Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 booster

Re:Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 b... by lbeltrame on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @07:51AM (#33786959)

That's not what the paper cited by Time says. It is a study in the US veteran population, whose health condition is much poorer than the general population. Secondly, the study is set up to pick up bad outcomes. Third, the people compared are those with 1 and 2 infections after the second infection, rather than seeing the effect of each infection. Fourth, the paper is pre-Omicron.

There is also far more than that. The press spun it quite a bit, in a different way.

Personally, all my family members and myself have had a contact with SARS-CoV-2 within the past months. It wasn't particularly pleasant, but certainly not a "deadly virus" (prior vaccination helps, but I'm not a person at risk anyway). It will be the first of many. I stopped caring after I got my second dose, and there's no way I will care now.

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Re:Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 b... by jleyank on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @08:37AM (#33787373)

It might not be a deadly virus now but it certainly was in mid 2020. And things mutate. Flu is harmless as well, except for the years when it isn’t. Minimizing risk for others is a positive human trait.

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Re:Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 b... by lbeltrame on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @09:02AM (#33787673)

Flu is not harmless. Not at all. It is a bad disease when symptomatic (30-40% cases may be asymptomatic). In particular for young children and the elderly.

Flu for me was way worse than a SARS-CoV-2 infection (think 40C fever).

SARS-CoV-2 was deadly for a specific part of an immuno naive population (60+). The age stratification was known since February 2020 (first Chinese paper on that from the Wuhan data). My country had zero excess deaths in the 0-50 range since the start of the pandemic.

EDIT: Anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccines do not block transmission, certainly not now. And as thus, their protection is primarily for one's own benefit.

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Re:Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 b... by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @07:59AM (#33787042)

> It wasn't particularly pleasant, but certainly not a "deadly virus"

I know somebody who contracted Malaria and lived. It wasn't particularly pleasant but certainly not a "deadly disease".

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Re:Harvard mandates the bivalent Omicron-specific Covid-19 b... by lbeltrame on Tuesday November 29, 2022 @08:07AM (#33787105)

Malaria is not an infection by a coronavirus (I do know one person too, FTR, my grandfather during the Albanian campaign in WWII). And it is not age stratified like a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And there's no 95% seroprevalence like with SARS-CoV-2 in most regions that had surges.

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