I am one of those and I will be one of those still wearing a mask. With only about 50% of the South King County population having at least 1 Covid vaccine, I’m not willing to be one of those that runs into one of the 50% that is unvaccinated. My daughter, fully vaccinated and boosted, has had 3 confirmed cases of Covid in the past year. She also rarely wears a mask.
Something I find confusing: Why aren’t we getting updated vaccines as new variants emerge?
AIUI, after we ramped up for mass production and administration of mRNA vaccines for COVID, updating the vaccine was supposed to be a minor effort. The adjuvants and admixtures wouldn’t change, just a slight change to the code of the mRNA payload (whose sequence is known because sequencing is also very fast nowadays).
So I’m just kind of confused at why this didn’t happen, we have this vaccine platform whose advantage was supposedly that it could be rapidly adapted to any pathogen for which we could produce mRNA, and instead we wring our hands that Omicron and Delta and BA2 aren’t stopped as well by the original vaccine developed 18 months ago.
I know it’s probably harder than I’m making out, but again, that was supposed to be the selling point. When are we going to start leveraging the supposedly rapid adaptability of this vaccine?
Outstanding post.
I had gotten the impression (from nothing I can link to in the moment) that for a time, the major game-changing variants were coming so fast and furious that vaccine researchers felt like producing a vaccine tailored to the flavor-of-the-month was not worthwhile.
Plus, it had been thought that the original vaccines were good enough in preventing bad results. It’s not frequently said out loud … but it seems to me that vaccine researchers have (perhaps temporarily) abandoned the goal of creating a vaccine that approaches sterilizing immunity – one that virtually stops societal transmission cold. So perhaps the idea of throwing a lot of work into a boutique vaccine that was going to be obsolete in six months – AND not really curtail transmission very much – has been unappealing.
What were the outcomes of her three infections? IMHO, that’s the lynchpin more so than just the simple fact of having repeated COVID infections.
I mean, sure, but the mRNA platform was touted as being the thing that would make it appealing. If we’re just gonna shrug our shoulders and say “they’re just coming too fast”, then we’re doing no better than the annual reshuffle of flu vaccines.
Except… the mRNA vaccines were announced 18 months ago! We’re not even meeting the 12-month refresh interval of the flu vaccine!
Let’s set aside the idea of updating the vaccine every time a variant comes out. What will trigger the very first update of the 18-month-old vaccine to treat a global pandemic that’s been circulating for over 2 and a half years now? It hasn’t even been done once.
I would guess the arrival of a variant for which the current vaccine offers little or no protection against severe illness or death might justify the expense of updating the vaccine. For all of the variants so far, the existing vaccines have offered pretty good (albeit not great) protection against severe illness. Whenever a decision is made that an update is warranted, the ability of mRNA tech to speed development will be very handy.
One issue is the original antigenic sin, which makes a variant-based vaccine less effective against its variant in people who have prior exposure (whether vaccine or infection acquired) than it would otherwise have been.
Of course, on the flip side, something needs to be your first exposure, and studies of immunologically naive people who had variant-based vaccines found they mounted a strong response against their variant, but a pretty crappy response against original-strain, which is still out there.
But “original sin” means that another dose of the same old vaccine is often nearly as good as a dose of a variant-based vaccine. So the push to produce new vaccines was weak as long as the original vaccine produced good protection.
And yes, it looks like we aren’t going to be able to achieve true sterilizing immunity to covid going forward. Although studies have found (surprise!) that immunized people are less likely to be infectious, and if infectious, are likely to be so for a shorter time, so getting vaccinated does still protect others. Just not as much as originally hoped.
Is that not exactly what they’re saying? That it’s essentially endemic at this point, like the flu or the other coronaviruses, and that we’ll all just catch it periodically forever, no matter what we do? And that our best defense is vaccination/boosting, so that when we do inevitably get it, it’s mild and not a big deal?
To add to what @bordelond is saying, I honestly don’t see things rapidly getting worse. What I see is cases slowly rising for about a month and a half then leveling off before memorial day. There’s a slight dip due to due the holiday but not compensating rise since. Cases along the east coast rose a month earlier than the rest of the country; their numbers are declining.
A much better indicator is hospitalizations. Even though there may be a delay, up to 50% of positives during the BA.1 surge were people going to the hospital for other reasons. It’s a good way to monitor trends. Hospitalizations are also starting to decline on the east coast.
