Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

Post Reply New Topic

Uh oh.

People who caught Covid in first wave get ‘no immune boost’ from Omicron
Study of triple vaccinated people also says Omicron infection does little to reduce chance of catching variant again

A newly developed blood test that measures a specific immune response in the body could help doctors gauge how much protection a person has against Covid-19, according to a new study.

The test, which focuses on the part of the immune system that confers long-term protection by prompting the body to "remember" the virus, could help make sense of the complex tangle of Covid immunity that now exists from person to person.

The test can, for instance, measure immunity regardless of whether someone has developed a level of protection from one or more natural infections or from vaccinations and booster shots. Others, who may have much lower levels of protection because they are immunocompromised, could also use the test to assess their vulnerability and see how they responded to the vaccines, said Ernesto Guccione, an associate professor of oncological sciences and pharmacological sciences at the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai.

"Ideally, it will give you a full picture of where you stand and a comprehensive picture of your immune protection," said Guccione, one of the authors of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Biotechnology.

The researchers said they are focused next on clinical trials in order to gain approval from both the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency.

The test involves taking a small blood sample at a clinic and mixing it with snippets of proteins from the virus. Researchers then look to see if the so-called T cells are activated in the sample.

Does anyone with Long Covid know:

Can a person have Covid without knowing it, and then go on to develop life-threatening illness from Long Covid?

Unlikely Long Covid with what most think of when that's mentioned. However, moderate-severe COVID-19 can cause organ and/or blood vessel damage that could lead to organ dysfunction and subsequent life-threatening illness or death later on, but such would be evident.

The omicron variant of the coronavirus is substantially less likely than the earlier delta variant to cause symptoms of long COVID-19, according to a new study.

The study from researchers in the United Kingdom published in The Lancet finds that 4.5 percent of omicron cases resulted in long COVID, compared to 10.8 percent of delta cases.

While on one hand it is good news that the currently circulating omicron variant is less likely to cause long COVID than the earlier delta variant, the study also shows there still is a significant chance of getting long COVID, even with omicron.

“The Omicron variant appears substantially less likely to cause Long-COVID than previous variants but still 1 in 23 people who catch COVID-19 go on to have symptoms for more than four weeks,” Claire Steves, the study’s lead author and a researcher at King’s College London, said in a statement. “Given the numbers of people affected it’s important that we continue to support them at work, at home and within the [health system].”

In addition, because the omicron variant spreads more easily and infects more people, the total number of long COVID cases was actually higher during the omicron period, the study found. For each individual, though, the odds of getting long COVID are lower.

OVID-19 boosters are designed to pump up the immune system as protection from the initial shots wanes, but federal data released Friday shows a surprising trend: For months, people with booster shots have been more likely than non-boosted vaccinated people to get infected with the coronavirus.

Medical experts said boosters can only do so much to battle omicron subvariants that are more contagious than previous virus strains, especially as immunity from the boosters declines over months and boosted people venture into increasingly riskier settings. Experts also said many boosted people may have been more cautious in the past, so they may have avoided getting the virus and don’t have the added immunity from previous infection.

“Part of it is just behavior and risk,” said Dr. Steven Carsons, director of the Vaccine Center at NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island in Mineola. “People who are boosted feel that they’re really protected based on the older data.”

“I struggle with myself,” Carsons said, regarding how much risk to take. He spoke by phone from home, where he was recovering from COVID-19 after getting infected for what he believed was the first time.

Carsons received his second booster on April 2, and in part because of that, “I was doing things the last couple of weeks I wouldn’t have done” previously, including dining indoors at restaurants.

Dr. Bruce Farber, chief of public health and epidemiology for Northwell Health, cautioned that the shift in infections shouldn’t discourage people from getting boosters.

“There is no suggestion or data that the booster increases your risk of getting COVID,” he said.

Boosted people still are least likely to end up in the hospital or die of COVID-19, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show. Plus, unvaccinated Americans remain at far greater risk of dying or getting severely ill from the disease than vaccinated people, and they are at higher risk of getting infected, research shows.

The CDC, in an email response to Newsday about boosters, wrote: "In well-controlled vaccine effectiveness studies, booster doses have been shown to offer higher protection against infection, hospitalization, and death, than a primary series alone, including during the omicron period."

Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, a professor of epidemiology and medicine at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, said people choosing to get boosted "are in all likelihood quite different from the people who are not." That includes, for example, health care workers and people who are regularly in crowded environments, she said.

“It’s possible the people seeking boosters are at higher risk of COVID, and are more likely to be in situations where you could get the virus, and that’s the reason they want to be boosted,” she said.

Boosted people also may be more likely to seek tests in hospitals, health centers and other sites outside the home, and that could push up their infection numbers in official statistics, El-Sadr said.

Boosters were first authorized in September, and for months, people with boosters were less likely to get infected than non-boosted vaccinated people, and far less likely to get infected than unvaccinated people, CDC data shows.

n the week starting Feb. 13, the infection rate for boosted people surpassed that of people with only initial shots.

In CDC data released Friday, from the week beginning May 15, the rate for boosted people was 247 per 100,000, compared with 121 per 100,000 for non-boosted vaccinated people and 422 per 100,000 for unvaccinated people.

The CDC on Friday also released data on people 50 and older with two boosters. They had a rate for the week starting May 15 of 162 per 100,000, versus 201 per 100,000 for those with one booster, 128 per 100,000 for vaccinated people with no booster, and 615 per 100,000 for the unvaccinated.

Data reported by New York City, which goes through the week ending June 4, shows that people there with boosters are more likely to test positive than vaccinated people without them.

Dr. David Hirschwerk, an infectious disease expert and medical director of North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, noted some people received their first booster nine months ago, and many eligible for a second booster haven’t gotten one.

“There certainly is some degree of waning immunity,” he said.

During the major winter omicron surge, many non-boosted people contracted the virus, “and the infection they experienced may have provided some subsequent protection from reinfection,” he said.

Hirschwerk said decisions about what risks to take are "personal."

Hirschwerk said that's where the focus should be: on how boosters decrease the chances of severe illness or death.

Yet even the gap between those rates had narrowed during the omicron surge, although actual numbers declined after the massive winter omicron spike.

The hospitalization gap also narrowed. In mid-November, for example, boosted people were more than six times less likely to be hospitalized than non-boosted vaccinated people, and 56 times less likely to be hospitalized than unvaccinated people.

By the week ending March 19, boosted people were about 45% less likely to be hospitalized than non-boosted vaccinated people, and about five times less likely than unvaccinated people.

Carsons said one reason for the narrowing gaps could be that many severely immunocompromised people — such as those on chemotherapy, transplant recipients and people with autoimmune diseases — are boosted, but because of their conditions, many don’t produce antibodies, even after one or two boosters. That puts them at higher risk for hospitalization and death. Some are unaware of that and may believe they are more protected than they really are, he said.

Another reason is the large number of boosted people in recent months counted as COVID-19 hospitalizations who entered the hospital for another reason — like a broken leg or a heart condition — and later tested positive, Carsons said.

IsabellaLinton,

She's had many diagnoses from many different doctors / departments.
The verdict changes daily. Sometimes twice a day.

Currently, they think this started in response to a virus of some sort.

I just wish they knew which virus it was.

Personally, I think it could have been EBV.