New article via Scientific American is rather interesting. It's mostly an interview with interim Director of the WHO, Maria Van Kerkhove.
How would you describe the overall state of COVID at this point in the pandemic?
COVID’s not in the news every day, but it’s still a global health risk. If we look at wastewater estimates, the actual circulation [of SARS-CoV-2] is somewhere between two and 20 times higher than what’s actually being reported by countries. The virus is rampant. We’re still in a pandemic. There’s a lot of complacency at the individual level, and more concerning to me is that at the government level.
Lack of access to lifesaving tools such as diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines is still a problem. Demand for vaccination is very low around the world. The misinformation and disinformation that’s out there is hampering the ability to mount an effective response. So we feel there’s a lot more work to do, in the context of everything else—[we no longer have a] COVID lens only, of course, but using masks for respiratory pathogens that transmit through the air is a no-brainer—plus vaccination, plus distancing, plus improving ventilation. People are living their life; we’re not trying to stop anyone from doing anything, but we’re trying to work with governments to make sure they do that as safely as possible.
Are there any other things you’d like people to know about COVID right now?
I think it’s important that we continue to talk about it. We understand you don’t want to hear about it. I don’t want to talk about it. But we need to because there’s more we can do. We cannot prevent all infections. We cannot prevent all deaths. But there’s a hell of a lot more that we can do to really keep people safe and save them from losing a loved one.
It does seem like the biggest challenge right now is complacency, but I doubt that will ever be unwound. The world at large has decided that some people just deserve to die and/or become permanently disabled for the sake of "normal".
Same as it ever was.
(wastewater flowing underground)
There’s a lot of complacency at the individual level, and more concerning to me is that at the government level.
God, I don't even know how to react to this. Nobody wants the inconvenience of interruptions or nuance, so it's been turned into a consumer-level choice. The range of symptoms and effects is SO dynamic that people would rather roll the dice. Most people have had it and survived, so survivorship bias kicks in and it's no longer a big deal to the average individual. And government wants business to continue so taxes can be collected.
Of course everyone is complacent. If all the most vulnerable people are already dead and the remaining at-risk individuals are already essentially hidden from the general discourse because the status quo focuses almost exclusively on the able-bodied, it's a total blindspot issue. Nobody wants to think about getting it and possibly dealing with the more severe consequences, but they're fine with betting that if they do get it then they'll get over it like a bad case of the flu. Que sera, sera.
Treating it with the seriousness it deserves is still not being supported for most people, either.
You've got a cough or a sniffle. Is it COVID? Who knows? If you eventually test positive, it will be 4-5 days from now. Are you going to stay home from work and burn precious PTO - if you even have PTO - on the chance that you might have COVID? Will your boss even let you?
And yes I know WFH. But only certain jobs can do that.
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TetraNitroCubaneNot Angry...Just VERY Disappointed...Registered Userregular
Someone I know recently had a cold that was pretty bad. Lasted something like two weeks, lots of coughing, bad headache. They went to work, though. The tests came back negative for COVID, so they felt like they had to.
After two weeks, their wife started feeling awful along with them. She tested positive almost immediately. So they tested too, and were positive.
Turns out they tested early and just assumed that it was all good. The tests really have a stupid long lag time on them now.
got back to work last week, theres 4 confirmed cases among staff, who knows how many students have covid. The only people Ive seen wearing masks are a couple of guys who have other health problems and covid would probably off them. Most offices in the building dont even have alcohol dispensers anymore, so theres going to be more cases for sure.
Luckily my boss had a mic and speaker installed at my office, so we deal with people through a glass window, but I think we are the only ones who have that system in the building.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
Yeah, wife had a fever and felt pretty bad last weekend. Isolated just in case, but no one popped a positive test. At this point she feels fine, daughter and I both have mild head cold symptoms, and son is (and has been) fine.
Fun
Well, we are all fine now, except I’m extra tired all the time and I’m not thinking terribly clearly.
None of us have had a positive test, so it’s probably nothing.
Yeah, wife had a fever and felt pretty bad last weekend. Isolated just in case, but no one popped a positive test. At this point she feels fine, daughter and I both have mild head cold symptoms, and son is (and has been) fine.
Fun
Well, we are all fine now, except I’m extra tired all the time and I’m not thinking terribly clearly.
None of us have had a positive test, so it’s probably nothing.
Right?
