I care less about protection against infections but are more worried if data from such articles could indicate significantly rising hospitalization numbers in the next waves. It also indicates that we need similar to flu shots each year “optimized” covid shots
If there’s a third Omicron surge it would be nice if hospitalization rates stay low, but as someone with multiple risk factors, I’d prefer to get back into the green.
Perhaps, but the amount of protection that they do provide is extended by several months with boosters. It says here.
I also have multiple risk factors but have put off getting that second booster (4th shot). Until now.
It was obvious to me from the people I know of who got Omicron last December that being fully vaccinated and boosted provided little or no protection against catching it.
I’m still going ahead with my second booster this coming week. The shots themselves don’t have any long-term side effects for the vast majority of people. It says here.
My companion got her second booster yesterday, and as has been the case with the three previous shots, today she feels like a bag of … well you know. I hope it was worth it.
I don’t usually get much of a reaction from the shots. I think she must have a much stronger immune system that me.
I’m not arguing against boosters. I got my first at the beginning of December when I saw Omicron coming, and the second last monrh when I saw this new surge was happening. It"s just not like Delta when fully-vaccinated people could socialize with each other indoors without masks with no worries.
I hope that’s the way things evolve. Having to get boosters every five months isn’t something that exactly increases “patient compliance”, as physicians like to say. Shots that are targeted differently such that they work against multiple (or all) variants would be the best-case scenario.
Somewhat discouraging, but hopefully the covid hospitalizations will start to drop or at least level off by the end of the month owing to the lag between reported cases (while going up and also while going down, I believe) and associated hospitalizations.
There’s no reason to expect hospitalization stats to drop significantly until after cases do.
If the plateau reflects the decline of BA.2 and BA.2.12.1 is being offset by the ascent of BA.4 and BA.5, then both stats may rise again.
It looks to me like reported cases are leveling off in the Northern CA counties you posted, and dropping (or also leveling off) in LA.
Leveling off could be a saddle point, I suppose, before another rise.
That’s a tendentious reading. Last week it looked like the SF Bay Area might have passed a peak as all five counties were slightly down. This week they were all slightly up. Given December’s sharp switch from exponential rise to exponential fall of BA.1, that’s no cause for optimism. We’ll know more next week.
These numbers from the NY Times seem crazy. No new data since May 29. Gives me hope for a rapid decline.
Alameda County:
LA County:
With the news that Dr. Fauci, who follows all of the rules, has come down with covid, it seems almost inevitable that every one of us will eventually have a bout, no matter how careful or careless we are.
That’s not a defeatist attitude; it just seems realistic. It’ll pay to have had at least two vaccinations; better three; best four. Not to prevent catching the covid eventually, because it seems we all will at some point get some variant of it, but to minimize the personal impact from having been infected.
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It occurred to me that the crazy-high test positivity rate is likely the result of people being far more likely to report positive results of home tests. Maybe the lack of new data after May 29 reflects whoever was collecting that realizing that the stat is now useless.
Every epidemiologists reports the opposite that the people are reporting less positive home test. In several companies I know >100 people were positive over the last month with home tests but aren’t part of any official statistics as they didn’t report anything
Are there any statistics breaking down test results by source?
I think that there’s some truth in both of these.
Many asymptomatic people fear being forced to quarantine. They don’t want to get tested (at a government-reporting test location), even if they know they’ve probably been exposed. They don’t want to know. They probably don’t even do a home test, and if they do and it’s positive, they don’t go in for a PCR. That tends to shorten the lines at test locations that report to government agencies and results in the number of reported new cases being much lower than the actual number at a given time.
Many symptomatic people may have taken a home test want to know for sure if it’s covid before self-quarantining or complying with mandated quarantining. These people do get tested. If it’s true that they have covid and not something else with similar symptoms, they want to know how to go about recovering. Coupled with fewer infected people getting tested, this tends to increase the positivity rate; i.e., there is a bias in numbers towards people who are likely to be infected with covid who are going out to get tested.
There are other influences. There’s a baseline of people who get tested due to occupational requirements and other reasons, no matter what. And there are some symptomatic people, not required to be tested, who simply stay home and treat it like a cold.