@roger,
Of course Roger that’s only my opinion. I wouldn’t hesitate on getting that fifth shot. You know to this day I don’t feel 100%, I never used to get headaches but sometimes I’ll wake up with one, and I feel tired. I used to get up early and workout but lately I just don’t have the energy. Mornings are a little foggy.
@jcboy,
jcboy wrote:
Of course Roger that’s only my opinion. I wouldn’t hesitate on getting that fifth shot. You know to this day I don’t feel 100%, I never used to get headaches but sometimes I’ll wake up with one, and I feel tired. I used to get up early and workout but lately I just don’t have the energy. Mornings are a little foggy.
By an odd coincidence, I'm going through that, myself. No head aches, but I feel like I'm never quite awake. I think this has been going on and getting worse for maybe six months. I was concerned enough to see my doctor (well, PA). She suspects breathing problems. Good spot O2, but she suspects a problem while I'm asleep. She was going to have Linde do an overnight check, though I haven't yet heard from them.
I almost suspect my cause of death will be "didn't bother to get out of bed",
@roger,
Roger, the last time I had a massive hospital stay was during a slow leak aneurism that took the hospital 7 days to figure out. I went from absolutely normal to collapsing on the floor and could not sit up, stand up, barely talk....nada. My blood pressure was extremely low, I don't remember exactly how I got to the hospital and the first few days were a blur. They finally noticed my low blood level and they gave me about 5 units of blood...I was in the hospital for 9 days and it took me months before I could walk without a walker.....I hate that (and I slept a look...many naps). They researched everything else, heart and lung...everything except the blood loss. That was last year on Sept 4th but I'm doing very well now, no problem with walking, no canes or walkers, blood levels are great...................but I still get tired. If I lived alone I don't know if anyone would notice if I was still alive............So get back to the doctors, make them take a full blood level, respiratory tests and and make sure your diet is serving you well. We both are getting too old to rely only on the good will of angels.
And for J.C. , do the same thing and make sure nothing else is going on. If you needy to rest, PLEASE rest, sometimes that's the best medicine. But make them check your blood levels again........sometimes things creep up on us. BUT REST WHEN YOU NEED IT.
@jcboy,
Please check what I posted for Roger...........I'm looking at you, take a nap, you might need it.
@glitterbag,
I'll give them a chance to get that blood oxygen thing set up. I'll probably pursue the rest if that doesn't reveal anything.
I didn’t know dogs could get COVID from people. A month before I got sick I had to call the mobile vet for Frankie, I use the mobile vet for him because he’s 13 years old and 105lbs and he can’t jump up in the car and he’s too heavy to pick up. He needed his vaccines. The vet said Frankie was surprisingly very healthy for a dog his age and size. Well when I was getting over COVID that dog would just lay around the house for two weeks. He wasn’t eating like he used to and I had to force him to go outside. He’s now back to his old self. Now I wonder if I didn’t give the poor dog COVID!
What You Should Know about COVID-19 and Pets
I didn't learn until this past year, late, that my son had covid early in the pandemic. He never let on. Saw him all day yesterday. Among other things he showed me an inhaler that he will need the rest of his life. They cost him $300. He doesn't look too healthy.
Is the pandemic over? Biden said so on 60 Minutes
President Biden wrote:The pandemic is over," he said. "We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape, and so I think it's changing, and I think [the Detroit auto show resuming after three years] is a perfect example of it.
This argument has been in the press for a few weeks with some experts saying Covid is still killing hundreds every day and mutating while others are saying with approaching herd immunity from those with the vaccine and those who have contracted Covid, the impact of Covid is approaching that of the flu in the mostly healthy population. I'm torn. My son's girlfriend came home from a business trip and got pretty sick, but was on her feet by the end of the week, so it's still going around. Long Covid is a thing, people are still dying, the winter virus season is coming. But I'm not masking or even worrying about it anymore as I've been boosted twice. I flew on business in August, for pleasure two weeks ago and will do so again for business later this week. Very few people are acting like we did two years ago. The
CDC graph of deaths show what looks like a steady state condition. So, is the pandemic over? Have we transitioned to a post Covid, management stage?
The Persistent Pandemic
It ain’t over till it’s over.
President Biden has been on a roll lately. As a crowning achievement, you can understand why Biden would want people to believe that the pandemic is over, as he told CBS’s 60 Minutes in a Sunday segment.
Except it isn’t over. The U.S. has recorded over 379,000 cases and 2,490 deaths in the last seven days as of Tuesday, according to CDC data. We may be headed to an endemic state, and we’re certainly better equipped to handle a future outbreak given medical advancements. But that doesn’t necessarily mean COVID is done with us.
Biden tried to walk back his remarks when he appeared at a campaign event in New York on Tuesday. "By the way, if you haven’t gotten your boosters, get them," Biden said, according to Bloomberg.
Biden’s blurted assertion that the pandemic is behind us is another in a series of impromptu misstatements that give his staff extreme anxiety whenever the president is speaking off-script. And it does damage—in three distinct respects.
