Get your updated boosters, folks. They offer 60% protection against hospitalization, relying on the old boosters gives you ~none.
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I agree with the conclusion but covid admissions have remained quite rare despite seeing it a lot
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I think there are three things at play here. First, the baseline is no longer an unvaxxed population that is naive to the virus altogether, so having 40% as many hospitalizations as baseline is a LOT different than it was in 2020-2021.
Second, the 1% or so of the people who were at the intersection of most vulnerable and unlucky have died since 2020, which has a similar but smaller effect.
Third, you’re in an area that probably has a very high uptake of vaccines. California is running at about 1.25x the national average, and I assume the big metro areas are higher than that.
All that said I’m quite curious what happens if the booster rate stays at like 20% the next couple years and the other 80% gets farther and farther out from their boosters. My theory is that we’ll see a statistically significant but societally insignificant increase in hospitalizations and deaths, but we’ll also see lot more bad “mild” cases that convince a lot of people to get boosted. I think a lot of people made their decisions by comparing the side effects of their last shot with their last experience with covid, which was likely in relatively close proximity to their last shot. They decided the side effects were annoying enough and the illness was mild enough that it wasn’t worth boosting, and who has time to read up on long covid and such and factor that in… But I think we’ll see more people experiencing the “knocked me on my ass for a week/gave me fevers and sweats three nights in a row/gave me the worst sore throat of my life/etc” version of covid when they’re farther and farther out from a booster, which will make them boost the following year.
Boy, I think you’re ascribing rationality to people when in fact most people are really fucking stupid.
Also this all a bit of a blur now, I had to think really hard to remember if/when I got this booster
Also, we really need better vaccines.
Was that rationality? I thought it was base level avoidance of suffering.
These were an incredible scientific advance and society bungled it. I think the better ones are having trouble getting funded quickly because there’s not much expectation of enough people taking them.
2nd rapid test in a month, still novid officially, this current bout just felt like an aggressive cold or a relatively mild flu, only symptoms, mid grade fever and snot.
Old school mercury thermometer was reading 38.8 for 102ish, but the oral one was 100.5 at its worst. I feel like maybe i was keeping the room too warm, being under blankets, was having making the fever worse, as soon as I opened a window and chilled out finally fell alseep at like 6 am and at least got a couple of hours in.
Don’t get me wrong, these vaccines are amazing. But, you’re right, the same reason our flu vaccines are shitty is the same reason these will probably be shitty like the flu vaccine. Not enough money in developing really expensive vaccines and updating them quickly when so many mouth-breathers won’t take them (even though they’re fucking free with insurance!)
How sure are we that this is the problem? Hundreds of millions of people worldwide take these vaccines. Is that really not enough to turn a profit? How many more people do they need?
Not very I guess, but I thought I read something about vaccine research being inadequately funded because it’s not a profit-generator like erectile dysfunction drugs or cold & flu medicine that doesn’t work.
End of an era, someone who interacted with me posd today, I did a 3rd test, it’s happening.gif. Reasonably fit male 42, do I try to get into urgent care tomorrow and snag a paxlovid script?
I’ll defer to our resident doctor but I’m pretty sure there’s way more upside than downside with Paxlovid. The taste thing sucks big time, but hard candies and fla-vor-ice helped a ton, as did trying to time meals to be right before doses so the flavor wouldn’t be impacted as badly. On the other hand, pounding sugar isn’t great when sick. Sugar-free hard candies/mints for the win.
You may be able to get Paxlovid via a teledoc with a picture of your positive test. It worked for us.
A little bit of sugar helps the medicine go down. Chase it with a lemon ice. Worked for me.
Or rather- when the taste started. Iirc it was about 1/2 hour.
I suspect there is more to it than this. Take Pfizer’s pneuococcal vaccine, for example.
I think they got that approved so could be given again even if you previously had other pneumonia vax so gotta imagine that sort of sales not going to sustain?
Here is some data for 2017 and 2024 projected. Seems about the same.
Now we don’t have all the years in between. As I was looking through things, In 2015 they also had approx 5 Billion in Sales and also in 2022. I’ll see if I can find a source with all in one place as looking each year up individually is a pain.
How many years of 5 Billion plus sales do they need for this to have been massively profitable? So far we’ve identified 5 years in which that happened. And there are very likely several more. Seems like a wildly successful product.
Yeah surprising to me that sales so stable, guess maybe people weren’t banging down the doors to get it initially
Actually found an article that describes what you’re talking about. Doesn’t look like the reduction is going to be that much:
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