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General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat

My cousin got covid in early August.
Got double pneumonia and was hospitalized. Now covid has fucked up his liver and he is having to have fluid drawn from his abdomen.

The really sad thing is he didnt get vaccinated because his missus is a pharmacist who is antivaxx. She got covid at the same time and got over it in a week. He on the other hand is likely to be in hospital for another month at least and is waiting to be transferred to another hospital that has a liver specialist onsite.

The vaxx works.
My 82 yr old dad got covid while in hospital fir heart problems...and he was just at the best stage of vaxx.. just 2 months after his jab. He had a high temperature for 2 days and some sniffles. He is still showing +ve on swab tests but feels fine.


As for mask wearing?
Its no skin off my nose to wear a mask. I wear them everywhere except my own home. Mostly because covid is on the up again since schools reopened and people are not being as careful as they were.
 
Yeah, me either. Wore one in Malaysia back in June, but don't think I've worn one in the UK since April or May.
 
Been in an orthodontist office recently and everyone was wearing one. Also in a hospital for a day procedure and everyone was wearing one there too except one particular cantankerous old patient. I wore one when I flew to Dublin a month ago, on the plane and in the airport waiting. Not many other people were wearing masks there. Otherwise I've not been wearing one for a while now.
 
Buddy Bradley said:
I've worn one when going into medical facilities because they still have the signs up, but then I feel a bit silly because literally nobody else in the entire building is wearing one, including the staff.
Click to expand...
I work in a medical facility, and we have those signs. I, too, am often the only one wearing a mask, AND I DON'T GIVE A SHIT :mad:

Oddly, nobody ever says anything.
 
ms starfish has finally caught it. Very, very achey & a hideous headache. She tested positive yesterday so back to mask wearing in house & sleeping in separate bedrooms, which we did when i had it in June. A bloke in her work went home with it on Monday but decided to come into work yesterday as it was 'a faint line', the prick.
 
I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?

Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?
 
MrCurry said:
I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?

Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?
Click to expand...

It depends what sort of protection you mean. Protection against infection is rather fleeting in many cases, protection against mild disease gets a nice boost but wanes eventually. Protection against hospitalisation and death also wanes but the true extent of that waning has much to do with the state of an individuals immune system and their other risk factors such as health conditions and age. For example one possible version of the truth is that t-cell based protection is long lasting after the initial 2-3 doses of vaccine, but older people that are more reliant on the antibody level of defence due to their t-cell based immune system not working so well in older age are far more in need of the boosters to bump up their antibody protection.

And in terms of truly getting to the bottom of these things and building a better picture over time, real world data always takes ages to accumulate, we only learn the truth about a particular booster vaccines impact on the particular strains of covid in current circulation once huge numbers of people have been placed in harms way during a wave. And although various bits of knowledge imporve as the years go by, the analysis also gets more ocomplicated because we've not got an increasingly complex set of immune histories out there. ie people have increasingly complex histories of being infected with particular covid strains in the past, increasingly complicated vaccination histories involvig different types of vaccines and different timing between doses and between vaccination and infection.

So take for example the impact that the new dual vaccines have against current strains compared to the original vaccines. You wont get a tidy straight answer about that, and there will be some contradictions between different evidence and analysis. For example some early evidence suggested the updated vaccine might not make much difference compared to the original vaccine, but this evidence was not really based on a sufficiently large number of people. But Moderna and Pfizer have an interest in proving that the updated vaccines offer a useful boost in effectiveness, and are keen to use any data they can muster that points in that direction to make impressive claims. And the extent to which we will actually get to the bottom of this in the fullness of time is unclear. Too many variables change over time to draw the simplest conclusions, and in a country like the UK where the aim is for the vast majority of autumn 2022 booster vaccine doses given to be the updated vaccine, we wont have a large enough pool of data about people who were given the older vaccine with which to compare and contrast how they fared against upcoming waves compared to those who got the new vaccine. Might be able to work around that by comparing studies from different countries, but different countries also have different histories of past vaccine timing and which past covid strains their populations were most exposed to.
 
