covid

Since COVID is really popping again, I'm going back to masking. I would wear KN95/N95s but those stink after a while and you can't wash it. Cloth masks aren't as effective but has to be better than nothing, right?

Is there any special type of mask which can be reused and washed while having ok protection against COVID?

I'm seeing in 360° paxlovision over here.

Test2treat
National Institutes of Health program. Here's a reddit thread about it

I finished the questionairre thing at 5am and had a reply from an actual person in my email at 10am. I'd gotten a prescription from my doctor moments before by that time though so I had test2treat cancel theirs. Also good to know— i got an offer to participate in a survey about the service for $50 compensation several days after.

Dr.B
This one costs $15 for the consultation and may interface with your insurance, I'm not sure. I'm on medicaid which covers pax so I wasn't concerned about it. It's robo livechat format. There's a low income option a little ways in that requires you to volunteer info like your living, housing, and gas expenses in exchange for waiving the $15 consultation fee.

Dr.B took from 6:30am to 9:30am to not only respond but to totally fill a prescription without asking for a confirmation. There wasn't an opportunity to cancel so i have a second pax script on hold at the pharmacy right now.

Either option you should just make sure you check at least one of the paxlovid-qualifying high-risk conditions. You can google the list but the easiest/least commital ones are probably "former or current smoker " and "depression/anxiety" though i doubt you'd need to provide proof for any of them.

I'm 32 and I don't have any of the high-risk conditions except depression/anxiety which i assume every sane person also has. I assume it was the jn.1 variant. I started paxlovid the first day i tested positive and i tested negative for the first time about five hours after my last paxlovid dose, technically very early on day six. That was a few days ago and I'm still testing negative, no rebound. I've had everything except the latest booster, just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

If you're on medicaid you can probably get 8 free at-home tests per month until at least next september. It may take a couple phone calls because no one knows what's going on, probably on purpose. In my case i had to call my pharmacy who told me to call my medicaid provider who told me to call the pharmacy back and actually instruct them what to do (the pharmacist has the ability to write you a prescription for at-home tests to be billed to insurance). Make sure the tests aren't expired too. Pharmacies will absolutely still try to give out expired tests, past even the "extended" dates.

Hopefully some part of this is helpful to someone.

https://mastodon.social/@mackayim2022/109345282886472862

A pandemic of heart failures. This is certainly something I've been worried about ever since we found out how much covid affects the heart, scary to see research pointing in that direction too.

I didn't watch her channel, but this is a very detailed write-up about someone's experience with very extreme long covid. I wish we were doing more to find treatments for people suffering.

questions for a friend (it's not its for me)

A map released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows a major uptick in positive Covid-19 cases in four American states. Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas all had a 17.2 percent positivity rate in the week of December 9. These figures represent an increase from the previous two weeks' confirmed positive test percentage of 16.7.

https://www.irishstar.com/news/us-news/map-shows-covid-cases-exploding-31710205

JN.01 making an impact. Some places around the world where JN.01 has achieved viral dominance are showing the highest levels of covid in wastewater they've ever detected.

Looks like it won't kick off in most places in the US until around the new year, with maybe a boost from Christmas. I don't know if it will be as bad as when Omicron first appeared, but it's likely to be worse than last year.

Variant trackers like JPWeiland are saying to expect hospitalizations to shoot up once JN.1 reaches 50% of covid infections an area. Hospitalizations are currently going up in NY. His predictions have been very accurate for the past year or two, and he warned the CDC and WHO about JN.01 months ago who took a wait and see approach and are now sounding the alarm, and it's lining up to be a little worse than even he predicted. New York is about a week ahead of other coastal and major cities and will be a preview of what's to come.

The WHO just recommended all healthcare workers to start masking up, and made JN.01 a variant of interest, distinct from it's direct predecessor.

Hopefully you've gotten the new vaccine, but also use air filtration if you are around other people indoors (a CR Box is kinda bulky but easy to build and very effective, just 4xMerv-13 filters, tape, and a box fan will do it), N95 Masks, avoid crowds, stay the fuck home if you are sick, jump through whatever hoops you need to wrangle up some paxlovid, and rest as much as you can for as long as you can if you get it.

