I’m getting a little tired of articles or chats with people where you get the impression that people think the vaccines will create some sort of covid-proof bubble around them. This is the only explanation I can find for people acting surprised that vaccinated people get sick. The whole point was to prime the immune system so that when exposed, the likelihood of extreme effects would be drastically reduced. That’s it.<p>(E: I don’t get why people downvote this - all of the benefits of vaccination are precisely due to what I describe. Lower likelihood of individual bad outcomes, which reduces burdens on healthcare, and ideally, reduces community spread by reducing the amount of virus that replicates in an individual and can be passed on. This is why I was one of the first in line when I could get the vaccine. Perhaps daring to critique people with unrealistic vaccine expectations is unacceptable?)
“ To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu.”<p>Exactly. I see no reason why I’d take strong measures to avoid getting exposed to it (now that I and 90% of adults around me are fully vaccinated) when I never did the same for the flu. Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost sight of what constitutes a normal disease burden.
Here’s an interesting calculator from Oxford using Britain’s data from COVID:<p><a href="https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation" rel="nofollow">https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation</a><p>My wife is a nurse and doesn’t follow up the data and she was in disbelief that her “risk” of serious/death was around 0.00005% or somewhere near that.
Looks like actual cases will make up a material portion of herd immunity. Columbia reports that up to 1/3 of Americans already had contracted COVID by the end of 2020:<p><a href="https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news/one-three-americans-already-had-covid-19-end-2020" rel="nofollow">https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/public-health-now/news...</a>
So did I a few weeks ago. I was vaxxed in April. And then caught it in early August. Three days of sweating and chills, a week of coughing and loopy-head. Positive PCR test. 3 weeks later and I still have a chest-cough I can't shake.<p>Of course, if I didn't have the vaccine, I probably would be in an overflowing hospital close to death.
> In my case, it was worse than expected, but, in the parlance of public health, it was "mild," meaning I didn't end up in the hospital or require oxygen.<p>> ...<p>> It was a miserable five days. My legs and arms ached, my fever crept up to 103 and every few hours of sleep would leave my sheets drenched in sweat. I'd drop into bed exhausted after a quick trip down to the kitchen. To sum it up, I'd put my breakthrough case of COVID-19 right up there with my worst bouts of flu. Even after my fever cleared up, I spent the next few weeks feeling low.<p>"Mild" can mean different things to different people. I doubt this description of "mild" fits most people's concept of the word, as it sounds like a severe case of the flu. The fact that these infections are happening against a backdrop of normalization efforts should give anyone who thinks we're out of the woods pause.<p>As the rate of infection increases, so does the risk to the vaccinated. It's another demonstration, once again, of how our public health system (and the CDC in particular) has failed us:<p>> ... "quantifying that [chance of symptomatic case in an unvaccinated person] in the U.S. is very challenging" because our "data is so shoddy."<p>Some time ago, the CDC stopped counting/sequencing "mild" breakthrough cases, so we're flying blind mostly. Maybe it's delta the reporter caught. Maybe something else. Who knows?<p><a href="https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asymptomatic-breakthrough-covid-cases-1616802" rel="nofollow">https://www.newsweek.com/why-did-cdc-stop-counting-mild-asym...</a><p>What's clear is that COVID-19 isn't going away any time soon. What's also clear is that it shares the tendency that all RNA viruses have to mutate at an extremely rapid rate. It has shown that it can change much faster than we can adapt.
This is what post pandemic looks like.<p>Covid is endemic, and just like you probably don't know anyone who has never had the flu or the cold, it will be the same with this.<p>Get your vax! It'll likely keep you out of the hospital when you do get it.<p>Mask up all you want. Avoid crowds. Shun and shame people. You're still going to get it, just like everyone else.
Sherman should have continued marching through the south for several years completely displacing all of the traitors who have become the Republican Party today. Then we could have public health.
> Recent research from the U.K. suggests that vaccinated people are about 50% less likely to develop long COVID than those who are unvaccinated.<p>To me that doesn't sound like that great of a risk reduction.
People get sick. It happens. I am well-aware that by resuming my pre-pandemic lifestyle, and only wearing a mask in the spaces where they're mandatory, I am increasing my risk of getting ill.<p>But I'm not going to change my behavior, because I'd rather be sick for a week than sit at home 24/7 for the next year, or wear a mask every time I step outside, and constantly monitor my physical distance from other people. My life is passing me by right now, and I want to enjoy it while I can.
The recognition that the medical establishment is still unsure of many things regarding a still developing situation is a good first step. The next is to realize that the misinterpretations of their knowledge and understanding are the direct result of misrepresentation of events and facts by media outlets.
