stay at their house.

sorry to hear that about the bf, harbl

I'm sorry to hear as well. Everyone has to make their own risk calculations. I just meant that if you are a vaccinated, boosted, say 40yo with no health issues, the odds of a legit, severe or long-term complication from COVID are very very small based on what we know so far. That said, even the short to medium term complications can suck and I can understand wanting to avoid them as much as possible. We have a friend (some prior health issues) who had a persistent cough for a couple months. We know one young, healthy person who was previously very fit and struggled to do his exercise regimen for a couple months after COVID but ultimately fully recovered. These aren't small problems to be sure.

I’m not otherwise healthy and not youngish, for the purposes of personal risk assessment

Xposts

xp oh so me

Happy update that the amount of active patients at my hospital has notably dropped to 17. We'll see where it goes from there.

I seemed to be a week ahead on Florida's decline - it appears last week was actually just the plateau, which became evident when the numbers changed later in the week. this is somewhat the problem with very low testing, as it makes it more difficult to tell.

hospitalization admissions still going up per week but more slowly, which seems to back that up, since that trails cases by a few weeks. nowhere near our January/February hospitalization totals thankfully. but still concerning.

Here in MDC numbers and positivity rates have plateaued.

NYC % got to 9+, fell to about 8 and has been parked there for what seems like forever. Really seems like it should have fallen further by now but each wave has been its own thing kind of.

positivity rates may fall slower as less and less people get tested publicly and rely on home antigen tests.

I know the CDC also only counts PCR tests in their positivity rates and don't include antigen, even if you had it done at a facility and the results sent to your Department of Health. that seems...odd. sure, false positives abound, but seems weird to not use them in the calculation.

(this is why FL DOH's positivity rate is so much lower than what the CDC reports)

this wave has been weird and sloggish. i was hoping for cases to back off in FL *before* the Fringe Festival started (which for me was 5/18), and we're a month past that now and just seeing signs.

my state’s positivity rate is 100% because they no longer report total tests or negative results. lol?

I’m also pretty sure false negatives far outweigh false positives

my workplace, having the right equipment, had a volunteer-staffed temporary pcr covid test lab during the early pandemic and they didn’t do a binary pos/neg result, but had an inconclusive/retest result as well. not so many of them, but probably the right methodology

oops, I meant false negatives, not false positives.

I actually got an "inconclusive" result on one of my PCRs a few months ago, but it turned out to be a proper negative when I retested twice over the two days following thankfully

asking for a friend (no really, I haven't had it as far as I know). First tested positive on a rapid test 8 days ago, still showing a line on tests. Is she contagious?

In the UK she is legally allowed to go about her normal life after 5 days, but she's trying to figure out whether she should wait until the line disappears or if that's meaningless at this point.

Any insights welcome

Iirc there is a difference between infected and infectious, but solely based on my own experience I’d tell her to go easy just because I ended up very tired after because my case was mild and I didn’t really rest enough. So tl;dr she’s probably not infectious but I’d tell her to give it another couple of days and take it easy.

Our pediatrician told us you can test positive for weeks after you're actually contagious.

Yep. A good friend in January didn't get a negative PCR until three weeks after her first test, though she'd seen her doctor in the interim, who also made the distinction between infectious and infected, i.e. she was no longer contagious after about a week, give or take.

First, make sure you understand which kind of test you are taking. A PCR test is very accurate at the start of an infection because it can detect and amplify even trace amounts of virus DNA. But a PCR is not the right choice to figure out when you are no longer infectious, because of its sensitivity, Grad explains.

"There are some people who have little blips of being PCR positive for weeks, or in some cases even months, after an infection" – even though they're no longer contagious, Grad says.

A better bet is to use a rapid antigen test, because they're "positive when your viral load is high," corresponding to levels when people are likely to be infectious, says Landon. So if you're negative on a rapid test and you don't have any symptoms, consider yourself in the clear, says Chin-Hong.

