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I “attended“ s Zoom conference with a legal colleague who is in quarantine for Covid. He tested positive on December 28. He held forth on a conference for about one hour on some complex issues. He sure did not look or seem sick. He is 76 years old and diabetic albeit fully vaccinated and boosted.
I “attended“ s Zoom conference with a legal colleague who is in quarantine for Covid. He tested positive on December 28. He held forth on a conference for about one hour on some complex issues. He sure did not look or seem sick. He is 76 years old and diabetic albeit fully vaccinated and boosted.
My husband just got his third negative test and is the only one of the extended family of ten who has avoided the virus. And the only one who had been able to get his booster.
His brother has tested positive today (not caught from us) and is asymptotic but his wife is really sick. Neither have been eligible for the booster yet.
My brother has just had to cancel his Canadian ski trip for the second year in a row. Just too many things could go wrong. Such a shame.
I think this is a very good idea. The method won't detect exact covid case amounts but it can yield a general high-low measure of covid percentages in a given region. I hope more regions adopt this method.
Here in Greater Boston we've already employed wastewater testing pretty much since the pandemic begun. The recent results are astounding. The data results give you the idea that it's not a good time to be out and about right now.
Lots of good stories here.
Would be interesting to see the selection of reader maps documenting the initial wave of coronavirus lockdowns, to be published on April 5, 2022.
Can't find the last date to submit your map.
No prize is mentioned either.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/how-has-covid-changed-your-life-show-us-with-a-map?srnd=citylab How Has Covid Changed Your Life? Show Us In a Map
Nearly two years into the Covid-19 pandemic, our worlds continue to be upended. We invite you to create a map detailing how the virus has reshaped your life — or show us the world you hope to see in 2022.
By Laura Bliss and Jessica Martin
December 22, 2021, 6:59 AM PST
* How to Submit Your Map
To submit your map and a brief description, follow this link. We’ll be reviewing submissions on a regular basis and choosing a selection of maps received for publication. Please submit your map by January 17 if you want to be included in our first review. We also invite you to share this link with friends, family, neighbors and essential workers in your community; our goal is to publish a diversity of maps and experiences. https://bmedia.iad1.qualtrics.com/jf...3Zj8VuCEiQPMZ7
The silence is deafening on how serious either IHU or Omicron is. It seems that we are throwing ourselves into societal dislocation over a common cold or mild flu. Are we masochists? Do we enjoy living in panic?
The silence is deafening on how serious either IHU or Omicron is. It seems that we are throwing ourselves into societal dislocation over a common cold or mild flu. Are we masochists? Do we enjoy living in panic?
The issue isn't entirely the severity of the disease - the issue is the health care system. The more infectious a disease is, the more people need care, including hospitalization. I'm not sure if you're suggesting the people who do get a severe illness just die at home or? Because you think they're old anyway, or have some other health issue that makes their lives not worth saving?
Then there are all the people who have had surgeries postponed because hospitals are overwhelmed with patients. Then there is the challenge of a simple doctor visit because the doctors are damn tired.
Then there are the people who are too sick to work but not sick enough for the hospital. They have jobs. I was at a CIBC bank yesterday and commented, "You're new," to the single person at the counter, and she gave a little, "hehehe," chuckle, and said sheepishly that she was not new, she was the manager and everyone else was home sick with covid.
The details of the Omicron variant are becoming clearer, and they are encouraging.
They’re not entirely encouraging, and I will get into some detail about one of the biggest problems — the stress on hospitals, which are facing huge numbers of moderately ill Covid-19 patients. But regular readers of this newsletter know that I try to avoid the bad-news bias that often infects journalism. (We journalists tend to be comfortable delivering bad news straight up but uncomfortable reporting good news without extensive caveats.)
So I want to be clear: The latest evidence about Covid is largely positive. A few weeks ago, many experts and journalists were warning that the initial evidence from South Africa — suggesting that Omicron was milder than other variants — might turn out to be a mirage. It has turned out to be real.
“In hospitals around the country, doctors are taking notice,” my colleagues Emily Anthes and Azeen Ghorayshi write. “This wave of Covid seems different from the last one.”
