A new COVID-19 variant has emerged, serving as a reminder that the coronavirus continues to mutate and spread around the world, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
The variant is called EG.5 and is a descendant of Omicron.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.
A new COVID-19 variant has emerged, serving as a reminder that the coronavirus continues to mutate and spread around the world, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
The World Health Organization (WHO) added EG.5 to its list of currently circulating variants that are under monitoring on July 19.
The latest data from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that EG.5 makes up approximately 14.6 per cent — or one in seven — of all COVID-19 cases in the U.K.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at University Health Network in Toronto, said he expects cases of EG.5 to pop up in Canada soon, if they aren’t already.
Some of the best defences against COVID-19 have been and continue to be masks, vaccination and good ventilation or air quality in indoor spaces, Bogoch stressed.
COVID-19 is now endemic, like influenza. However, we do have vaccines so every 6-12 months when we get a booster shot we can get a bivalent vaccine that contains some of the latest variant to help prevent serious illness. This allows us to recover much more easily, reduce transmission, and ultimately eliminate the clogging of hospitals.
The real danger is from people who refuse to vaccinate because they’re going to be more susceptible to the endemic virus and its subvariants.
The problem is that the latest vaccines don’t contain the latest variant - they’re always going to be behind the curve because it takes time to develop them after a new variant emerges.
For example, here in NZ, we’re still giving people the bivalent mix designed for the omicron BA.4/BA.5 variant (and the ones before it) which is now about 2 years old and hasn’t been seen here for about 9 months.
There’s a non-zero level of protection from those vaccines, but they’re not keeping up with the virus in real time.
This is another major reason I have not stayed current with my boosters. What is the point of using something based on a strain that has not been seen for 9 months, and is in fact 2 years old? It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me.
Sure it will offer SOME ability to improve the immune response to a CV19 variant given how short-lived the protection from natural infection and vaccination seems to be, but it certainly isn’t going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. I’m still going to get horrifically sick again.
From an overseas perspective I can tell you that practically nobody in Australia is taking any form of booster. Elderly populations are, particularly those in a care setting but the general population are completely uninterested.
This is a combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once and not being particularly badly affected, and most people having had either direct or indirect experience of negative side effects from vaccination, and the now predominantly negative media coverage of the vaccination campaign.
If there is a marked shift towards increased mortality in any given strain, Australia is fucked. Thankfully that does not seem to be the trajectory of the virus at this time.
Nah, the real danger is the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it. Long Covid is only beginning to be recognized for the mass disabling event it is, and the response of governments from the municpal all the way to the federal levels have been to let it rip, stop testing, shut down tracking sites, repeal mask mandates, and declare victory. Literally doing the thing they rightly mocked Trump for suggesting.
Now over a million people have died in the US alone, and our government has decided to force everyone back to work to sustain commercial real estate profits, and in the process condemned us all to a lifetime of body-destroying reinfections by a virus who’s key traits are infectiousness and rapid evolution.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it’s a crime of unprecedented scale.
the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it
When I ask actual doctors, they disagree. Then we laugh about how anti-vax karen-convoy it sounds.
anyone with significant experience (even just as a patient) in the medical system can tell you doctors are not infallible. most medical professionals i’ve encountered in my area don’t even mask anymore and haven’t for about a year and some change now. of the ones that do, most are still just wearing surgical masks (useless)
This isn’t entirely true though. Yes they are far from perfect and yes they are worse than better masks, but they are still better than nothing and do actually reduce transmission.
Are these the same doctors who insist on taking a wait and see approach to Paxlovid? If so, I’m not sure they should even be allowed to call themselves doctors.
The idea that reinfections would be benign was inspired by politics and vibes. There’s plenty of evidence that reinfections are bad. It’s a virus that can damage all our organs, brain included, cause micro clots, vascular damage, and harm the immune system itself by trashing our t-cells, and it’s a virus we can catch multiple times a year and is mutating so rapidly we are having trouble knowing what to target when we develop yearly vaccines.
It’s kind of a problem if reinfections are bad for us when we are counting on perpetual infections to “build our immunity”.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it’s a crime of unprecedented scale.
Yes it did. If all countries did this around the world many people would have starved to death. It’s simply not ethical. Without eliminating it everywhere it would spread eventually - just look at Australia.
You can’t even enforce a total lockdown in western countries without excluding “key workers” that would allow the virus to spread anyway.
Nothing you have suggested would work in the real world. The only solution to prevent this is new medicines and prophylactics. We have developed some of these in the form of antivirals but they are not used enough to stop the spread.
We already enjoy a level of health unknown to people 100 years ago even with COVID-19. There will always be new diseases and this is the nature of evolution unfortunately. Previous generations had to accept this, now we have to as well. I hate to say it but probably our current level of health and healthcare isn’t sustainable without further advances thanks to antibiotic and antiviral resistance. We will need to change our approach going forward using things like bacteriophages, increased sanitation, healthier life styles, less cattle antibiotics, and new treatments to keep up.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world.
Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn’t have stopped it anywhere else.
Now, what I do agree with is that the response could’ve been a lot better, and many lives would’ve been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.
Everything is beyond fucked man, I know, you’re probably preaching to the choir. Theres no reload, no save, no do over. Find happiness the best you can and pray you die before we turn from sideways to upside down.
You’ll correct me for sure, but I remember Aus was banking on its internal vaccine and didn’t want to lock down in vain while the vaccine was imminent; only when that vaccine failed to be effective and on time did they have to start Plan B, and that put everyone way behind.
