Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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So if she is up to date in her vaccines (including the new Omicron variant, when did she receive her last shot. It takes two weeks for the shot to become completely effective. This is an important question. Or did she contact a new variant?

Well, she is vehemently anti-mask, so I can't imagine she takes too many precautions herself.

What are the symptoms of Covid? The answer has changed after nearly three years in the coronavirus pandemic, largely depending on your vaccination status.

Nexstar Media reports the ZOE Health Study, a joint effort by researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital, the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, King’s College London, Stanford University School of Medicine and the health app ZOE, published its findings last week showing the most common Covid symptoms.

Participants who were fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated and unvaccinated reported four of the same main symptoms: A sore throat, runny nose, persistent cough and a headache. But the prevalence of each, as well as a fifth symptom, varies depending on how many vaccine doses you’ve had.

For those who are fully vaccinated, a blocked nose is the third-most frequently reported symptom, researchers found. Those who have received just one dose of the vaccine say it’s sneezing, and those who are unvaccinated commonly report a fever.

According to ZOE, sneezing and a runny nose weren’t previously thought to be common symptoms of Covid infection.

Fully vaccinated:
1. Sore throat

2. Runny nose

3. Blocked nose

4. Persistent cough

5. Headache

Partially vaccinated:
1. Headache

2. Runny nose

3. Sore throat

4. Sneezing

5. Persistent cough

Unvaccinated:
1. Headache

2. Sore throat

3. Runny nose

4. Fever

5. Persistent cough

According to the CDC, other Covid symptoms can include loss of smell, shortness of breath, fatigue, body aches, nausea/vomiting, diarrhea, stomach aches and “Covid toes.” The loss of smell was more commonly reported with the delta variant, whereas a sore throat has been more common with the milder, more contagious omicron variants.

The ZOE study found fully vaccinated patients were less likely to report a loss of smell, a fever or shortness of breath, but more likely to experience sneezing. Unvaccinated patients still experience more of the original Covid symptoms, though loss of smell and trouble breathing appear to be less prevalent with omicron cases.

The study did not define how severe each symptom was with each group.

People who reported experiencing side effects to the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines such as fever, chills or muscle pain tended to have a greater antibody response following vaccination, according to new research.

Having such symptoms after vaccination is associated with greater antibody responses compared with having only pain or rash at the injection site or no symptoms at all, suggests the paper published Friday in the journal JAMA Network Open.

“In conclusion, these findings support reframing postvaccination symptoms as signals of vaccine effectiveness and reinforce guidelines for vaccine boosters in older adults,” the researchers – from Columbia University in New York, University of Vermont and Boston University – wrote in their paper.

But even though some people may have small, localized side effects or no symptoms at all, the vaccine still elicits robust immune responses in them too. Nearly all study participants exhibited a positive antibody response after completing a two-dose Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine series.

“I don’t want a patient to tell me that, ‘Golly, I didn’t get any reaction, my arm wasn’t sore, I didn’t have fever. The vaccine didn’t work.’ I don’t want that conclusion to be out there,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, who was not involved in the new study.

“This is more to reassure people who have had a reaction that that’s their immune system responding, actually in a rather good way, to the vaccine, even though it has caused them some discomfort,” Schaffner said.

The researchers analyzed data on 928 adults who self-reported what symptoms they experienced after receiving Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna Covid-19 vaccinations, as well as submitted a dried blood spot to test for antibodies. Most of the participants were White adults, with a mean age of 65.

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The researchers found that after either vaccine dose, 446 or 48% of participants reported systemic symptoms while 12% reported only local symptoms and 40% reported no symptoms at all.

Meanwhile, antibody reactivity was observed in 444 or 99% of participants with systemic symptoms, 99% of those with only local symptoms and 98% of those with no symptoms.

Ivermectin, a drug once touted by conservatives as a treatment for Covid, does not meaningfully improve the recovery time for people with mild to moderate cases, according a large clinical trial published in a peer-reviewed journal.

