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California county urges residents to wear masks again as COVID-19, RSV levels spike
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2023
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COVID is the real Neverending Story
I mean, so is the flu.
As a species I think it’s a little bit arrogant that we’d think new challenges to our survival were over. Aside from the current major ones that we kinda look at with worry sometimes but leave be the majority of the time.
I wonder if we’re going to start taking Covid and flu more seriously, or if we just start to blow of Covid as a nothing-burger like most (Americans at least) do for the flu.
Seeing as only 14% of American adults have received the updated COVID vaccine, I'd say most are blowing it off.
I don't have the over 200$ to hand to these pricks to get a prick for the wife n me. I'd like one, but fuck it i guess. Ride or die baby
They should be covered by your insurance. You can just go to any pharmacy at any supermarket to get it.
Even if you don't have insurance, I think it's covered.
I went to my pharmacy to get mine, handed over my insurance card when asked. The techs got so frustrated trying to get the info to take, they just rang me up as a walk-in with no insurance, no added charge.
Not everyone has insurance.
But that's if you have insurance.
I don't understand why vaccines should cost money anyway. It's to the benefit of the nation that people are vaccinated ffs.
CVS participates in the govt program that gives the covid shots for free. I was between insurances when my husband left his corporate job and I'm immunocompromised, so I looked into it and while there's a few schools and medical centers participating too, CVS is pretty much everywhere and it was absolutely zero cost to me.
That's a great thing to have. I'm Canadian so vaxes are free up here (except for travel). Yet our stats are similar to America (about 15% of the adult population got the newest vax).
There's an assumption you've made that is wrong, unfortunately.
Shot is free for uninsured
Oh really? I actually did not know that. Thanks, I'll look into it today
Check out your local department of health.
At a certain point, I think about March of 2022, most news regarding Covid was just sensationalistic. Every time I dug deeper into the science, the scientist were saying something like “be careful” and then the journalist took that and turned it into something like “half of us are going to die”.
At that point, I pretty much checked out of the whole Covid news cycle. I figured, if there was some information important enough, it’d find its way to me. And I stopped actively consuming it.
If anyone has a good mailing list or something to follow for just the most important Covid updates… otherwise, I’m just living my life… no mask, one vax and a booster.
Ngl, I got 2 shots and the 1st booster. It seems like now they are just trying to get every dime out of this and make it a seasonal booster. I had covid for the first time this year (that I know of at least... had a crazy respiratory thing in 2020 before there were tests n I was 90% sure I had it then too) It was mild AF. Pretty sure the OG vaxx provides far better immunity than they lead on, and just want annual revenue. I'm done. Unless younger people start getting affected by it and dying in droves, I don't need anymore boosters. Frankly, I was hesitant to get the MRNA vaxx in the first place, since we don't know if there are any long term complications, and after having it earlier in the year, I'm really not worried about it, or trying to get a booster every 6 months.
They're not trying anything; that's what viruses do when they are not eradicated.
COVID is a moving target. It is evolving as it spreads. This selects for the variants that bypass the current dominant strains. The new vaccines are adjusted to include the newer ones, or rely on boosting general immunity to get the same effect. COVID will almost certainly be endemic, like the flu. As such, will require periodic boosts or adjustments.
As for the mRNA, there's no mechanism for longer term problems. It is in and out of your system relatively quickly. Combined with being easy to hyper target it means they should be a lot safer than the older methods. I would also expect to see problems in the existing worldwide usage. We saw some minor issues with 1 of them, but even that was only due to the sheer number of cases. With any other drug, the problem would have been lost completely in the noise.
Idk man, I had far worse reactions to the vaccine than actual covid. The 1st one I got, I woke up at like 3a with my heart beating insanely hard. Not fast, hard. Like it felt like it was beating out of my chest. I still went ahead and got the 2nd one and the 1st booster, but that one reaction made me way more hesitant about getting more. I'm in decent shape, and imo not at risk of dying from covid. Maybe I'll get them again if it's still a thing in my 50s, but for now, I'm good.
I've had COVID and the vaccine. While the vaccine was less than pleasant, COVID left me coughing blood. I was alarmingly close to the 2 week collapse before I got ahead of it.
The kick would be down to the adjuncts in the vaccine. There are 2 parts to a vaccine. The target, and the immune activators.
The mRNA produces a critical protein in COVID's outer shell. It is then expelled from the cells. This protein is inert and useless on its own. The normal reaction to this would be quite mild, and produce next to no protection.
The adjuncts are used to convince the immune system there is a major attack ongoing. The small debris created by the mRNA now causes a huge reaction and strong immunity. Unfortunately this is also what makes us feel unwell. It's not the flu virus that makes us feel shit, it's our immune reaction to it.