(I’m paraphrasing my nephew who lives there, so it’s second-hand at best).
But they seemed to start out with a fine, conservative fuck-the-plebes plan, at least.
That’s pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.
Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for ‘diplomatic’ purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.
This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.
At the beginning of the pandemic someone very correctly predicted that America was going to do the plague the same way we did Vietnam: enthusiastically for a little bit, then once we realize how expensive it is we were gonna give up, run away and loudly declare victory.
Funny, I was just going to mention Vietnam; they did the lockdown as it should have been. Closed borders, no gatherings, the whole shebang. And wouldn’t you know it; economic damage from the pandemic was extremely minimal because of all the people (read: workers, read: customers) that didn’t needlessly die or were permanently disabled.
This was the case with Cuba as well. They did the damn thing right and ended up in a position where they were exporting doctors and techniques to the rest of the world.
The number of people ignoring this is terrifying. Study after study keeps showing its a problem.
There’s going to be a massive accumulated health crisis in 10-20 years where a quarter of the population has a wrecked vascular system. On par with diabetes, but in this case untreatable which is going to kill millions far earlier than they should.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate to explore my own anxiety about this situation.
My fears are exactly the same as yours.
The part that I cannot reconcile is this: I took my initial doses of vaccine, I had a booster. I did all the right things in terms of minimising exposure and the risk to myself and my family.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
My entire family have lived the same experience.
Most people’s thinking in my circle now seems to be: why would I expose myself to the risk of cardiovascular complications by being continuously vaccinated, when I am still going to get infected and face those same cumulative cardiovascular risks again.
From a risk management perspective if I am not in a disease cohort likely to face mortality from infection, am I not reducing my total risk by simply reducing my exposure to the spike protein overall and electing to skip vaccine boosters altogether? I am going to get infected either way, that much is clear.
I am massively concerned about the long term consequences of repeated infection with this pathogen but it seems the world has moved on from giving a fuck.
I don’t know a single person who has received a booster in the last 12 months and given the shift in media narrative here it is not hard to see why.
The numbers are still in favour of getting vaccinated. Complications from the vaccine are as close to zero as any medical procedure could be. The complications from raw-dogging COVID are far greater, regardless of your cohort. Turning a life-threatening infection into an inconvenience is what the vaccines do. If your concern is minimizing total risk, getting a COVID booster each year with your flu vaccine is the way to go.
I remember when vaccines rolled out. I would have to sit down and go over it. But there was a time where I stopped having to process bodies for the morgue at my job and that was a nice change. We still saw lots of sick people, they just didn’t die nonstop. So vaccine all thr way.
Gonna be honest from the perspective of a current critical care nurse, as long as you didn’t end up proned face down in the hospital with a ventilator stuck down you and paralyzed on Nimbex and losing a lobe of your lung then you got out lucky.
I have a damn near knee jerk reaction to talking about covid in which I tell people that “still got it” that as long as they didn’t need serious medical intervention then they should be fucking thankful for not having to endure whatever the fuck fever dream of Hell existed in the first two years of covid in most hospitals in the US. Shit was and still is fucked beyond fucked.
edit: this is also not at all meant to downplay/ be mean everyone that got covid and luckily avoided a vent, many that contracted “mild” covid suffer from long covid with no end in sight.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
there being a few 2000 year old roman bridges doesn’t mean they were good at building bridges that last a long time, they built LOTS of bridges and a couple out of tens and tens of thousands survived
You’re assuming the booster is giving you the same (or anywhere even close) to the vascular damage caused by catching the virus. As far as the studies I’ve read, the vascular impact from catching COVID is dozens of times worse than a booster.
You say “Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows” The doctors know, that’s why boosters are being offered to everyone for free in Canada.
This is one of the reasons why Canada, which has a much higher vaccination and now booster rate than the US is doing better than the US with it’s abysmally low booster rate. Canada is losing about 50 people per week right now, the US is still at around 2000 (40 times higher, despite only having a little over 8 times the population)
What the world does or doesn’t do is completely irrelevant to your personal choices. If they all jumped off a bridge to their death, would you do it too?
I’ve continued masking in crowded public areas, boosted regularly (last Monday was my most recent dose), kept my kids masked at school, boosted them regularly too, none of us have had COVID at all. Make your own choices.
Have you been boosting every 6 months? I’ve been mulling over getting another booster or waiting till the new one comes out. I’ve been more up to date than most, but last one I got was when the bivalent vaccine came out.
I should be so lucky. My last booster was over a year ago, and there are no plans to introduce them for any but the oldest and youngest people in Britain.
Oh, man, the UK was an absolute disaster for getting vaccinated. In 2021 in my area there were literally crowds of young people at “walk-in” vaccination centres getting turned away and being told to wait for another 1-2 months. Meanwhile about 3 elderly patients were getting the shot per hour and the Guildhall looked empty besides.
My friends in other countries were vaccinated months before me. Ended up getting all my boosters outside the UK because they couldn’t give a fuck about anyone under 65.
At this point probably everyone has had omicron or one of the later less harmful variants. The trend of becoming more transmissible and less harmful is normal for corona viruses. Im with most people in being apprehensive about getting additional boosters. Why do you feel there’s a real danger?
How come Canada still has no many anti-vax/lockdown nut jobs still?
Ours went away faster than the virus, what’s going on in Canadian society that they’re still falling for that shit? Kinda had more respect for youse than that.
