@puzzlelegal , have any of your similar-aged friends gotten badly sick with COVID since taking the fall 2022 bivalent boosters? Trying to ferret out whether or not in your particular cohort there has been a difference in outcomes depending on date infected and/or time elapsed since last previous vaccine.
Only one similar-age friend caught covid more than 3 days after the bivalent booster. (One caught it from her grandkids the day after she got the shot, too soon for it to have worked.) Hmm, another had a bad case over the summer, I forget whether he’d had the booster yet or not. So I’m only looking at 3 or 4 people, 1 or 2 of whom had the latest booster. They were all pretty sick. The one who had it most recently (a month and a half ago) still hasn’t completely recovered. She says she’s basically fine, except she needs an hour more sleep every night than she did pre-covid.
I have tons of younger friends who caught covid, were sick for 3 days to 3 weeks, and then were fine.
I think the sending workers home to telecommute rather than continuing to have large numbers of people in enclosed spaces turned out to work in slowing the spread. I think the statewide “Stay-at-home” orders at the beginning, until health officials could learn more about what was going on, was justified. Widespread masking encouragement was wise and I suspect more effective than we presume (as long as using the right kind of masks) - altho I think it should have been encouraged sooner.
What did not work or was less effective in hindsight: face-shields, directional arrows on grocery store aisle floors, and having politicians deliver public health management messages. I think my state’s Governor did a good job handling the pandemic early-on (Gavin Newsom), but his rambling diarrhea of the mouth gave some people all the reason they needed to disregard the messaging. I would have much rather had politicians take a step to the side and let their public health officials deliver the messages about what to do and when, and why - this may have reduced the amount of politicization of the issue we ended-up with.
The vaccines clearly worked. I was going to start another thread here asking about how all the anti-vax worries turned out. By now billions of humans have been vaccinated, a lot of them multiple times, and somehow humanity is doing fine (acknowledging there are legit reasons for not getting the vax, and there are non-zero complications in a small number of people). Evidently, they are safe and effective, which is what health officials have been saying all along - so I guess they were right.
I think some of the measures weren’t as effective as they could be because a significant subset of the American people refused to take any precautions against COVID. In October 2020, I went to a small diner in rural Arkansas to pick up my lunch and I was the only person with a mask on in the crowded restaurant. They even had a sign up saying they would assume anyone without a mask couldn’t wear one due to medical reasons. This was at a time when the governor’s mask mandate was still in effect.
It wasn’t just a matter of people being lazy, we had tens of millions of people for whom willfully flouting social distancing and masking was part of their social and political identity. And then there were people who simply denied there was any pandemic. I know someone who died of COVID (prior to the vaccine), and his family was too embarrassed to tell anyone what he had died of. It’s difficult to implement any measures when so many people are going to refuse to follow them.
Apart from the COVID issues, my big take-away is that we as a society should start normalizing mask use much more. Especially during known flu seasons.
I can see mask use when going to medical places becoming standard - that’s where the sick people tend to congregate. I’ve been doing frequent blood tests for about two years now, which I will have to continue for the rest of my life, and everyone there is expected to wear masks.
Other places like busses where you’re in close proximity to a large number of random people should also be mask-encouraged areas.
There also needs to be a better push for “If you’re sick, stay home!” Normalize taking sick days off work, and not requiring doctor’s notes.
Don’t want to hijack too much … but this in the Breaking News thread may be of interest. Successful Phase 2 trial of an anti-fatigue long COVID treatment.
What I think we need is a reasonable and separate amount of paid sick leave for ALL employees.
The idea being that we want nothing administrative or structural in the way of people who are truly sick staying home. Too many employers either don’t offer paid sick leave at all, or they do things like lump it in with vacation time and jury duty time as “Personal Time Off”, and then try to sell it like you get extra vacation if you don’t actually call in sick or get called for jury duty. Others just don’t offer sick time at all, and people have the choice of vacation time (if they get it), or unpaid leave (if they can get it).
Of course the flip side is that everyone thinks of PTO as vacation time, and is insanely jealous with it, especially during the early part of the year, and employees who don’t have much. People routinely get put in the position of choosing between staying home when they’re mildly ill, or being able to go visit their family for a week at Xmas, or being able to go on their family vacation they’ve been planning. And a whole lot of them will absolutely choose family/vacation over coworkers if they’re forced to like this.
Having a reasonable amount of separate “sick” time means that people can take it without having to jeopardize their vacation/holiday plans, or having to actually take unpaid time off work. It takes a lot of the pressure off- you can just take sick time for doctor’s visits, when you’re not feeling good, etc… and you don’t have to worry about your paycheck, or if you’ll have to work through the holidays.
