Both my wife and I (double vaxxed for 5 months, not boosted yet although were just about to do so) caught Omicron-flavoured Covid in the lead-up to Christmas and it wiped us out each for 2-3 days each, with a combination of fatigue, aches, fever, and violent coughing. Certainly worse than any cold or flu we've had up until that point.
I still have a pretty nasty cough and a throat inflammation.
Aren't anecdotes fun?
This is why it has a vaccine. That prevents it, prevent seriousness of symptoms, and deaths. (yet a large percent of the population doesn't get it, and so 50k us citizens die each year)
Fever for 4 days, horrible coughing, vomiting, barely able to get out of bed. Flu vaccines certainly provide some cross-immunity when the vax isn't matched to the strain, but not too much. That's what my doctor told me when I complained to her (when she told me I had tested positive for flu) that I'd gotten the annual flu vaccine the preceding October. Depending on the strain vs the vaccine for that year and how big of a mismatch it is, it can really whip your ass despite the vaccine. That being said, the flu shot is a good idea for anyone, and crucial for seniors.
It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
> It's understandable that some are very concerned after or about getting sick but many of us, for our own sanity and psychological health, need to move on.
WWII lasted longer, and IIRC the US was under a restrictive civilian rationing regime that whole time.
I understand that people can get annoyed with various measures required for the public good, but that's not good reason to "move on" from whatever challenge that motivates them.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/non-us-setting...
I don't think 1% is "a small minority".
“7. Health/disability status is self-reported by study participants rather than clinically diagnosed. From February 2021 study participants were asked to exclude any symptoms related to COVID-19 when reporting their health/disability status. However, in practice it may be difficult for some participants to separate long COVID symptoms from unrelated exacerbation of pre-existing conditions, so these results should be treated with caution. “
I have absolutely non-zero desire to go through this every year, unlike my parent commenter though.
Would I be of a similar opinion as parent if I had a similarly asymptomatic-to-mild case? I don't know for sure, but I would hope not, because I wouldn't want to draw conclusions or base policy from just my anecdotal experience.
Other replies to me appear needlessly partisan jibes: I neither said nor implied anything about continued lockdowns and any such inference is pure projection.
Many people get sick every year or every other year. Their illness is like you described: 2-3 days of being "knocked out" and about a week to fully recover.
It's not that I "desire" to go through that every year or two, it's just life. I expect that's why people responded incredulously to your post: for them, getting sick occasionally is normal.
Each is likely an endemic version of something that was far more serious and deadly historically. Now it’s a minor or major annoyanace that is part of normal life. i bet eradicating covid would fall into the same bucket S eradicating any of the others. Something to aspire towards, but until then something to simply accept as normal and move on with our lives.
No, it doesn't. I've never felt "wiped out" from a typical cold.
This whole thread is full of anecdotes from people implicitly claiming that their experience applies to everyone, when in reality everyone's going to have different experiences with everything from colds to covid. Unfortunately, the latter has a much higher prevalence of seriously-worse side-effects (long-haul, ageusia, anosmia, death, etc) compared to the former.
Omicron now is no different. Ended up taking 3 days off work and am now back to normal capacity.
The 'privileged' comment is 'I got COVID it was just like a cold, I can do this every year ... so there's no more pandemic'.
Conflating their personal anecdote with the range of outcomes.
For now, we're still in a pandemic. Hopefully it will get better.
But, personally, I would like to avoid getting Omicron, as long term effects are still unclear: does "long Omicron" exist, does it affect vaccinated, and if yes how common and severe is it. There are some recent news about long Covid: it could be micro-clots.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2787741
Specifically, reporting long covid symptoms correlates with thinking you had covid, and not as much with actually having had covid.
Of course this doesn’t mean there aren’t some real severe cases out there, but it’s probably not nearly as widespread as it seems.
Anecdotes was precisely the reason why I posted it. See whom I'm replying to.
I think it's a fair critique that some lockdown measures go too far (particularly those with low efficacy, or "safety theater"), but it's more helpful to take about specifics, rather than "lockdowns good" or "lockdowns bad".