Canadians are, more than ever before, influenced by American media and social media and that includes the dogmatic and polarizing rightwing anti-science narratives rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. We’re being absorbed into the American weltanschauung since the advent of the Internet and our culture diluted. You can see it in our politics.
I want to say yes, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it, and my vocabulary’s not bad :P. Kudos to @NathanielThomas for sharing it! I think the only German loanword I know is schadenfreude
Yeah I dunno. It’s gross. I found one at work unfortunately. He started going off on 15-minute cities and I’m just like, “Dude, you’re telling me an insane misinterpretation of the concept. I’ve heard it. I like you, but stop with this shit. I’m just trying to work.”
So this is the first time I’ve heard of the 15 minute city concept, especially as a bad thing. I live on a farm but if I wanted to move to the city… 15 minutes to everything sounds great. Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?
My ex lives in Moose Jaw and that’s a pretty good description of it, it’s 15 minutes drive from edge to edge and it’s honestly a really nice little city. No traffic jams and you can also walk or bike most places you want to go, as long as the weather permits.
The idea is that you’d be able to walk or bike to all your necessities - Doctor, Grocery Store, etc etc - within 15, reducing the need for cars.
A 15-minute city would describe a neighbourhood in a larger city, really.
They’ve somehow turned that in to “you will not be allowed to leave your 15-minute city”
The counter argument is simply “who profits from you believing that?” I got a couple people to drop it by turning the conspiracy theory around on them.
The thing is, I believe it. I have to no proof, but 15-minute cities would totally cut in to oil and car manufacturers profits and they’ve been known to do that kind of thing before. 🤷🏻♂️
Lead poisoning with the boomers and christofacists funding the Conservatives up here. Keep them dumb so they can further attack healthcare and other Canadian values so they can turn us into Americans.
That’s true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.
That doesn’t mean the danger has passed or that our “death from disease” rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.
That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we’ll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we’ll still need all the long term care programs that aren’t being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we’ll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.
On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it’ll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.
So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn’t going to be all that much fun for millions of people.
Is it though? It’s an omicron subvariant that doesn’t seem to be any worse that its predecessors and the annual booster update is likely to get authorized in a few weeks.
This is the new normal. Covid mutates like flu, and each year will have covid and flu shots in the fall.
I vaguely remember reading that long COVID is really chronic fatigue syndrome or similar. Basically it can happen after any infection. Doctors haven’t been able to figure out what causes it largely because there hasn’t been enough data. It’s not until COVID came along that they’re taking it seriously.
Not sure if that’s more or less reassuring though. I guess personally I find it reassuring that it’s likely not something COVID specific.
I mean you need only look at the people in your daily life to realize there aren’t many people who care anymore.
Simple things like wearing a mask are off the table for the vast majority.
That’s because we literally don’t know much. EG.5 has only had 183 sequences submitted to GISAID, and EG.5.1 has had 3400 sequences submitted. This means we only have about 3600 cases confirmed as EG.5, but it’s growth rate since May is crazy fast. 10% of sequences submitted to GISAID by the end of July were for EG.5, compared to 0.02% in May.
Part of the problem is that people have stopped going to the doctor when they can just do a COVID test at home, so we are less able to track individual strains and calculate things like transmission rates. When’s the last time you heard the phrase “contact tracing”?
sick right now in Ireland (can’t be sure but we’re exploding with this variant)
for me, fatigue, stuffed & runny nose which is making me cough. on day 1 I had a headache but only for that day. I had a fever for about 6 hours. sneezing, gastro fun.
Wife has a dry cough. she had a wicked fever with chills. also gastro fun, which is fun for me by proxy.
Geez that sounds pretty rough- I hope you’re able to get out of Florida asap.Good luck w/ the covid, also. I kid, I kid.
How’s it going? I was essentially symptom free day 5, and today, day 6, if I popped into existence with no memory right now and sometone asked me if I was sick I’d say “nope”, although I’m taking it extra easy because I understand pushing yourself through the accute infection is highly correlated with long-haul symptoms (mailnly persistant fatigue)
Yeah pretty much same! Today I woke up a bit meh, but slept a few hours and woke up like it never happened. I’d say 2 days of lead up, two days of full blown illness, and then more or less fine. A bit of drainage.
I’m in a musical right now and we open tonight, so the timing couldn’t have been better. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in Florida for a bit. Trying to do my part to de-shitify it but it’s an uphill battle.
I know you didn’t ask, but I’m not sure it’s safe to go singing in an enclosed space. The 5 day self isolation is for economics, not health. If you knew you were getting other people sick who would get other people sick, would you still do it? No need to answer me, I was just kind of wide-eyed when you said you were going to go be in a musical 5-6 days after you first got sick.
No that’s valid and I’m with you 100%. I raised these concerns to the people actually putting up the show and they apparently aren’t in a position to be able to cancel or postpone.
I’m taking all the precautions I can to avoid spreading it. Double mask the entire time and isolating myself when not on stage. But I agree with your point. Best would be to not do it at all. But I can’t very well just refuse to do it, a lot of people worked really hard and spent money to put this up, and if they want to go ahead with it after I’ve tested and informed everyone, then so be it.
“I don’t know that it’s time to worry about this (EG.5) just yet. We know very little about this new variant. There’s currently no evidence to suggest that it causes more severe illness. And the CDC is indicating that it does appear to be susceptible to COVID vaccines, which is good news.”
