Agreed - live and let live. I thought your question was a good one, though.
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(Sidenote: If you have suggestions about where those folks might migrate, please let me know!).
I dunno. I’ve never been on Twitter. (I occasionally read posts linked in news articles and that’s about it) And I’ve never felt I was uninformed about health news or anything in general. I feel like social media has a way of tricking you into thinking if you aren’t constantly obsessively checking it you’ll miss something. Same with cable news. The reality is there is a plethora of information a google search away. Unless there’s like literally an imminent natural disaster coming at you, a constant live feed of news an opinion isn’t really that important.
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It will be ‘over’ as much as flu is ever over (= never). And people die from flu every year, in large-ish numbers. It just does not make the news** because it is just flu. Covid makes more news because it is new, and because for some people it can have a long and debilitating tail, and much is not yet fully understood about it.
(** Well, it makes the news here in UK when the NHS is cancelling operations because too many beds are full of serious flu cases, and then the news might mention how many are dying of it.)
I get my flu jab every year, as an immuno-compromised person, and this also means I’ve now had 6 Covid shots in the past 2+ years.
So, despite my medical status, I’ve pretty much gone back to ‘normal’ most of the time. But I don’t live in a city, don’t have to get on trains or buses, and don’t spend much time socialising in public. At the same time, I do try to make sure I have a mask on me when I do go out, in case I end up somewhere crowded for any length of time.
Not objective or quantifiable, but that’s my take on it.
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I’m baffled as to why Twitter helps you prevent getting Covid. Test regularly, mask when you have to, get vaccinated and boosted. You may still catch it, but it will be mild. And if you know people saying stupid things, your being on Twitter isn’t relevant.
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THIS. However, it also requires that employers have enough headcount to cover people staying home sick (::falls out of chair from laughing too hard:: ) AND giving people enough PTO/sick leave for them to take it without having to figure out how to make up the missing days in their paycheck.
MY roommate works as a pharmacy tech for one of the national chains, and she’s had to work while sick multiple times, even before COVID.
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“we know it’s not covid because we’ve tested numerous times with various antigen & pcr tests, it’s allergies and a kid who won’t blow her nose no matter how many times we ask her to” has been our mantra for months.
thankful most people we know/socialize with are also taking it seriously enough to actually test and if really uncertain isolate and mask up
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Excellent answer.
That was my first thought;
Unless reason number 1 is “Because I tested negative,” I’m not at all inclined to even deign to acknowledge any other ‘reasons.’
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The point of lockdown and quarantine and vaccinations isn’t to eradicate the virus-we can’t do that. Humanity has managed to contain smallpox quite well so far, but polio is making a comeback these days and the others are mostly controlled by vaccination, not eradication.
We needed a quick and broad response to Covid because of the speed with which it was spreading and how high the fatality rate was. Now that most people are vaccinated and the newer variants seem to be less lethal I’m willing to be more relaxed. We are past the crisis stage and into the long haul.
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So, I’m curious and will throw this question out there to the BBS-ers: Using objective, quantifiable metrics, when will you personally consider the pandemic to be “over” enough that you’re ready to go back to life as normal? Or do you ever expect that to happen?
I’m honestly not sure I want to go back to masklessness ever. I have an unfortunate tendency to catch every respiratory bug out there. Prior to COVID, I spent every winter sick as a dog - and because I am the primary caretaker for my child and am also self-employed, it’s not like I can luxuriate in bed when I’m sick. I don’t get sick days. I don’t even get to sleep in when I’m sick. Ever since I discovered that a mask can prevent this sort of misery from happening, I’ve been wearing a mask every time I go outside or interact with anyone.
When there’s a 100% reliable preventive/cure for Long COVID - i.e. when COVID becomes a simple two-week flu experience with no other sequelae - I might be tempted to start socializing again. But I can’t afford Long COVID for the same reason I can’t afford any other illness, and it terrifies me to think of being in such a condition that I can’t work or parent my child and require caretaking from others, for months or years. I can’t risk it.
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OK at the risk of this being a silly long commentary building off of your commnent…
How clinical tests work in a general population is actually fairly non-intuitive. So when the news reports how well tests work it often misses the important aspect of how we interpret those numbers in actual use.
Sensitivity and specificity relate to how a test works in development. We take known positives and negatives and figure out how well the test finds true postives (sensitivity) and how well the test finds true negatives (specificity)
But what is really interesting is what happens when you actually start using a test? We need to start considering the incidence of the disease which changes the probability you have the disease before we even tested you. This is called “Prevalence”
When we bring prevalence in we can calculate two much more useful statistics:
PPV – Positive Predictive Value (Proportion of positive tests that are true positives)
NPV – Negative Predictive Value (Proportion of Negative tests that are true negatives)
I should note here that Prevalence is the incidence of the disease in the tested populations specifically.
When prevalence increases the PPV increases, but the NPV decreases.
For rapid tests, we have very good lab determined specificity (not a lot of false positives), but lower sensitivity (more missed cases) than PCR tests.
A recent review determined that sensitivity was ~72% for symptomatic tests and only ~58% for asymptomatic tests. Specificity was high at ~99.6% in both types of testing. (Dinnes 2021).