Nasal Sprays like covixyl, betadine, xclear and the like should all help your odds in preventing an infection, and double as treatment if you do get infected.

If you are tired of precautions, or can't do them anymore for whatever reason, because CDC guidelines are to not give a fuck, please at least use one of these sprays to lower the viral load you are exposed to. There are no guarantees, but pretty much everything I've read about covid suggests the less virus you are exposed to the better your odds are going to be of avoiding all the numerous negative consequences of an infection.

There are also all the other respiratory diseases popping off at alarming rates, and taking precautions against covid protects you from all of them as well. We are also seeing more severe symptoms from people who get the diseases we are used to, because covid harms the immune system and makes us more vulnerable to everything else.

Despite people trying to wishcast every new variant as "mild" or "just a cold" because hospitals aren't overwhelmed with the dead anymore (1700 dead from covid last week), the risk of long covid, every time you are infected, is essentially the same as rolling dice and hitting snake eyes, which is way too fucking high for us to be repeatedly infecting ourselves with this virus.

There is a wide range of long covid symptoms because it can harm essentially every part of our body, so you might get lucky and have something relatively minor for six months or the rest of your life, but there is also no current cure and the risk of bad outcomes increases with every infection. Symptoms improve with time for some people, other people get worse, and another covid infection can bring it all back or add on new problems.

Let's hope sterilizing vaccines arrive before we have to endure several more years of this shit.

Seventeen hundred dollars.

Death to America.

Edit - I was able to resolve it through this site: https://www.paxlovid.com/enroll-in-co-pay-program . You probably have to call the number if you're in a situation like mine (wrong state, etc.), but you will get the drug for free, after consenting to waive all of your privacy rights and allow them to send you billions of text messages. It's all bullshit and I hate Pfizer and I hope they die painfully, but at least I can get my meds.

Hospitals and emergency rooms could be forced to ration care by the end of this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Thursday, saying recent trends in COVID-19 and influenza are now on track to again strain America's health care system. The new COVID variant JN.1 is making up an increasing share of cases, the CDC's tracking shows.

"COVID-19 hospitalizations are rising quickly," the agency said in its weekly update. "Since the summer, public health officials have been tracking a rise in multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), which is caused by COVID-19. Influenza activity is growing in most parts of the country. RSV activity remains high in many areas."

The CDC has been urging people to get vaccinated as the peak of this year's mix of three seasonal respiratory viruses — influenza, COVID-19 and RSV — is nearing.

In pediatric hospitals, the CDC says beds "are already nearly as full as they were this time last year" in some parts of the country. Data from emergency rooms published Wednesday tracked emergency room visits nearly doubling in school-age children last week.

JN.1 is now about 50% of cases worldwide, and at 50% it starts stressing hospitals according to variant trackers like JPWeiland.

The US, Canada, and UK will be at 50% in the next few weeks. Some states in the midwest might be at 50% already.

And all this on top of major flu and RSV outbreaks. In parts of Canada the flu season is the worst it's been since the h1n1 swine flu pandemic in 2009, and last year was almost as bad.

WOOOOOOOO!

My wife just tested positive for COVID the second time this year and we are sooo mad. We are so sick of other people and their total disregard for each other. Even tho we don't know for sure where she got it, we were at a small gathering last weekend where someone showed up sick without any sort of warning. They said it's not COVID and something about how its just their sinuses, you know, the normal brushing off of obvious symptoms.

Then on Monday I had to go to the office for a meeting and overheard 2 different people saying they weren't feeling great... They both ended up going home and neither of them showed up the next day, but a third person did show up the next day, also complaining about being sick... I really just don't understand why!

My wife and I do everything we cant to be safe; we wear masks in public, we make our concerns known, we have canceled and changed plan in order to keep in line with our concerns and comfort.

Why do people insist on going to work or to gatherings when they can admit they are sick?

Why does nobody give a shit about anyone around them?

I hate people, I really do, but I still don't go into social situations while sick and if I had to I would wear a fucking mask. It's that fucking simple, yet no one has the common courtesy to not bring their fucking communicable disease into public.

Fuck people.