From an AMA gathering on July 26, (speaker is Andrea Garcia, JD, MPH, vice president, science, medicine & public health, American Medical Association)
Less serious than what? If my aged brain remembers correctly, Omicron severity is comparable to the original strain, only making it less serious than Delta. As I understand it, the primary factor in reduced severity was that vaccines were available and most people got the vaccine.
Okay when are we gonna be done with omicron? We got alpha, delta, then we hit omicron and just stopped, now we just get omicron v2 and omicron v3. We need some new ideas, when are we gonna get the xi variant?
I dunno if we need to worry in Canada. There’s been almost no deaths al associated with COVID in a while now. Worst case, people get hospitalised but that’s it. We’ve built a pretty good social immunity thanks to vaccination.
It’s the other countries who don’t have our resources that are more at risk. We need to send them vaccines so the can immunize themselves properly.
1.4 of 38-odd million is absolutely not rare, it’s nearly 1 in 50. The US figures are even worse. For something to be considered medically rare, it needs to be at most 1 in 10,000.
Ah yes, you’re right. There are potential lifetime effects to COVID. I forgot about those. A couple of friends of mine have been permanently affected with various problems like asthma since catching it.
I think if we get a yearly immunization shot for influenza and covid we should be fine. And people should just quarantine if they’re sick, COVID or not. I hate it when people go to work sick when they have the option to work from home. Especially in an office setting. Like haven’t they learned anything? Why spread the disease to all your colleagues?
Agreed. Both don’t last forever. I got it 4 times, for reference, since I seem to have come a across as an antivaxxer. Either way though I think the pandemic proper is over.
Unfortunately as well, there is likely a much higher percentage of nutjobs who think vaccinations are a conspiracy, who are also probably the type of people who don’t use RAT tests and who prioritise themselves over others (so even if they suspect they are sick, they’ll go attend major events, etc).
Whilst 2 people I know genuinely are good people who don’t believe in vaccination (which again, was at least likely partially facilitated by our dumb PM at the time and Trump), another two I know (who legally SHOULD have gotten vaccinated for work actually, since they work for the government), are two of the worst self-centered people I know
This last one was named after a famous battle Droid
(But really the new strains seen are given greco alpha numeric names. There are a bunch of strains that get named that we don’t hear about because they Peter out.)
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !canada@lemmy.ca
Huh. I did notice a sudden wave of infections, including me. I wonder…
EG.5 -> G.5 -> 5G
YOU KNOW WHAT CAUSED THIS!!!
Hahaha!
Good one!
Primes
1,2,3,5
E + 3 = H
G+ 5 = L
5 -2 = 3
Half Life 3 confirmed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A new COVID-19 variant has emerged, serving as a reminder that the coronavirus continues to mutate and spread around the world, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
The World Health Organization (WHO) added EG.5 to its list of currently circulating variants that are under monitoring on July 19.
The latest data from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that EG.5 makes up approximately 14.6 per cent — or one in seven — of all COVID-19 cases in the U.K.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at University Health Network in Toronto, said he expects cases of EG.5 to pop up in Canada soon, if they aren’t already.
Some of the best defences against COVID-19 have been and continue to be masks, vaccination and good ventilation or air quality in indoor spaces, Bogoch stressed.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Idk what people are so worried about, I’ve been assured that the pandemic is over and we beat covid in
2020202120222023It’s kinda taboo to name it after places now. No more Spanish, Hong Kong, Wuhan flu.
Another few months and we’ll have beaten it for 2024 too!
I thought this was pretty clever and funny, nicely done:)
“it’s only for a few weeks! Flatten the curve!”
COVID-19 is now endemic, like influenza. However, we do have vaccines so every 6-12 months when we get a booster shot we can get a bivalent vaccine that contains some of the latest variant to help prevent serious illness. This allows us to recover much more easily, reduce transmission, and ultimately eliminate the clogging of hospitals.
The real danger is from people who refuse to vaccinate because they’re going to be more susceptible to the endemic virus and its subvariants.
The problem is that the latest vaccines don’t contain the latest variant - they’re always going to be behind the curve because it takes time to develop them after a new variant emerges.
For example, here in NZ, we’re still giving people the bivalent mix designed for the omicron BA.4/BA.5 variant (and the ones before it) which is now about 2 years old and hasn’t been seen here for about 9 months.
There’s a non-zero level of protection from those vaccines, but they’re not keeping up with the virus in real time.
This is another major reason I have not stayed current with my boosters. What is the point of using something based on a strain that has not been seen for 9 months, and is in fact 2 years old? It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me.
Sure it will offer SOME ability to improve the immune response to a CV19 variant given how short-lived the protection from natural infection and vaccination seems to be, but it certainly isn’t going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. I’m still going to get horrifically sick again.
From an overseas perspective I can tell you that practically nobody in Australia is taking any form of booster. Elderly populations are, particularly those in a care setting but the general population are completely uninterested.
This is a combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once and not being particularly badly affected, and most people having had either direct or indirect experience of negative side effects from vaccination, and the now predominantly negative media coverage of the vaccination campaign.
If there is a marked shift towards increased mortality in any given strain, Australia is fucked. Thankfully that does not seem to be the trajectory of the virus at this time.
I remember when Americans were sending their kids to CoViD parties, thinking it was like the Measles.
It ended horrifically.
Talk to a doc and follow those recommendations.
Just a note that “Measles parties” are also likely to end badly.
Nah, the real danger is the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it. Long Covid is only beginning to be recognized for the mass disabling event it is, and the response of governments from the municpal all the way to the federal levels have been to let it rip, stop testing, shut down tracking sites, repeal mask mandates, and declare victory. Literally doing the thing they rightly mocked Trump for suggesting.