By the time there was any public acknowledgement or civil response, SARS-CoV-2 was already firmly entrenched in the continental United States, and given the infectivity and largely asymptomatic transmission “near-total lockdowns” and “forceful quarantines” would have been ineffectual even aside from the legal issues and public backlash that would have produced. Although I think many states could have been far more effectual in both clear public guidance and imposing restrictions against large gatherings, a “total lockdown” scenario is just not practical. Restrictions on international travel and immigration was, in fact, severe.
This had a major impact upon industries which are dependent upon migrant workers, and in particular agriculture and food processing. Making even more stringent restrictions would have exacerbated these further.
The SARS-CoV-2 vaccine was produced in literally record time, and expedited through the standard three phase clinical development process to ensure safety of the vaccine and efficacy of the protocol. I don’t know where you get the figure of “8 months” from but that isn’t remotely plausible for even an Emergency Use Authorization, and given the amount of hand-wringing and anti-vaccine sentiment based upon (unfounded) fears that this process was short-circuited, actually cutting corners and potentially compromising safety data would have been a terrible move to take. Although this vaccine was never likely to cause a crisis like the Cutter Incident which used attenuated live virus, it would have been a tragic setback if it had caused large outbreaks of inflammation or other side effects. As it was, there were people grossly exaggerating the rather minor and extremely rare adverse reactions and conflating coincident conditions into supposed massive deaths from heart attacks, stroke, et cetera. The only criticism I have about the way the vaccine was deployed is that it was pushed down to state and local health officials who were often ill-constituted for a mass vaccination campaign as well as bureaucratic restrictions on who could be vaccinated with ‘spare’ doses before they expired leading to a lot of waste and delay earlier in the process.
What didn’t work is that we (the United States) was completely unprepared for any respiratory pathogen outbreak despite the fact that epidemiologists have literally been warning that something like this was coming for decades. The federal government didn’t maintain stockpiles of protective equipment, ventilators, medication for treating respiratory and clotting factors, or support for the standby capability to ramp up production of the same, nor was adequate pathogen surveillance capability in place to rapidly test & trace at the national level, and most states and municipalities have minimal capability to support this. And the problem now is that we still aren’t doing any of this or otherwise preparing for the next pandemic outbreak on anything like the appropriate scale.
That’s true in general, and not just personal sick leave but also leave for parents to stay home with sick children instead of dumping them in daycare or school.
Stranger
Agreed. This is one of those things that just don’t make sense. It’s a benefit to the employers to not have a sick worker infecting everyone else at work. Even if you can force all your employees to come in sick, they don’t produce at anywhere near their usual levels of production.
You can get 0% from one worker staying home sick and 100% from the other four, or 80% from 5 workers coming in sick, and break even. Any less than 80% or any more than 5 workers out sick, and you’re losing.
I think this all comes down to trust. Yes, it makes perfect sense from a public health perspective, and from the employee’s perspective, but from the boss’s perspective they have to trust their employees not to abuse “sick time” as just another day off to play (e.g.: the whole doctor’s note thing). The way I see it, employment in America is generally not based on that sort of trust, where an employee calls-in to say they are not feeling well, and the boss says “Sure! Just go ahead and stay home today - you will get paid anyway. We got this! Feel better and see you soon!”.
I’m reminded of my previous workplace in about 2016-2017, where we had “PTO”, and the company was kind of stingy with it. We suggested the ability to work from home when sick, and pointed out that many people will choose to come in sick rather than jeopardize family vacation plans or holiday plans, and they looked at me like I’d grown a tentacle out of my forehead while sitting there. Long story short, we had a single bucket for PTO and no ability to work from home if we felt bad.
Not a year later in early December, someone got the flu (Flu B, in fact), and because of the way that nearly everyone showed up at work until they were deathly ill, the entire IT department ended up taking a de-facto week off, because so many people were out sick that the people in the office couldn’t actually get work done.
Separate sick time (or work from home capability) would have headed that off at the pass in all likelihood, as people would have been much more willing to just take off sick or work from home, rather than have to weigh missing holiday plans vs. the likelihood of making everyone else sick.
It can be; most people will live up to those expectations of honesty. I’ve worked for a couple of companies that had honor system sick time. As in, it wasn’t tracked, and you stayed home if you were sick. Interestingly enough, it worked extremely well- people stayed home when they were sick, but you didn’t see too many incidents where people just didn’t feel like coming in, and didn’t feel like taking a vacation day either. People treated it with the respect that it deserved.
That’s what we do. We actually do it with vacation time too. We don’t keep track.
Oh, I agree that is what it should be, and what it could be. But, that is not what it is for the vast majority of American work places.
It’s almost like, if you treat your employees with respect, and not like a bunch of criminals plotting to rip you off, they reciprocate.
Weird, I’m sure it was just a fluke.
I would sometimes come in sick not realizing that I problably should have taken the day off. But when you’ve got something like a cold, typically just taking off a single day isn’t going to prevent you from spreading diseases around. While I work from home about 90% of the time, there have been a few times where I’ve cancelled face-to-face meetings on account of me being ill. Not too sick to work, but just sick enough that I shouldn’t be around other people. Working from home does have an advantage for employers because it will cut down on sick days. At least in theory. I need to check and see what our PTO usage at work has been since 2020 and compare it to earlier years.
