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+--- Thread: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE (/showthread.php?tid=239994)
Re: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE - RgrF - 11-12-2023
Speedy, did you go to a paxlovid treatment?
Re: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE - Speedy - 11-12-2023
rgG wrote:
[quote=Speedy]
A new COVID variant, HV.1, is now dominant. These are its most common symptoms
https://www.aol.com/news/covid-variant-hv-1-now-023335640.html
What are HV.1 symptoms?
The symptoms caused by infection with HV.1 are similar to those caused by recent variants, says Schaffner, which include:
Sore throat
Congestion or stuffiness
Runny nose
Cough
Fatigue
Headache
Muscle aches
Fever or chills
“Congestion, sore throat and dry cough seem to be the three most prominent symptoms right now,” says Schaffner.
Increasingly, doctors report that COVID-19 symptoms appear to follow a pattern of being concentrated in the upper respiratory tract, starting with a sore throat and followed by congestion or a runny nose, NBC news reported.
Coughing isn't typically a primary symptom, but it can persist. "The virus seems to produce a kind of a chronic bronchitis, so that you can have a cough syndrome that lasts beyond the period where you’ve recovered from other symptoms," says Schaffner.
Another trend is that COVID-19 seems to be causing milder infections, likely because people have some prior immunity. “By milder, we mean it doesn’t require hospitalization even though you can feel quite miserable for several days,” says Schaffner.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-summary
>>>>>>>
After reading the symptoms and seeing they matched the ones I had been experiencing, I took a Covid test which was positive. I felt miserable for about three days and now just have a sore throat and resultant cough. My wife had it, we suspect, and had recovered several days before I became symptomatic. Her case wasn’t quite as miserable. We are fully boosted and this was our first time with Covid.
Sorry to hear that. Aren’t you the one who is more than fully boosted, like you had several extra shots?
Glad you and your wife are both better.
Yes, got a couple of extra doses early on by changing states and not presenting a CDC card. Nothing extra in the last year though. I was last boosted September 18, 2023.
RgrF wrote:
Speedy, did you go to a paxlovid treatment?
No, I tested positive on Saturday after a miserable Friday but by Saturday I no longer had any fever and was doing well except for the cough and sore throat. Today, Sunday, I still have the cough but just a very minor twinge in my throat. Because it was the weekend, I decided not to pursue any of the treatment options like Paxlovid. I’m isolating for five days once my cough goes away.
My wife has had a number of close contacts with our (immunosuppressed) daughter lasting several hours each time including while she was symptomatic. Daughter has not shown any signs. I did some electrical work on daughter’s house for four hours the day before I had any symptoms. Fingers crossed. Daughter was boosted in early September and is due for another booster this week according to her MyChart; her doc just needs to send the order to Walgreens.
My wife has no idea where she got it and we didn’t test her because her symptoms mimicked a mild cold. We even did our daily three mile walk throughout her infection. I only tested because my symptoms were more severe and because I read the article I referenced, checking the box for every symptom plus loss of appetite.
Scientists’ May Have Found the Cause of Long COVID - Speedy - 01-24-2024
Scientists’ May Have Found the Cause of Long COVID
https://www.aol.com/lifestyle/scientists-may-found-cause-long-123000270.html
Long COVID has mystified the medical community for years, making it a tough condition to diagnose, let alone treat. However, a growing body of research has found more information on what may be behind long COVID, with the hope of eventually finding an effective treatment. Now, a new study has made an interesting discovery on what may cause long COVID symptoms: a change in the immune system that may be detected via a blood test.
That’s the major takeaway from a new study published in the journal Science. For the study, researchers followed 113 patients with COVID-19 and 39 healthy patients as controls. After six months, 40 of the COVID-19 patients developed symptoms of long COVID.
The researchers analyzed blood samples from those patients and found that they had a group of proteins that showed that a portion of the immune system called the complement system was ramped up well after the patients recovered from COVID-19.
