One thing I think about: There is such a thing as post-viral syndrome following all sorts of viruses. And we have never had a very effective flu vaccine, or vaccines for most of the other viruses that regularly infect children. It’s an interesting rabbit hole for perspective for anyone concerned about long Covid in children. Incidence in adults seems correlated with number and severity of symptoms, and symptoms in kids are most often mild or none. Example: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y Studies on long Covid in children, for those that might not have seen them. Australian study, posted in other threads.https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanchi/article/PIIS2352-4642(21)00124-3/fulltext UK study using Zoe app, also posted in other threads. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.05.21256649v1 Ciao Corona Swiss study, from earlier in thread. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.21257255v2 German study of adolescents: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v1.full Not long Covid, but death risk, in UK as in US, primarily in those with underlying health conditions. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-57766717

Are you serious? Who thinks those with symptoms shouldn’t be tested? I hope that isn’t where things are going. I’ve also heard there are a lot of other viruses going around and have heard of a lot of people with high fevers, sick for over a week, like a bad flu, but not Covid. I wonder if health care is doing much flu testing of these people; I’ve sort of wondered if flu would make an earlier appearance with things opening up and Covid declining.

To avoid long Covid, you have to avoid Covid, right? I understood that you’re concerned about long term effects, but avoiding Covid before vaccination would still be the goal then. There is a personal preference in how much risk you take. There are a lot of people out there who basically don’t think about this at all anymore, others that are very concerned, and some in between. Those on this thread seem to be in the last two categories. I think you might have taken my post in the wrong spirit. I am saying I don’t worry at all about outdoors, Delta or no Delta makes no difference to me, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t. You should do what you are comfortable with.

Is the structure of your church such that you can require this when the church policy says something different? If so, then I think you have to do what your conscience tells you to do, realizing that some families may not comply or might complain.

I wouldn’t lock down again for Covid. I do expect we may need to scale back our activity this fall. Even if we would rather not - and I don’t know how I will feel then or what kind of risk there will actually be - I just think that things might be that way whether i like it or not. Social activities require other people. 🙂 There is a possibility that flu could be worse than Covid for a time this winter, too. I don’t think we will get a variant that will evade vaccine immunity to the extent it causes severe disease in most younger, healthier people, at least any time in the near future, and I don’t want to live my life in fear that it might happen at any time. The virus isn’t going away, we will probably get exposed to it, and though it would be great if more adults would get vaccinated, there would not be “zero Covid” even if every single one went out and got the shot tomorrow. Whatever the risks objectively are, we don’t all perceive risks in the same way. It seems pretty important to you to avoid any Covid infection in your children at all costs, until they are vaccinated. In that case, maybe masking outdoors and not taking them anywhere indoors unless absolutely necessary is what you need to do. If you do take them to see friends indoors or do other optional things indoors, then masking outside doesn’t seem to make as much sense from a numbers POV, because it shows that you are actually willing to take some small risks re:Covid. ETA I say this because I think risk indoors with mask >>>>>>>> than outdoors without mask In asking what other people do, for me it’s not just a matter of who in the family still can’t be vaccinated, it’s what risks they may have had to accept, or been willing to accept to avoid other non-Covid bad outcomes, since the initial lockdowns ended last summer. I have little kids, but not only little kids, and most older kids in our culture need to do some things outside the home. Life wasn’t normal, but I haven’t had the kids hunkering down this whole time, either, so we have already been taking risks. There are also plenty of families who have had members working outside the home either the entire time, or if initially WAH, have long since been back at work. Many kids have been in school at least part-time. So the unknown but by all accounts minuscule risk at an outdoor playground is so tiny compared to the potential exposures they have had all this time, that it doesn’t register as a big deal.

Thanks. I had thought that was only for sequencing which variants were the breakthroughs, but no. It looks like they do still have some studies going on looking at milder breakthroughs. I wonder if any states still track all of them. I don’t think they have ever recommended testing for asymptomatic, and it seems like that would be a huge waste of resources to continue doing that for over half the population. There are other public health concerns that need attention, too.

Is that true? Do you mean for vaccinated, or for everyone, or…? I still see case numbers reported, and people who are vaccinated with symptoms are still encouraged to get tested. Did CDC stop keeping track of any breakthroughs?

