china hasn’t gone to war since the 70s and it had run into a stalemate at taiwan three times. i get that we are scared of china, but i think it’s more like xi to always play the long game, and not walk into a dumpster fire of own making like putin.
plus it just might be easier to annex a bigger chunk of siberia than taiwan. not economically obviously, but territorially.
Three years and a half-dozen post-covid trips to disneyworld, and I’m officially off of team Novid after a week in which I have had basically no unmasked human contact besides with my immediate family who are all negative. FML.
Edit: I frequently teach and stopped wearing masks while teaching (I am generally not that close to people in the front row). I found it difficult to project. That has to be where I got it. Oh well.
Darn kids swapping all that spit.
I got the bivalent booster in October. Do I get it again? I’ve been pretty diligent so this would be my sixth covid shot.
Sorry to hear that, good luck! Hopefully you come through it quickly and unscathed.
I got mine in November and I’m planning to re-up in May. It’ll be #6 for me as well if I stick to the plan.
Very interesting study from The Lancet on long covid. They compared the risk of various types of long COVID to those from other respiratory infections. My main issue here is they don’t say which other respiratory infections. So, are we talking all minor stuff? Or are we talking possibly some other heavy hitters in there?
It’s looking like part of what’s going on here is that there’s long everything and we never really knew it/talked about it. COVID is worse than the other respiratory infections on most stuff, but not like CRAZY worse. For example, the hazard ratio for cognitive deficit after covid vs. other respiratory infections is 1.36.
However, cognitive deficit is one of the ones that does not return to baseline.
One thing I’m curious about is this table. It shows the incidence rate of each issue with covid and other respiratory infections two years after the infection. In parenthesis is the death rate in that group. Some are like scary high. My first thought, which I hope is right, is that correlates strongly to people already having some sort of serious health problem. Otherwise it would likely mean that, for example, cognitive deficit correlates strongly with other serious complications.
Am I reading this right? After two years, 6.4% of people who had covid still had cognitive deficit. However, of the people who had cognitive deficit at some point in that span, 16.7% had died??? And that number is 27.1% with other respiratory infections?? Like, this is saying that 27% of people who get cognitive deficit after stuff like, say, the flu are dead within two years? And that’s among adults, not older adults. But the numbers are much worse among older adults for cognitive deficit outcomes.
Also, since the control is the other respiratory infection group, we’re not seeing a comparison here to people who didn’t get sick. And none of this stuff would have a 0% incidence rate for them, right? So if the incidence rate after two years for cognitive deficit is 6.4% for COVID and 5.5% for other respiratory infections, it’s still X.X% for nothing at all, so the actual risk of it from covid is lower than the numbers we’re looking at here, right?
What are the latest guidelines about how often to get shots? Is this sanctioned or is it a “oh hey I haven’t gotten this shot yet and don’t have my card” sort of thing?
Wife and I are both so far doing well from our close contact over the weekend. She thought she might be getting sick yesterday and took a test but it was negative, feels fine today, I’ve felt fine. Hopefully this keeps up!
There is no current guidance that allows for a second bivalent booster. You’d have to lie.
Yeah you’re definitely right. Although a lot of psychiatric epidemiology numbers quote annual prevalence but this is only incidence of new diagnosis so would probably have to dig around a little to get an accurate number to compare to. Also depends how different things group disorders
It does but that likely partially because they include delirium as a cognitive deficit which really is more a marker for 1) how medically sick someone is and 2) how “bad” their brain was prior to getting sick. It’s also short term (hours to days). So you expect a lot of people who get delirious to die regardless. So delirium is included in cognitive defect but that is not at all what your worrying about as far as longterm brain fog
Also for any the dementias you’re going to see a lot more diagnosed after an illness because lot of people had the dementia already but diagnosis never made it in chart and now they suddenly getting a lot of medical care so someone will write it down for first time
Pretty good listen clovis posted in UP. It’s remarkable how the discourse over this changes when you actually talk to real scientists.
I 1000% agree with this but I think it is economically obvious for the Chinese to colonize Siberia. They don’t even need to officially take it from Russia, just send a few million people a year to settle there.
The UK is basically making it impossible to get boosters at all if you’re under 50 without health risks. I wouldn’t be shocked if that’s the direction we’re headed next. But, we’re going to be out of the emergency declaration thing in mid-May, right? Then isn’t it just whoever wants it (and will pay for it) can get it?
Guess I’ve got some supplemental reading to do to see if they break anything down by actual infection. Like it’d be quite the curveball if long pneumonia is accounting for like 90% of the long “other respiratory illnesses” and flu is approximately zero.
Right, I haven’t heard a lot of stories about people in their 30s 40s 50s getting dementia after covid, so I’m guessing that’s skewing hard to the 60+ portion of 18-65. But, you never know.
I’m mainly concerned from that list about the Mild cognitive impairment, somnolence, other symptoms involving cognitive funcitons/awareness.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for taking a look at that, I’m going to have to keep digging on it. It’s making me feel like loosening precautions could be on the table sooner than later.
I’d like to finish removing this obesity risk factor, though. I’m down 44 pounds since late August, seems kind of silly to rip the mask off ~4.5 months before getting out of obesity range in terms of bodyfat% after being super careful for 25 months.
Just being ventilated carries serious long-term health problems IIRC, I think we see that kind of thing from other respiratory viruses.
That is a good example of the larger issue at play here is that it’s common for people to get really sick and have “long term” issues afterwards but that’s very different than what people think of when they say “long X” which is that you have a mild illness then some sort of long term issue afterwards.
Also challenging things is “brain fog” is what young people rightfully worry about but it’s a symptom, not a diagnosis so like seen in this study they have to mash together a bunch of diagnoses. And to me most those diagnoses don’t have much to do with the thing people are worrying about which in my mind is probably most similar to the subjective concentration/cognitive impairment seen in Major Depression.
supplement for that