The best indicators of severity are ICU patients and deaths. Barely a blip.
In my area, cases and hospitalizations have been slowing rising for over a month and a half. Even with the slow rise, hospitalized people with a positive covid test are still near the lowest we’ve had throughout the pandemic. ICU and ventilator patients are the lowest they’ve been. Very few deaths.
So I think the major dangers are over unless a new, more dangerous variant comes along. Otherwise, it’s preventing long covid. Does vaccination help mitigate this or do we have to try to avoid being infected all together? I still put some effort to avoid getting infected but not as much as the past. I’m double-boosted and wear a mask if I’m going to be inside will plenty of people. On the other hand, I don’t bother putting on a mask if I’m just going to run in the store for a few minutes. I have eaten in a restaurant during off hours a few weeks ago.
Is it? My understanding is that all variants prior to Omicron (maybe prior to Delta) are essentially extinct in the United States.
Then again – Omicron itself is an umbrella with dozens of variants under it.
It’s not currently circulating, no. But if we developed a large population with no immunity to it, I’m sure there’s enough lurking around the edges that it would make a comeback.
Both.
The better studies I’ve seen suggest that vaccination reduces the odds of long covid in two ways:
- you are less likely to catch covid at all
- if you did catch covid, your odds of long covid are about 1/2 the odds of an unvaccinated person who catches covid.
So…a huge improvement, but still a risk worth putting some effort into avoiding, imo.
I feel like I’ve hit a good stride with what I and my family are doing (KN95s in public, mostly socializing outside, work in the office with masks, up to date on vaccinations).
I’m wondering when preventative testing will be a thing of the past, though. I get it if you have symptoms or an exposure. But, as a for instance, my son is going to a summer program in Texas. All the kids are required to be fully vaxed and boosted and show proof of that. On top of that, he needs to provide a negative PCR test from the day before he leaves, and they’re going to rapid test him two days after he arrives.
Is all that necessary? They’re not going to be in anything approaching a bubble - in Texas!! - with outings to a public, indoor dance performance, the mall, museums, etc. and instructors who will be out living their lives every night. The pre-testing seems a bit like emptying the ocean with a thimble. And I’m wondering when those sort of requirements will be a thing of the past. If we’re just living with this indefinitely, that’s what I’d eliminate.
Yeah, around here in my area of Chicago, for all practical purposes, life has gone mostly back to normal and has been for some time now. The only difference you’ll see between now and 2019 is that about 15% of people in my neighborhood wear masks in public.
Otherwise, life feels normal, unlike this time in 2020. I travel. I fly. I don’t avoid big crowds. I’m not anxious. I go to concerts. I eat out. I’m at large (300+ guest) unmasked wedding receptions almost weekly. My kids go to school largely unmasked (there are times masking was required again.) The majority of my friends and family are the same in their attitude. There’s only one or two I could think of that are more hesitant of public spaces and always wear masks out. I can’t think of anyone who requested I wear a mask in their presence. (Which I, of course, would do.) Basically, it feels like the general mood is most people – whether rightly or wrongly – have decided to go about their lives as if this were influenza.
Yikes, that’s grim. The COVID county community level site lists my county as 95% having at least one shot, followed by an explanation that they cap that number at 95%. So for first shots my county is maxed, with 80% having a second shot and 40% boosted.
Does anyone else use the community level COVID site to keep abreast of your current situation? I rolled my eyes pretty hard when they first introduced the “community level”, but I love just having it in a tab on my phone I can refresh to check the current level at a moment’s notice.
Here’s my county, you have to switch it to yours with a little selector thingy at the top.
A month or two ago we were at low, then a few weeks ago it went to medium, then within a week it was high, but it has since dropped back down to medium for the last week or two. I mask unless it says low. I think the official guidance says to mask if it says high, not medium, but a little extra caution doesn’t hurt.
Welp, they just dropped the testing requirement to fly into the U.S.:
I don’t really see what it was doing. They weren’t testing for domestic flights. At this point what’s the dif?
Yeah I’m not even sure how I feel about it.
Ha! SO glad I hadn’t yet booked pre-departure testing for our study abroad crew when this announcement came down. Sometimes procrastination is its own reward; sometimes there are more concrete benefits 
Right, and it’s not like we are keeping disease from our shores by ensuring people who have it are kept away. They’re flying into a country rife with covid!