Hey! I’m the “right” people. Where’s my “big” money?
You’ve been dead on with lots of opinions, but you’ve said nothing truer, in multiple (more than two) countries.
Some comments on recent virus observations
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Delta may not actually be more transmissible, it might just spread faster because it takes 3-4 days from infection to being contagious vs 5-6 for Wuhan Classic. It can be hard to tell intrinsic transmissibility from rate of spread, especially with all the confounding behaviors factors changing all the time. Claims of much higher viral loads seem to be overstated as well.
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despite headlines that delta can infect vaccinated people and that they can be similarly contagious, that is not really true. This is a good study out of Singapore and shows the CT values are similarly high at the very start but in vaccinated people they fall much faster (top of chart = more virus)
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.21261295v1.full.pdf
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also, note that CT values are measures of the presence of viral RNA, which is not the same as the presence of live virus. We now know that unvaccinated people test positive for viral RNA for weeks after infection, but after about 1 week from when symptoms appear, they are no longer contagious and this is just viral debris from the immune system destroying the virus but not yet cleaning up all the non-functional pieces. So even with the initially and briefly high CT values seen in vaccinated infections, they may not be very contagious or not for very long - still TBD on that.
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long covid risks seem to be, among other things, correlated with severity of initial, acute covid health problems. As such, getting vaccinated so your risk of severe outcomes is vastly reduced is probably helpful for reducing this risk. Not for sure, as there are definitely cases of long covid in mild covid survivors, but perhaps suggestive of a vaccination benefit for long term risks as well.
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Isnt it to be expected that vaccinated (and those previously recovered) will pass the virus quicker, since their immune system already knows the correct response? I dont know the technical definition of “contagious”, maybe it does include a function of time. But I’d say vaccinated people are just as contagious when infected (when an infected person coughs on you, them being vaccianted isnt affecting whether you catch it or not), but for a shorter time since their body kills the virus quicker.
Yet again this seems to be starting to circle around what some of us have thought all along… Despite all the claims that us armchair scientists were just being stupid and didnt understand.
I continue to believe that “long covid” is mostly attributable to prexisting, if undiagnosed, conditions, and represents complications the person was destined to suffer at some point regardless.
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Not necessarily. How much live virus is in your nose and upper airways determines how much you breath or sneeze out on people around you. You can be infected and have more or less virus, depending on your particular case and likely depending on how your body’s immune reaction is going. I do think you probably have lower amounts if you’ve already been exposed to the virus previously, but I haven’t actually seen research on that.
I continue to believe that “long covid” is mostly attributable to prexisting, if undiagnosed, conditions, and represents complications the person was destined to suffer at some point regardless.
I don’t think it’s that, although I guess nobody really knows yet. If some 5-10% of people end up with medium term symptoms, there are going to be a ton of them. Chronic fatigue is under 1% of everyone, even counting all the people they think who have it and don’t get a diagnosis.
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Time to stop panicking over case counts? no way. I guess it’s the UK, so we can keep up the Fear for political reasons.
Prof Hunter, who advises the World Health Organisation on Covid, also said it was time to change the way the data was collected and recorded as the virus became endemic.
“We need to start moving away from just reporting infections, or just reporting positive cases admitted to hospital, to actually start reporting the number of people who are ill because of Covid,” he added. “Otherwise we are going to be frightening ourselves with very high numbers that actually don’t translate into disease burden.”
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Or just report all of it, because increased case counts are proportional to and a good predictor of near-future hospitalizations and deaths.
Well that’s that was for UK, which has a higher vaccination rate than here, but as you get most of the people vaccinated, case counts among that group might be proportional but the constant is like 1/20 or 1/100 of what it was before.
Given no one is going to bother to explain this, a better approach might be to just report on hospitalizations, which definitely are a lot closer to what you might care about for non-political public policy (being those really are likely still proportional to expected new deaths, how taxed your medical system is, etc).
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California has a similar vaccination rate to UK. And I’m watching hospitalizations and deaths climbing from the recent spike in cases. Deaths appear to be a fraction of the prior waves (like last summer), but larger than 1/20th (we never reached 1/20th of last summer), but hospitalizations are closer to maybe 80%. I’m eyeballing, see the charts for yourself here.
When someone has basic cold/flu symptoms, feels crappy, gets tested, and tests positive, but isn’t in need of inpatient medical services, are doctors giving those people any sort of medicine yet?
No, although if you’re high risk and positive you can get the monoclonal therapies to try to keep it from getting worse. They only work well early since they’re trying to stop the virus from replicating rather than addressing excess inflammatory issues that lead to breathing issues, etc.
I don’t know about most folks, but the moment I test positive with a breakthru case, I’m taking my wife’s prescribed hydroxychloroquine and calling every “quack” in town until I can get my hands on some ivermectin. I’d gladly take what doctors normally prescribe instead of that stuff, but if their treatment is just chicken soup, I don’t see the harm in taking the “unproven” stuff.
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Dude, you’re a parent. You should know that chicken soup and Vick’s Vaporub cures everything.
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Skip the “tests positive” aspect. You’ve got it … whether you do or don’t. More importantly, it’s going on your permanent record. 
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And I’m pretty sure that is the ONLY similarity between CA and the UK. Both parties are happy with that fact.
Last night, the local news’ “fact check” segment tackled the question “Can you sue your child’s unvaccinated teacher if they get sick?”
The answer was a resounding yes.
The promo for tomorrow’s (today’s) segment then posed the question if you can sue the parents of your child’s friends for being unvaccinated.
Good lord.
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It’s America, you can sue anyone. You can even sue Fauci for funding the Wuhan Lab for killing grandma, but don’t expect to get very far with it.
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About the only people that you can’t sue are politicians. They don’t even need to force you into arbitration. 
Yes, I know you can try to sue anyone for anything. The message was pretty clearly that they can be held liable in a lawsuit (in other words, you can win), not merely that you are technically able to try.
Tonight’s segment was fact-checking claims that “covid is being spread by illegals crossing the boarder”. They found data that 20% of such people crossing the boarder are in fact covid positive. But no, they’re not responsible for covid spread, mostly just because Dr Fauci said so.
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China - no further investigation of viral origins allowed.
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