The adjuncts are one of the areas where the COVID vaccine did cut corners. While the dose of adjuncts is still completely safe (they are used in most vaccines, some in higher doses) they aren't optimised. The larger the dose, the more ill you feel from the vaccine. In a perfect world, they would have used multiple trials to find the perfect dose, just enough to trigger the response, but no more. Unfortunately, this would have taken additional months or potentially a year to do. Instead they found a safe dose that worked, and went with it. This leaves the vaccine more aggressive in its activation. This is still perfectly safe, but less pleasant for the patient.
In short, they didn't bother with the fine tuning of comfort Vs effectiveness of the vaccine, they just went for optimal effectiveness.
The vaccines also don't leave a solid 5-10% of people with permanent cognitive impairment or heart problems.
I'm pissed because we largely shut down society to protect people over 50 from death at first, and now it turns out that young healthy people are the ones getting fucked by endemic long COVID forcing them to go on long term disability, and the boomers are all "cognitive impairment? Lol What's that?"
Fully agreed. They made the right call getting it out fast. It also means that vaccines against future variants shouldn't be so harsh. A combined flu and COVID yearly vaccine should be perfectly doable, and would help protect all.
The vaccines don't block infections totally, but they do give the immune system enough of a head start to stop it progressing to dangerous or damaging levels.
I'm not going to agree with the booster conspiracy stuff you've mentioned, but I can't fault anyone for turning down additional boosters after having the initial 3 doses of the vaccine. Covid was much worse and lasted far longer than the vaccine side effects for me, but the vaccine side effects did make me decide to decline further boosters. Each of my 3 covid shots had progressively worse side effects, and with the 2nd and 3rd ones I had flu-like symptoms and irregular heartbeat.
The booster conspiracy shit is fucking maddening. I have been so happy that my family is all sane people, but this past year two of them have fallen to this brand of anti science brain rot. And they don't understand that it's exactly the same as every other form of anti science bullshit, and they've just bought into the liberal side of the same fucking propaganda they'll rant about later without any self awareness.
Its insane to me how people will essentially brag that they failed high school biology.
Are you just so dumb you dont grasp that youre turning on a neon sign saying "I dont understand common science facts that children know"?
Or is your lack of understanding a sticking point of pride among the stupid?
Do you feel like a big man when you write insulting comments to people on the internet? Are you proud of what you've written?
Sorry, did the guy who is actively trying to argue that the multi year studied vaccines designed to combat the neuron and lung degredation disease isnt safe or worth it just try and act like anyone making fun of him shouldnt be proud?
My comment makes people laugh at you. Yours gets people choking to death on their own breath.
E: oh, sorry, youre not the anti vaxxer, just someone coddling them. Yeah, no, I have no sympathy for anti vaxx dipshits. Coddling these morons killed thousands of thousands of our neighbors literally less than 3 years ago. There is no tolerance for this dangerous willful stupidity in a safe society.
Your comment does nothing but make people angry. It's not helping anything, and will not change the behavior of anyone. When you insult someone, you only make enemies for yourself, and that's nothing to be proud of.
Take some time and think about what you write and how it can realistically affect the world. Would you not rather make a positive contribution, and improve social media?
Making these people think their crackpot kook shit is a respected viewpoint that they can bring to the table as an equal and respectable standing is the reason this shit was spread so far and so pervasively.
Its not a real stance. Its not a respectable opinion. It is killing people.
You are coddling and fostering anti vax acceptance by treating it as anything other than what it is. If you want to lecture someone about affecting the world, look in a mirror. Youre giving this shit a seat at your table, so it can kill the people eating there.
You want a positive improvement to social media? Do not make anti vax idiots welcome. They do not need more help spreading this garbage.
I haven't looked at the most current stats for COVID, but I believe death rates from it are still quite a bit higher than the flu, and with more long-term complications.
Long-term it is probably just going to be treated much like the flu barring some major breakthroughs in treatment/prevention, something that will always be around and you just have to deal with, so kind of a nothing-burger to use your words.
It's possile, maybe likely, that overtime it could mutate to be less deadly (it's theoretically advantageous for the virus to not kill its host, someone who's able to walk around go about their life is more likely to infect more people than someone in isolation in a hospital) as well as herd immunity increasing and as we make advances in treatment/prevention. I think we've definitely already seen those improvements in terms of how we treat it, probably in our immunity thanks to vaccines and people acquiring it through infection, and I can't really comment on how the virus is mutating, that's certainly way above my area of expertise and when I Google it I seem to get conflicting answers.
Annecdotally, it does seem like the general public taking illness a little more seriously, at least around me, I occasionally still see the odd person here or there wearing a mask, there's definitely more hand sanitizer, wipes, etc around than there was before the pandemic (though not as much as during the height of it of course) etc.
Statistics canada just released a report saying 1 in 9 Canadians suffered from long covid, and as of June 2023, half of those still had symptoms.
People still won't care though until it affects them.
As far as mutations go, there were concerns about it being primed to become more infectious potentially, if it came from gain of function research. Though last I read on it, lableak theory was only regarded as a possibility, still not probable.
I can confirm that a ton of otherwise reasonable people are now actively hostile to the very concept of public health after dealing with this immense collective trauma. Because people are fucking garbage.