Right. Presumably you have a vaccine for the latest covid and you don't have one for the more ordinary colds that are still spreading like wildfire this season, multiple people tested negative multiple times, nobody lost their taste or smell I assume since you left that out (yes that still happens). It sounds like your only lingering symptom is tiredness, which can have a lot of fairly ordinary causes. If you're here worrying about long covid after probably not having covid, stress is likely a factor somewhere. If you really want to test it, go do some mild exercise at this point. You might feel a little out of shape which would be normal, but if you have a covid related metabolism issue, the exercise will cause a sudden and extreme spike in fatigue unlike anything you've ever felt before. You should also go see your doctor if you still have concerns.
Yeah I wouldn't immediately worry about long covid if you don't bounce back from every illness in a week. One thing we all should internalize after the past 4 years is: when you get a viral illness that makes you feel bad it's actually kinda rough on your body a lot of the time even beyond immediate symptoms and you should take it easy for a while afterward.
Which incidentally is why I'm never going to give up masking entirely. Like I haven't gotten sick after air travel at all since I started masking, despite the number of people sitting near me just like coughing directly into my eyeballs.
Yeah I wouldn't immediately worry about long covid if you don't bounce back from every illness in a week. One thing we all should internalize after the past 4 years is: when you get a viral illness that makes you feel bad it's actually kinda rough on your body a lot of the time even beyond immediate symptoms and you should take it easy for a while afterward.
Which incidentally is why I'm never going to give up masking entirely. Like I haven't gotten sick after air travel at all since I started masking, despite the number of people sitting near me just like coughing directly into my eyeballs.
Also, this forum has been around for awhile now. None of us are young anymore.
Yeah I wouldn't immediately worry about long covid if you don't bounce back from every illness in a week. One thing we all should internalize after the past 4 years is: when you get a viral illness that makes you feel bad it's actually kinda rough on your body a lot of the time even beyond immediate symptoms and you should take it easy for a while afterward.
Which incidentally is why I'm never going to give up masking entirely. Like I haven't gotten sick after air travel at all since I started masking, despite the number of people sitting near me just like coughing directly into my eyeballs.
Also, this forum has been around for awhile now. None of us are young anymore.
Yeah I wouldn't immediately worry about long covid if you don't bounce back from every illness in a week. One thing we all should internalize after the past 4 years is: when you get a viral illness that makes you feel bad it's actually kinda rough on your body a lot of the time even beyond immediate symptoms and you should take it easy for a while afterward.
Which incidentally is why I'm never going to give up masking entirely. Like I haven't gotten sick after air travel at all since I started masking, despite the number of people sitting near me just like coughing directly into my eyeballs.
Also, this forum has been around for awhile now. None of us are young anymore.
I have a doctor appointment coming up for other reasons anyway.
Speaking of options for when people are sick, while I have WFH, it's a tough balance between the kids staying home and/or going to school (both elementary). The fact that our NotCovid (even with the big boy dr office tests) has left us all with lingering rough coughs doesn't help. Ignoring the possible risk of catching/spreading stuff, taking significant amounts of time off is... not ideal for their academics. Fortunately, the teachers can post some things to google classroom, and I can help a great deal, but I'm already doing a full time job.
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TetraNitroCubaneNot Angry...Just VERY Disappointed...Registered Userregular
Americans who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to routinely stay home from work and school for five days under new guidance planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The agency is loosening its covid isolation recommendations for the first time since 2021 to align it with guidance on how to avoid transmitting flu and RSV, according to four agency officials and an expert familiar with the discussions.
The CDC plans to recommend that people who test positive for the coronavirus use clinical symptoms to determine when to end isolation. Under the new approach, people would no longer need to stay home if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without the aid of medication and their symptoms are mild and improving, according to three agency officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal discussions.
According to a paper published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection about a year ago, which looked at the duration of infectiousness from mild COVID cases in Health Care Workers:
In conclusion, we showed that viral shedding continues for >10 days among mild cases infected with Omicron, and a symptom-based approach might not be a good approach for the cessation of isolation.
"fuck it, just... we know no one's still listening to us, so just do whatever you want and your employer tells you to, I guess. fuck."
Nah, I'm not even willing to give the CDC that much credit on this. That would imply the CDC knows better and is just giving up. But if that were the case, if they truly believed it didn't matter because nobody is listening to them, then why update guidance at all? Just stay silent and let the previous (ly ignored) guidelines stand.
The only reason to actually take action to reduce the guidelines is either because they honestly believe it's fine (which, per Tetra above, would be wildly naive at best) or because they actively want to help push the false narrative that everything is back to normal.
"Let's take a look at the scores! The girls are at the square root of Pi, while the boys are still at a crudely drawn picture of a duck. Clearly, it's anybody's game!"