The bolded is not an example of virulence. Virulence doesn’t mean increased infectiousness. I think most people agree that Delta is spreading more easily, though epidemiologists and virologists quibble over the term “transmissible”, because there can be many reasons for increased spread that have nothing to do with transmissibility. Basically, virulence means assuming that if the same person were infected with one variant vs. another, one of them would consistently result in more severe disease. Those studies are harder to do well and have not been released or published for Delta; they have to do things like compare statistically matched groups, one group infected with one variant and another with another, under similar conditions of locality, hospital capacity, etc. Then they measure outcomes like hospitalization, death, percentage needing ventilator. This type of study when done for alpha vs. wild-type variant, showed that alpha was not more virulent; it still may be that alpha had some increased virulence, but the other data supporting that view had some issues. Hanage does say virulence a couple of times, thanks for linking. I think that with all the other virologists, immunologists, and physicians etc. who say that there is no evidence of increased virulence, maybe he shouldn’t say that so strongly. Most use words like “may” or “might be”. Given the climate of uncertainty, anyone stating virulence as fact should give citations or further explanation for that viewpoint, and he doesn’t do either.

Press release on phase 3 trial of an antiviral that WORKS. Great news. Vaccines are great but medications are still going to be needed. https://www.heteroworld.com/images/Press_Release_Molnupiravir_Interim_Clinical_Results_Final_090721.pdf

Singapore. I think that it is precautionary. They don’t know that the myocarditis following the vaccine is autoimmune, or any kind of immune reaction. They don’t know why the vaccine leads to myocarditis. Usually, light exercise helps the immune response, but it does make sense to limit activity to prevent any stress on the heart. Don’t know if that will prevent anything, since they don’t know why it happens. I would think you would not want to take anything that could mask the symptoms, so I wouldn’t do that until cardiologists come up with something official.

I don’t understand the assumption that Delta is the primary variant from here on out. The latest from PHE is that Delta now has spread numbers similar to Alpha. Is there any reason to think we won’t have another variant predominant a few months from now? There is not yet any clear and substantial evidence that symptoms following Covid are more significant or more common than after other common infections, so I think we are a long way from any premise that we will get regular shots to prevent asymptomatic infection or long Covid, even if maybe eventually that is true. Not that long Covid isn’t real, but you can’t study whether something is currently happening or being prevented if you don’t have a good definition or good epidemiology. Preventing symptomatic infections, sure, no one wants to get sick from this if they don’t have to. But right now the rest of the world is still on fire.

I think this is right, just from what I hear and read. We will probably have other variants. By the fall, we might not be seeing Delta anymore, it could just as well be another one with some combination of these similar mutations. I agree with you; I think more people will get vaccinated before the end of the year. I do think a few people were are off by the talk of boosters and when cases were down when they became eligible, they thought they might just as well wait for the first doses. There is a certain logic to that, I guess. I don’t how any of us here can say that when the scientists aren’t even sure. I learn so much from this podcast, but this episode was particularly good and pertains to this discussion. https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-777/ The first hour is most of the content. It talks about the concept of viral fitness vs transmissibility as the title says, and how the public conversation about transmissibility of variants is very muddled and inaccurate, but so much more. There is a lot about vaccination, B and T cells, the differences between Covid and influenza vaccines and what they do, why most people should not need boosters with the current VOC (something said not only here, but many other experts), and an interesting note about flu vaccination and the debate over whether we should vaccinate children for flu only with an inactivated vaccine like FluMist, since other flu vaccines do not produce T cell responses and immune memory. (This is something I have wondered about for a long time). I plan to listen again, but other interesting points that I’ve heard before, elsewhere: -assays for neutralization (in all the variant neutralization studies, for example) are not standardized for this virus among labs. So you can’t directly compare all the different studies you see. -antibody assays are not standardized either. Different countries use different ones with different measurements. -and this one is huge- we don’t have a correlate of protection for this virus the way we do for influenza. With influenza, when antibodies go below a certain level, you will get infections. We don’t know what this is for this virus, they are learning as they go. But flu vaccines don’t induce good T cell responses the way the Covid vaccines do. T cells protect from severe disease, which changes the whole picture, and they go into this a lot more.

That’s an interesting way to study long Covid. Thanks for linking this. I think what they did is neat, but I don’t think much can be concluded from it, even if you are a middle-aged female Fitbit wearer like most of the participants. They don’t include any health information about the participants. Maybe they weren’t set up to do that, but it’s kind of important. I also don’t see that they compared baseline heart rates and step counts of the two groups for any differences. It is interesting that they returned to their baseline step counts while still having elevated resting HR, but reassuring that they all did return to resting rate and that for 85% of them, the difference was a couple of beats per minute. When influenza comes back, maybe we will see more comparison studies with it. We can hope that it will be harder for researchers to find enough patients for those studies!