Now over a million people have died in the US alone, and our government has decided to force everyone back to work to sustain commercial real estate profits, and in the process condemned us all to a lifetime of body-destroying reinfections by a virus who’s key traits are infectiousness and rapid evolution.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it’s a crime of unprecedented scale.
When I ask actual doctors, they disagree. Then we laugh about how anti-vax karen-convoy it sounds.
anyone with significant experience (even just as a patient) in the medical system can tell you doctors are not infallible. most medical professionals i’ve encountered in my area don’t even mask anymore and haven’t for about a year and some change now. of the ones that do, most are still just wearing surgical masks (useless)
This isn’t entirely true though. Yes they are far from perfect and yes they are worse than better masks, but they are still better than nothing and do actually reduce transmission.
you’re correct, i was being a touch hyperbolic. iirc it’s like 23-27% effective or some shit, maybe in the 30s (it’s been a while)
that said, a solid 70% of the doctors i see masking have it either under their nose or on their chin so
Are these the same doctors who insist on taking a wait and see approach to Paxlovid? If so, I’m not sure they should even be allowed to call themselves doctors.
The idea that reinfections would be benign was inspired by politics and vibes. There’s plenty of evidence that reinfections are bad. It’s a virus that can damage all our organs, brain included, cause micro clots, vascular damage, and harm the immune system itself by trashing our t-cells, and it’s a virus we can catch multiple times a year and is mutating so rapidly we are having trouble knowing what to target when we develop yearly vaccines.
It’s kind of a problem if reinfections are bad for us when we are counting on perpetual infections to “build our immunity”.
US dept. of Health and Human Services https://twitter.com/HHSGov/status/1659589815887712256
New Zealand government covid updates https://nitter.kavin.rocks/covid19nz/status/1670943608428539905#m
Another study showing cumulative risk upon reinfection https://nitter.kavin.rocks/i/status/1688769749868490752
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-repeat-covid-infections-increase-the-risk-of-severe-disease-or-long-covid/
Yes it did. If all countries did this around the world many people would have starved to death. It’s simply not ethical. Without eliminating it everywhere it would spread eventually - just look at Australia.
You can’t even enforce a total lockdown in western countries without excluding “key workers” that would allow the virus to spread anyway.
Nothing you have suggested would work in the real world. The only solution to prevent this is new medicines and prophylactics. We have developed some of these in the form of antivirals but they are not used enough to stop the spread.
We already enjoy a level of health unknown to people 100 years ago even with COVID-19. There will always be new diseases and this is the nature of evolution unfortunately. Previous generations had to accept this, now we have to as well. I hate to say it but probably our current level of health and healthcare isn’t sustainable without further advances thanks to antibiotic and antiviral resistance. We will need to change our approach going forward using things like bacteriophages, increased sanitation, healthier life styles, less cattle antibiotics, and new treatments to keep up.
Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn’t have stopped it anywhere else.
Now, what I do agree with is that the response could’ve been a lot better, and many lives would’ve been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.
Everything is beyond fucked man, I know, you’re probably preaching to the choir. Theres no reload, no save, no do over. Find happiness the best you can and pray you die before we turn from sideways to upside down.
That’s my plan at least.
You have said it very well.
In Australia even our absolute harshest lockdowns made allowances for millions of “essential” industries.
Unless you owned a business installing styrofoam nuns, you kept going to work in some capacity.
We’re an island for fuck’s sake! We could have stopped this thing in it’s tracks. But no, the flights must keep arriving. Business must business.
Dayjob Orchestra fan right there!
Me too. Was driving tow truck then. No passengers allowed and driving was a gd dream come true … :)
You’ll correct me for sure, but I remember Aus was banking on its internal vaccine and didn’t want to lock down in vain while the vaccine was imminent; only when that vaccine failed to be effective and on time did they have to start Plan B, and that put everyone way behind.
(I’m paraphrasing my nephew who lives there, so it’s second-hand at best).
But they seemed to start out with a fine, conservative fuck-the-plebes plan, at least.
That’s pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.
Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for ‘diplomatic’ purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53776285
This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.
At the beginning of the pandemic someone very correctly predicted that America was going to do the plague the same way we did Vietnam: enthusiastically for a little bit, then once we realize how expensive it is we were gonna give up, run away and loudly declare victory.
Funny, I was just going to mention Vietnam; they did the lockdown as it should have been. Closed borders, no gatherings, the whole shebang. And wouldn’t you know it; economic damage from the pandemic was extremely minimal because of all the people (read: workers, read: customers) that didn’t needlessly die or were permanently disabled.
This was the case with Cuba as well. They did the damn thing right and ended up in a position where they were exporting doctors and techniques to the rest of the world.
Yup. Cuba even sent personal to Canada to help us out, all because we’ve imported and adopted the American denier mindset. :(
The number of people ignoring this is terrifying. Study after study keeps showing its a problem.
There’s going to be a massive accumulated health crisis in 10-20 years where a quarter of the population has a wrecked vascular system. On par with diabetes, but in this case untreatable which is going to kill millions far earlier than they should.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate to explore my own anxiety about this situation.
My fears are exactly the same as yours.
The part that I cannot reconcile is this: I took my initial doses of vaccine, I had a booster. I did all the right things in terms of minimising exposure and the risk to myself and my family.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
My entire family have lived the same experience.