At some point (and maybe it's now?), we'll need to shift our thinking from "pandemic" to "endemic". COVID is going to be with us from now on, and will start to look more like flu season (viruses tend to evolve to be less deadly over time). And I don't say that to trivialize it; COVID has given me much greater awareness of the impact of the seasonal flu on the elderly and the immuno-compromised.
So did the vast majority of South Africans who aren't vaccinated.
I push the vaccine onto all my high-risk family members. I recommend it to anybody as a tool to introduce your immune system to the virus.
But let's be honest about this:
The vaccines in circulation were created to stop the Alpha variant. The immune system response is too targeted to antigens on the spike protein that are no longer present in the newly evolved, vaccine escaping variants. The vaccine is a useful tool for mitigating severe disease, but it's an outdated vaccine for a variant that no longer exists. Just like the a flu shot for the wrong strain tends to have some positive benefit when you catch a mismatched strain via some cross immunity, that's what we get from this vaccine. And guess what? We get it from infection induced immunity as well.
This is true of essentially all diseases except some very very rare exceptions that also tend to burn out very quickly. That's just how disease spread works, mild cases help the virus propagate. It's not like the virus is a mustache twirling villain that wants to murder you, it takes a fairly specific balance to obtain long term survival.
> It's almost like you've got an unfalsifiable way to always say "it worked!"
There's plenty of evidence to support the idea that "it works", and actually quite a lot of evidence to contradict the idea that "it doesn't work". Severe outcomes are blatantly more common, per capita, in people who are not vaccinated. The only way you get to any other conclusion is if you just plain don't trust any evidence presented, in which case there is literally nothing that is falsifiable for you and you may as well believe covid-19 is evil unicorns or something.
With omicron? I have not seen any data to support that.
That said, I don't think the null hypothesis is suddenly "vaccines do nothing" for some reason. It's clear enough it spreads more easily but that doesn't suddenly invalidate all prior assumptions about the vaccines' effectiveness against severe outcomes.
Edit: I'm very happy to be proven wrong about this but I feel like people should direct some of these replies more to the person I was replying to? I'm not the one who thinks vaccines do nothing here. :P
From the very beginning, the South African medical authorities were screaming that this variant was producing far fewer hospitalizations OVERALL (despite higher case numbers) than the delta/alpha did.
But because they are a third world country, and the news media in the West is biased towards bad news, they chose to treat this positive data as suspect. It the SA scientists had talked about how horrible it was, they would have taken it as gospel.
Those of us who were looking at the data knew otherwise.
I was amused at the sudden acknowledgement of natural immunity from previous infection in the very publications that have constantly claimed it doesn't exist, the minute it supported their need to keep fear mongering. Same with the younger population point, considering these very organizations have gone out of their way to obfuscate the vast risk stratification by age for most of the pandemic. The terrified 20-somethings wearing respirators in TikTok videos are a result of this.
Can you cite some of these alleged claims?
No it's not. Late November was too early. In mid-December we could start drawing conclusions. At this point things are becoming quite clear - we see similar trends everywhere, not just South Africa.
"The data suggests that three doses of vaccine provided an estimated 68% drop in the risk of being hospitalized with Omicron compared with people who were unvaccinated."
The way we know a medical treatment works is by looking at large scale data, controlling for variables, understanding mechanisms of action, and by approaching this science in good faith and not cherry picking data to fit one's own conclusions. There's a concept known as "Number Needed to Treat" that is probably relevant to your concerns here.
Vaccinations have historically been extremely effective for many diseases, and COVID is no exception. It's accurate to say (most) "COVID vaccines are highly effective at preventing severe disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 viruses". Omicron is so new that it's hard to be certain of anything regarding it right now, but we'll have a better picture in a few weeks. I do know that we're seeing many hospitals get overwhelmed across the US currently, and many medical workers are out sick with a COVID infection.
It's like we rolled a die once, and it came up 6, and now we're all forming our own special opinions on whether or not the die is fair. We just can't know. Of course, if someone rolled the dice 30,000 times and reported what they found, that would be great (wink wink).