What if 10 days have passed and you're still testing positive on a rapid test? "That definitely happens, and we don't have a good answer" as to why, says Landon. One thing to look at is how faint the positive line is on the rapid test, she says, because research has shown that the darker or more intense the line is and the more quickly it shows up, the more virus is present in your nose. So if you're past day 10, you feel better and you're not immunocompromised, and the rapid test line "isn't very dark or it's taking longer to turn positive each day, you're probably safe to be out in the world," she says.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/02/17/1081510375/isolation-testing-omicron-infection

I’d concur with that: I spoke to a UCLH virologist when I was ill, and he said the Omicrons normally tail off after day 5 with negative LFTs a few days after that. I was testing negative on the 8th day.

thanks all, yes she isn't going to push herself but is trying to work out if a visit from her parents can go ahead-- they aren't especially vulnerable but are super nervous about getting it, so were considering cancelling a long-planned visit. It sounds like they should probably be OK, they're already on day 9 I think and the visit is later this week.

And here we are

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/06/pandemic-protections/661378/

And in early 2021, the sociologist Elizabeth Wrigley-Field and a small group of volunteers

also such a noted Cubs fan that they married in just to make it clear!

seriously, thanks for the link Ned!

I went to summer camp with Elizabeth!

I wonder why/how I haven't gotten it yet? I should say why/how/whether, I guess, there's no way to know for sure, really, but at no point have I had characteristic symptoms.

I guess I am in a weird state where I feel like I'm not trying very hard not to get it -- I'm traveling a lot, I'm seeing people, I'm in lots of crowded rooms. But then again, I wear an N95 on the plane and when I go in a store, which I feel like almost no one else is, and I certainly eat outside when it's convenient, which it usually is this time of year. So... I'm not trying very hard not to get COVID, but maybe I'm nonetheless trying harder than the median person? I guess by "not trying hard" I mean "I'm not taking any actions that would be annoying or difficult for me."

So... I'm not trying very hard not to get COVID, but maybe I'm nonetheless trying harder than the median person?

Ha, this.

I mask when teaching at the store, library, basically any public interior space...yet I've eaten inside restaurants and hung out in trusted homes.

I had an exposure recently where the person I hung out with indoors, unmasked tested positive the next day, and 5 days after, 10 tests (combo of PCR and antigen), all negative, no symptoms. this was after an exposure to Omicron earlier in the year 2 days before someone tested positive, same thing.

the most recent incident, nobody else has tested positive yet, so it could have been "she wasn't very contagious", but I've survived about 5 direct exposures in a 1.5 year period now. as has my brother's girlfriend.

there’s also the possibility you’ve had a very tiny infection where your immune system cleared an unnoticeable amount of virus

I've considered that too.

xpost that's definitely possible.

in either case I'm glad my more comfortable N95s arrived cos the ones I had previously left a semi-permanent indentation on my nose

Latest nyc 7-day average is about 12%

Quantity of testing is down, which lends distortion but this is the highest % in months

FL's plateau has lasted almost a month. Theory is BA.5 is pushing out BA.2 and thus prolonging the wave.

Wonder if that is the case in NYC.

Exhausting

Yeah, I don't see our national averages dropping until well into August before school starts. Everyone's traveling, and I can't blame them.

leeeeeroy jenkins

LACC and Fire Marshall is no longer letting anyone in #AX #AnimeExpo pic.twitter.com/3sLP6z3Jb6

— Anime News Network (@Anime) July 1, 2022

The vaccines in trial against all coronaviruses are exciting (if they work) - gimme that never have another cold shot right in the arm.

Cases at my hospital dropped to around 15, back up to 24, and thus weekend definitely won’t help.

xpost yeah really hoping Moderna and Pfizers excitement about their bivalent pills aren't a lot of smoke. they are really needed. i don't care how many times I have to get stabbed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2ou-WIxfLY

Just home-tested again after flying 2x and being in a few shops & restaurants in a rural area where no one was masking at all. Back in NYC now and still negative! Riding the wave (of never having had covid).

A compendium of anecdotes:

My older daughter caught covid the last week of school in May, presumably at prom. She missed her last three days of high school ever and, despite minimal symptoms for a day or so, kept testing positive for well over a week.