People who took ivermectin recovered from Covid in 12 days while people who didn’t take the drug recovered in 13 days, according to the study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Friday. Ivermectin has been approved to treat parasitic worms in humans, but it’s primarily used as a dewormer for horses.

“Among outpatients with mild to moderate COVID-19, treatment with ivermectin, compared with placebo, did not significantly improve time to recovery,” the team of scientists led by Duke University School of Medicine wrote. “These findings do not support the use of ivermectin in patients with mild to moderate COVID-19,” they concluded.

Early on in the pandemic when there were few treatment options, ivermectin gained national notoriety when a couple of groups of conservative doctors, including Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance and America’s Frontline Doctors began touting the drug on social media and elsewhere as a treatment for Covid. But there was little data backing up those claims and a study by Dr. Pierre Kory, a critical care physician in Wisconsin and president of the critical care alliance, claiming it was an effective treatment was later retracted for having flawed data.

The latest trial looked at 817 people who took ivermectin tablets for three days and compared them to 774 who received a placebo. The participants who took ivermectin received a daily dose based on their weight. Recovery from Covid was defined as three consecutive days without symptoms.

One person died in the ivermectin group while not one person who received the placebo passed away. The number of people hospitalized in each group was the same at nine participants each.

The imbalance in death rates among the nation’s racial and ethnic groups has been a defining part of the pandemic since the start. To see the pattern, The Washington Post analyzed every death during more than two years of the pandemic. Early in the crisis, the differing covid threat was evident in places such as Memphis and Fayette County. Deaths were concentrated in dense urban areas, where Black people died at several times the rate of White people.

Over time, the gap in deaths widened and narrowed but never disappeared — until mid-October 2021, when the nation’s pattern of covid mortality changed, with the rate of death among White Americans sometimes eclipsing other groups.

A Post analysis of covid death data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from April 2020 through this summer found the racial disparity vanished at the end of last year, becoming roughly equal. And at times during that same period, the overall age-adjusted death rate for White people slightly surpassed that of Black and Latino people.

The nature of the virus makes the elderly and people with underlying health conditions — including hypertension, diabetes and obesity, all of which beset Black people at higher rates and earlier in life than White people — particularly vulnerable to severe illness and death.

The virus also attacks unvaccinated adults — who polls show are more likely to be Republicans — with a ferocity that puts them at a much higher risk of infection and death.

When the coronavirus appeared in the United States, it did what airborne viruses do — latched onto cells in people’s respiratory tract, evaded innate immune responses and multiplied. The pathogen, free of politics or ideology, had a diverse reservoir of hosts and found fertile pathways for growth in the inequalities born from centuries of racial animus and class resentments.

Unequal exposure, unequal spread, unequal vulnerability and unequal treatment concentrated harm in communities that needed protection the most yet had the least. Cumulatively, Black, Latino and Native American people are 60 percent more likely to die of covid.

But as the pandemic progressed, the damage done by the virus broadened, and the toxicity of modern-day politics came to the fore.

What emerged is a story about how long-standing issues of race and class interacted with the physical and psychological toll of mass illness and death, unprecedented social upheaval, public policies — and public opinion.

Resilience gave way to fatigue. Holes left by rural hospital closures deepened. Medical mistrust and misinformation raged. Skeptics touted debunked alternatives over proven treatments and prevention. Mask use became a victim of social stigma.

Many Republicans decided they would rather roll the dice with their health than follow public health guidance — even when provided by President Donald Trump, who was booed after saying he had been vaccinated and boosted.

Researchers at Ohio State found Black and White people were about equally reluctant to receive a coronavirus vaccine when they first became available, but Black people overcame that hesitancy faster. They came to the realization sooner that vaccines were necessary to protect themselves and their communities, Padamsee said.

As public health efforts to contain the virus were curtailed, the pool of those most at risk of becoming casualties widened. The No. 1 cause of death for 45-to-54-year-olds in 2021 was covid, according to federal researchers.