"fuck it, just... we know no one's still listening to us, so just do whatever you want and your employer tells you to, I guess. fuck."
Nah, I'm not even willing to give the CDC that much credit on this. That would imply the CDC knows better and is just giving up. But if that were the case, if they truly believed it didn't matter because nobody is listening to them, then why update guidance at all? Just stay silent and let the previous (ly ignored) guidelines stand.
The only reason to actually take action to reduce the guidelines is either because they honestly believe it's fine (which, per Tetra above, would be wildly naive at best) or because they actively want to help push the false narrative that everything is back to normal.
That would be on theme for Jeffery Zients’s handling of the crisis for the past few years.
It puts it in line with RSV and flu which is stupid because A. COVID is worse even accounting for reduced lethality with vaccination and it no longer being a novel virus B. We don't treat those two seriously enough anyway.
It puts it in line with RSV and flu which is stupid because A. COVID is worse even accounting for reduced lethality with vaccination and it no longer being a novel virus B. We don't treat those two seriously enough anyway.
Well then I guess that makes my statement even more true.
"This brings our COVID guidance in line with RSV and the flu: we would rather you die of any of them than cause the stock lines to not go up".
"Let's take a look at the scores! The girls are at the square root of Pi, while the boys are still at a crudely drawn picture of a duck. Clearly, it's anybody's game!"
98% of the country doesn't care about covid anymore
Probably. But now they can hang a Mission Accomplished sign up. They beat covid!
That has been rhetorically the case for years. People talk about things "back during COVID" as though the pandemic is over
Yeah I guess that's true. It just seems suspicious that a few months ago they relaxed the covid isolation protocols and then suddenly they're going to remove them altogether.
It is pretty normal for policy recommendations to be rolled back if they're widely ignored so that other policies retain at least some cognitive weight, and new policies will be more likely to be followed. It sounds dumb but human behavior in aggregate can be pretty dumb.
Anyway.. I'm going to be doing frequent business trips that require me to fly. I almost always get sick on vacation so I decided to wear a mask when boarding and in flight. Shocking absolutely no one here I didn't get sick and stayed healthy for the whole time there and when I got back.
I'm going to continue to do this. It seems stupid to expose myself to the grossness of others if I can just slap a mask on and keep myself healthy.
There were maybe 10 people I saw across 4 flights still wearing a mask.
I have terrible luck with planes but I also can't manage to withstand masking for a 4 hour flight, the masks hurt the bridge of my nose really really badly. It's very hard to bear after a few hours.
When it comes to flights and stuff, I feel like its definitely worth investing in those kind of straps that go around your head. The bridge of your nose can still hurt, but it'll save your ears a lot.
I still mask on a plane, and don't ever really plan not to. Its hard to go back to just signing up to petri dish, even if I was no longer concerned with Covid (which I still am, and generally mask when I go out in public, even if I'm the only one)
Yeah, I was going to comment earlier but left in draft that the "over the head" ones are SO MUCH better than the behind the ears ones. I had a behind the ears one for a ~8 hr flight to the UK in late 2022 for work and it was absolute agony, to the point where I sought out a different style mask to wear for the flight home. I found the 3M Aura N95 masks to be the most comfortable for longterm wear (it's a pain to take on and off though) and relatively affordable if you buy in bulk.
Meanwhile, I love the ear loop Happy Masks that someone here recommended to me, because over-the-head straps don't work for me at all. (They slide completely off my skull unless they are in one (1) very particular spot, and when they are in that spot, they pull up on the mask.)
Yeah, this is long hair guy privilege, but I wear a hat, put my hair in a pony, stick the pony through the hat hole, and put the strap on top of my pony. Pony holds strap, hat holds pony.
It is pretty normal for policy recommendations to be rolled back if they're widely ignored so that other policies retain at least some cognitive weight, and new policies will be more likely to be followed. It sounds dumb but human behavior in aggregate can be pretty dumb.
Fwiw people at my workplace who get COVID still tend to stay home for a minimum of 5 days before coming back to the office. I imagine that culture will diminish with these new guidelines.
Realistically, the point of the quarantines was never to prevent people from contracting Covid, it was to prevent the entire health care system from collapsing due to a ton of people needing hospitalization at the same time. Now that everyone strongly vulnerable to Covid is already dead, a ton of people have built up some amount of resistance through vaccines and prior infections, the strains themselves are somewhat less deadly, and the endemic nature has led to reinfections being spread out more continuously, there's less incentive for them to continue.
Posts
Same as it ever was.
