And of course, everybody becomes vulnerable over time, because eventually you get old (and you don’t have to be super old for your risk factors to jump.)
It will be interesting to see what it does to life expectancy.
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The friend I was talking to is so far on the other side of the “I did my own research” anti vax side into the highly paranoid “I did my own research” side - essentially won’t believe any studies that says covid won’t be terrible forever, and thinks their (not public health trained) conclusions are more expert than epidemiologists.
I find that kind of thinking frustrating because it seems to place Covid on pedestal away from other public health concerns, including mental health.
I keep struggling with how we have been through plagues, including 1918 pandemic, and we didn’t like… stop having restaurants or double mask everywhere forever
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In northern Nevada things have been back to normal for a year. I am guessing you will get a annual Covid vaccine similar to the flu. I only get the flu about once every 10 years and don’t get the shot. But I will get a yearly Covid one. I am actually surprised that I haven’t caught it yet because I am in nursing homes and assisted living facilities every week to visit friends.
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This is where one of my brothers and his wife are, and it’s incredibly frustrating. Especially when they do other health sabotaging behaviors like excessive drinking. The “you’re abandoning everyone if you think we shouldn’t still be in full Covid lockdown” crowd is definitely also hard to deal with.
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I find this also frustrating when it comes from people that aren’t in a socioeconomic class where they saw firsthand how awful covid lockdowns were for service industry folks. Like… it’s super easy to say we should be in lockdowns forever when you’ve been in a remote tech job all along making 5x the national median income and didn’t have to deal with constant fear for your health at work and daily abuse for enforcing the laws.
I just absolutely do not think continued lockdowns are sustainable or even effective - China is making it clear how they don’t work with omicron.
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Cassie how can we convince you to get the flu shot! We have a forum badge for it 
Yea, the most recent NYtimes article I read was super depressing because initially they thought a yearly covid vaccine in front of an annual wave like flu would be the path, but with omicron being good at not generating immunity they’re now saying that it’s more like every 2-3 months like a common cold.
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I see you’ve met that brother and his wife 
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I find as this pandemic wears on, I have fewer strong feelings about how things should be handled and more frustration that it seems like no one (even the experts) know.
Like, I’m pretty willing to follow rules if I feel like they are
- perceived to be reasonable
- perceived to make a difference
It feels like no expert is giving us a combination of those two at this point. I think humans get really frustrated by long-term unpredictability, and this has been 2 years of massive unpredictability about even the simplest things in life and it’s not sustainable.
My recent experience around trying to get dosing information for my immunosuppressant after infection just reinforced for me that 2.5 years is really long time to live through a pandemic, but a really short window for science to know anything.
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Late to the discussion, but I am hoping we get out of this through a combination of:
- annual booster shots that are more tailored to current strains (I have wildly unrealistic dreams of the FDA allowing Moderna/Pfizer to swap out the mRNA sequence every year without redoing all the testing, like they do with annual flu vaccines) and
- the nasal vaccines that they’re working on which will stop covid right as you breathe it into your nostrils vs. waiting until it invades enough for your immune system to respond as the current vaccines have trained you to do
That’s on a global level, though. Personally? I have just about run out of fucks to give and am doing whatever I want and wearing a mask whenever possible. If I have to remove my mask to, say, dine indoors, so be it. I think this perspective is somewhat informed by the fact that I had covid so early on, so avoiding it altogether was never an option for me. Not that I want to get it again, but it feels like the ship has sailed. I mostly just don’t want to spread it to others if I do get sick.
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okay that’s really fucking cool.
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I was in that category, then I got covid, now I have had covid for 17 days and had to cancel a lot of things because I had a rebound when I thought I was recovered.
I’ve been symptom free except a slightly runny nose for almost 2 weeks now - if I didn’t have a positive antigen test, I would defiinitely be out there living life and assuming this was slight allergies.
This is a thing I have a question about - it’s obviously not gonna work long-term to pull kids out of school and people out of work for 3 weeks* if we’re gonna get it every 2-3 months.
People don’t test for flu or the common cold and they go back to work after symptoms stop (some go back to work all along which we need to fix). Is it likely that we would persist with testing? I expect not because my friend who works at an old folks home had to go back to work on Day 10 even though she was still testing positive.
*nor is that economically feasible for all the workers without sick pay
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Now that my state seems to finally be pulling out of our “opening up to the world” COVID wave, I expect to be in the mindset of “life as normal but with varying degrees of mask and crowd avoidance” by about September (Spring here).