First, the new vaccine booster, engineered to work against the omicron variants, apparently works even better than hoped. But far too few Americans are getting it. And if the pandemic is over, why should they?
"We are not where we need to be if we are going to quote ‘live with the virus,’" Anthony Fauci, Biden’s chief medical adviser, pointedly said on Monday.
Second, the president’s gaffe gives Republicans ammunition to refuse the administration’s request for more COVID money in the upcoming vote on the continuing resolution to keep the government funded. "If it’s over, then I wouldn’t suspect they need any more money," Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told CNN.
And third, Biden is likely to be a defendant in an upcoming lawsuit challenging his order to cancel student debt. The order is based on the president’s special powers in a national emergency, namely the COVID pandemic. While the law in question allows the president to redress harms triggered by the emergency and doesn’t necessarily require the emergency to be ongoing, it gives an entry point to a right-wing judiciary to use the president’s words to claim no emergency exists. At the least, it weakens the argument in the court of public opinion.
Joe Biden is the only president we have. He’s doing a lot better than many of us expected, and we have to wish him well. Biden’s occasional misstatements based on wishful thinking are in a different moral universe from Trump’s cynical lies. But Joe, if you can’t resist damaging blurts, do the country and yourself a favor and stay on script.
~ ROBERT KUTTNER
Sars-CoV-2 has not stopped changing, and a number of new omicron sublines have emerged recently, some of which have it all.
A study from Sweden, among others, has now shown that the omicron sub-variant BA.2.75.2 in particular is apparently able to evade antibody immunity acquired through vaccination and infection.
Omicron sublineage BA.2.75.2 exhibits extensive escape from neutralising antibodiesQuote:Abstract
Several sublineages of omicron have emerged with additional mutations that may afford further antibody evasion. Here, we characterise the sensitivity of emerging omicron sublineages BA.2.75.2, BA.4.6, and BA.2.10.4 to antibody-mediated neutralisation, and identify extensive escape by BA.2.75.2. BA.2.75.2 was resistant to neutralisation by Evusheld (tixagevimab + cilgavimab), but remained sensitive to bebtelovimab. In recent serum samples from blood donors in Stockholm, Sweden, BA.2.75.2 was neutralised, on average, five-fold less potently than BA.5, representing the most neutralisation resistant variant evaluated to date. These data raise concerns that BA.2.75.2 may effectively evade humoral immunity in the population.
Competing Interest Statement
My daughter who lives near Austin and her husband are about recovered from a week long bout of covid. Makes two times for her. She was miserable for a week, but says it was not quite as severe this time. They suspect their preteen son spreads it, but he never gets sick.
After two years of avoiding it, I finally got it. I was down for a day and still have a lingering cough. Definitely wasn't fun.
@engineer,
I was rough for about a week, and a few weeks ago I developed a cold sore.
The last time I had one of those I was at primary school.
The lower the proportion of vaccinated people in a population, the more life expectancy decreased.
According to an analysis, life expectancy has developed very differently in the European states during the Corona pandemic.
Belgium, France, Sweden and Switzerland were thus able to largely compensate for the drop in life expectancy in 2020 by increasing life expectancy in the following year. Italy and Spain also showed a clear increase in life expectancy in 2021, but both lost 7.4 months in the sum of the pandemic years. Eastern European countries in particular, with the exception of Slovenia, recorded a reduction in life expectancy in both pandemic years, for example in Slovakia by 33.1 months. This also applies to Germany, but to a much lesser extent with a decrease of 5.7 months.
In the USA, life expectancy fell by 28.2 months in 2020 and 2021.
Life expectancy changes since COVID-19
Omikron was not transmitted by an animal, nor did it develop in immunocompromised humans, according to a new study by Berlin's Charité hospital. Instead, predecessors of the variant had been circulating for longer than previously known.
For about a year now, Omicron subtypes have been dominating the incidence of coronavirus infections worldwide. According to a new study, however, precursors of the variant existed well before the first detection in November 2021.
The study published in the journal "Science" by the Charité Berlin and African cooperation partners thus contradicts two other hypotheses on the origin: according to the findings, Omikron emerged gradually over several months in various African countries. This development was simply overlooked due to a lack of analysis.
Gradual emergence followed by exponential spread of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant in Africa[/b]Quote:Abstract
The geographic and evolutionary origins of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant (BA.1), which was first detected mid-November 2021 in Southern Africa, remain unknown. We tested 13,097 COVID-19 patients sampled between mid-2021 to early 2022 from 22 African countries for BA.1 by real-time RT-PCR. By November-December 2021, BA.1 had replaced the Delta variant in all African sub-regions following a South-North gradient, with a peak Rt of 4.1. Polymerase chain reaction and near-full genome sequencing data revealed genetically diverse Omicron ancestors already existed across Africa by August 2021. Mutations, altering viral tropism, replication and immune escape, gradually accumulated in the spike gene. Omicron ancestors were therefore present in several African countries months before Omicron dominated transmission. These data also indicate that travel bans are ineffective in the face of undetected and widespread infection.