(wastewater flowing underground)
"a surrender that would once have been unthinkable"
Pepperidge Farm something something "endemic" something something mission accomplished
God, I don't even know how to react to this. Nobody wants the inconvenience of interruptions or nuance, so it's been turned into a consumer-level choice. The range of symptoms and effects is SO dynamic that people would rather roll the dice. Most people have had it and survived, so survivorship bias kicks in and it's no longer a big deal to the average individual. And government wants business to continue so taxes can be collected.
Of course everyone is complacent. If all the most vulnerable people are already dead and the remaining at-risk individuals are already essentially hidden from the general discourse because the status quo focuses almost exclusively on the able-bodied, it's a total blindspot issue. Nobody wants to think about getting it and possibly dealing with the more severe consequences, but they're fine with betting that if they do get it then they'll get over it like a bad case of the flu. Que sera, sera.
You've got a cough or a sniffle. Is it COVID? Who knows? If you eventually test positive, it will be 4-5 days from now. Are you going to stay home from work and burn precious PTO - if you even have PTO - on the chance that you might have COVID? Will your boss even let you?
And yes I know WFH. But only certain jobs can do that.
After two weeks, their wife started feeling awful along with them. She tested positive almost immediately. So they tested too, and were positive.
Turns out they tested early and just assumed that it was all good. The tests really have a stupid long lag time on them now.
Luckily my boss had a mic and speaker installed at my office, so we deal with people through a glass window, but I think we are the only ones who have that system in the building.
None of us have had a positive test, so it’s probably nothing.
Right?
Right. Presumably you have a vaccine for the latest covid and you don't have one for the more ordinary colds that are still spreading like wildfire this season, multiple people tested negative multiple times, nobody lost their taste or smell I assume since you left that out (yes that still happens). It sounds like your only lingering symptom is tiredness, which can have a lot of fairly ordinary causes. If you're here worrying about long covid after probably not having covid, stress is likely a factor somewhere. If you really want to test it, go do some mild exercise at this point. You might feel a little out of shape which would be normal, but if you have a covid related metabolism issue, the exercise will cause a sudden and extreme spike in fatigue unlike anything you've ever felt before. You should also go see your doctor if you still have concerns.
Which incidentally is why I'm never going to give up masking entirely. Like I haven't gotten sick after air travel at all since I started masking, despite the number of people sitting near me just like coughing directly into my eyeballs.
Also, this forum has been around for awhile now. None of us are young anymore.
Why'd you have to go at me like that?
I have a doctor appointment coming up for other reasons anyway.
According to a paper published in Clinical Microbiology and Infection about a year ago, which looked at the duration of infectiousness from mild COVID cases in Health Care Workers:
Nah, I'm not even willing to give the CDC that much credit on this. That would imply the CDC knows better and is just giving up. But if that were the case, if they truly believed it didn't matter because nobody is listening to them, then why update guidance at all? Just stay silent and let the previous (ly ignored) guidelines stand.
The only reason to actually take action to reduce the guidelines is either because they honestly believe it's fine (which, per Tetra above, would be wildly naive at best) or because they actively want to help push the false narrative that everything is back to normal.
“CDC recommends that if someone at work has COVID that you beckon them over and begin huffing their breath for five straight minutes”
EDIT:
That would be on theme for Jeffery Zients’s handling of the crisis for the past few years.
Well then I guess that makes my statement even more true.
"This brings our COVID guidance in line with RSV and the flu: we would rather you die of any of them than cause the stock lines to not go up".
98% of the country doesn't care about covid anymore
Probably. But now they can hang a Mission Accomplished sign up. They beat covid!
That has been rhetorically the case for years. People talk about things "back during COVID" as though the pandemic is over
"before the surrender" might be the correct phrase now
Yeah I guess that's true. It just seems suspicious that a few months ago they relaxed the covid isolation protocols and then suddenly they're going to remove them altogether.
I'm going to continue to do this. It seems stupid to expose myself to the grossness of others if I can just slap a mask on and keep myself healthy.
There were maybe 10 people I saw across 4 flights still wearing a mask.
I still mask on a plane, and don't ever really plan not to. Its hard to go back to just signing up to petri dish, even if I was no longer concerned with Covid (which I still am, and generally mask when I go out in public, even if I'm the only one)
Especially helpful if I'm wearing one at the office so I can pull my mask down when I'm alone and quickly bring it back up if someone's approaching.
Fwiw people at my workplace who get COVID still tend to stay home for a minimum of 5 days before coming back to the office. I imagine that culture will diminish with these new guidelines.