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Long Covid and Ba5 wave [1]
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Date: 2022-09-10
Ba.5 is receding quite stubbornly, the death rate staying well above 400, closer to 5 even as the newly reported cases steadily fell to well below 100k. It is likely that they are much higher than reported for this reason.
Since I wrote that, its about 70K cases per day, 35k hospitalized and deaths finally edging below 400.
We still don’t know yet about the relative number of omicron caused long covid cases. I hope its lower, its hard to imagine something as harsh as delta not doing more damage than omicron.
I read that we have 2-4 million people in the us who can’t work due to this, out of, they say, 16 million cases of long covid to date. And that number is more likely to go up than down. Each of these millions in the statistic is an individual tragedy…
This is in line with what I was expecting in my first article on this. A disease that kills 1x will severely impact 3 to 5x of the survivors. With long covid we also have the extra 13 million suffering from impacts ranging from quite mild to miserable but just able to drag themselves to work.
I am not as worried as some over a new, “super variant”. Its possible but the odds are against it especially since deadliness and contagiousness seem to work against each other in covid, involving the lower and upper respiratory track respectively. There is only so much immunological space a virus can mutate into, when it has explored that space and we have some immunity spread across it, we have endimicity, like the flue today vs 1918. So far, the non super variants have been bad enough.
My two big worries at this point are long covid and hitting endemicity with a high death rate. Not only do we have a high death rate and a quarter of our population unvaccinated, but uptake of boosters among the fully vaccinated has been quite low. Yale and rhe CDC if anyone listens to them anymore, think we will go to endimicity in 2024. That gives us two years to get that death rate down. If we get it below 50k, it will be like the flue. The flue plus long vid, but less of that too.
The good news is there are some new antibody treatments that seem to very polyvariant effective.
We also just got a vaccine thats 80% effective against malaria! Thats a tough target medically and financially since poor people get it. Go science!
Also the CDC just said its now ok to die of covid. So, relax!
clickhole.com/…
Stay safe, encourage everyone to vaccinate and Gluck auf!
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