Yeah, but I don’t think they typically give them to otherwise healthy 51 year olds.
I imagine if I was a senior citizen or otherwise frail, they might have acted differently.
My friends who have had mixed recommendations are all in their 60s, with the younger/healthier one not taking meds, and the older/one with more medical issues taking paxlovid.
Ah. That makes sense.
The “soon after onset” is also an issue - I had Covid twice. No symptoms either time but I only got a prescription once and that’s because the circumstances made guessing when I was exposed a possibility. My husband had symptoms and tested positive so it was likely I got it from him recently enough to prescribe the antiviral. The other time I tested positive when I was admitted to the hospital - who knows how long I had it, so no antiviral ( That had other issues - if you were going to isolate me when I tested positive, maybe you should have tested me when I got to the ER, not nine hours later. And gotten the results in less than 5 hours.)
I would have them from now till the end of time. It didn’t work perfectly but it did cut down on the number of people clogging up the aisles.
Last time I had Covid I had zero respiratory issues. There really wasn’t much to be concerned about. Things have progressed. I was sent home and told to try and not expose anyone. Must have worked, my wife didn’t get it.
It appears that the most recent complete year for mortality statistics is 2021. In 2021 it was listed as the 3rd leading cause of death. I would like to know what the current numbers are.
Kaitlyn Jetelina says it’s now the 10th leading cause of death. That was a week or two ago.
ETA:
Not that i saw. People examining the cans just caused traffic jams. God i hated that. It took so damn long to get through the store.
Ugg, that link didn’t work very well. Let me try again
We made it through the first winter after ending the emergency . Things are (thankfully) very different now than at the height of the emergency. 98% of people have immunity from vaccines and/or infections. Covid-19 is now ranked the 10th leading cause of death (it was 3rd at the height of the pandemic). Long Covid prevalence has remained relatively stable, regardless of additional waves.
From
Thanks. I figured it had to be much different than 2020-2021.
Thanks for the truly great cite there @puzzlegal.
I’ve read her work before and I can’t imagine what our world would be like if everyone in charge of everything had a worldview and attitude like hers, not like most execs, politicians, and opinionators.
This paragraph from that cite deserves further dissemination as well IMO:
This won’t impact what must change the most: the number of hospitalizations, deaths, and treatments for long Covid. At this winter’s peak, Covid-19 resulted in 20,000 hospitalizations and 2,000 deaths per week. But, 95% of hospitalizations are among people who are not up-to-date on vaccines. 1 in 4 nursing home residents didn’t get Paxlovid. Long Covid-19 treatment is moving at a snail’s pac
(formatting in original)
Want to reduce your odds of hospitalization by 20x? Get and stay currently vaxxed. It really is that simple.
Given that almost nobody dies of COVID outside a hospital and of those hospitalized for COVID only some (unknown to me) percentage die, that says 20x is a loose lower bound for the vaxxed reduction in likelihood of death from COVID. It might easily be 60 or 75x reduction. And yet that’s not compelling enough for a decent fraction of the populace.
The best stats I could just find suggest that as of a year ago, spring 2023, about 30% of the population had the original series plus at least one booster, a further thirty percent had the original series and nothing more, about 10% had had one original vax, so incomplete vaccination, and 30% were completely unvaccinated. Some of the unvaxxed of course are little kids, bur almost all the rest are … a problem.
Eh, my mother died of covid outside a hospital because we chose home hospice care, and she’d had all the vaccines she could get at the time. She was old and immune compromised, and the vaccine didn’t do her any good.
And my brother’s partner is immune compromised, and basically stays home these days (and mostly make my brother stay home, as well) because the world has gotten extremely dangerous for her.
Yeah, for most people, the current risk of covid is long covid, not death. And there are numbers available for how much being currently vaccinated protects you from death. They are hard to interpret, though, because most of the unvaccinated people have some immunity from prior infection. I guess that’s true of the hospitalization numbers, too.
But there are still people out there who, through no fault of their own, have to worry about dying of covid. And honestly, life sucks for my brother’s partner. Can society afford to keep her safer? Probably not. It would greatly increase the suckitude for an awful lot of people to substantially reduce hers.
