Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

When? Who took care of you? How do you think you got it? How did you isolate from Karen? Did you go to the hospital? Did you have any therapies?

I only know peeps who got Omicron after being vaxxed and boosted - and they say it was pretty bad. I can’t even imagine what getting it before the vax was like and surviving.

Interesting thing: Researchers have looked at the variants in deer, and they closely match the percentage of each variant in the local human population. There is no variant specifically adapted to deer. I can see hunters getting it from deer, but how does the other direction work? Deer hunters don't ever "catch and release". It might be through field mice, if they can pick up the human shed virus from droplets on the ground. Then their feces and respiratory droplets contaminate the grass deer eat. Domesticated deer could catch it directly from their caretakers, but I imagine they have little close contact with wild deer. It may be that deer are highly susceptible, so they can pick it up from objects or surfaces humans have sneezed on.

Lots more Paxlovid is sitting on shelves, not being used. You have to really have somebody advocating for you, to try and get it if you need it. It is totally ineffective if nobody takes it! If they do get it within a few days of symptom onset, it is terrific. People who get it often walk out of the hospital the next day!

There are resources online for locating it. In particular, CVS seems to be stocking it, but you need a prescription to get it. Don't delay if you get a positive test and are old or have comorbidities. It must be given within a few days of symptom onset to do any good.

On the lighter side concerning the booster shot.

This happened yesterday and is important information for our age group. especially those of us over 70.

A friend had his 3rd dose of the vaccine - the "booster" at a Pharmacy, after which he began to have blurred vision on the way home. When he did get home, he immediately called the pharmacy for advice about seeing a doctor, or to be hospitalized.

He was told NOT to go to a doctor or a hospital, but to immediately return to the pharmacy and pick up his glasses.

On a different thought. I wonder why china isn't giving everybody a vaccination. I know, theirs wasn't very good but, by now, I suspect they have the capacity to produce one that will actually work?

Seems that would be a lot easier than, literally, shutting down all of china?

I'm not so sure that they do have the ability to produce "another" one that will actually work.
Why? Because in an environment like modern day China, not all that much has changed since 1949, at least not as far as the unwillingness to inform Premiere Xi that something done on his watch is less than satisfactory.
In other words, I suspect no one wants to be the one to tell Xi that his original Sinovax isn't very effective.
And thus Sinovax is officially "the best COVID vaccine ever invented and has 100% effectiveness against anything Xi says it does."

Authoritarian despots aren't fond of do overs.

We all got it (Feb2020) and we're pretty sure it was our daughter who brought it home, as she was working as a men's hair stylist at a very swanky salon
that catered to the jet set. We all got it at pretty much the same time.
When I went to the hospital I didn't even know what I had and neither did the hospital.
I spent eight hours in the ER, no one had masks on where I was, including when I passed out and when I reawakened with an oxygen mask on.
They sent me home with a bottle of Prednisone and a pocket full of asthma puffers and I spent the next three weeks on the bedroom sofa wheezing frantically
with my O2 saturation hovering in the eighties.

Yes, O2 saturation...with a heart patient for a kid, we do HAVE quite a bit of 'gear' at the house.
Surprisingly my son tolerated COVID better than I did, he was very sick, but only for about a week.

I know people who caught Omicron after being vaxxed and boosted, they felt like they caught a cold.
We are all doubled vaxxed and boosted and we're planning to get the second booster.

I am definitely one of those "COVID long haul zombies" everyone talks about.

Probably saved your life. One of the keys to successful treatment is NOT to give steroids early on, because they decrease immune response and that can make an infection worse. But by the time you get to the hospital passing out from low oxygen saturation, most of the virus is "dead". Those symptoms are immune system over-reaction which causes almost all Covid deaths. The doctors probably had no idea what you had, but ran some simple blood tests and found a very high C-reactive protein level. That indicates inflammation, and steroids are the best treatment. Fortunately for you, WHO had not told everybody not to give steroids yet.

For most everybody under 70 and with no comorbidities, a fourth shot is unnecessary. You WILL get infected if exposed to the latest variant, but it will just be a "Covid cold" and act as a booster. For people with more things that make it likely to be serious, a fourth vaccine will boost your antibody level for a few months and make even that "Covid cold" less likely. But a fourth shot is very unlikely to cause any harm to anybody who did not have a serious problem with previous Covid vaccinations.

For vaccinated people with a working immune system, there is this thing called "somatic hypermutation" that makes antibodies against a wide variety of variants. Even against SARS1 and MERS, as well as every possible future variant. Not a lot of each antibody type, but enough that you have some that will react against a new variant and start the immune system cranking out new variant-specific antibodies quickly. This is why a new "Covid cold" acts as a booster for most people.

Of course, the real "star of the show" is T-cell and B-cell immunity. Those are much longer lasting and much more resistant to "immune evasion" than antibodies with new variants. Antibodies react to a much smaller region of the virus (an epitope) than T-cells. So a few mutations in a new variant can make the variant evasive to old antibodies, This is why so many monoclonal antibodies are no longer effective. T-cells react to a much much larger viral epitope, so several mutations don't affect them.

I'm going to be 65 in a few days, and my list of comorbidities is Type 2 diabetes, COPD, 35 lbs overweight and fatty liver.
So I WILL be seeking out that second booster and so will everyone else in Hacienda del Haas.

Know WHY I threw out the Prednisone? Because it felt way too much like being high on crack cocaine, that's why.
I put down the crack pipe twenty-seven years ago, and feeling that overcranked hyperactive crap scared the bejeezus out of me.

You should NEVER cold-turkey steroids. If you tried them and hated it, you can. But if you have been on them for a while, you need to taper slowly.

If they freaked you out, you should have just tried cutting the dose. Or asked your doc for a different one. Dexamethasone was actually the first one found to help people after serious acute Covid to avoid inflammation leading to Long Covid. I'm afraid you shot yourself in the foot there.

But I'm the same way with opiates. Tried one pain pill after I had three buried teeth extracted. I hated it so much I switched to ibuprofen.