If only there was a safe, effective, available, current and free vaccine. If only…
I got boosted in October. Been very good about getting all my shots.
Still got covid from my office in late December, and it knocked me down for two full weeks.
The vaccine is not enough, we need to be masking again.
I mean, it provides more protection, not immunity. I got boosted in October but I was pregnant and thus immunocompromised. I got it in November but none of the rest of the family did… We hadn’t been leaving the house for anything but groceries and even that was enough. My daughter was born at the tail end of symptoms so here’s hoping she got a good dose of antibodies to protect her until she’s old enough to be vaccinated herself.
Man, I hate that I need to mask up again. I was diligent about it during early COVID. Still to some degree once vaccines were rolling out. I’ve gotten bad about it lately though.
In my defense I always run hot and I’m an excessive head sweater. Simply masking during a grocery run turns half my face into a sauna and gets me drippy. Masking during a concert or something is so miserable.
Had it back in October but reckon I should get boosted up again and get back to being diligent. Our state is on the uptick in cases lately. :C
reckon I should get boosted up again
Here’s a simple way to check whether you need a booster:
- is there a new one?
Given its track record and its benefits, that’s the only question left.
Oh yeah, my card has been filling up with each new booster dropping. In it for the long haul so fully expect this to be standard procedure for foreseeable future.
I have the same issues as you with masks but I am immunocompromised so I don’t really get a choice.
It’s get vaccinated and mask up or fucking die.
Maybe y’all should be happy that masking is just uncomfortable for you and not uncomfortable and a life or death choice.
Fucking whiners. It’s not that hard.
Sorry to hear about your extra challenges, truly. I absolutely count myself lucky being someone who had a bad time with COVID recovery vs a fight for my life. I’m also a cancer survivor with elderly parents, plenty of friends in similar immunocompromised boats. Would be an absolute tragedy should any of us succumb to this virus.
If I came off as whiney, not the intention. More frustrated with the fact that life as we know it continues to change, with no end to this slow burn pandemic in sight. Have friends in healthcare with no shortage of horror stories. It’s exhausting.
Just airing frustrations, but obviously there’s always someone going through worse.
Same here. I got the flu and covid vaccine the week before Thanksgiving and got sick with COVID. The week before Christmas. I was out of commission for 2 weeks and I still have a little bit of a cough. The vaccine is not enough.
The vaccine is not enough, we need to be masking again.
Reminder, masks you keep you from infecting other people. You need a face shield to keep from getting infected.
Yes masks do help prevent a covid carrier from infecting others.
Are you suggesting that wearing a mask doesn’t help protect you from being infected by others? Why’s that?
I’m suggesting that if you’re going to wear a mask, you might as well wear a face shield as well. A lot of people accidentally spit while talking. A mask doesn’t prevent getting infected from spit/micro droplets that land in your eyes. There was a 30% reduction in infection rates from people who wear eyeglasses and those don’t even protect from the sides. Half measures aren’t enough.
Got the booster in October. Working in a hospital requires it.
Current vaccine targets EG.5. I don’t know how close JN.1 is though.
It seems like COVID protection is a gray sliding scale. EG.5 is better than BA.5 vaccine is better than original vaccine is better than nothing. But with enough mutations even EG.5 vaccine isn’t enough to prevent mild illness / staying home from work for a few days or causing you to spread COVID-19 JN.1 to your friends.
But the vaccines seem really good at preventing severe illness that sends people to the hospital or graveyards.
We need to stay educated on the vaccine and it’s efficacy to changing variants.
Isn’t this what epidemiologists predicted? That it would mutate into a less deadly form but become endemic? It would still require regular boosters, just like the annual flu vaccine.
Becoming endemic doesn’t necessarily mean “no big deal”. Smallpox was endemic. Polio was endemic. Malaria is endemic.
Note the key word ‘was’. Reason is vaccines. The malaria vaccine is only recently available
Note that Smallpox and Polio didn’t mutate like COVID19.
There was much debate on whether or not the so called “Spike Protein” of the COVID19 virus would mutate rapidly enough to keep up with vaccines. If COVID19 mutated slower (like smallpox), then it would have been erradicated. Some supercomputer even went in and calculated all the ways COVID19 could change and decided that the spike-protein was the least-likely to change. So this is our best shot at stopping the virus.
Alas, here we are on… erm… JN.1? After EG.5, after BA.5, after Omicron, after Delta, after Alpha, after the original COVID19. The speed of this thing’s mutation is too quick (even on the so called “Spike Protein” that was supposed to be a difficult to mutate sequence). Which was not the happy future we wanted. Still though, we can make new vaccines as fast as COVID19 mutates. So this isn’t too bad in the great scheme of things. Just keep your shots up to date and we’ll be good moving forward.
