In general true - but - another thing to keep in mind - there are times when (under a lot of environmental stress) we can have rapid mutations. This has been the case in the evolutionary past - and I won't be surprised to see some of that play out as more people get vaccinated.
My concern is colleges going back to in person learning for this semester. Locally Ithaca College did remote learning for the fall while Cornell was in person. Now IC is going in person while infections are much higher than the fall. I assume similar things are happening across the country. Seems as if infections will have to increase as a result.
If I were a private college, I would have a vaccine requirement. Proof of vaccination by fall entry, or you don't get to set foot on campus. They already a myriad of these for things like meningitis, etc. Precedent has been set.
Yep. I think after watching this for a year the one thing we can be sure of is it will surprise us. I hope I'm wrong and I hope the vaccine suffocates it but I think my hopes will be dashed.
Can't really blame you. Things have been so bad and always just as bad or worse than expected. But maybe we're due for a break. Continued stream of excellent news; this time the AstraZeneca vaccine: NO hospitalizations in the vaccinated group (vs. 15 in the placebo). And decent efficacy if you wait longer between doses. These vaccines continue to be remarkably effective. Obviously many of the trials didn't have a lot of exposure to the variants, so this will come down somewhat. (What solves a reduction in efficacy? More vaccinations!) Subscribe to read | Financial Times https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1356690406776451073?s=20 We'll await the word on that P.1 variant to knock us down a few pegs.
Interesting tidbit: I had an employee stay home because his wife had C19, and the Fed gave us a Federal Income Tax Credit for his wages. Our payroll company handled it for us automatically.
So, for those of you following my personal saga, there is a slight addendum now. You may recall that my wife got symptoms on Jan 14th, got a positive test on Jan 15th and spent almost a week in the hospital Jan 20-25... What I didn't mention before is that my daughter (who had pre-isolated) had come for a brief visit on Jan 12th and was supposed to be back at school but got stuck quarantining with us. She ended up developing symptoms and testing positive on Jan 25th right after my wife got back home... Thankfully she had mild symptoms and feels fine and is almost done with quarantine now. So, I had a negative PCR test on Jan 19th when my wife thought I must have brought it home asymptomatically... So my wife and her doctor are like "you must have brought it home asymptomatically" and already stopped being positive by the 19th... You may also recall that my doctor's office basically wouldn't order any antibody testing for me since they said it wouldn't really change anything on treatments, isolation, etc. So... my wife's doctor instead ordered me antibody tests to clear up that question to know if I already had it. I just got the results back. Surprisingly (to me) they are negative too. I have been living in a small 1 bathroom house for many weeks with 2 positive COVID cases right next to me and I still don't seem to have caught it?! I guess there is still a chance I could come down with it in coming weeks? Don't know how I made it this far...
This week I've had two patients receive the vax at their local grocery store pharmacy (different chains)!
I am not much of a Fox watcher, but this seemed interesting: Steve Hilton investigates origins of COVID-19, links to US commissioned research Factual or BS ?
My friend’s uncle lived in a small house with his family. One son got Covid - and passed it to the uncle. He was 80+ but in good health. Finally he passed away after a couple of weeks - all at home. The aunt and others at home never caught Covid. From what I remember only about 50% of family members seem to catch Covid.
I have a question that is way too politically incorrect to ask in real life. But since there are many medical professionals here, I'd like to take the chance to find out. This all stems from COVID research. I was going down the rabbit hole of how covid and obesity together makes the disease deadlier. Looking at how once ppl get to a certain size, the cardiovascular system can no longee supply enough oxygen to every part of the body so parts start dying off. Now, can the same be said about our nervous system? Our skin's feeling of touch. Is it possible that as your surface area expands while the amount of neurons stays constant, the feelings you get from the skin gets less intense?
Yep. There's the guy in post 1161 of Corona virus and oil crash who believes he's "invulnerable" now (I pointed to him before in this thread). The troll at COVID-19 aka 2019 (and 2020) Novel Coronavirus - Page 144 - My Nissan Leaf Forum who posts a lot of misinformation and has wacko views sure seems like he's not going to bother w/safety protocols now.
I didn't watch much beyond the first minute and a half. What has Dr. Fauci announcing the US rejoining WHO to do with the origin of COVID? Just a weird connect all the unrelated dots to come up with an insane conspiracy.
I believe related to the chronic inflammatory state that occurs with obesity. Why is obesity a risk factor for severe covid-19? In July Public Health England estimated that having a BMI of 35 to 40 could increase a person’s chances of dying from covid-19 by 40%, while a BMI greater than 40 could increase the risk by 90%.1 But why is this? Stephen O’Rahilly, director of the Medical Research Council’s Metabolic Diseases Unit at the University of Cambridge, also speaking at the briefing, said, “Two things happen when obesity occurs: the amount of fat increases, but also you put fat in the wrong places. You put it in the liver and in skeletal muscle. And that disturbs metabolism. The key disturbance is that you get very high levels of insulin in the blood.” This disturbance is associated with a range of abnormalities, including increases in inflammatory cytokines and a reduction of a molecule called adiponectin that directly protects the lungs, he says. It’s also possible that fat increases in the lung itself, which may disturb how the lung handles the virus, he adds. “The simple stuff you read about—big chest, big bellies, et cetera—is all grossly oversimplistic. What is really going on is metabolic, and we know that because if we look at genetic markers for the metabolic disturbance they are much more closely related to the bad outcomes than genetic markers for obesity itself,” O’Rahilly says.
Sitting in the waiting area after having just received my first dose of the vaccine (health care worker) in Norway. I got the Pfizer-BioNTech one (called "Comirnaty" in Europe at least). The world is moving forward!