But I’m still worried about long covid. I know too many people with trouble concentrating, and trouble exercising, and trouble enjoying food, that started with a covid infection.
Good points all. Experience is all over the map, and plenty of people are in bad situations or have really bad outcomes. I’m sorry to hear of your Mom’s ordeal; that had to have been awful.
My late wife was a late-stage cancer patient with some immunocompromise and zero excess life capacity for disease-fighting when COVID began. Like your Mom, our onco was pretty skeptical the COVID vax would do any good given her ragged condition. She did get vaxxed however, under the “Can’t hurt; might help” rubric. She was already living a pretty small mostly-at-home life so COVID had little impact on her daily life. She managed not to catch it, and died in the summer of 2021 of the cancer. COVID didn’t even have much impact on her medical care: the oncology folks being pretty well separated from the pulmonary and ICU folks.
For me it was a mix; I still had to work out in public, but not as much during the height of COVID. Except for work my life was already pretty circumscribed by hers, so the “lockdowns” felt pretty much like ordinary life to me. I took max precautions to not bring COVID home to her. And somehow succeeded. I finally caught it myself in summer of '22 a year after she’d died. From the mass of public at work of course. Only minor symptoms, no lasting effects I can detect, and haven’t had it again since.
I count myself real lucky overall about COVID. Not everybody has the good fortune to be able to say that.
I still see the remnants of old signage, most of the signs about distance and direction of travel have largely gone from my workplace but you can see where they were. The building I work in has a double staircase and they’ve retained the signage on the stairs so that you should use one side to go up, and the other staircase to go down. It reduces traffic and means the flow of people is much better.
Buses and trains have signs saying masks are preferred, and also something telling us that they’re cleaned every night with anti-bacterial stuff. Doesn’t make the travel experience any less loathsome though!
At least here in suburban Chicago, it’s started back up. Home remodelers and landscapers for the most part (“we’re working on a project for one of your neighbors!”), but AT&T is the most annoying culprit.
I have our landline, and our cell phones, through AT&T, but my ISP and cable TV are through Comcast. AT&T desperately wants me to switch to them, and they not only send me two to three pieces of direct mail a week about internet or TV, but they send a door-to-door salesman in, at least twice a year, trying to convince me to switch. During COVID, the door-to-door nonsense stopped, but they resumed last year.
Speaking as an advertising/marketing professional, this tells me that AT&T’s “cross-sell” algorithm is terrible. “This guy hasn’t switched to us due to the last 500 things we’ve sent him, but this offer is sure to be the one!”
I deal with ghost artifacts every damn day. As a result of Covid California changed its ventilation rules, so now my classroom gets a complete atmosphere change every 20 minutes. Great if the heat/air is on. But if it’s 40° outside and my room is at 72°, I get a complete change of outside air. At outside temps. So my room temp pogos all day. PITA.
At home, my door-to-door sales are all Spectrum. They get 10 seconds to clear the property before I set the (imaginary) dogs loose.
I’m in Toronto and I haven’t encountered any empty sanitizer containers post-pandemic. I only tend to use them at bank ATMs and in medical-type settings, though.
Speaking as a marketing-hostile ordinary consumer I think they’ve forgotten or are ignoring the one algorithm that works:
Just keep offering a lower price than last time with every new mailing. Eventually you’ll cross my level of indifference and then you/they will get the sale. But not before.
AT&T is weirdly insistent. At my condo we had Comcast for all things cable. I personally subscribed to only the minimal internet speed which came with the basic cable package. So plenty of room for upselling. For several years they did not bug us at all.
Moved to a different apartment with AT&T fiber for internet, and DirecTV (once a division of AT&T) as cable provider. We sprung for the middle-speed internet package and a few more channels than the basic, then soon-to-be-ex wife began adding more and more channel packages to the mix. So ever less room for upselling.
We got their solicitations in the snail-mail about weekly for the whole 2 years I was there. They totally wanted to sell us VOIP, etc.