Curious if you can say where they lived if they got Janssen. I didn’t know it was used very much outside of the US, except in a trial, or more recently I saw in South Africa. There is some Canadian data out. I don’t know if there are effectiveness percentages, but it shows very few breakthroughs in the vaccinated, as with the US. https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/epi/covid-19-epi-confirmed-cases-post-vaccination.pdf?la=en And the UK data has effectiveness data for millions of people. I don’t know how that compares with the Singapore data, whether there was some different type of analysis with that one or not, but yes, small numbers in Singapore would seem to make the conclusions less certain. eta a smaller number of Canadian cases are Delta as compared to the UK, but there are some.

Of course they mean not right now. How could they say boosters will never be needed? The statement is careful, but clearly they put it out because the drug companies and the media are jumping the gun and freaking everyone out. The whole thing is unfortunate, as with so much about Covid info. There isn’t any evidence at this time that any of us will need another vaccination in the fall, and people that know do say that, and it is reported somewhat, but the big scare gets a lot of attention.

CDC and FDA put out a joint statement this evening that says boosters are not needed.

Seems like a good idea. I expect to see more people masking this winter. Maybe mandates, too, but I think we will see it either way. I hope I am wrong and that we won’t have a lot of hospitalizations and won’t feel the need to. I don’t think we will have the huge waves all over this time, though. What do I know, but that seems to be the consensus.

I’m concerned about long Covid, too. That is another area where good studies are needed. I might quibble on the age but basically agree. I would be surprised if they weren’t effective at all under any circumstances. The evidence-based comes in for how much effectiveness, and under what circumstances. From the one trial that was done, we know that they are not 50% or more effective to an adult wearer of a medical mask when there isn’t a lot of virus around. I don’t know exactly what “a lot” was in that instance, or whether it’s comparable to what we have now. I think it matters if we expect everyone to do something for a long time. It would also be really helpful in another way. If they reduce infections only by 2 or 5 or 15%, then maybe people would realize it still isn’t a good idea to do certain things if virus is high. A while back I saw numbers on social media where people were saying 80%. Maybe that’s true in a hospital with properly fitted PPE, but I don’t believe that it is close to that in the community. And maybe I’m wrong! But no one knows.

I didn’t think that was the best piece, either, FWIW. I don’t care if people want to mask indoors in all situations for the rest of their lives, I only care if they expect others to do the same. For the quote, I don’t think that is how evidence-based medicine or evidence-based public health is supposed to work. The pandemic is not quite over, but the public health emergency part of it is over. I don’t see that those who say the evidence is poor think that masks are “totally useless,” but instead that we should find out when and to what extent they are useful. That is what I think the article is saying. I think it is good to acknowledge that masks aren’t completely benign for everyone: young children, special needs, hearing-impaired, maybe other conditions. There is also the psychology to consider if we are going to ask everyone to do it again. Not everyone feels it is no big deal. Also, there are things that people thought were common sense or looked great from observational data that were found to be ineffective or even harmful when studied more closely.

I thought that the latest thinking and research was that most people can tolerate carbs better earlier in the day, and not as well in the evening. YMMV etc. and always better to have complex carbohydrates in a balanced meal, not a load of simple sugars, and mostly I think it’s better to focus on eating whole foods of various kinds instead of focusing on macronutrients. Example, realizing there probably are articles that say the opposite. 🙂https:// health.clevelandclinic.org/the-best-time-of-day-to-eat-carbs/

Have you thought about working with a registered dietician? Maybe you can find one who has some experience with the medical issues you have. There may be ways to include more nutritious whole foods if you have some help and support.

I get the rationale, I just think at some point there is waning utility in doing so, and I see a lot of downsides to indefinite masking. I can’t see making this the norm for children and young people, especially. If only they had done some decent studies early on that gave a better idea of the utility of masking in the first place. That most of the rationale seems to be based on aerosol-blowing mannequins is a problem; the precautionary principle only works for so long when asking people to change something so substantial for such a long time.

There was one myocarditis case in the Novavax trial. Could be coincidental, or maybe not. Seems like the largest risk with mRNA is for males under 30 or 40. Not as much for females and not at all for females over 30, so far. Young men could take J&J, women mRNA if wanting to avoid known side effects? I guess I’d be pretty nervous with that family history, too, though.

So does anyone know if a college student counts as same household if their permanent address is the same, but away at college in fall/spring? And does anyone know if more than one screen can use prime video at the same time, like how Netflix gives options for number of screens available?

Washer. More issues IME. I would love to have room for an extra washer. I’d probably put the occasional grungier loads in there if I had a second one. Having had several broken appliances over the past few years and especially this past year, and experienced not only long waits for service, but delays in getting parts, I might even keep both for a while if I could, but washer over dryer. Line drying works for most things in most circumstances, barring something like large family in rainy climate.