As I said earlier: I really, really was hoping for eradication.
Moving forward: this means that as different variants pop up, it will be the job of public health officials to:
- Sequence the new mutations.
- Predict the dominant mutations.
- Order a vaccine against the (future-predicted) mutations.
- Tell everyone when the new vaccine is ready and when its been a big enough change that we all need to update the vaccine in our system.
And moving forward, step 2 or step3 are perilous. A bad prediction will cause people to lose trust (and real-life situations, like government shutdowns during said studies, like back in 2014, could cause worse predictions. IE: government mismanagement causes loss of trust, causing more mismanagement causing more loss of trust). I think its more important to realize how many little elves need to do their job in this big chain of predictions for any of this to work out, and to respect the hard work put in.
Even when the work will inevitably fail / mess up one year or two.
A lot of people are in practice stuck at step4 (too distrustful of our public health officials that they refuse to take the updated vaccines). But as a reminder, it can absolutely get worse, and will get worse when they finally make a mistake. Its hard work trying to predict the future, and I’m honestly surprised a mistake hasn’t happened yet. (BA.5 was a perilous vaccine, there was a lot of debate over the prediction. It turned out to be correct, but we aren’t going to be so lucky moving forward).
It was one debated endgame, yes.
I’m no epidemiologist but I was hoping for eradication of the virus personally. But regular vaccines with my yearly flu shot isn’t bad at all, a 2nd shot in the other arm and I’m on my way each year.
Note that the yearly flu-vaccine is really against 3x different strains of the flu. Moving forward, we can likely have 2x flu vaccines + 1x COVID19 shot all in one, so you only get one shot and get all the protection you need each year. I don’t know what the progress is on the combined flu/covid shot, but its at least theoretically possible.
But the status quo (just get 2x different shots) really isn’t a big deal.
If you want a minor update for your infobank, flu vaccines have been quadrivalent for a few years now.
As someone who got the flu and covid vaccine at the same time, I definitely don’t recommend it. It was worse than my actual covid infection.
As someone who got the flu and covid vaccine at the same time, I definitely don’t recommend it
anecdotal, and its worth pointing out that if you had covid or the flu within 3 month previous to getting shots, the shots can cause a slight reaction making you ‘feel sick’, this is likely what most people who say “the flu shot made me sick” are experiencing.
No kidding it’s anecdotal; I literally shared an anecdote.
I know what an immune response from a vaccine feels like. Doing both at once can definitely cause a stronger immune response than from one alone.
As someone who had a strong immune response from the covid vaccine alone, getting both at once was significantly worse.
For me it felt like I got hit by a truck on my way to the hospital for a severe flu the entire day after I got the vaccines.
I doubt that will happen. Too many are fine with the flu vaccine but against the covid vaccine
That’s how most diseases trend. Killing your host isn’t super conducive to survival.
I mean, other corona viruses are part of the “common cold” collective.
Evidence is accumulating that the vaccines may reduce likelihood of “long covid” symptoms as well.
My family is fully boosted and my wife and I are currently in the middle of covid. Fortunately not terribly serious though.
WITCH BURN THEM
Okay because I guess that it is needed /S
I finally caught covid on Sunday while in the hospital :/ I’m vaccinated and boosted, so far I just have a fever, body aches, and post nasal drip. I’m hoping this is the worst of it.
dont exercise dont work dont clean just lay there. long covid is correlated with “pushing through” the accute infection.
Do you have any source documents for this? My partner has been stuck with long covid symptoms for almost 2 years now.
I’m sorry, I’m trying to find where I read this- It was a tweet from a government body, might have been CDC, or HSE or NHS, I’m sorry but I can’t recall which, it was over a year ago. Citing some reasonably reliable evidence that people who tried to keep working/exercising/staying active despite being rather sick wound up having longer lasting symptoms.
I’m sorry to hear about your partner, I hope it improves
All good. Wasnt trying to put you on the spot. Just looking for info on the topic, and what you mentioned was something new to me, so I wanted to read up on it.
Found this, not the original thing I had seen… The thing I remember was actually someone else quote tweeting the CDC or similar’s advice, with the tweeter adding “seemingly if you get sick to reduce the risk of longer lasting symptoms you must channel potato”, but that was just a gag of course.
I just read this Time article and it might help her in some way. For what its worth, in my profession I speak to a lot of people about their circumstances and have spoken to several people with longer lasting symptoms (mainly brain fog and fatigue) and all of them continued to improve continuously over time.
