Basically, yes.
My household is multiply immune compromised with poor vaccine response, problematic vaccine reactions, and at elevated risk for post-COVID complications (including acute and permanent flare up of pre-existing conditions). The poor outcomes I see in people with the same diagnoses are not captured in general statistics on COVID-19 outcomes. So I feel like my head is in a similar same place as it has been. A lot of the people who were most susceptible to long hospitalizations and horrific ICU deaths already died, but the virus isn’t just safe to catch now for people who can’t rely on vaccines to prevent poor outcomes.
Transmission is really high right now with a new circulating pandemic variant and another one probably on the way for this winter (by wastewater estimates, which historically tracked pretty well with case data, more than 1 in 40 people in the USA is currently infected). WHO recognizes the pandemic as present tense; as far as I know, it’s only talked about as past tense in political contexts?
I will say that even for healthy people, I’ve not seen evidence to support the idea that COVID-19 has similar ramifications to the flu for any risk cohort. Aside from all the other differences between the viruses, one bout of the flu typically confers immunity that lasts five years or so, so people just don’t catch it as often over the course of their lifespan. More people end up with new chronic conditions after COVID than after flu. More people end up with dysregulated immunity and for longer; more people experience a new chronic illness, organ damage, or a cardiac event post infection. Just counting long COVID syndrome and not other complications, the lowest recent estimate for long COVID following an infection is around 3%.
My community continues to suffer from absences and closures during these big waves because some people are just too symptomatic to work sick. COVID-19 is a little unusual in that the way it undermines immune function invites coinfections, so winter waves are especially rough with people getting one infection after another (not just COVID) and sometimes more than one at a time.
Even before there was ever a vaccine, many people made the observation that a majority of patients experienced the virus as just a cold and made the argument that it was fine to live life as usual. Many people did ignore it from the start and accepted the risks to themselves or others.
When the vaccine came out, the promise was that it would reduce transmission enough that people wouldn’t need to mask or isolate (and most public indoor spaces would not need to meet higher ventilation or filtration standards for the air) in order to curb transmission, prevent new variants from arising, and protect immune compromised people in the community. But as people dropped suppression measures, the virus quickly evaded immunity to the point that there were fully vaccinated super spreader events. More people have died since then than died before. But vaccinated people who were low risk to begin with were statistically even lower risk once vaccinated, and again the acute symptoms were always cold like for a majority of patients, so they decided to accept the risks that others had already accepted.
All cause mortality has continued to spike after every wave for as long as we’ve tracked it. Vaccinated people fared better than unvaccinated in the stats, but the only demographic whose mortality wasn’t elevated above pre-pandemic norms were people who hadn’t had COVID at all.
I respect that people get to choose their own risks to take in life, how much time they want to spend under the weather, and what odds they find acceptable for what outcomes; people are in all kinds of different situations.
Kat
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