At the beginning of the pandemic, health agencies started misrepresenting and overstating the certainty of science, in order to attempt to get more buy-in from the public.<p>It started with masks. The studies that we had about masks really were not great, but they did a risk-reward calculation behind closed doors: worst case scenario, the surgical masks don't impact the spread and it changes nothing; best case scenario, we reduce community spread. The problem with this is that if they told the public that this was how they were thinking about the problem, they wouldn't get people wearing the masks, so they overstated their confidence in it when speaking to the public. A good amount of people truly believe that the science was clear. But it wasn't.<p>It continued with tests. It's much better to have a high rate of false positives than to have any rate of false negatives, so they pumped up the cycle count to accomplish this. They later toned it down. To the public, the tests aren't even questioned, most people believe they're pretty accurate, and most people are unaware that they have changed the criteria throughout the last year and a half. They sold it to the public like this because they knew that people would avoid getting tested and staying quarantined if they didn't trust the tests.<p>Lately, it's about the vaccines. There is no serious scientist that believed that the vaccines would prevent COVID from becoming endemic. It was obvious that this was going to be with us for the rest of our lives back all the way in April of last year (or earlier). There are no serious scientists that believe that 2 shots and a booster is going to be the end of it, and yet they're happy to tell us that we "might" need boosters. Do any serious scientists actually believe that? These aren't "breakthrough" cases, because it's not truly a vaccine in the sense that the Polio vaccine was a vaccine. It's a prophylactic. We <i>always knew</i> it was a prophylactic, but they sold it to the public as something else, because people wouldn't get it if they didn't lie.<p>We need to decide if we're okay with science agencies lying to us. Is their purpose to exact change on society, or is their purpose to do good science and tell us honest results? All of the confusion in this article stems from the misrepresentations they sell us.
"Next, a headache clamped down on the back of my skull. Then my eyeballs started to ache. "<p>Why do I feel like this was written in an alarmist tone with some kind of an agenda?
There’s a lot of conflicting data about the vaccine effectiveness against reducing symptoms of breakthrough infections.<p>It’s interesting though, that the author’s symptoms sound about average for someone of their age group if unvaccinated, which is around the same or slightly worse than what all of the people under 50 I know who got Covid reported, whether vaccinated or not.
> The vaccines aren't a forcefield that ward off all things COVID. They were given the greenlight because they greatly lower your chance of getting seriously ill or dying.<p>> ... there were reassuring findings earlier this year that the vaccine was remarkably good at stopping any infection, even mild ones. This was a kind of bonus, we were told.<p>Isnt this false? If I recall, there was not enough data in early clinical trials to tell how effective the vaccines were at preventing severe illness and death, and the vaccines were largely approved based on reducing the risk ratio of infection<p>EDIT: pretty sure I'm right. See data below.
> Where did I get it? Who knows. Like so many Americans, I had loosened up with wearing masks and social distancing, after getting fully vaccinated<p>I’m not a fan of this vaguely hamartiological style of reasoning. The narrative structure is like a biblical cautionary tale. The author had something bad happen to him, and so he’s searching for a transgression he committed that he can use to construct a punishment narrative.
It’s depressing how all these stories just reinforce the idea that the US could never suffer another lockdown.<p>We have exploding cases and even a brief lockdown would greatly decrease them, but the political will to try and stop it has completely dried up, likely from business interests.
I searched for "monoclonal" and "respirator" in the article and found nothing. If you want go avoid getting infected, wear a correctly fitted respirator, preferably NIOSH P100 elastomeric with replaceable cartridges. If you can convince your doctor, they can prescribe monoclonal antibodies right after you get exposed, with no symptoms or testing needed.
If you think you're getting sick, the number one action you should take is to begin treatment <i>early</i>. You need to take action before symptoms get worse. The author had a high grade fever for a week but never mentioned seeking any treatment.<p>Things you should do yourself: take vitamins and nutritional supplements, drink plenty of water, get your body moving, isolate yourself from others, wear a mask.<p>Things your doctor should do for you: prescribe antivirals, also corticosteriods & antithrombotics if symptoms continue to worsen. The goal is to avoid the hospital and severe outcomes - many clinics will prescribe these safe & widely available over the counter medicines with little to no consultation.<p>Whether you're vaccinated or not, this should be the standard of care for everyone - it's no different than most other viral infections. For some reason very few people seem to be aware of this advice, and all the scientific evidence supporting it (in the context of SARS-CoV-2 and in general).