After it became clear that communities of color were being disproportionately affected, racial equity started to become the parlance of the pandemic, in words and deeds. As it did, vaccine access and acceptance within communities of color grew — and so did the belief among some White conservatives, who form the core of the Republican base, that vaccine requirements and mask mandates infringe on personal liberties.

“Getting to make this decision for themselves has primacy over what the vaccine could do for them,” said Lisa R. Pruitt, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who is an expert in social inequality and the urban-rural divide. “They’re making a different calculus.”

It’s a calculation informed by the lore around self-sufficiency, she said, a fatalistic acceptance that hardships happen in life and a sense of defiance that has come to define the modern conservative movement’s antipathy toward bureaucrats and technocrats.

“I didn’t think that that polarization would transfer over to a pandemic,” Pruitt said.

It did.

Lifesaving vaccines and droplet-blocking masks became ideological Rorschach tests.

The impulse to frame the eradication of an infectious disease as a matter of personal choice cost the lives of some who, despite taking the coronavirus seriously, were surrounded by enough people that the virus found fertile terrain to sow misery.

Three to five weeks after a fourth shot, those people who received the new boosters aimed at BA.4 and BA.5 variants “had similar neutralizing antibody titers as those receiving a fourth monovalent mRNA vaccine,” the authors conclude in a manuscript posted on the preprint server bioRxiv.org. This held true for antibodies that protect against BA.4, BA.5 and older variants such as the original omicron strain, according to the study.

And since they've pointed out many times how bad the 'immunity' from the original injections is against the BA Series.
Their new vaccine is, thus revealed to also be, complete rubbish.

Titer (American English) or titre (British English) is a way of expressing concentration.[1] Titer testing employs serial dilution to obtain approximate quantitative information from an analytical procedure that inherently only evaluates as positive or negative. The titre corresponds to the highest dilution factor that still yields a positive reading.[2] For example, positive readings in the first 8 serial, twofold dilutions translate into a titer of 1:256 (i.e., 2−8). Titres are sometimes expressed by the denominator only, for example 1:256 is written 256.[3]

Of course Jeremy Pelofsky and Christine Grimaldi want people to meet their new baby. This is their only child, after all, the long-awaited first grandkid on either side.

But first, some ground rules.

The visit will take place in the backyard. Anyone who wants to come over will need to take a rapid coronavirus test. And if guests want to hold the baby or go inside to use the bathroom, they’ll be asked to wear a mask.

These measures seem like common sense to Pelofsky and Grimaldi. They’re trying to keep themselves and their infant safe, plus they want to protect their elderly parents and do their part to reduce community spread. Not long ago, the couple felt that their precautions were in sync with much of the rest of society. But in recent months, their idea of covid common sense has grown painfully out of tune with the view that it’s time to throw caution to the wind and masks in the garbage.

“I didn’t feel draconian before, and I feel draconian now,” says Grimaldi, 36. “Everyone seems to have abandoned the things that were de rigueur before.”

Pelofsky and Grimaldi are among the Americans who are still going very far out of their way to avoid the virus. They don’t dine indoors at restaurants. They continue to practice social distancing. They wear highly protective masks if they must visit a doctor or stop at a pharmacy. Some are home-schooling their kids. Others are refusing to return to the office. They populate the dozens of social media groups whose members identify as “Still COVIDing.”

Many of them would like the unmasked masses to know that this isn’t easy and that it’s only gotten harder.

We’ve turned down various parties and events that are indoors because we just don’t feel comfortable doing that yet,” says Pelofsky, 47. “We are a bit cut off from certain friends, unfortunately.” And although none of their guests have balked at their requests, the couple know it will all get harder in the winter, when it’s less comfortable to socialize outdoors.

They took the threat seriously from the beginning, and have managed to avoid contracting the virus (as far as they know). For a short time, post-vaccination, they loosened their restrictions. But they doubled down after finding out Grimaldi was pregnant last fall, especially as the pregnancy took a toll on Grimaldi’s health. The couple kept up precautions after the baby arrived, not wanting to expose an unvaccinated infant.

