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Omicron anecdata?


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What is the latest evidence on vaccine spacing/frequency?  I last was vaccinated in autumn 22. I wasn't eligible for vaccination in spring or autumn 23. I contracted Covid in December 23.

Vaccination is now available privately here. Is it worth having a spring vaccination or should I just wait for autumn? 

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25 minutes ago, Laura Corin said:

What is the latest evidence on vaccine spacing/frequency?  I last was vaccinated in autumn 22. I wasn't eligible for vaccination in spring or autumn 23. I contracted Covid in December 23.

Vaccination is now available privately here. Is it worth having a spring vaccination or should I just wait for autumn? 

🤷‍♀️ My latest vaccine was Sept 23, and I caught covid around the last week of December. 

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16 minutes ago, Jaybee said:

🤷‍♀️ My latest vaccine was Sept 23, and I caught covid around the last week of December. 

How bad was this bout of Covid for you? I was flat out for a week and then breathless for about a month.

Husband - vaccinated last autumn  - didn't catch it from me.

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We are still masking, but when we caught it, it was in October of 2022. Either a specific mask was not the right fit, or it was from being in a small room to eat after someone contagious had vacated it.

The DS that is the most exposed (has to eat at school) is boosted every six months, and he hasn’t brought it home that we know of. He also had a close scrape with being exposed at an event where he could not mask all the time (and not going to the event was not an option really)—he had been recently boostered and didn’t come down with Covid in spite of several others getting it at the same time.

Adding: 3 out of 4 of us had mild Covid when we got it. DH was like the flu. We’d been recently boosted, but his had maybe not had as much time to take effect. DH doesn’t get sick often (none of us do), but he goes down hard when he does.

Edited by kbutton
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1 hour ago, Laura Corin said:

How bad was this bout of Covid for you? I was flat out for a week and then breathless for about a month.

Husband - vaccinated last autumn  - didn't catch it from me.

It wasn't nothing, but it wasn't horrible. Like a miserable bad cold for about a week, fatigue for several weeks, at least for me. Dh had a deepish cough that hung on for awhile--after other symptoms had disappeared, and he is generally over things more quickly. My cough was just a shallow one, but I had more sneezing. Neither of us ran fever.

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2 hours ago, Laura Corin said:

What is the latest evidence on vaccine spacing/frequency?  I last was vaccinated in autumn 22. I wasn't eligible for vaccination in spring or autumn 23. I contracted Covid in December 23.

Vaccination is now available privately here. Is it worth having a spring vaccination or should I just wait for autumn? 

Would you be eligible again in the Fall, or how often can you get them? The vaccines seem to have a significant effect in the initial months, but it does fade such that I don’t think I would want to get one in Spring if I was only going to get one a year (which is what we’re currently doing). I would wait until November on the one a year plan. 

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1 hour ago, KSera said:

Would you be eligible again in the Fall, or how often can you get them? The vaccines seem to have a significant effect in the initial months, but it does fade such that I don’t think I would want to get one in Spring if I was only going to get one a year (which is what we’re currently doing). I would wait until November on the one a year plan. 

I probably won't be eligible for a free jab but I can afford two this year if that's the best thing.

Maybe May and November? 

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5 hours ago, Laura Corin said:

How bad was this bout of Covid for you? I was flat out for a week and then breathless for about a month.

Husband - vaccinated last autumn  - didn't catch it from me.

My recent bout was horrid. It was 2 1/2 weeks of active misery (fever, aches, breathless, bad cold symptoms), and I am still very breathless and napping daily. I'm doing pretty well with gyrotonics. However, I had a 30-minute workout on Monday doing light weights and core and ended up asthmatic all day. I rarely use an inhaler but needed one yesterday. I am going to try another short workout tomorrow, this time doing the inhaler beforehand to see how I do.

I choose to do any and all vaccines available to me. I think the evidence is clear that the vaccine is milder on the body than catching the disease in the wild. That said, I wouldn't do it until six months after an infection.

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27 minutes ago, Harriet Vane said:

My recent bout was horrid. It was 2 1/2 weeks of active misery (fever, aches, breathless, bad cold symptoms), and I am still very breathless and napping daily. I'm doing pretty well with gyrotonics. However, I had a 30-minute workout on Monday doing light weights and core and ended up asthmatic all day. I rarely use an inhaler but needed one yesterday. I am going to try another short workout tomorrow, this time doing the inhaler beforehand to see how I do.

I choose to do any and all vaccines available to me. I think the evidence is clear that the vaccine is milder on the body than catching the disease in the wild. That said, I wouldn't do it until six months after an infection.

That's really rough.

The six months thing is the conundrum.  If I get a vaccination in June, at six months, then it will be waning when autumn comes - everyone indoors and coughing, and new semester at work.  Maybe I should just wait until September and start a regular vaccination schedule then.

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7 minutes ago, Laura Corin said:

Maybe I should just wait until September and start a regular vaccination schedule then.