Some companies have unlimited PTO. This sounds great, but often times employees don’t end up taking advantage of it and it can save the company money. And when you quit, well, there’s no PTO or vacation days they have to pay you because it’s unlimited rather than a pool.
Stranger
This has probably been said. My experiences only apply to Canada with limited exceptions.
The good
- Decent job by public on social distancing
- In Canada, decent job of mask wearing
- In Canada, fairly high levels vaccine uptake
- Relative mortality rates low
- Governments acted reasonably quickly
- Politicians chose science over “hoax”, infighting
- Moneys made available for relief
- Generally respected rights
- Amazing science to make vaccines fairly fast
- People came together for a while
- More research on viruses and vaccines
- Less tolerance of meanness, temporarily
The bad
- Closing parks? Dog walking areas? Gyms?
- Closing schools? Choice of essential stores?
- Time to acquire tests, vaccines, beds
- Nursing home and ICU problems persist
- Not recognizing current ER and provider needs
- Politics by fiat, not consensus
- Moneys often badly spent or tracked
- Mental health and education sequelae
- Made people less compassionate
- Business supports often lacking
- Some ugly jingoism, racism, othering
- Crucial industries no longer local
- New expectations not always better
- Scaremongering
- Travel restrictions; delaying, not mitigating
The ugly
- Anti-science and anti-vaccine persistence
- Decline of influence of experts
- Global surveillance programs stopped just before needed
- Stockpiles stopped just before needed
- Medical staff burnout, intimidation
- Excessive profiteering
- Failure to widely distribute vaccines globally
- Could still be a big future problem
- Adopting anti vaccine as political platform, dumb
- Origin, conditions still may persist
- Failure of many restaurants, some industries
- Lessons probably not learned by many govts
- Education effects will persist for some time
- Medical backlog/effects of delaying appts/Dx/Sx
Australia generally had a good Covid epidemic, with early intervention, restricted international travel and various amounts of interstate travel jurisdictions leading to very low death tolls [zero covid deaths across the nation sometimes], which allows contact tracing and other suppression to be worthwhile control methods.
Ys, it definitely helps to live on an island, but in the first 18 months Uruguay and Paraguay, both bordering Bolsonaro’s Brazil - which frequently hit the top 10 fatality charts, and Vietnam all did phenomenally well, so the island thing alone is no answer.
What worked well for Australia was we closed China inflights early, and were fairly quick with others. A national cabinet of the Feds and states / territories, so that all of the states (who do the heavy lifting in the medical system) had a clear stake in a single coherent national position. Australians are generally not fans of politicians, but they expect them to step up and earn their pay in crises, and will follow instructions that do not seem to be too self-serving or stupid. The state premiers took on a much stronger leadership role.
The National Cabinet were advised by a committee of the state chief medical officers, so there was a clear distinction between the medical advice and the political position. Its a little thing but the transparency of that feed of ideas into policy matters a lot in convincing people to put trust in expertise.
I think all the state premiers early on established a daily covid press conference, where they’d repeat some key messages, and then the Chief Health Officer would give details on cases, issues etc, and journalists could ask questions. It really helped to have a single source of truth as to what the requirements were, and how and why they would change (often flagged weeks in advance).
I think we were lucky to have two very strong leaders in the most populous states who became a de facto national leadership couple (one Liberal, one Labor), but none of the premiers proved to be a dud.
Another thing that was really important in Australia’s success was that in 2019-20, just before Covid we had a horrific and unprecedented fire season across the country. It really shook out the emergency services, the links between different agencies and lines of communication and command. It made the switch to covid as the issue far easier, and with well-tested and tuned machinery in response. The states accused the Feds of dropping the ball, so they were extra-keen to be quick in stepping up when covid appeared.
Overall, trust in government so that there was a single coordinated national response cascading down smoothly to all levels of govt was critical. Having a structure where technical medical expertise was allowed to do its thing and politicians put in a position where they had to justify their response on the evidence was also critical (and unprecedented). The third was the quickness of the response, so that cases and fatalities were kept low and could allow further suppression measures like contact-tracing to be effective.
And just to note for everyone’s benefit that the World Health Organisation has declared that the Covid Emergency is over, at least as a pandemic of international concern.
In brief:
The WHO Director-General concurs with the advice offered by the Committee regarding the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. H e determines that COVID-19 is now an established and ongoing health issue which no longer constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) .
So, we survived it (with the usual caveats and crossed fingers and touching of wood).
Now when it kills you, you won’t feel any more special than if you’d had lung cancer or been hit by a bus or just made bad choices about what parental genes you took on.
AIUI, they said it’s still a pandemic. It’s just no longer an official Emergency.