Which isnt far off where I currently am except that right now I’m avoiding things like working in an office and putting my kid in group activities.
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Yeah, it’s definitely not a one size fits all solution, just what I’ve come to for myself. I’m lucky enough not to have risk factors to need paxlovid, so I’m not as likely to have a rebound. And I’m also privileged to have a ton of sick leave available. So it would be feasible for me to isolate until I tested negative (even if I would be bummed about whatever activities I’d have to miss in the meantime). I’m also really hoping I’m not gonna start getting it every 2-3 months if I’m still wearing a mask most of the time…
But of course that’s not the situation for many people who can’t afford to catch it (health-wise, job-wise…) which is why I desperately wish the experts had a better long term solution that would work for everyone. To your point earlier , though, science just doesn’t work on this kind of time scale. It’s honestly a miracle to me that we’ve done as much as we have, science-wise (don’t get me started policy-wise).
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This is about where I am, except for the part where I don’t think I’ve ever had covid (although I’ve never taken anything but tests that can tell if you currently have it, and I know a fair number of people who were asymptomatic and only know they had it because they tested when family members started having symptoms, so who knows). I still don’t do a lot indoors and wear masks when I can, but while I’m hoping that vaccinations/boosters get better, I’ve got a bad feeling that the actual best hope is mutation towards more contagious/less dangerous strains. I’d much prefer it to be otherwise, but even if there was enough of a push to make it possible for everyone to lock down (and I’m talking across the world since one country going into lockdown isn’t going to do a whole lot unless borders go completely shut and stay that way–just look at what’s happening in China even with their attempt at isolation), there are enough ‘covid’s not a thing/covid’s just the flu’ people out there that it still wouldn’t happen.
Having said that, I’m visiting family with a currently un-vaccinatable toddler later this summer, and I’m timing my next booster to do my best to avoid taking any crap to them because especially with long covid we just don’t know.
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I would guess that at some point we’ll get enough Paxlovid/enough paxlovid data that it will be approved for everyone like Tamiflu. Between that and rapid tests things for people with health care access (and without very severe risk factors) should get less scary.
But one advantage we had in the 1918 pandemic was that flu mutates so quickly. It was still killing more people than a normal flu season for many years though, and people just kind of ignored it
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The sneaky thing for me that’s frustrating is the way this virus seems extra able to inhabit ALL parts of the body’s systems, hideout, and reactivate later. It’s similar to HIV in its ability to hang out in nooks and crannies and then just poof reappear. It also reactivates other diseases.
The current estimates are like 20% of adults are experiencing long covid symptoms which seems shocking to me and I’d like to believe is just fear mongering/bad initial data. Maybe long covid is just a thing we accept though, and find ways for society to handle it better. Or maybe Paxlovid means we treat early, and it seems that might reduce chances of long covid based on the current (preliminary AF) data.
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I agree with this. Also, COVID is only two years old so let’s take “long” with a grain of salt.
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I am also hoping the preliminary numbers aren’t real so that’s my bias but:
When you read what people are actually describing as long covid the symptoms are wildly different in both length and severity. It officially starts counting at 6 weeks I think, and a lingering cough and some residual tiredness with exercise for about a month after a two week illness is something I’ve experienced about once every other year. That’s dramatically different than developing life long POTS or other post viral syndromes.
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Yea, long covid is a really big category.
The thing that’s concerning specifically about covid is how few viruses seems good at doing what it seems to be good at doing: finding its way into and fucking up nearly every body system.
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I think some of this is definitions. Based on the definitions going around, I’m pretty sure I qualify since I saw doctors for covid-related symptoms months and even years later. BUT my long covid symptom is only exercise-induced tachycardia. I mostly kept getting checked out to make sure exercise was safe. And it is. No actual physical issues with my heart or lungs. I just have to listen to my body and work out a little less intensely than I used to to keep my heart rate from staying too high for too long. But it doesn’t affect my daily life at all, and I still finished the half marathon I set out to do before I got sick. It was just slower than my original goal.
I’m not saying the medical field shouldn’t take it seriously, because people with any kind of long covid absolutely deserve full attention and care. But I do wish the news reporting would break it down more in terms of life-altering and non-life altering. I’ll bet the numbers would be less alarming.
I would also be curious if “long covid” is really any worse than, say “long flu”, proportion wise. It wonder if it just feels like a lot because we don’t usually have so many people infected with the same virus all at once, and people are acutely aware of any changes they feel after they’ve had covid.
EDIT: I typed slow, but what @darlingpants said.
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