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Covid 44: The Sickening


Mlle. Zabzie

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35 minutes ago, Deedles said:

Was delighted to register my 6 yo this morning. My mum had treatment for lung cancer this year, and my brother, father and sister in law all tested positive after going to the pub on St Stephen’s day. (26th). Fortunately she hasn’t appeared to get it. I believe there were industrial quantities of bleach and separate bedrooms / isolation. 
 

We did cancel a family holiday to Lanzarote on the 21st. We had been due to fly on the 29th for a week, but felt Omicron was too unpredicable at the time. Glad we did cancel as would have found out about Dad around an hour before flight was due. While we are all fine so far ( and either J or I are taking a test daily), I think we would have been very anxious had we gone

Good to hear that your mum seems to have avoided it!

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1 hour ago, Iskaral Pust said:

The FDA finally approved the vaccine booster for kids aged 12-15.  We’ll get an appointment for our son this week.  He likes my strategy of Friday evening to allow time for the fever to pass.

My daughters will be at 6 months right at about their 12th birthday.  I'm really interested to see what the guidance looks like for them.  Do they get a new series of full doses?  Do they get one full dose at that time?  

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2 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

My daughters will be at 6 months right at about their 12th birthday.  I'm really interested to see what the guidance looks like for them.  Do they get a new series of full doses?  Do they get one full dose at that time?  

My wife and I were literally just wondering the same thing for our oldest who is twelve very soon...

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Teachers Union in Chicago might be locked out of the online teaching networks.  As covid soars among the teachers and staff, they want to return to distance learning and the poobahs say no.  Just like here, even though there aren't enough teachers and staff to keep a lot our school open right today.  Mayor says there are plenty of substitute teachers, while requesting ANYONE, yes, ANYBODY, who has ever had a teaching license at any level please contact NYC Education and come on down!  At the same time, always a significant number of students and their parents refuse masks, are anti-vax, and threaten the teachers with violence -- as they do medical personnel.  WTF are those who are supposed to be leaders THINKING?  Neither our national education nor health system can survive this level of determined blind stupidity.  At the same time the governor tells us our hospitals are in really big trouble from the overwhelming numbers sick enough with covid to be hospitalized, which leaves everybody else without any treatment at all.  Additionally, the governor says, this is just getting started.

But we need the teachers in the classroom.

But we won't mandate a negative test for everybody before entering the schools.  The private schools do.

https://gothamist.com/news/we-are-going-keep-our-schools-open-adams-promises-covid-cases-shatter-records

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2 hours ago, Zorral said:

Teachers Union in Chicago might be locked out of the online teaching networks.  As covid soars among the teachers and staff, they want to return to distance learning and the poobahs say no.  Just like here, even though there aren't enough teachers and staff to keep a lot our school open right today.  Mayor says there are plenty of substitute teachers, while requesting ANYONE, yes, ANYBODY, who has ever had a teaching license at any level please contact NYC Education and come on down!  At the same time, always a significant number of students and their parents refuse masks, are anti-vax, and threaten the teachers with violence -- as they do medical personnel.  WTF are those who are supposed to be leaders THINKING?  Neither our national education nor health system can survive this level of determined blind stupidity.  At the same time the governor tells us our hospitals are in really big trouble from the overwhelming numbers sick enough with covid to be hospitalized, which leaves everybody else without any treatment at all.  Additionally, the governor says, this is just getting started.

But we need the teachers in the classroom.

But we won't mandate a negative test for everybody before entering the schools.  The private schools do.

https://gothamist.com/news/we-are-going-keep-our-schools-open-adams-promises-covid-cases-shatter-records

I come out a different door than you do.  We need to be doing everything we possibly can to keep kids in schools.  The data are overwhelming that virtual is absolutely no substitute and that the harm to kids - including a recent study showing the huge learning and behavioral gaps coming out of Belgium (which shut down less that most parts of the US).  And in the US public schools provide many, many, more social services than in lots of other parts of the world.  I’ve spent a fair bit of time discussing this with my sister, who is a public school administrator (and classroom teacher if needed for subbing) in the school system of a small city.  She thinks it is perfectly apparently what the right answer is, and she certainly has convinced me that this point, the public health balance is in favor of schools being open unless we are facing the zombie apocalypse (and we’re not, to be clear).