Most people’s thinking in my circle now seems to be: why would I expose myself to the risk of cardiovascular complications by being continuously vaccinated, when I am still going to get infected and face those same cumulative cardiovascular risks again.
From a risk management perspective if I am not in a disease cohort likely to face mortality from infection, am I not reducing my total risk by simply reducing my exposure to the spike protein overall and electing to skip vaccine boosters altogether? I am going to get infected either way, that much is clear.
I am massively concerned about the long term consequences of repeated infection with this pathogen but it seems the world has moved on from giving a fuck.
I don’t know a single person who has received a booster in the last 12 months and given the shift in media narrative here it is not hard to see why.
The numbers are still in favour of getting vaccinated. Complications from the vaccine are as close to zero as any medical procedure could be. The complications from raw-dogging COVID are far greater, regardless of your cohort. Turning a life-threatening infection into an inconvenience is what the vaccines do. If your concern is minimizing total risk, getting a COVID booster each year with your flu vaccine is the way to go.
The best informed benefit/risk of subsequnt boostes is cohort based.
https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-2023-booster-advice
If you are unsure what’s the best choice for you, you should chat with your doctor.
Your link is broken or the site is down.
One can do all the right things and still win the bad lottery. It’s about reducing risk on the whole so all our chances are reduced.
I remember when vaccines rolled out. I would have to sit down and go over it. But there was a time where I stopped having to process bodies for the morgue at my job and that was a nice change. We still saw lots of sick people, they just didn’t die nonstop. So vaccine all thr way.
Gonna be honest from the perspective of a current critical care nurse, as long as you didn’t end up proned face down in the hospital with a ventilator stuck down you and paralyzed on Nimbex and losing a lobe of your lung then you got out lucky.
I have a damn near knee jerk reaction to talking about covid in which I tell people that “still got it” that as long as they didn’t need serious medical intervention then they should be fucking thankful for not having to endure whatever the fuck fever dream of Hell existed in the first two years of covid in most hospitals in the US. Shit was and still is fucked beyond fucked.
edit: this is also not at all meant to downplay/ be mean everyone that got covid and luckily avoided a vent, many that contracted “mild” covid suffer from long covid with no end in sight.
there being a few 2000 year old roman bridges doesn’t mean they were good at building bridges that last a long time, they built LOTS of bridges and a couple out of tens and tens of thousands survived
survivorship bias
You’re assuming the booster is giving you the same (or anywhere even close) to the vascular damage caused by catching the virus. As far as the studies I’ve read, the vascular impact from catching COVID is dozens of times worse than a booster.
You say “Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows” The doctors know, that’s why boosters are being offered to everyone for free in Canada.
This is one of the reasons why Canada, which has a much higher vaccination and now booster rate than the US is doing better than the US with it’s abysmally low booster rate. Canada is losing about 50 people per week right now, the US is still at around 2000 (40 times higher, despite only having a little over 8 times the population)
What the world does or doesn’t do is completely irrelevant to your personal choices. If they all jumped off a bridge to their death, would you do it too? I’ve continued masking in crowded public areas, boosted regularly (last Monday was my most recent dose), kept my kids masked at school, boosted them regularly too, none of us have had COVID at all. Make your own choices.
Have you been boosting every 6 months? I’ve been mulling over getting another booster or waiting till the new one comes out. I’ve been more up to date than most, but last one I got was when the bivalent vaccine came out.
Mostly, we had to adjust the schedule to happen a little earlier to get the kids done a few weeks before school starts back up each fall.
It was never claimed to stop you getting it. Same as many vaccines it doesn’t give sterilising immunity.
But it’s completely possible it stopped you dying or going to hospital.
The vaccine causes almost no damage but COVID 100% causes massive damage if you aren’t vaccinated.
They literally claimed that it prevented symptoms in 90+% of people. This is an outright lie.
Preventing symptoms is not the same as not catching it.
Also sources please.
HA!
I should be so lucky. My last booster was over a year ago, and there are no plans to introduce them for any but the oldest and youngest people in Britain.
Oh, man, the UK was an absolute disaster for getting vaccinated. In 2021 in my area there were literally crowds of young people at “walk-in” vaccination centres getting turned away and being told to wait for another 1-2 months. Meanwhile about 3 elderly patients were getting the shot per hour and the Guildhall looked empty besides.
My friends in other countries were vaccinated months before me. Ended up getting all my boosters outside the UK because they couldn’t give a fuck about anyone under 65.
Isn’t that just UK politicians in general ?
At this point probably everyone has had omicron or one of the later less harmful variants. The trend of becoming more transmissible and less harmful is normal for corona viruses. Im with most people in being apprehensive about getting additional boosters. Why do you feel there’s a real danger?
I am one of the lucky few that has never had it.
I never had a noticeable case of it either. I think I probably had an asymptomatic case
How come Canada still has no many anti-vax/lockdown nut jobs still?
Ours went away faster than the virus, what’s going on in Canadian society that they’re still falling for that shit? Kinda had more respect for youse than that.
Canadians are, more than ever before, influenced by American media and social media and that includes the dogmatic and polarizing rightwing anti-science narratives rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. We’re being absorbed into the American weltanschauung since the advent of the Internet and our culture diluted. You can see it in our politics.
Is weltanschauung actually a word you Canadians use?
I want to say yes, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it, and my vocabulary’s not bad :P. Kudos to @NathanielThomas for sharing it! I think the only German loanword I know is schadenfreude
Yeah I dunno. It’s gross. I found one at work unfortunately. He started going off on 15-minute cities and I’m just like, “Dude, you’re telling me an insane misinterpretation of the concept. I’ve heard it. I like you, but stop with this shit. I’m just trying to work.”
