Living with Covid plan

[Buddy Bradley]

It seems the risks of COVID are currently similar to the risk of flu.

I don't recall any time when the news was telling me that 1 in every 20 people in the country currently have flu.

 

[teqniq]

Saw this yesterday. Bridgen unsurprisingly shows himself to be a complete scumbag:

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I don't recall any time when the news was telling me that 1 in every 20 people in the country currently have flu.

Doesn't mean this hasn't been the case, mind you.

There were more than 40,000 excess deaths in the UK in the winter of 2014-15 due to the flu, but if you weren't working in health services, that crisis might have passed you by. (Not saying that's the right attitude, but we are hyper-sensitive to covid deaths atm in a way that we never were to flu deaths.)

 

[bimble]

Contact traced as a close contact, which is good to know. Almost certainly the flight I was on couple days ago.
The message still says to do LF tests for a week, Will the tracing service stop too ?
ETA of course this is happening

 

[elbows]

Doesn't mean this hasn't been the case, mind you.

There were more than 40,000 excess deaths in the UK in the winter of 2014-15 due to the flu, but if you weren't working in health services, that crisis might have passed you by. (Not saying that's the right attitude, but we are hyper-sensitive to covid deaths atm in a way that we never were to flu deaths.)

I'm supposed to be taking a break but as that subject is of special interest to me I'll just make this one additional response today:

The figure of 43,900 excess deaths for that winter isnt even for the whole of the UK, its the figure for England & Wales!

But when drilling down into the detail, note that respiratory diseases were only attributed to 36% of the excess deaths! Thats the sort of thing I often moan about, because it implies not just that there are a mix of other factors beyond flu, but that our ability to attribute cause of deaths properly is likely severely flawed. eg if people are killed by knock on effects and not the most obvious signs of respiratory distress, the cause of death gets lumped into another category.

Winter 1999/2000 death excess is somewhat easier to attribute more directly to influenza because their estimate influenza-like-illness rates were espeially high that winter, but even in the following ONS report on the excess deaths in 2014/15 we see signs that they know influenza is a big factor. For example they talk about the dominant strain being a H3N2 type in 2014/15 and contrast that with H1N1-dominated winters. They speak of how H3N2 is especially deadly to older people, and how vaccine effectiveness that winter was estimated to be just 34%. They make mention of the higher flu rate estimates for 1999/2000.

I'd really like to be able to directly compare and contrast Covid ONS infection survey estimates such as '1 in 20 people had covid that week' with historical estimates of influenza prevalence, but I fear I cannot begin to do that properly due to how weak our traditional sentinel surveillance for influenza is compared to the systems we built to monitor Covid levels. I will see if I can find some work on this at some point though, because its important to this discussion that people have some sense of how many people get influenza in a bad inflenza year compared to how many people are getting covid.

The source I used for the 2014/15 excess mortality details:

Excess winter mortality in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics

Excess winter mortality in England and Wales, by region, sex, age group and local authority.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[2hats]

Saw this yesterday. Bridgen unsurprisingly shows himself to be a complete scumbag:

Aside from exposing Bridgen's true colours, this also illustrates all-too-common misunderstandings about the virus, omicron in particular, even amongst some clinical staff, that (of course) the media blindly propagates and never corrects.

At the time of writing there is no evidence to demonstrate that omicron is intrinsically milder than all previous VOCs (severity perhaps reduced somewhat compared to delta, but still similar to alpha and early type).
DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp2119682.

The majority of the [surviving] population, immunocompetents, have developed degrees of immunity following either recovery from infection or vaccine mediated exposure to antigen, or both. For that subset of the population the infection episode can be (is more often than not) mild-to-moderate so we see an overall lower risk of serious disease and death at the population level.

The clinically [extremely] vulnerable - the immunosuppressed, the immunodysfunctional, the immunosenescent - and the immunonaive (including many vaccine refuseniks) are all still exposed to similar* degrees of high risk as they previously encountered in this pandemic. 1000/week (in the UK) aren't dying mild deaths.

* For many, higher and increasing risk as the aforementioned sub-population increasingly pretend the pandemic is over, albeit modulated to some degree by developments in mAbs and antiviral treatments.

 

[2hats]

Even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study* shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure and stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease.

What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.

* DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01689-3.

Heart-disease risk soars after COVID — even with a mild case

Massive study shows a long-term, substantial rise in risk of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, after a SARS-CoV-2 infection.

www.nature.com

 

[Yossarian]

With scientists saying ominous things about the BA2 subvariant and warm weather still some time away, the only way dropping all restrictions and phasing out testing seems to make sense right now is if Johnson's talk about "levelling up" was code for eugenics.

 

[prunus]

It seems the risks of COVID are currently similar to the risk of flu. I don't support mandatory quarantine of infected persons for that risk level. I didn't before the pandemic, and I don't see any reason to change that view.

It does not seem that way. Long-term serious damage to multiple organ systems, including very significantly the heart and circulatory system, is showing up in admissions and mortality in recovered covid patients, seemingly not highly correlated to severity or vaccination status. While such things are not unknown with influenza infections, indications are it’s very much more prevalent with covid.

We are not going back to ‘life as it was before’. At best we are going on to life as it was before but with the risk of serious debilitating long-term illness being at least several times higher, for everyone, forever. There is a powerful wishful thinking drive to believe otherwise. But that’s all it is, wishful thinking.

To dispense of all prophylactic measures, especially masks, which have very little downside, is the height of foolhardiness.

 

[Aladdin]

Its terrifying for those of us who are very high risk.
2 years cocooned has been very tough. The vaccine was supposed to be the way out of this but now its looking like some people who are immunosuppressed / immunocompromised are still very high risk..I will be very wary of going out meeting anyone even if I have a mask.

 

[gentlegreen]

I'm nearly 62, but if anything have a slightly over-enthusiastic immune system - which isn't remotely comparable I know, but I don't want any of this - I suppose the difference is that even once the "boosters" are no longer available and my antibody factories are no longer on alert, my T-cell immunity should get going reasonably quickly on any virus that takes root in my URT and gets very far in terms of replicating and spreading and hopefully before the possibility of cytokine storms and the like ...

I suspect that when I was working I was always giving my immune system virus fragments to chew on before a live virus took hold pretty well every year.
Now that I've retired and am living alone and have had not caught anything in 2 years, I would feel I had "failed" were I to get so much as a "cold" so I will be masking in supermarkets for a long time to come.

On another thread, 1 to 10 cases per 100k was mooted as an acceptable risk for the likes of me to start taking chances ...

I confess that I am tending to look at multi-generation families I know - including my own as some sort of litmus paper.

I certainly see into the future it will be very important to choose our real life friends and encounters carefully ...

Perhaps it's time for someone to start an organisation for those of us who take viruses seriously and produce an easily-identifiable FFP2 mask.

 

[Griff]

Walking round Columbia Road flower market yesterday and it was absolutely rammed, just like pre-covid levels of people.