For example, JCVI said the following about the updated vaccines based on the evidence they had at the time, some months ago. They werent clear that there would be a notable advantage to the updated vaccines at the time, but they still thought it was worth trying to use those ones anyway. The extent to which evidence has improved massively since then is not hugely clear to me at this particular moment, I think its still a mixed picture with much uncertainty. And we never know what strains will come along in future to test the vaccines in a big new way.

JCVI has reviewed data from studies undertaken by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna on bivalent Original ‘wild-type’/Omicron BA.1 mRNA vaccines, and from the COV-BOOST clinical trial. These studies indicate that neutralising antibody levels against Omicron after vaccination with a bivalent or monovalent-Omicron vaccine are marginally higher than after vaccination with a monovalent wild-type vaccine (references 2, 3 and 4). Reactogenic events were similar to those observed in clinical studies of antecedent wild-type mRNA vaccines. There is no data on the clinical efficacy of these variant vaccines against currently circulating strains, or on their durability of protection.

The committee considers that the likely clinical benefits arising from only small differences in neutralising antibody levels between bivalent and wild-type vaccines are highly uncertain, with no clear advantage against other non-Omicron variants either. These uncertainties are increased when set in the context of on-going evolution of the SARS-CoV2 virus and the possibility of the emergence of future new variants of concern over winter 2022 to 2023 (reference 5).

There are no head-to-head trials comparing different bivalent Original ‘wild-type’/Omicron BA.1 mRNA vaccines. From the available data, JCVI considers that there are limited differences between bivalent Original ‘wild-type’/Omicron BA.1 mRNA vaccines in relation to immune responses generated against Omicron or wild-type virus (references 2 and 3).

Modelling analyses indicate that in adults aged 65 years and over, there may only be a small additional benefit in terms of the number of hospitalisations prevented by using a variant vaccine compared to a wild-type vaccine. Any potential benefit from a variant vaccine over wild-type vaccine would be abrogated if substantial delay to deployment was incurred as a result of the use of variant vaccines. A summary of the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) analysis is in the annex.

These considerations will be kept under review as new data emerges and new vaccine products become available.
Click to expand...

From JCVI statement on the COVID-19 booster vaccination programme for autumn 2022: update 3 September 2022
 
And here for example is recent news about Modernas updated claims of effectiveness, with this particular article being sure to point out some of the caveats with the data they've used:


That sort of article is also quite clear about how a lot of this stuff is seen as a business story, a story of Modernas sales forecasts etc. And I already see other articles about Modernas stock price surging on that news. For that and other reasons its generally better to wait for other sources of data about vaccine effectiveness to emerge other than those the companies use in their sales pitches. Such other studies also benefit from much larger amounts of data, but as I pointed out in a previous post, as the immune history of people and populations grows more complicated as the years go by, the number of caveats to studies conclusions can also be expected to grow.
 
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In terms of broader UK studies of vaccine effectiveness, the vaccine surveillance reports attempt to keep an eye on this sort of thing:

www.gov.uk

COVID-19 vaccine quarterly surveillance reports (September 2021 to July 2024)

Data on the real-world effectiveness and impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk

But it takes time to accumulate data. When a new booster campaign starts, and new strains become dominant, it can take quite some time before any of their analysis and the studies they link to to start to be able to come up with even low-confidence estimates. For example these days there is some BA.4 and BA.5 specific stuff covered, as well as the impact of previous boosters, but evidence about the latest booster campaign and the updated vaccines isnt going to show up much there yet.And due to large reductions in mass testing for covid in the UK, it will probably be much harder to come up with decent estimates about reductions in symptomatic infection using mass UK data in future. They will still be able to do estimates in other ways (eg measuring antibody levels in individuals) and they will still be able to come up with estimates of protection against hospitalisation and death.
 
MrCurry said:
I’ve not been paying attention I’m afraid, so sorry if this is a question which has been answered before. How long does the protection against omicron given by the newer ”dual” vaccines such as the updated Pfizer one last?

Previously it was said the protective effect against newer covid variants faded within a few months. Hopefully the updated vaccines do better than that?
Click to expand...
Degrees of protection against severe disease, from a wide range of variants, in under-65 immunocompetents with hybrid immunity or completion of primary series plus booster likely can be measured in years (more so for the former cohort). For others (older/immunosenescent/immunodysfunctional), [widely] varyingly less so.