Instead of using Calc 1 as a filter course, we should use Statistics instead.
(it's recent data, from NY, so - likely a lot of omicron)
See https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
Those "frickin" statistics? Or which ones?
> [The] vaccines likely (and evidence shows they) still have great protection against severe disease; …
This exactly what we were talking about above.
You can't extrapolate a population-level percentage from a single data point. Luckily, we've got information on hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of hospitalizations, and billions of shots.
Getting Covid or not is binary, yes, but the severity of the disease is on a spectrum. I can surely get a 15% less severe disease thanks to a 4-5 month old vaccination. Just like the severity of the disease depends on the viral load you're exposed to.
Of course there's no way of knowing what the exact percentage is for me personally, so in that sense you're right - it's just an average. But it's surely indicative, which is why you should be getting boosters after a specific amount of time, if you're in a risk group.
Yes, it's called 'Science'.
The vaccine absolutely helps to reduce symptoms, hospitalizations and death, even 5 months in.
There are millions of Omicron cases around the world measure up against various vaccinated and unvaccinated populations.
You would have thought that after 800,000+ deaths in the US people would have learned the importance of understanding statistics when dealing with these issues, especially on a place like HN, but pandemic has melted people's brains and now people are arguing anecdotes about what constitutes a "bad cold" and a "mild flu".
The funny part is that it doesn't really matter because it's not like we get to collectively vote whether the pandemic will end or not. It's pretty clear that, even given how extremely contagious omicron is, people don't care as much as the used to about a seasonal flu.
Even supposing covid sticks around and becomes "only" as bad as the flu, 10 years ago if your said it was fine to double the annual cases of flu and flu death people would have said that was insane.
Sadly if people haven't learned to reason about these problems correctly now, it means they very likely never will.
And if you told them that things like lockdowns and vaccine mandates were still in effect at that point, they'd say that was insane too.
No, that one is particularly weird right now. Vaccines are essentially mandated for many parts of life, and have been for my entire life. At multiple points throughout my development I've had to get required vaccines to do things. I had never even heard of antivaxxers until my late 20s. They used to be laughed at as an insane fringe group on HN.
Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated. I suspect if I predicted on HN that there would be strong resistance to a vaccine in the event of a global pandemic people would have laughed at me as ridiculous.
People don't like vaccines because they don't like the reality we're in and they strangely think resisting wearing masks and resisting vaccines somehow makes it less real. Unfortunately it has made things much worse.
Not ones requiring multiple jabs per year, seemingly forever (unless something like Omicron comes along).
Also not experimental ones rushed out with an EUA. Would you accept a mandate of the Chinese or Cuban vaccine, twice per year, for your whole family, for the whole foreseeable future?
> Nobody in 2011 would have thought it was weird that vaccines would be mandated.
You'd be very wrong. I remember very well that people were highly vocal against the H1N1 vaccine a decade ago and would've (rightfully so) lost their minds with mandates. Turned out the vaccine caused narcolepsy in kids[0], among other things. I never had that vaccine. My pregnant partner did (which turned out to be a lucky gamble).
> resisting wearing masks
Barring N95/FPP2+ masks it's mainly theater. It will be interesting to read all about this in a year or three once the heated political agendas have subsided.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic_vaccin...
It's so unprecedented and unpopular an idea that everyone - including Biden - were falling all over themselves assuring us they would under no circumstances mandate the Covid vaccine.
Also, see most of South Africa.
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/vaccine-effectivenes...
tl;dr Vaccine effectiveness around 15% for me at this point. So it was the natural immune response (gasp!), combined hospitalization rates across the world reflects this.
The same still applies as always: Vaccinate the risk groups.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1139035/v1
I hope your recovery goes well and you truly have zero issues.
I do apologize if you took that as fear mongering, I have a nephew in a similar situation as you and we are keeping an eye on him just in case anything does come up, not that we expect anything will.
Best wishes to your nephew.
https://www.ninds.nih.gov/Current-Research/Coronavirus-and-N...