FUCK

//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

UPDATE: Just got an email from one of my colleagues who just tested positive for COVID. He was in the office Monday, complaining about feeling sick, but waited 4 days to test because “he didn’t even think about COVID until someone else mentioned it.” Mind you, this person sees me with a mask on EVERY DAY, but didn’t think about COVID…

I really really hate people and am thinking about leaning into the hermit life. Just me, my partner, and our cats; everyone else can fuck off.

yeah I know some people call it the 100 day cough, it just makes it sound unserious to me. Maybe it's more common in the UK though.

Also

Earlier this year the UKHSA warned that uptake of the maternal Whooping Cough vaccine had dropped to its lowest level in seven years.

Good, so yet again it's likely due to increased anti-vax sentiment in the west

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf recently took to X to mourn the “catastrophic” decline in U.S. life expectancy.

But his post, which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and health care, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID-19 waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.

Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, “excess,” deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.

With the worst of COVID behind us, annual deaths for all causes should be back to pre-pandemic levels — or even lower because of the loss of so many sick and infirm Americans. Instead, the death toll remains “alarming,” “disturbing,” and deserving of “urgent attention,” according to insurance industry articles.

Actuarial reports — used by insurers to inform decisions — show deaths occurring disproportionately among young working-age people. Nonetheless, America’s chief health manager, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opted in September to archive its excess deaths webpage with a note stating, “these datasets will no longer be updated.”

Covid is over, so what could it be?

So close to getting it...

News from US Project NextGen:

The 3 vaccines from the USA chosen for Project NextGen are:

• Gritstone Bio’s self-amplifying mRNA vaccine aiming to be “variant-proof”;
• Covi-Vac/CoviLiv: A live virus intranasal vaccine from Codagenix; and
• Castlevax viral vector intranasal vaccine, from a Mount Sinai Hospital spin-off.

Mucosal vaccines:

• Mucosal vaccines are currently authorized for use in 6 countries: China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, and Russia. There are 5 of these vaccines: China has 2, and one of them is authorized in 3 countries:
  • Ad5-nCoV (Convidecia Air) Viral vector (adenovirus) vaccine by by CanSino (China)
  • BBV154 (iNCOVACC) Viral vector (adenovirus) intranasal vaccine by Bharat Biotech (India), using ChAd-SARS-CoV-2-S by Washington University in St Louis
  • DNS1-RBD (Pneucolin) viral vector intranasal vaccine, by Beijing Wantai BioPharm (China)
  • Razi Cov Pars Protein subunit by Razi Vaccine & Serum Research Institute (Iran)
• 27 have reached clinical trial, with at least one of those has been discontinued.
• 6 mucosal vaccines have reached phase 3 trials, including the 5 authorized vaccines.

Lookin' good!

Emergency waiting room populations have ballooned across the province, and hospitals are way past capacity in Edmonton, according to the head of the Alberta Medical Association.

“It’s as bad as we’ve seen it in 25 years, that’s how bad it is right now,” president Dr. Paul Parks said Monday. “We’ve never had that many in the Edmonton zone. We are literally activating the AHS disaster plan … we’re trying to get patients to next available beds.”

Last Monday, in the Edmonton zone, Parks said there were 202 admitted very-sick patients with no hospital beds to go to, so they were stuck in emergency.

“We’ve never had that many in the Edmonton zone,” Parks said.

Chart taken from: https://nitter.net/MoriartyLab

Not sure if this is allowed here and I mean no disrespect to anyone’s views. However, I am curious how this transition was experienced by folks here.

In March 2020, it was quite taboo to ignore the guidelines in many places, and laws were strictly enforced. Now, the vast majority have essentially returned to “normal life”. Basically a complete 180 in right around 4 years.

Did you see this outcome coming?

Was there a tipping point?

Did your views evolve over time? Or diverge in specific ways?

As someone in the middle of the spectrum, the trajectory the pandemic took (in terms of how serious people took guidelines) seemed somewhat unsurprising and inevitable. Personally, I picked up a couple of good habits like being stringent with hand washing and never going into the office sick (regardless of illness).

Just interested in other peoples perspective on this if you care to share :)

I've had literally zero luck with it. Would like to find people irl that share my feelings about covid rather than having to choose between spending all my time alone or hanging out with the "why are you wearing a mask?" crowd all the time

Covid can infect the gut and cause havoc. Covid also seems to persist there in some people, as well. It's an area our immune system has difficulty clearing.