I acknowledge that NYC private schools are requiring testing to come back (took my son this morning; daughters are testing on their first day back from break).  I’m actually not sure that is the right answer.  NYC Private schools are doing whole population tests once a week and for re-entry.  It’s incredibly expensive, and I’m not sure it’s a good allocation of testing resources, especially as most NYC private schools are vaccine- and mask-required and are also going to require boosters (inevitably).  (I’m also not sure it is a good use of private school resources from a fiduciary perspective - my guess is that we’ll be at sampling soon and then it will fall away).  

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2 hours ago, Mlle. Zabzie said:

I come out a different door than you do.

I come out of the same door through which the teachers are leaving: ill-paid, badly treated by everyone, are expected to keep putting their lives on the line for your kids, with no supplies, no support, and constant abuse, and told they can't have a job unless they put their lives and their own families line on the line for everyone else's convenience and economy. Teachers spend more time now doing janitorial work than teaching, are paying for toilet paper and hand soap -- because we can't allocate public funds for these essentials.  And somehow the assholes running shyte like Adams think you can plug in just anybody to teach anything at any age group, and even if you haven't put foot inside anything resembling a classroom in 15 20 years, are elderly and far more likely to have a a breakthrough covid case, vaccinated even so, and then far more severe.  WHAT THE HELL IS ANYBODY THINKING?

 

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Whoot!! Booster shot appointment at 10:00 am on Friday. A message popped up on my phone saying there was a broadcast message from my doctor’s office and I checked it right away in case it was about booster shots and it was. The message was offering appointments for today and tomorrow but when I called in I was put on hold for five minutes and I’m sure all the appointments between today and Friday got booked.

Here in Ontario Pfizer is tagged for people under 30 and Moderna for those over 30, but I asked for Pfizer for me and my brother  and that’s what they’ll give us.

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Two things are worrying me right now.

1) As you may know, hospitalizations are rising steeply in many countries (including pediatric). Unfortunately there is little clarity regarding the exact situation. One news outlet is straight out calling you to panic, the next one is saying that there is no reason for that because decoupling and mild.

It is very hard to get a clear assessment of the situation. At least from the distance. How many of these hospitalizations are incidental? How many are in-hospital infections? Age stratification? Vaccination status? Etc.

That after almost two year into the pandemic it gets that hard to get an assessment of situation is disappointing. I really hope that policymakers have better overview of the data, however it seems that news outlets are just trying to gaslight people towards particular behaviors, which is of course bad. People need reliable information to take their decisions, thinking that you can manipulate into compliance is not only morally wrong, but it will backfire in the end, as it had during the pandemic.

2) This one is more hypothetical. A new study on Omicron cell's entry and replication as well as immune evasion, in line with previous studies. However...

Quote

The SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron, shows rapid replication in human primary nasal epithelial cultures and efficiently uses the endosomal route of entry.

At the end of 2021 a new SARS-CoV-2 variant, Omicron, emerged and quickly spread across the world. It has been demonstrated that Omicrons high number of Spike mutations lead to partial immune evasion from even polyclonal antibody responses, allowing frequent re-infection and vaccine breakthroughs. However, it seems unlikely these antigenic differences alone explain its rapid growth; here we show Omicron replicates rapidly in human primary airway cultures, more so even than the previously dominant variant of concern, Delta. Omicron Spike continues to use human ACE2 as its primary receptor, to which it binds more strongly than other variants. Omicron Spike mediates enhanced entry into cells expressing several different animal ACE2s, including various domestic avian species, horseshoe bats and mice suggesting it has an increased propensity for reverse zoonosis and is more likely than previous variants to establish an animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2. Unlike other SARS-CoV-2 variants, however, Omicron Spike has a diminished ability to induce syncytia formation. Furthermore, Omicron is capable of efficiently entering cells in a TMPRSS2-independent manner, via the endosomal route. We posit this enables Omicron to infect a greater number of cells in the respiratory epithelium, allowing it to be more infectious at lower exposure doses, and resulting in enhanced intrinsic transmissibility.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.31.474653v1

So, Omicron is not only bypassing immunity and becoming the fastest spreading pathogen known to humanity, but also shows enhanced potential to infect other animals, including domestic avian species. Given the rapid spread of Omicron and difficulty to contain it,  these reversed zoonosis events might be happening right now in multiple chicken farms all around the world. Then what?