That’s good to know! I have some chronic disorders that cause fatigue and brain fog, so I’m definitely trying to be extra careful with how I choose to heal from this infection
For me, the worst thing was the fatigue. Just rest up at much as you can and be prepared to be on light duty for a couple weeks.
Thanks for the heads up :)
Lots of tea lots of soup lots of blankets, you’ll be ok bb
Yup, I had it in early October and I’m still struggling with fatigue and brain fog.
My week has fucking sucked. Friday morning I woke up with the onset of kidney stone pain (I’ve had one before and it’s quite a unique…Experience). I said fuck it I’ll let it pass instead of paying a $250 copay for an ER visit only to get irradiated with 100mSv of a CT scan and nothing they can do. The last one passed into the bladder within a few hours. What’s worse is we were given a one-time gift to take my daughter to this bounce-house place that we were all looking forward to. So I said if I feel like it passes before we need to go, I’ll go. It seems to do so, but man I’m sore as this one tore up my kidney/ureter. So I go. I bounce more than I should’ve, cause you know, kids…
Get home a little sore but nothing too bad. Next day my flank is still sore but I have chills and hot-flashes and body-aches. It has only gotten worse since with little sleep. Exhausted, weak, body-aches. I kept thinking it was getting better on some days, but at night it came back worse. Didn’t really give me infection/sepsis vibes for a few reasons, but then it dawned on me that covid/flu is spiking heavily right now and I must’ve been exposed. Even though it was outdoors, it was still pretty crowed. Taking tests today.
I took 3 breaks to pace around the room just writing this.
Don’t leave us hanging, what were the results?! Also, hope you feel better soon!
Hey thanks… So finally today I broke down and went to an ER per my nurse wife’s advice. Turns out I was negative on covid. Flu, rsv, etc. (even no evidence of kidney stone but doesn’t mean it didn’t happen per doc). They diagnosed me with pneumonia, pleural effusion, early sepsis and now I’m admitted taking IV antibiotics…whew…
With some iv fluids and antibiotics and a little bit of ibuprofen I’m feeling far better at the moment but still having insane coughing fits to the point it triggers vomiting.
Just nuts man… I consider myself to be pretty healthy. I run, do moderate weight training, take my vitamins, consciously try to eat healthy etc. But this can knock you on your ass!
Sounds like your on the mend and on the road to recovering. Just make sure to do all the follow up appointments and everything and remember no one is going to advocate for your health more than you, so take care of yourself first and foremost and I know it doesn’t help much, but things take time to diagnose and to heal so be patient with your body, things can always get better. At least your not pissing, shitting, and vomiting at all once! ;)
Oh yeah it could be much worse. And for sure, I’ll keep up with any of the follow-ups they advise. I’m lucky to have a lot of veteran medical people in my family so they’re keeping a close eye on me. They still haven’t nailed the root cause. I may need a thoracentesis and they’re testing for a fungal infection now.
Sometimes you just have to keep at it things, keep waiting, keep appointments, yet it can all become tiresome or exhausting. The point is to rule things out and that sadly just takes time. If things persist, a different doctor or a specialist should be able to track things down. It’s all a cat and mouse game sometimes when the diagnosis is not easily identified. Took one of my friends almost a year before they found what was wrong with them. Just be patient, keep at it, and I’m sure things will eventually get better. Good luck!
Thanks, friend. Appreciate it!
vaccines require educational, health, and cultural changes the US does not support
since state’s rights goes above federal unless the state favors the federal law and corps have final say no united front could be formed including nation wide PSAs, adding virology or similar subjects and beefing up education, buffing up our health policies and technology and availability, etcetera
Anyone know if this shows up on the those home covid test kits. I tested negative but have been in bed for ~3 days now. Fever, sinus issues, fatigue, general fogginess and lack of balance.
Ah, general soreness as well. Things like picking relatively light weight will sting in the muscles like needles
I had relatively similar symptoms, maybe a little more mild but the tests didn’t show up anything for me, however my boss had a lab test and he tested positive for covid. The doctors told him whatever new variant is out there doesn’t typically show up on the at home tests.
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Home test bought today tested negative. Had symptoms like this for a few days. Cough, major weakness, body aches, fatigue. The only thing is I don’t really have nasal congestion so not sure if I got anything on my swab.
Gonna test for flu, too. Or it could just be sepsis from the kidney stone I passed last week :)
Not sure what I got as they were saying there was also influenza and RSV in my area…but whatever it was kept me in bed for at least 3 days, and I was pretty sick for a full week. Didn’t fully recover until about 2 weeks later.
I’d been keeping up with all my boosters and even got the flu shot, but I still got hit. To be fair, it hit me maybe 9 days after I got the shots.