But even when the baby gets her second dose of the vaccine next month, Pelofsky and Grimaldi expect to continue masking and taking other measures to mitigate their risk. Grimaldi got a taste of prolonged illness during pregnancy and doesn’t want to return to that state; Pelofsky fears the effects of long covid.

The precautions don’t feel particularly onerous to the couple. What gnaws at them is the sense that they’re out of step with society.

There’s no reliable tally of the people who are “Still COVIDing,” but certainly they’re in the minority. A September poll by Monmouth University found that 22 percent of people are very concerned about a family member becoming seriously ill with covid, compared with 45 percent the previous September. And a quarter of Americans supported mask mandates and social distancing guidelines, down from 63 percent last September.

People who continue to take many precautions know that when President Biden said “the pandemic is over” during an interview last month, he was reflecting a popular attitude.

“People are making judgments without having a kind of community consensus, which makes it harder for people,” says Steven Epstein, a sociology professor at Northwestern University.

Epstein often contrasts the covid pandemic and the AIDS epidemic, when clear, widely agreed-upon guidelines on how to stay safe emerged (wear condoms, don’t share needles). “The problem with covid is we don’t have that kind of clarity,” he says. “People are kind of muddling through. We make very personal assessments at a time when there’s no clear consensus.”

People who are still taking all available precautions largely fall into two groups: those with underlying health conditions for whom contracting the covid-19 virus — or, in some cases, even getting the vaccine — could be very dangerous; and those who just don’t want to get this virus, either because they fear acute illness or long-term deleterious effects. Both camps have largely given up waiting for a light at the end of the tunnel. They view covid as here to stay, and have reordered their lives accordingly.

Lindsay Poveromo-Joly spent years as a hyper-engaged mom, the type who knew everyone at her kids’ school and ran half the committees of the parent teacher association. She’s also a rule follower, so from the beginning of the pandemic the 36-year-old-mother of two has continued following all the rules, even when the rules were lifted in her home state of Florida.

“People kind of talk about you like you’re a bunker person,” Poveromo-Joly says. She has had friends subtly questioning her decisions. Not to mention strangers. At one point when she was out with her masked children, she says, a passerby pretended to cough aggressively in their direction.

But Poveromo-Joly sees her continuing efforts to keep the virus out of their home as totally rational. She’s worried about her youngest child, a daughter who is now six and has twice been hospitalized with severe cases of the flu, and about her husband, who is a diabetic. That worry didn’t disappear with access to vaccines. So now her kids are home-schooled. They bought a new house with a home office for her husband so he could continue to working remotely. She has repopulated her social circle with new friends who are making similar choices.

Most of their social circle is made up of other home-schooling families, who they see regularly for outdoor gatherings and play dates.

“Do I talk to a lot of the people from our old life? No, unfortunately,” she says. “For a while people tried to make it work. But sometimes you do lose relationships.”

The adjustments can take work — “Let me call ten dentists and see which one is still wearing masks,” Poveromo-Joly says of a recent effort — but the changes have also come with benefits. Poveromo-Joly says they spend much more time together, their life is less hectic and their daughter, who was diagnosed with dyslexia, gets more personalized instruction. So Poveromo-Joly has stopped thinking of their pandemic era changes as temporary, and stopped hoping that they could be.

Emily Landon, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Chicago Medicine, understands the concerns of people like Poveromo-Joly. Though acute covid is “largely survivable” because of advances in therapeutics and vaccines, she says, there are still very real risks related to long covid, including prolonged illness, cardiac conditions and neurological symptoms.

“There are good reasons to avoid getting covid,” she says, such as the possibility of those longer-term effects. Landon still wears her mask when she heads to the grocery store. People who take care of patients who’ve had long covid, she says, “are a little shy about getting covid.”

The Still COVIDing Facebook groups are made up of people like Poveromo-Joly looking for each other, and for things like extra-careful dentists.

“2019 is gone. It’s gone. And it’s not coming back,” says Kara Darling, the moderator of that group and several others like it.