So this is the first time I’ve heard of the 15 minute city concept, especially as a bad thing. I live on a farm but if I wanted to move to the city… 15 minutes to everything sounds great. Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?
My ex lives in Moose Jaw and that’s a pretty good description of it, it’s 15 minutes drive from edge to edge and it’s honestly a really nice little city. No traffic jams and you can also walk or bike most places you want to go, as long as the weather permits.
That’s the point of a small town.
The point of big cities is to concentrate capital so that a few people can become exceedingly wealthy.
The idea is that you’d be able to walk or bike to all your necessities - Doctor, Grocery Store, etc etc - within 15, reducing the need for cars.
A 15-minute city would describe a neighbourhood in a larger city, really.
They’ve somehow turned that in to “you will not be allowed to leave your 15-minute city”
The counter argument is simply “who profits from you believing that?” I got a couple people to drop it by turning the conspiracy theory around on them.
Generally this is the only tactic that works against brain worms
The thing is, I believe it. I have to no proof, but 15-minute cities would totally cut in to oil and car manufacturers profits and they’ve been known to do that kind of thing before. 🤷🏻♂️
That’s an intriguing point. Before the car, city living was nearly unheard of.
“We don’t have the funding that the US government does… How exactly do you propose Canada will fund the creation of 15 minute cities?”
Are you quoting someone else or asking me?
Canadian cities only have to zone stuff appropriately and provide infrastructure. It’s not that wild of a concept.
Lead poisoning with the boomers and christofacists funding the Conservatives up here. Keep them dumb so they can further attack healthcare and other Canadian values so they can turn us into Americans.
Pandemics over, actually
@Flinch @girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
No.
LoL
That’s true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.
That doesn’t mean the danger has passed or that our “death from disease” rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.
That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we’ll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we’ll still need all the long term care programs that aren’t being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we’ll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.
On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it’ll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.
So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn’t going to be all that much fun for millions of people.
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Can we go back to naming them after countries? I was looking forward to the Micronesia variant
Well that’s concerning
Is it though? It’s an omicron subvariant that doesn’t seem to be any worse that its predecessors and the annual booster update is likely to get authorized in a few weeks.
This is the new normal. Covid mutates like flu, and each year will have covid and flu shots in the fall.
Long covid implications are worrisome, multiple reinfections are one of the few things we know are not good
Agreed. I guess I’m saying is that it’s no more concerning that what is currently floating around. It’s what most epidemiologists expected to happen.
I vaguely remember reading that long COVID is really chronic fatigue syndrome or similar. Basically it can happen after any infection. Doctors haven’t been able to figure out what causes it largely because there hasn’t been enough data. It’s not until COVID came along that they’re taking it seriously.
Not sure if that’s more or less reassuring though. I guess personally I find it reassuring that it’s likely not something COVID specific.
Thanks for being the only voice of reason. Everyone else is just like “ya but we don’t die so who gives a fuck” attitude.
I’m glad some people are still looking at COVID as a whole.
I mean you need only look at the people in your daily life to realize there aren’t many people who care anymore. Simple things like wearing a mask are off the table for the vast majority.
I think a lot of us are, I just feel folks who are thinking big-picture aren’t the type to make a lot of noise on the internet about it, ya know?
It isn’t, really. Barely newsworthy, but it’s something.
No indicator on severity of this strain in the article
This is my issue with the article.
Headline: Here’s what we know about EG.5 so far
Body: Apparently not much. We uhh, know the name of it? Severity, how contagious it may be, symptoms, breakthrough rate…like umm, anything??
That’s because we literally don’t know much. EG.5 has only had 183 sequences submitted to GISAID, and EG.5.1 has had 3400 sequences submitted. This means we only have about 3600 cases confirmed as EG.5, but it’s growth rate since May is crazy fast. 10% of sequences submitted to GISAID by the end of July were for EG.5, compared to 0.02% in May.
Part of the problem is that people have stopped going to the doctor when they can just do a COVID test at home, so we are less able to track individual strains and calculate things like transmission rates. When’s the last time you heard the phrase “contact tracing”?
Source: https://GISAID.org/lineage-comparison and also I work in COVID monitoring.
sick right now in Ireland (can’t be sure but we’re exploding with this variant)
for me, fatigue, stuffed & runny nose which is making me cough. on day 1 I had a headache but only for that day. I had a fever for about 6 hours. sneezing, gastro fun.
Wife has a dry cough. she had a wicked fever with chills. also gastro fun, which is fun for me by proxy.
Sick right now in Florida, my symptoms pretty closely match yours. Killer headache, scratchy throat, congestion, and fatigue.
It started with being tired on Saturday, and the full brunt hit Monday. Feeling a bit better today. I didnt get much gastro stuff fortunately
Geez that sounds pretty rough- I hope you’re able to get out of Florida asap.Good luck w/ the covid, also. I kid, I kid.
How’s it going? I was essentially symptom free day 5, and today, day 6, if I popped into existence with no memory right now and sometone asked me if I was sick I’d say “nope”, although I’m taking it extra easy because I understand pushing yourself through the accute infection is highly correlated with long-haul symptoms (mailnly persistant fatigue)
Yeah pretty much same! Today I woke up a bit meh, but slept a few hours and woke up like it never happened. I’d say 2 days of lead up, two days of full blown illness, and then more or less fine. A bit of drainage.