There are at least three main ways that Omicron looks substantially milder than other versions of the virus:
1. Less hospitalization
Somebody infected with Omicron is less likely to need hospital treatment than somebody infected with an earlier version of Covid.
An analysis of patients in Houston, for example, found that Omicron patients were only about one-third as likely to need hospitalization as Delta patients. In Britain, people with Omicron were about half as likely to require hospital care, the government reported. The pattern looks similar in Canada, Emily and Azeen note.
Hospitalizations are nonetheless rising in the U.S., because Omicron is so contagious that it has led to an explosion of cases. Many hospitals are running short of beds and staff, partly because of Covid-related absences. In Maryland, more people are hospitalized with Covid than ever.
“Thankfully the Covid patients aren’t as sick. But there’s so many of them,” Craig Spencer, an emergency room doctor in New York, tweeted on Monday, after a long shift. “The next few weeks will be really, really tough for us.”
The biggest potential problem is that overwhelmed hospitals will not be able to provide patients — whether they have Covid or other conditions — with straightforward but needed care. Some may die as a result. That possibility explains why many epidemiologists still urge people to take measures to reduce Covid’s spread during the Omicron surge. It’s likely to last at least a couple more weeks in the U.S.
2. Milder hospitalization
Omicron is not just less likely to send somebody to the hospital. Even among people who need hospital care, symptoms are milder on average than among people who were hospitalized in previous waves.
A crucial reason appears to be that Omicron does not attack the lungs as earlier versions of Covid did. Omicron instead tends to be focused in the nose and throat, causing fewer patients to have breathing problems or need a ventilator.
As Dr. Rahul Sharma of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell told The Times, “We’re not sending as many patients to the I.C.U., we’re not intubating as many patients, and actually, most of our patients that are coming to the emergency department that do test positive are actually being discharged.”
In London, the number of patients on ventilators has remained roughly constant in recent weeks, even as the number of cases has soared, John Burn-Murdoch of The Financial Times noted.
3. And deaths?
In the U.S., mortality trends typically trail case trends by about three weeks — which means the Omicron surge, which began more than a month ago, should be visible in the death counts. It isn’t yet:
Covid deaths will still probably rise in the U.S. in coming days or weeks, many experts say. For one thing, data can be delayed around major holidays. For another, millions of adults remain unvaccinated and vulnerable.
But the increase in deaths is unlikely to be anywhere near as large as the increase last summer, during the Delta wave. Look at the data from South Africa, where the Omicron wave is already receding:
The bottom line
Given the combination of surging cases and milder disease, how should people respond?
Dr. Leana Wen, Baltimore’s former health commissioner, wrote a helpful Washington Post article in which she urged a middle path between reinstituting lockdowns and allowing Omicron to spread unchecked.
“It’s unreasonable to ask vaccinated people to refrain from pre-pandemic activities,” Wen said. “After all, the individual risk to them is low, and there is a steep price to keeping students out of school, shuttering restaurants and retail shops and stopping travel and commerce.”
But she urged people to get booster shots, recommended that they wear KN95 or N95 masks and encouraged governments and businesses to mandate vaccination. All of those measures can reduce the spread of Covid and, by extension, hospital crowding and death.
What about elderly or immunocompromised people, who have been at some risk of major Covid illness even if they’re vaccinated?
Different people will make different decisions, and that’s OK. Severely immunocompromised people — like those who have received organ transplants or are actively receiving cancer treatment — have reason to be extra cautious. For otherwise healthy older people, on the other hand, the latest data may be encouraging enough to affect their behavior.
Consider this: Before Omicron, a typical vaccinated 75-year-old who contracted Covid had a roughly similar risk of death — around 1 in 200 — as a typical 75-year-old who contracted the flu. (Here are the details behind that calculation, which is based on an academic study.)
Omicron has changed the calculation. Because it is milder than earlier versions of the virus, Covid now appears to present less threat to most vaccinated elderly people than the annual flu does.
The flu, of course, does present risk for the elderly. And the sheer size of the Omicron surge may argue for caution over the next few weeks. But the combination of vaccines and Omicron’s apparent mildness means that, for an individual, Covid increasingly resembles the kind of health risk that people accept every day.
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testing wastewater for Covid 19