Darling is a partner in a network of medical clinics that provide care coordination for people with complex diseases. Three of her four kids have a rare condition called autoimmune encephalitis in which their immune systems can cause debilitating inflammation of the brain. Darling says that when her son got hand, foot and mouth disease, a common childhood virus that’s generally mild, it took him two years to fully recover.

“Getting covid is just not an option for my kids to stay functional,” she says.

Occasionally Darling feels frustrated toward people who opt not to don masks in shared spaces like doctor’s offices and pharmacies, but mostly she’s upset that federal health agencies aren’t issuing stricter guidelines.

She worries that people walking around maskless in crowded spaces don’t have enough information about the potential dangers of long-term covid damage, especially from multiple infections.

“I really feel sorry for them,” she says. “Because they don’t know what they’re doing to their bodies, what they’re doing to their brains. I believe if people are given the right information, nine times out of ten they’ll make the right choices.”

There have been costs to her own approach. The family moved from Colorado to Delaware in late 2020, but Darling says her husband couldn’t take the seclusion anymore and moved back to Colorado. “He was just done,” she says. Her oldest daughter, a 21-year-old former theater kid who long dreamed of being a performer, has had to rethink her career path. And when one of Darling’s sisters had a new baby this year, the sister asked when Darling would come to meet the child.

“I said, ‘I really want to see your baby, I love all the pictures,” she recalls, “but are you going to take the week off before we come and then the week while we’re there?’ And she said, ‘Well, no. I can’t really do that.’” The visit never happened, Darling says.

She doesn’t fault her sister, or even her husband. “It is what it is,” she says. “I’ve seen big rifts — people who don’t even speak to their family members any more. I just need to be practical and know how I can keep my family safe.”

Ariella Cohen Coleman does harbor some resentment.

“We’d be more comfortable going out into the world if people would just show people some respect and put on a mask,” says Cohen Coleman, who has a constellation of genetic conditions that trigger severe immune system responses. She worries an infection could be lethal.

At the start of the pandemic, the health-care attorney felt a renewed sense of solidarity. Finally it seemed as if people understood a little bit of what it’s like for her to live with chronic illness, to stay home all the time, to be in seclusion.

“In the early days of the pandemic people were checking on each other,” she says.

These days she feels more alone than ever.

“It’s absolutely more isolating now,” she says. “It makes me feel kind of left behind and forgotten.”

They had to lift the mandates because people were ignoring them in mass numbers. If they continued on they would have lost whatever credibility they had left.

You may think the still COVIDing are crazy but as an autistic, you should be understanding of what it is like to be an outlier.

The advice they were given from day one was WRONG. The virus can be spread 50 feet not 3 feet or 6 feet but 50 feet in indoor environments. THIS IS WHY THEIR EFFORTS TO CONTROL THE SPREAD FAILED.

The director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Rochelle Walensky, experienced a COVID-19 rebound after completing a course of Pfizer Inc's (PFE.N) COVID-19 pill, the agency said on Monday.

Walensky had experienced mild COVID-19 symptoms less than ten days ago. After completing a course of Pfizer's Paxlovid, and a period of isolation, she had tested negative for the virus, but on Sunday, she tested positive again, CDC added

Walensky is the third government executive, after U.S. President Joe Biden and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci, to experience a recurrent viral infection following the first course of Paxlovid.

Last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration asked Pfizer to test the effects of an additional course of its antiviral Paxlovid among people who had experienced a rebound in COVID-19 after treatment.

Walensky is up to date on vaccines and isolating at home, where she will participate in planned meetings virtually.

Epstein often contrasts the covid pandemic and the AIDS epidemic, when clear, widely agreed-upon guidelines on how to stay safe emerged (wear condoms, don’t share needles). “The problem with covid is we don’t have that kind of clarity,” he says. “People are kind of muddling through. We make very personal assessments at a time when there’s no clear consensus.”

There were lengthy school closures and mitigation measures when we knew by May 2020 the children were at very minimal risk for severe disease. IMHO the psychological damage plus missed learning were the greater of two evils.

Why is the U.S. the main region of infections? Has anyone asked this question.