That makes my wife the last of us to have never tested positive for covid. But - and this is a big but - she started seriously losing her hair in January, which would have been right after her booster. Could that have sparked an autoimmune response resulting in her alopecia? She wouldn't be the first one, anecdotally; apparently serious hair loss is a relatively common side effect of covid, though dunno about the vaccine.

Somehow virtually none of our close family friends have caught covid, but the dad in one of the more cautious families finally caught a (mild) case. And the son in a family of five good friends just caught it, the first of his family to ever test positive (despite a mom that travels a ton for work); they had to cancel a trip that, ironically/sadly, was meant to be a family reunion remembering the passing of a couple people that died during (but not of) covid. Most dramatically I learned a friend of mine who finally caught covid in May ended up having something of an anxiety-induced breakdown and can no longer even drive, let alone fly. He's been on disability leave from a big tech company here because even working 4 day weeks his productivity had apparently dropped down to 60%. He can barely leave the house.

We just got back from a trip to Los Angeles, where we met up with the Aussie side of the family, for whom this was the first trip since covid hit (none of us got or are sick, so far). All four of them caught covid for the first time back in the spring, as did my sister and her family in England. It finally seems to be catching up with folks that avoided it for years. And yet the one person I know that has perpetually been most at risk, given his job is closely tied to both concerts and restaurants, has never tested positive, even when his entire family tested positive. Compare that to my kid's new piano teacher, a family of six that all had it at once. No rhyme or reason.

My parents caught it two weeks ago; Dad most likely brought it home from work. Mom suffered severe sore throat, runny nose, hacking cough, but no fever. Dad, not feeling well on Father's Day weekend, only realized he had it five days after symptom onset; that's how mild his symptoms were (both are jabbed and boosted). He tested PCR-negative last Wednesday, Mom yesterday. That's the closest it's come to me.

Can't recall if I mentioned that another person we know, their daughter tested positive the day after running a marathon. Which means she literally ran a marathon with covid.

Covid (@UCSF) Chronicles, Day 838
The die is now cast: BA.5 is destined to be our dominant virus.
In today’s 🧵I discuss the implications on the course of the pandemic, and how to think about responding.
(I use “BA.5” & not “BA.4/5” since BA.5 is poised to outrun BA.4.). (1/25)

— Bob Wachter (@Bob_Wachter) July 4, 2022

Great thread, I always love Wachter. My only quibble (and it's not just him saying this) is this part:

But since we’re missing ~80% of cases due to home tests, today’s true case-rate isn't far from Jan’s.(6/25)

Because that pre-supposes that we weren't undercounting in January, when all tests (home or lab) were difficult to obtain. But that is just a minor gripe.

The lengthy plateau he mentioned is what has me worried - we're in the midst of a month long plateau at very high levels in FL. There's been little respite. We had maybe a month of low cases after BA.1 before things started to rise again.

People keep saying "the pandemic will end, they all do", but if new scarier variants occur that cause mass reinfection, I don't see how it ends, other than "just giving up", which seems our current M.O. Endemicity seems so far away still.

Another good hot off the presses article:

Finally out after peer-review @NatureMedicine:
Emergence of SARS-CoV-2 Omicron lineages BA.4 and BA.5 in South Africa. In this publication, we describe the origins, evolution and impact of BA.4 & BA.5, which emerged in SA and now dominate most of the global COVID infections. 1/x

— Tulio de Oliveira (@Tuliodna) June 27, 2022

Wachter clearly knows what he's talking about, but honestly I've had trouble with him ever since he seriously overreacted over his (vaxxed, mild symptoms, 28-year old) son not answering the phone and essentially freaked out. Then again, anyone fully immersed in the shifting dangers of this disease is probably prone to freaking out now and then, as we've all discovered.

I’m going to start masking at my basically outdoor bar job— getting paranoid about getting it again.

At least two of my friends have had their second Cron :(

Stay safe tabes.

I ordered new N95s that fit comfortably over my big-assed nose

Well, these latest tidbits at least make me feel less like a crazy forest hermit… I reckon I’ve been applying just about the right level of restraint/caution.

But lord do I hate this