One of the common long covid symptoms is "brain fog" though. Which I _think_ is probably metabolic or circulatory or something, but definitely affects the brain whatever the actual cause is.
Statistically, people who are healthy and vaxxed developing severe symptoms from Omicron are outliers. That is no comfort to you, and I can assure you I know how you feel on that front when people like me tell you the stats. My mother-in-law suffered a very rare (statistically) adverse event from her second Pfizer shot in May, which killed her. She was in her early 60s, and healthy, but suffered cardiac arrest 3 hours after her second shot, in the midst of a fever. It was an exceedingly rare event, but it was no comfort to us to be told that.
It's mainly that you provided a personal anecdote in one direction and I found it prudent to provide one in the other direction - one that echoes everything we've seen so far, cases skyrocketing, hospitalization rates barely nudging.
That aside, hospitalizations are going up faster than they have at any point prior so not sure where your "barely nudging" comes from.
Atleast here in slovenia, most of the mandates affect mostly the young and healthy... yes, theoretically neither 20yo bobby nor his grandpa can enter nightclubs, due to them being closed, but with such data, we could reopen nightclubs, let bobby party and do all the stupid stuff we were free to do at 20yo, and focus the effort at grandpa, so he gets vaccinated, gets the masks, has somone bring him food, so he doesnt have to go to the stores, subsidize a plan for a smartphone to encourage more videoconferencing instead of live visits, give out free tests at home, to detect the infection early, etc.
So you have milder symptoms because you're vaxxed.
It also sounds like you're not aware of a) the vaning efficacy of the vaccine or b) how little it does against Omicron.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/covid-variants-ma...
It's also possible for new variants to evolve in animal hosts, then spread back to humans.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/some-experts-suggest-omi...
It's not all about the individual.
The main benefit of vaccines is in reducing symptom severity. They only produce a limited and temporary reduction in transmission risk.
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02689-y
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
Leave the straw man out of this, disease is not a reflection of character.
This one, omicron, seems to mostly infect nasal passages and upper respiratory tract. The next, maybe after spending 2 years spreading across all the weasels of upper winchester county, may affect the lungs again.
This is a lottery that's less fun to play...
(edited for clarity)
> This is a lottery that's less fun to play
How exactly do you propose not playing? Lockdowns, social distancing, masking, etc. for life? We're eventually going to have to start treating Covid the same as we've always treated "the flu" and it definitely appears that once Omicron has run through the population, we'll have reached the time to do that.
Very few places did lockdowns at any point so I wouldn’t expect that to start now, butthe ones which did were successful in breaking spread. It doesn’t need to be continuous, but it’s clearly effective for preventing huge spikes.
Similarly, we’d save lives and billions of dollars if we established the same social norms which some Asian countries have about wearing masks when you’re symptomatic. It doesn’t need anything like 100% compliance or time to be useful – we appear to have lost an entire strain of influenza this way.
This is some grade-a gaslighting, plenty of countries had long brutal lockdowns where no-one was allowed outside unless it was "essential".
> butthe ones which did were successful in breaking spread.
No. Many of those places had worse outcomes than places that didn't do any sort of lockdown.
(When I say lockdown I mean stay-at-home orders. Do you have a different definition?)
There are a number of things going on in the world that fall into the "really bad" category of both thing and trend of thing.
There's space in between bland acceptance and incapacitating terror. At the very least have an honest, clear eyed view of where the risk bars are going, and it isn't in a good direction.
If you can't handle these things as a part of your life you're really not going to like what climate change brings to the relatively near future.
But you don't have to worry about arguing in forums, you've already won. Nobody respects lockdown, and never really did, even at the highest rate of infections I see people wearing masks beneath their noses, crammed next to people in airports. After omicron I can't imagine anyone caring at all even if we double our current death count.
Covid is here, it will stick around forever, it will probably be notably worse than the flu for years to come. But in a few more years that will seem like a quaint thing to worry about.
But immunity is analogue. A strong, specific, antibody response can prevent infection. A T-cell response can stop infection turning into severe illness and death. Variants can evade antibodies somewhat easily, but find it much harder to evade T-cells. Antibody levels wane in weeks or months (although memory B-cells remain), T-cells remain active for years or decades.