So for asymptomatic tests we can generate numbers like this:
Prev PPV NPV
0% 0.0% 100.0%
1.0% 59.4% 99.6%
5.0% 88.4% 97.8%
10.0% 94.2% 95.5%
50.0% 99.3% 70.3%
100.0% 100.0% 0.0%
And for symptomatic test we can generate numbers like this:
Prev PPV NPV
0% 0.0% 100.0%
1.0% 64.5% 99.7%
5.0% 90.5% 98.5%
10.0% 95.2% 97.0%
50.0% 99.4% 78.1%
100.0% 100.0% 0.0%
So what does this mean?
For Asymptomatic testing:
I beleieve general population prevalence was around 5% during some of the 2020 peaks. So we expect asymptomatic testing to be on a group with less than 5% prevalence (perhaps far lower).
The Negative Predictive Value is actually pretty good. Although it is mainly good due to the low pre-test probability that someone actually has COVID without symptoms.
The suprise might be that the Positive Predictive Value is probably in the range of 60 to 90%, so test positive people have a pretty good chance of not actually having COVID, when the population prevalence is low at the time of testing. This is due to the very low incidence among people being tested causing false positives to grow faster than true positives.
For Symptomatic testing:
Postivity tended to peak around 10% based on PCR tests so prevalence was probably around that range at peak COVID.
The NPV is a still pretty good at ~97%
The PPV is substantially better so you are actually far more likely to have COVID than something else, but you still have a chance of having something else.
As you can imagine once we throw this wrench into interpretation it causes all sorts of complexities around how we think about the benefit of each test. This depends not just on the situation we are applying it to, but when we do the test (peak or trough of case numbers). Depending on the goals of public policy these numbers can challenging to integrate into sound policy (balancing risk of unnecessary quarantine with risk of spread etc etc etc…).
Some citations:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD013705.pub2/full
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I’m on the other side of the fence, My immediate reaction to any cough, sniffles or headache is, OMG, I have COVID. That really bad Flu I had two months before the 1st recorded case of Covid? Pretty sure that was COVID.
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After 4 vaccinations, then actually getting Covid (likely BA.4 or .5 because of where I was), then the bivalent booster… I’m feeling like I can pretend things are pretty safe, until some fast-spreading more virulent version starts to show up nearby.
I wish tests were cheaper, but I isolate, mask if I have to go out, and test every other day for 10 days if I have symptoms…
Lots of privileges in my life, I am aware!
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Wait, so it’s still on your hand and stem? I’m sorry, that’s awful! Is it supposed to eventually go away?
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I usually don’t react very strongly to vaccines, and that one hit me like a ton of bricks. If that was half as bad as getting the shingles, I am very glad I got the vaccine.
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Ugh, that sucks.
Reactions very so much. I got both of that shot, and the only reaction both times was a very sore arm.
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Not with that attitude we wont.
But seriously, yes, we can eradicate it. We just (as a whole) lack the will.
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At one point eradicating the virus might have been as simple as sick people staying home for a couple weeks, except somehow that got “democracy has failed us, let’s help the virus spread” as a response.
It’s infuriating how most of humanity’s challenges these days are completely self-inflicted.
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Nah it did go away, it just didn’t spread to more of my body when i did get it. Was thankful for that
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I’m far less scared of COVID than I was earlier this year after having suffered through it. Don’t get me wrong, it fucking sucked a lot. I don’t recommend it. I don’t want it again. But I did everything right short of never leaving the house. I got vaccinated and boosted. I washed my hands religiously. I wore masks and never took them off when I was out unless I had to eat or drink. I rarely ever ate in at restaurants. I tried to be careful. I still got it.
Ever since then I’m a little less stringent about masking. I don’t really bother now if I’m just outside unless it’s in a large crowd with little separation. If I’m only popping inside for something super brief I also may not bother. Anything that’s extended indoors with strangers or in a large crowd though I still definitely mask.
Going for over two years without getting sick at all was a really nice experience. So I may be a little less careful but I’m still trying to be responsible. I still got my bivalent booster (and dealt with the two days of hell from that) and flu shot. COVID may be around for the long term but that doesn’t mean I want to get it again, I’m just a little less scared of it.
Pretty much nobody is masking anymore and I’m in a really progressive area. I often feel unconscious peer pressure to not mask, but fuck it. If I feel uncomfortable with the situation I have no problems doing it anyway.
And FFS people if you’re sick, please just stay home. And if you can’t stay home, wear a fucking mask. It’s not hard.
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Same here. Prior to COVID #2, my shingles vaccination (the second dose, I think) gave me the most “post-vaccination sore arm” effect I had ever had.
The only reaction I had to any of the COVID shots was a sore arm (and boy, was it sore, to have beaten out the shingles event). At this point, I’ve had three Pfizer (first two doses, booster #1) and two Moderna (booster #2, multivalent booster #3). Add to that the annual flu vaccination for the past 20+ years, three shingles vaccinations (the original, then the two Shingrix shots), three pneumonia vaccinations, and miscellaneous others (tetanus boosters, etc.), and I feel like my circulatory system is probably mostly vaccine by now. 
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