I’m in a musical right now and we open tonight, so the timing couldn’t have been better. Unfortunately, I’m stuck in Florida for a bit. Trying to do my part to de-shitify it but it’s an uphill battle.
I hear you.
I know you didn’t ask, but I’m not sure it’s safe to go singing in an enclosed space. The 5 day self isolation is for economics, not health. If you knew you were getting other people sick who would get other people sick, would you still do it? No need to answer me, I was just kind of wide-eyed when you said you were going to go be in a musical 5-6 days after you first got sick.
No that’s valid and I’m with you 100%. I raised these concerns to the people actually putting up the show and they apparently aren’t in a position to be able to cancel or postpone.
I’m taking all the precautions I can to avoid spreading it. Double mask the entire time and isolating myself when not on stage. But I agree with your point. Best would be to not do it at all. But I can’t very well just refuse to do it, a lot of people worked really hard and spent money to put this up, and if they want to go ahead with it after I’ve tested and informed everyone, then so be it.
Other articles has said it’s nothing special. Not any deadlier.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2023/08/06/eg51-nicknamed-eris-is-new-covid-19-variant-spreading-monitored-by-who/?sh=3c989b585941
Presumably as a descendent of omicron… It is probably easier to catch and less serious. But you’d think they’d address it…
“I don’t know that it’s time to worry about this (EG.5) just yet. We know very little about this new variant. There’s currently no evidence to suggest that it causes more severe illness. And the CDC is indicating that it does appear to be susceptible to COVID vaccines, which is good news.”
From an AMA gathering on July 26, (speaker is Andrea Garcia, JD, MPH, vice president, science, medicine & public health, American Medical Association)
link to PDF here
Less serious than what? If my aged brain remembers correctly, Omicron severity is comparable to the original strain, only making it less serious than Delta. As I understand it, the primary factor in reduced severity was that vaccines were available and most people got the vaccine.
Okay when are we gonna be done with omicron? We got alpha, delta, then we hit omicron and just stopped, now we just get omicron v2 and omicron v3. We need some new ideas, when are we gonna get the xi variant?
Someone get the marketing team on this. We need fresh new ideas!
It’s 2023 I stopped caring after a year of BS
Don’t worry. CoViD still cares about. And if you don’t care about yourself, CoViD will use you to go meet your friends.
Sorry you’re bored of responsibility.
How does following every protocol and mandate make me not responsible?
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I dunno if we need to worry in Canada. There’s been almost no deaths al associated with COVID in a while now. Worst case, people get hospitalised but that’s it. We’ve built a pretty good social immunity thanks to vaccination.
It’s the other countries who don’t have our resources that are more at risk. We need to send them vaccines so the can immunize themselves properly.
I mean there’s plenty to worry about besides death. I don’t understand why people discount all the other potentially life altering effects of COVID.
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Long term symptoms aren’t rare. It’s at least one in ten people. And a lot of people are in denial and refuse to accept they’re scewed.
You know I really wish I hadn’t caught COVID at some point and lost the ability to sleep properly at some point.
That sucks :( What happened?
Long COVID. It’s one of the neurological problems left over.
Welcome to long covid, where your body has adrenaline attacks at random points in the middle of the night.
Not downplaying what you’re going through but that sounds like anxiety attacks. But I’m no doctor so what do I know.
That’s so weird though. Did you get any kind of diagnosis from a doctor? Have you tried any medication?
1.4 of 38-odd million is absolutely not rare, it’s nearly 1 in 50. The US figures are even worse. For something to be considered medically rare, it needs to be at most 1 in 10,000.
Ah yes, you’re right. There are potential lifetime effects to COVID. I forgot about those. A couple of friends of mine have been permanently affected with various problems like asthma since catching it.
The death count is low because immunity is up. If we relax on things like vaccinations or quarantine orders it will come back.
There’s already an uptick from wastewater testing for the past few weeks according to CBC.
Seems like we need to be a hair more responsible for a while.
Do people even follow quarantine orders anymore? My employer stopped giving us covid sick days.
I think if we get a yearly immunization shot for influenza and covid we should be fine. And people should just quarantine if they’re sick, COVID or not. I hate it when people go to work sick when they have the option to work from home. Especially in an office setting. Like haven’t they learned anything? Why spread the disease to all your colleagues?
Don’t we have herd immunity now? Having caught it recently is just as good as a vaccination.
herd immunity relies on people maintaining immunity. if you can get the vaccine, you should, regardless of if you’ve caught the virus.
Agreed. Both don’t last forever. I got it 4 times, for reference, since I seem to have come a across as an antivaxxer. Either way though I think the pandemic proper is over.
Unfortunately as well, there is likely a much higher percentage of nutjobs who think vaccinations are a conspiracy, who are also probably the type of people who don’t use RAT tests and who prioritise themselves over others (so even if they suspect they are sick, they’ll go attend major events, etc).
Whilst 2 people I know genuinely are good people who don’t believe in vaccination (which again, was at least likely partially facilitated by our dumb PM at the time and Trump), another two I know (who legally SHOULD have gotten vaccinated for work actually, since they work for the government), are two of the worst self-centered people I know
Covid cases are rising everywhere right now, stay safe out there lemmings!
Who the fuck is in charge of naming these?
This last one was named after a famous battle Droid
(But really the new strains seen are given greco alpha numeric names. There are a bunch of strains that get named that we don’t hear about because they Peter out.)
It takes more than fast servomotors and bad programming to kill a Jedi.
Look up pangolin COVID naming.
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