A randomized, placebo-controlled trial of modulating the gut microbiome is successful for symptom alleviation in #LongCovid

This is the first successful randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind trial with an adequate sample size (N=463 participants) for #LongCovid

https://nitter.net/EricTopol

From the study:

We did a randomised controlled trial on the efficacy in alleviating PACS of adult recovered patients using a synbiotic preparation SIM01 (RECOVERY trial). The synbiotic preparation (SIM01) is a micro-encapsulated lyophilised powder containing 20 billion colony-forming units of three bacterial strains, B adolescentis, Bifidobacterium bifidum, and Bifidobacterium longum with three prebiotic compounds including galacto-oligosaccharides, xylo-oligosaccharides, and resistant dextrin, which has been shown to promote the growth of these bacterial strains but also other probiotic strains.

The specific ratio of the three probiotic bacteria was decided based on the relative abundance of these species naturally present in the healthy Chinese population. We previously found that the relative abundance of several species, including B adolescentis and B longum, and the bacterial pathway of short-chain fatty acid production, were all significantly lower in the gut of COVID-19 patients compared with healthy individuals.

Results:

At 6 months, a significantly higher proportion of individuals who received SIM01 had alleviations in fatigue, memory loss, difficulty in concentration, gastrointestinal upset, and general unwellness compared with the placebo group, after adjusting for multiple comparisons. The relative benefit increase after SIM01 were 47% for fatigue, 56% for memory loss, 62% for difficulty in concentration, 30% for gastrointestinal upset, and 31% for general unwellness.

I think you can find the strains used in this study in over-the-counter suppliments and/or in foods like kefir or yogurt, and there are vegan varieties of both. If you have health issues from a covid infection it's worth trying.

If you have a standard US diet, high in processed foods with preservatives, it's probablly a good idea to intentionally eat more probiotics anyway.

As we prepare to record "Covid Year Four," Beatrice, Artie, and Abby discuss what is left of national covid data following the end of the public health emergency, how what's left has become so thoroughly abstracted, and how the CDC prioritizes representing deaths as an abstract percentage even as the official death count has been over 1,000 a week since August.

Yeah, that 3 month period 4 years ago when you couldn't get a haircut is the reason for all of your problems today.

As predicted by covid variant tracker nerds on twitter in recent weeks, JN.1 is exploding. A 40% increase in covid cases since last week. Most sequences coming in to variant trackers are JN.1.

The biobot chart shows the last six months, if you zoom out we are at or approaching covid levels not seen since last winter, so not totally unexpected... but the CDC expects cases to peak in February. However JPWieland predicts it will peak after christmas due to the rapid growth of JN.1.

There are also outlier cities in Europe showing more covid in wastewater than ever measured during the pandemic. Canada isn't doing much better. The UK isn't doing well either.

Along with covid, flu and RSV are also hitting pretty hard at the same time, especially in the South, with a touch of mystery pneumonia in various places around the world as a treat.

Thankfully the latest vaccine helps against this variant. Unfortunatly vaccine uptake rates are abysmal now because capitalism.

I'm mainly still posting about covid out of anxiety and watching the health of friends and family who have been infected and "were fine" slowly deteriorate.

Good luck, everyone.

EDIT:

The CDC director is recommending wearing masks. So things will probably get pretty bad...

https://twitter.com/CDCDirector/status/1732547659292967203

Strange how excess deaths are high in all the diseases that covid is known to cause or can make worse. But also the pandemic is over?

The biggest number of relative excess deaths occurred in young and middle aged adults amid higher than expected instances of cardiovascular, diabetes and acute respiratory diseases.

The CMI’s analysis showed that the largest relative excess deaths in 2022 were for young (20-44 years) and middle-aged (45-64 years) adults.

The OHID analysis considered how excess mortality has varied by age band and cause of death. It shows that for ages 50-64 deaths between June 2022 and June 2023 were 33% higher than expected for cardiovascular diseases, 35% higher than expected for diabetes, and 43% higher than expected for acute respiratory diseases.

Stuart McDonald, deputy chairman of the CMI, said: “We continue to see persistent excess mortality, particularly for the working age population, years after the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

Just one more wave, bro, I promise bro.