How the hell do I buy an elastomeric mask without an exhalation valve?
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At Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, the largest of four county-run public hospitals, around 90% of infected patients were admitted for something other than COVID-19 — and “virtually none of them to go the ICU,” according to Dr. Brad Spellberg, the hospital’s chief medical officer.
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Per the CDC stats, cases and hospital admissions per 100K both dropped last week, and hospital beds were unchanged, so presumably they won’t reinstate the mask mandate.
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And indeed.
That might change soon as the next school year will soon begin which could have an interesting effect on cases and hospitalizations
Why do you think that? To date I see no correlation. The first Omicron surge included the winter school holidays, and school was in session during the lull between that surge and the current one.
What I hear is that many schools might get much less focused on checking mask use indoors, ventilation, testing etc. In the first omicron surge masking etc was very good enforced at a lot of schools I am aware in SF, SD and Boston. And the first omicron variant was “hardly” infectious compared to BA5
Berkeley tends to be in many ways more cautious than everybody else (they still have the highest vaccination rate). For everybody else it will be more up to districts and even schools
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Good summary
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“If you get infected over and over again, and it seems like that’s going to be the case — in part because of viral evolution and in part because of waning immunity — that secondary, tertiary, quaternary, those repeated infections are probably not going to be as damaging,” said evolutionary biologist Katia Koelle of Emory University.
Except maybe for the increased likelihood of long Covid, heart disease, asthma …
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two rapid antigen tests conducted 48 hours apart were sensitive to 93 percent of the infections detected independently by the much-more accurate PCR tests during the initial week of infection. But a single rapid test caught only 60 percent of infections among symptomatic people on the day they came up positive on the more sensitive PCR test
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/08/11/cdc-coronavirus-recommendations/
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Have you seen anything that suggests the risk of LC is additive?
Guessing you saw this btw…
https://mobile.twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/1557391752889307138
I’ve seen multiple well-informed, conservative epidemiologists and the like saying that it looks like every infection increase the risk of long Covid, but I haven’t read the studies behind that yet.
Looks like the latest surge is on the way out, unless BA.6 or something comes along to give it another boost.
Wastewater looks like it peaked too.
I’m curious about LC, both selfishly, and because it doesn’t seem to match epi/real world experience. If 1/20 or something cases results in LC, wouldn’t we be seeing much more of it given Omicron prevalence the last 8 months?
Eric has a good recent summary (with some links to original papers) and overall it looks like that long covid is quite far spread but I here in the US there is less of a culture so far to talk about than in Europe where more data is showing that ~10% seems to develop long covid symptoms (which can be also quite diverse)
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