If you had COVID last winter, then there would be a good chance of you getting it again this winter, even if it was the exact same strain. But you'd be much less likely to die of it.
So when does the pandemic "end"? What is a "pandemic"? If tens of percent of the population are catching every winter, but few are dying, is that still a pandemic?
Vaccines do not prevent contagion but reduce the chances of severe symptoms.
Also AFAIK vaccines do not lower transmission either.
The vaccine also gives one a sense of protection from infection and so they are more likely to attend mass gatherings. where the virus can be transferred.
Lowered symptoms on droplets would be better, but a lot of in-person workplaces have a "do you have a fever?" check before they issue you any sick leave.
Not having a fever and looking like a mild cold in winter would cause at least my cousin's employer to ask her to come in and wear a mask at work (manufacturing, so she wears a P100 respirator anyway).
But the WHO has been warning about this for months.
> We cannot say this clearly enough: even if you are vaccinated, continue to take precautions to prevent becoming infected yourself, and to infecting someone else who could die.
> In many countries and communities, we are concerned about a false sense of security that vaccines have ended the pandemic, and that people who are vaccinated do not need to take any other precautions.
https://www.who.int/director-general/speeches/detail/who-dir...
Try not to get sick. If you do get sick, don't spread it. If you do spread it, try to spread less of it. Defense in depth.
The only unvaccinated person you know who has had it, has had it three times?
> hopefully without being lynched for asking the question
Somehow this is a sad reality of social media and the current 'situation'... asking anything is seen as "provocative", and there are many things happening that would require more rigid questioning and better answers.
> This is the first evidence to show us that the rate of reinfection with Omicron is high—3 times higher than Delta. In other words, infection-induced immunity is not doing a great job at stopping Omicron.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
Can you give us some indication of how severe your symptoms are? Mostly we're hearing that if you've been vaccinated and/or you've had covid in the past that omicron is relatively mild.
Omicron is less dangerous than Delta. It's still dangerous.
I think at this point, the likely endgame is endemic virus with tolerable consequences. Humanity probably isn't capable of the level of cooperation required to drive this virus to extinction (I'm guessing that would take a massive, coordinated, well-complied with vaccination campaign undertaken over just a couple months).
As far as I know previous immunity still protects against serious disease, even with the variants, so hopefully we'll see less deaths and hospital admissions.
- vaccination is a risk reducer on severity of infection. Nobody said immunity; nobody said prevention.
- and on that point not getting into the hospital is important. From a management standpoint, we've got to insure demand for hospital resources does not dwarf those same resources. That's the key management function here.
What on earth? Yes they did, all along.
December 2020:
> Fauci Predicts U.S. Could See Signs Of Herd Immunity By Late March Or Early April
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...
> "I would say 50% would have to get vaccinated before you start to see an impact," Fauci said. "But I would say 75 to 85% would have to get vaccinated if you want to have that blanket of herd immunity."
Talking about herd immunity is definitely saying immunity, and doesn't make sense unless the vaccine prevented transmission.
Then, May 2021:
> Masks off? Fauci confirms ‘extremely low’ risk of transmission, infection for vaccinated
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/dr-fauci-confirms-extreme...
(I am vaccinated btw)
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/23/opinion/covid-vaccines-tr... "Many scientists are reluctant to say with certainty that the vaccines prevent transmission of the virus from one person to another. [. . .] There should be more data within the next couple of months. Until then, precautionary measures like masking and distancing in the presence of unvaccinated people will remain important."
FWIW, it seems like those commentators who were actually right until Delta emerged. Looking at graph of Covid cases in the USA for example we were on track to low case levels until July, then the Delta variant began to break through in vaccinated individuals and the epidemic grew in size again.
Gotta compare 2021 to the the curves from 2020 though: It's the same shape with different magnitude. Looks more like that drop in the spring and early summer was because it's seasonal than anything else, which we misattributed to the vaccines.