I think whats hard is you can either have it at maximal efficacy for the Fall surge or the Winter surge, but not both (if we continue to see that Fall and Winter pattern for the biggest surges each year).  

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2 hours ago, mommyoffive said:

I would have liked the first graph “annual number of new cancers” to show further than 2020. It doesn’t seem the delayed diagnosis part of the equation would be likely to still be making a significant contribution for the last couple years. But I’m curious at what point the previous increasing curve resumed. 

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12 minutes ago, kbutton said:

Anyone following the H5N1 bird flu stuff? Any interest in a thread?

People on my Covid aware FB groups are starting to get really rattled.

I’ve not been following this yet. I’d read a thread on it though. I was just reading about the increase in serious meningitis infections https://apnews.com/article/bacterial-meningitis-cdc-alert-f6f33ce353168ed043e809952316eb64

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I've been seeing bits here and there about Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, too (as I understand it, it's a prion disease similar in some ways to mad cow). The link below is for a study of N=1, but it's not the only one I have seen.

Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease Associated with E200K Mutation and SARS-CoV-2 Infection: Pure Coincidence or Neurodegenerative Acceleration Clinical and Translational Neuroscience. N = 1. From the Abstract: “In our opinion, the rising global prevalence of neurodegenerative complications following COVID-19 disease adds urgency to the study of this potential relationship, mostly in elderly patients who may experience worse long-lasting outcomes systemically and within the nervous system.”

Edited by Amoret
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4 hours ago, kbutton said:

Anyone following the H5N1 bird flu stuff? Any interest in a thread?

People on my Covid aware FB groups are starting to get really rattled.

Yeah. The latest indication that it’s potentially transmitting in dairy cattle seems concerning. Even if not for affecting humans for affecting the food supply. 

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52 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

Yeah. The latest indication that it’s potentially transmitting in dairy cattle seems concerning. Even if not for affecting humans for affecting the food supply. 

Yep! Concerned about that too. I have an order in for a side of beef if everything goes well this summer.

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1 hour ago, kbutton said:

Yep! Concerned about that too. I have an order in for a side of beef if everything goes well this summer.

There was a live export cattle ship that left here that had a significantly higher than usual number of cattle deaths.  No cause identified as yet as far as I know: we don’t seem to have much bird flu yet if any from what I’ve heard and our bio security is quite strict so it’s likely a coincidence but odd timing.

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17 minutes ago, Ausmumof3 said:

There was a live export cattle ship that left here that had a significantly higher than usual number of cattle deaths.  No cause identified as yet as far as I know: we don’t seem to have much bird flu yet if any from what I’ve heard and our bio security is quite strict so it’s likely a coincidence but odd timing.

My understanding is that migration is tied to the timing of spread, but I could be misunderstanding that.

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Another call for improved indoor air quality. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/31/measles-alert-for-sydney-as-experts-call-for-improvement-in-indoor-air-quality

The article is mostly focused on measles cases, definitely a lot more than there used to be (28 cases this year so far - as far as I'm aware they've all originated from overseas). I wish there was a way to stop the importation of all these viruses from overseas. It's such a long plane ride from anywhere to Australia, hours and hours of breathing in other people's germs.

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The Greatest Trick: Most governments are trying to trick us into believing we don't need to adapt to COVID-19. They can't sustain the illusion forever. (The John Snow Project)

Governments around the world did not tell people it was safe to resume their pre-pandemic behaviour. Most official guidance said it was up to people to assess their own risk and decide what they were prepared to do in light of the existence of a novel pathogen. Many people took this to mean it was safe to resume pre-2020 behaviours and have learned the hard way that there is a big difference between 2019 and now: a new virus has been added to the landscape of pathogens and it is one that can still exact a hefty toll in the form of Long Covid.

While telling individuals to assess their own risk, many governments have removed the tools for people to do so, dismantling testing regimes, free vaccine programmes, surveillance and free treatment provision. Anyone who wants to understand the true risk posed by COVID-19 is effectively flying blind.

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What COVID-19 Does To The Body (Fourth Edition, Pandemic Accountability Index, 130+ Studies On COVID-19 Effects & Prevention)

Since our last edition in December, the CDC has now empowered employers to force workers sick & contagious with COVID-19 to work through an active viral infection, spreading pestilence to others. Along with an uptick in LongCOVID as a result of this past year’s pandemic mismanagement, we also have a growing body of research showing the many harms that even “mild” (not hospitalized) COVID-19 infections can leave on the human body. This round, the largest number of developments have come from understanding COVID-19’s effects on children, the brain, the immune system, and Long COVID - a disability afflicting millions of Americans, including kids.

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25 minutes ago, kbutton said:

From the conclusion: "Based on these findings, we have estimated that vaccine efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 ancestral strain 6 months to 1 year after the second dose was at least 65.5 % (95 % CI: 23.0–90.8), including for participants aged 65 years or older."