Don't confuse that with efficacy to [any] infection which unsurprisingly wanes sooner (timescale of months), particularly for those with infection-only or vaccine-only mediated immunity; less so for those with hybrid immunity. Note that individual antigenic exposure histories and HLA genetics will modify this picture.
 
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elbows said:
www.gov.uk

COVID-19 vaccine quarterly surveillance reports (September 2021 to July 2024)

Data on the real-world effectiveness and impact of the COVID-19 vaccines.
www.gov.uk www.gov.uk
Click to expand...

Also note some of the effects of study/data limitations that show up when they try to analyse severe hospital cases, eg:

There are likely still some incidental admissions in our data, in particular among younger adults, which may explain the higher vaccine effectiveness against hospitalisation in 65+ year olds compared to 18 to 64 year olds
Click to expand...

All the same, the following is an example of the sort of picture they have come up with via the past Omicron waves. I havent seen equivalent conclusions based specifically on the updated vaccines that include Omicron yet:

Vaccine effectiveness against a range of hospitalisation outcomes with the Omicron variant has been estimated using a test-negative case control study design (Table 1, Error! Reference source not found.). Among 18 to 64 year olds, VE after a booster peaked at 83.9% before dropping to 45.5% by 25 to 39 weeks after booster vaccination. VE against the most severe outcome measured (those on oxygen/ventilated/on intensive care) ranged from 92.4% down to 53.7% following a booster vaccine. Among those aged 65 years and older, VE against hospitalisation peaked at 89.5% before waning to 60.7% at 40 weeks or more after receiving a booster vaccine. Protection against hospitalisation requiring oxygen/ventilated/on intensive care ranged from 92.4% down to 66.8% for older adults (Table 1).
Click to expand...
 
I've had 6 vaccines now.
And EVERY time my lfts go further off. I get lfts every 3 months so tracking it became easy.
Last vacc was 6 days before a blood test. The results were not ok.
I've had autoimmune hepatitis for 22 years. By 2020 I had just about developed Fibrosis...20 years on.
Roll on 2 years and suddenly I'm at stage 3 Fibrosis. I am dreading having another vacc in 6 months.
 
8ball said:
Do you have any info on this person's scientific credentials?
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She always attaches links to any papers she cites and apologises if she gets it wrong.
I subscribe to Rebecca Watson largely because she ISN'T Richard Dawkins...
 
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gentlegreen said:
She always attaches links to any papers she cites.
Click to expand...

It’s not the papers that are the problem in this case. More that, while she points out that individual immunity debt (framed as immune system damage) as per anti-vaxxers is not a real thing, she is happy to leave the viewer with an “immunity debt isn’t real” impression.

She also doesn’t understand the origin of the term, or it’s non-garbled meaning, which I’m going to put down to politically-motivated blinkers.

I’ll have a dig in that paper about there needing to be more to what is being seen than infection lag, because she glosses over that pretty quickly.

Edit: actually there’s no citation there at all. She just says “experts say..” in the video and that’s it.
I don’t doubt an expert has said that at some point, but a quick Google shows up nothing.
 
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To be honest I have short attention span and posted it pretty much for comment by people who know about this stuff...
 
gentlegreen said:
To be honest I have short attention span and posted it pretty much for comment by people who know about this stuff...
Click to expand...

I can’t see that she has said anything scientifically wrong (though I can’t find evidence for one claim), and I agree with her about the currently misused term.

She’s just not clear that the term has a legitimate use (I don’t know whether this is deliberate or not). Though granted it was in v limited usage til recently.

The fifth reference from the below article interests me, but I don’t have access right now - might give sci-hub whirl later in case it’s there…

www.thelancet.com

Quantifying the RSV immunity debt following COVID-19: a public health matter

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) is the most common cause of lower respiratory tract infection in children younger than 5 years. In 2019, a meta-analysis estimated that RSV was associated with 33 million acute lower respiratory infection episodes and 3·6 million hospitalisations for acute lower...
www.thelancet.com
 
How reliable are LFTs for omicron infections? My wife has had fever (38.5C), sore throat, runny/blocked nose, faintness, etc since Friday, but an LFT test yesterday showed no line. Just wondering if that can be considered definitive or if it’s still possibly omicron, as she hasn’t had a covid vaccine shot in about a year?
 
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