 

 

 

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35 minutes ago, rotting sea cow said:

1) As you may know, hospitalizations are rising steeply in many countries (including pediatric). Unfortunately there is little clarity regarding the exact situation. One news outlet is straight out calling you to panic, the next one is saying that there is no reason for that because decoupling and mild.

It seems pretty clear that both the "decoupling is happening, Omicron is milder" and "Omicron is a HUGE problem" arguments are mostly right.  Omicron is spreading at a dizzying pace.  In the US the previous high daily case count through November '21 was just over 300k.  Right now the seven day average is nearly 500k (we'll probably hit that today or tomorrow).  Hospitalizations aren't exploding at the same pace as cases, but they're still rising quickly, and there's always the lag between cases and hospitalization.  The worst for US hospitals will probably be the second half of January.  Considering that hospitals (particularly staff) are already under immense strain, I think that we will see wait times and triage at a level never seen in the past 2 years of pandemic. 

It is incredibly fortunate that the decoupling of cases and hospitalizations is happening.  It is very hard to measure exactly the degree to which this is reduced severity and how much is just the population getting more resilient to COVID than it was in the Delta wave.  But whether it's 30% or 50% or 70% less dangerous (probably somewhere in that range), that is still hundreds of thousands of people who don't need to go to the hospital who would otherwise have to. 

 

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I have a question and hope someone might know.   When the new variants come out, do the previous variants, like Delta and the original virus Covid 19 go away or are they still around and able to infect people?  Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this question.

thank you!

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28 minutes ago, LongRider said:

I have a question and hope someone might know.   When the new variants come out, do the previous variants, like Delta and the original virus Covid 19 go away or are they still around and able to infect people?  Thanks to anyone who can shed some light on this question.

thank you!

The answer is 'it depends'. But typically they still stick around for a while provided that there is fuel. And because Covid is transmissible to other animals, there is often plenty of fuel.

As a more concrete way of saying this, Omicron is very good at crowding out Delta in its own area - it is more transmissible, has a faster incubation period, and also has the added effect of providing the host good immunity against other Covid strains, including Delta. For places where they both are active I would expect Delta to die out quickly as it runs out of vectors of infection. But it may not die out completely there, and more importantly it would likely not die out everywhere. Other pockets of the world may have been exposed to Delta but not Omicron, and as long as Delta can circulate there long enough it can be reintroduced.

This is, by the way, why we occasionally get measles outbreaks in the US - because while the US does not have pockets of measles running rampant, that's not true for other countries and people can bring it along with them. Measles is also super contagious so it helps that, but that's why we get these occasional flare-ups. 

What is more likely is that we get something like what happened with Omicron (we think) - which is that an older variant goes zoonotic, starts spreading in animals, and then spreads back to humans some time later. Omicron is theorized to have done exactly this. We may see some future Delta variant in like a year's time that does something similar.

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48 minutes ago, Kalsandra said:

The answer is 'it depends'. But typically they still stick around for a while provided that there is fuel. And because Covid is transmissible to other animals, there is often plenty of fuel.

Thanks for the answer, very informative.  :cheers:

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Flurona………………… I seriously can’t with this shit anymore.

As for omicron, yes, it’s here, sewer samples show a rise in SARS-Cov concentration again. 

I read a couple articles about people stepping up to say that 4th and 5th vaccines are not a viable or sustainable solution to control the pandemic and this spark of reason makes me a bit less angry and unhappy. 

Father spent NYE at a hotel, he said he’d wait out the incubation period to see if he’s got symptoms and then get a booster if he doesn’t. (For the fun of it he did come to see me and sister on Monday) What are tests anyway? sister was at a house party for NYE and then she stayed over at my place for Sunday night and Monday. I do hope their luck lasts a few more weeks and my father can safely get a booster before he contracts omicron.

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4 hours ago, Fragile Bird said:

Whoot!! Booster shot appointment at 10:00 am on Friday. A message popped up on my phone saying there was a broadcast message from my doctor’s office and I checked it right away in case it was about booster shots and it was. The message was offering appointments for today and tomorrow but when I called in I was put on hold for five minutes and I’m sure all the appointments between today and Friday got booked.

Here in Ontario Pfizer is tagged for people under 30 and Moderna for those over 30, but I asked for Pfizer for me and my brother  and that’s what they’ll give us.

Looks like we're booster buddies. I'm also getting Pfizer at 10 on Friday, though you're an hour ahead of me. I'm curious what they're going to do with my laminated card.

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