The 4 covid infections that occurred in the vaccine group were all more than 300 days post-vaccine, and were mild (2) to moderate (2).

The study was done pre-Omicron, but if these results turn out to be applicable to Omicron as well, this is really good news for Novavax. It's such a shame that they had so many supply chain and quality control issues with their adjuvant repeatedly delaying the launch, because this seems like a really good vaccine with very few side effects.

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48 minutes ago, Corraleno said:

The study was done pre-Omicron, but if these results turn out to be applicable to Omicron as well, this is really good news for Novavax. It's such a shame that they had so many supply chain and quality control issues with their adjuvant repeatedly delaying the launch, because this seems like a really good vaccine with very few side effects.

I think it also could’ve been more appealing to people who were uneasy about mRNA vaccines. Now I think we lost that opportunity.

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We have had overwhelmed hospitals and ambulance system again last week. (Elective surgery cancelled) Apparently there’s a kind of sub variant of the current variant that’s taken off here but not in other states. Wondering if there’s a connection.

Also we had an imported measles case a couple of weeks ago and it’s now transmitted to a teen from the same family.

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7 hours ago, wathe said:

Paxlovid news: EPIC-SR was finally published in NEJM.  Negative outcome.  I haven't combed through it yet.

Quote from Conclusion: "The time to sustained alleviation of all signs and symptoms of Covid-19 did not differ" (I bolded the key word here.)

Just from my personal experience. Paxlovid probably did not decrease how long I had Covid. It did however, get rid of the Covid headache after one dose, which for me is totally worth it. It decreased my misery from about a 9 to a 7 on the misery scale.

Edited by knitgrl
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9 hours ago, wathe said:

Paxlovid news: EPIC-SR was finally published in NEJM.  Negative outcome.  I haven't combed through it yet.

I think based on these results, I would still lean toward it for elderly family members without contraindications. It wasn’t high enough powered to say if Paxlovid reduced severe outcomes in those groups, but the results tilted enough in that direction that I would be inclined. 
 

I’m still waiting for more definitive results regarding long Covid reduction—the degree of risk reduction has varied a lot in the studies so far. For most of us, that would be the primary reason to take it, if it holds up that it reduces the incidence of long Covid. This particular study wasn’t designed to be able to assess that at all, so this one doesn’t help clarify that. But even if it’s on the lower end at a 26% reduction in long Covid? Absolutely I’d want that. 

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5 hours ago, knitgrl said:

Quote from Conclusion: "The time to sustained alleviation of all signs and symptoms of Covid-19 did not differ" (I bolded the key word here.)

Just from my personal experience. Paxlovid probably did not decrease how long I had Covid. It did however, get rid of the Covid headache after one dose, which for me is totally worth it. It decreased my misery from about a 9 to a 7 on the misery scale.

There is also supposedly not a lot of evidence for various treatments for cough duration-wise, but there are a lot of things that make people less miserable while they have one, and some of those things can make a profound difference in ability to breathe and sleep while waiting for the cough to clear (I have a kid with expiratory airway collapse—it’s a big deal to be able to keep a lid on coughing; ironically while we want him to have controlled and productive coughing!). 

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^That study might be used by insurance companies to deny payment for Paxlovid...I am already hearing of people being denied repeat Paxlovid for infections that are just a few months apart.

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New research published showing viral persistence after Covid. Plasma-based antigen persistence in the post-acute phase of COVID-19

 Although not without limitations (appendix p 14), our data provide strong evidence that SARS-CoV-2, in some form or location, persists for up to 14 months following acute SARS-CoV-2 infection (appendix p 13). This persistence is influenced by the events of acute infection. These findings motivate an urgent research agenda regarding the clinical manifestations of SARS-CoV-2 persistence, specifically whether it is causally related to either post-acute chronic symptoms (eg, fatigue, pain, and cognitive difficulty) or discrete incident complications (eg, cardiovascular events).

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Fwiw, having done Paxlovid one round (and I do fit the high risk parameters), I dont know that I would do it again. The GI side effects were tolerable but all it really seemed to do was push out how long it took for covid to really “hit”. As soon as the viral suppression ended, it took a couple of days and then I became really ill (nebulizer treatments around the clock to keep my 02 up, still came close to needing to be on oxygen support).

I am on a med that lowers TNFa and IL-6….supposedly makes me less likely to have super severe covid.

I was told with my last appointment that I have best coverage days 15-45 post vax to avoid disease and up to day 90 to reduce severity. I still mask everywhere indoors, but try to time any travel around boosters or vice versa. I think I still fall under the every 4 months guidelines…but got boosted last late November and probably wont again until September-November.

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46 minutes ago, mommyoffive said:

I feel like one of the big hold ups on this is testing. Without testing, better guidance can’t be implemented and I’m pretty certain the government doesn’t want to keep providing testing and nobody cares enough to do it anyway, so much as I completely disagree with the guidance, I do see the practical barriers to better approaches right now. Which is a crappy thing to have to acknowledge.

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