With covid, it's just automatic, but you just need 1 foolish move between 2 people, and there's no server making sure only one person gets it at a time, it's totally a distributed network. And the timeout, instead of being 60 seconds, it's 2 maybe 3 weeks (perhaps a lot longer - we don't REALLY know).
The thought experiment here is that if we TRY to keep something alive that's actually kinda hard to and it lasts 3 months, how is covid EVER going to end?
If we get to the point where people aren't dying of covid at a significantly higher rate as any of the other "usual suspects", does that not mean it's over? It looks like between the vaccinated and just about everybody else that is about to or already has gotten covid, we're must may arrive at the point where covid is a just another thing on the list of seasons ailments.
> For the week ending Dec. 18, 1,265 lab-confirmed flu patients were hospitalized, up from the week prior. The cumulative hospitalization rate was 1.4 per 100,000 population as of Dec. 18, nearly double the overall cumulative hospitalization rate reported during the 2020-21 season. 3
I think you're comparing hospitalization rate per population vs. hospitalization per infected persons. If we look at the recent data and do some estimation, that's about 50k new hospitalzed for 3M new omicron cases, which is 0.016 or 10 times the flu; this sounds more reasonable.
1 or 2 colds a year is pretty typical.
If covid brain fog compounds over time there will be some serious damn consequences.
Being pregnant does dampen the immune system.
This is a highly dynamic situation. Omicron is not alpha or even delta.
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021122...
Let's just assume it was Omicron that killed this guy. All signs point to Omicron being less deadly than the common cold.
https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/cold-guide/common_cold_ca...
I'd guess that because, for the most part, that's how the previous variants behaved. Relatively robust immunity, with subsequent infections generally being rare and more mild. Since Omicron has a lot of mutations on the spike protein which is the primary antibody target, it has greater immune escape potential because the antibodies don't fit as well.
https://yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com/p/omicron-updat...
Does anyone else still believe the shots prevent infection or transmission?
I have Omicron. Already caught the virus in February 2021, good old OG Alpha Covid, which resulted in mild symptoms and loss of sense of smell for 7 months.
My only symptom is a mild runny nose, nothing else. I WISH I had colds this mild. We have a new virus that is endemic in humanity. We can choose to accept it, protect the vulnerable like we do with flu, and get on with our lives. Or we can continue to allow the news media to enervate us with non-stop panic, and choose existing over living, while fucking over kids to protect older adults.
My father is a rabid viewer of MSNBC, lacks mathematical or critical thinking skills, and doesn't read much. The result is he has been in a constant panic since the virus hit, and has isolated himself from family in a manner that has been detrimental to his health. This despite being vaxxed, boosted, and recovered from a mild post vax delta breakthrough infection. He still thinks the virus can kill him, and cancelled Christmas Eve plans for 5 of us to go to his house. The media has polluted his brain with irrational fear. His shitty physician (where I grew up is a dirt poor rural county, and the MDs there are the dumbest i've ever met) told him that "there is no natural immunity to COVID, it doesn't exist." Utter nonsense. As if my immune system (I wasn't eligible for the vaccine in Feb 21) fought, then cleared the virus from my body with some mysterious, unidentifiable mechanism that is completely unrelated to how it clears other viruses.... just unbelievable.
The virus was deadly because it was novel. It ceases to be novel when your immune system acquires memory T-cells, even if you no longer have active antibodies present. If you are old enough, or have a deteriorated immune system, the lag of producing new antibodies can be very problematic with the other strains of COVID, which is why boosters are so crucial for high-risk groups.
The data is now this:
People in their 70s who are VACCINATED have a lower death rate from Omicron than they do from flu. (If they aren't vaxxed, this is obviously not the case.)
See the New York Times, which is a very hawkish paper on COVID, for that specific stat:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/briefing/omicron-risk-mil...
FWIW, David Leonhart is one of the only journalists at the NYT who seems to be remotely literate in data and statistics writing about COVID. That newsroom is essentially filled with people who haven't studied math since high school, despite their degrees from Columbia/Yale/Harvard journalism schools. And boy does it show.