The study analyzed 6,596 proteins across 268 blood samples, which were collected during patients’ acute phase and again six months later. Researchers found several differences in the blood of people with long COVID compared to the healthy patients, including an imbalance in proteins involved in blood clotting and inflammation. Researchers also found that those with long COVID had a group of proteins that showed that a portion of the immune system, called the complement system, was ramped up well after the patients recovered from COVID-19.
The researchers concluded that the findings provide “a basis for new diagnostic solutions” for long COVID. Here’s what you need to know about the findings.
What is the complement immune system?
As the name implies, the complement immune system is part of the immune system. “It’s our baseline and first line of immunity,” says Thomas Russo, M.D., professor and chief of infectious disease at the University at Buffalo in New York.
“Complement is an arm of the immune system that ‘complements’ the action of the other arms,” explains infectious disease expert Amesh A. Adalja, M.D., senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “Activities that it performs range from literally attacking the cell membranes of a pathogen to summoning the cells of other immune systems to the site of infection.”
Among other things, your complement immune system cleans up damaged cells, helps your body heal after an injury or infection, and destroys microscopic organisms like bacteria that can make you sick, the Cleveland Clinic notes. The proteins that make up your complement system are created in your liver and move to your tissues and blood, the organization says.
The complement system also activates inflammation in your body to prevent infection, Dr. Russo says. “If it’s dysregulated or constantly activated, that inflammation can continue,” he says.
Here’s the problem with that: If your complement immune system is activated for too long, it puts you at risk for autoimmune or inflammatory conditions like allergic asthma, anemia, leukemia, kidney disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, the Cleveland Clinic notes. And, apparently, long COVID.
In the case of long COVID, this complement immune system activation may be linked to microclots—tiny blood clots—that can form. “These can block the blood vessels and lead to damage,” Dr. Russo says. “That can cause premature cardiac events, dementia, respiratory failure, and renal failure.” Microclots have also been linked to the extreme fatigue some people with long COVID struggle with.
What happened after a man got 217 coronavirus shots - Speedy - 03-07-2024
What happened after a man got 217 coronavirus shots
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/05/german-man-covid-vaccine-217-shots/
German researchers have examined a “hypervaccinated” man they say received more than 200 coronavirus shots without any noticeable side effects or harm to his immune system.
Their findings, published Monday in the Lancet Infectious Diseases, a medical journal, indicate that coronavirus vaccines have a “good degree of tolerability,” the researchers said, although they noted this was an isolated case of “extraordinary hypervaccination.”
The 62-year-old man came to researchers’ attention when German prosecutors opened up a fraud investigation, gathering evidence that he had obtained 130 coronavirus shots in a nine-month period — far more than recommended by health authorities.
“We learned about his case via newspaper articles,” Kilian Schober, one of the study’s authors, said in a statement. “We then contacted him and invited him to undergo various tests. … He was very interested in doing so.”
>>>>>
Even by the 217th vaccination, researchers say the shot still had an effect: The man’s antibodies against the coronavirus “increased significantly as a result.” (Researchers say the man insisted on receiving another shot during the study. They took blood samples, which helped them determine how his immune system was responding.)
The researchers made it clear that despite their findings, they “do not endorse hypervaccination as a strategy to enhance adaptive immunity.”
Despite its 'nothingburger' reputation, COVID-19 remains deadlier than the flu - Speedy - 05-16-2024
https://www.aol.com/news/despite-nothingburger-reputation-covid-19-150029934.html
Since the earliest days of the pandemic, health officials have gauged the threat of COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu.
At first, it wasn't even close. People hospitalized in 2020 with the then-novel respiratory disease were five times more likely to die of their illness than were patients who had been hospitalized with influenza during the preceding flu seasons.
Immunity from vaccines and past coronavirus infections has helped tame COVID-19 to the point that when researchers compared the mortality rates of hospitalized COVID-19 and seasonal influenza patients during the height of the 2022-23 flu season, they found that the pandemic disease was only 61% more likely to result in death.
Now the same researchers have analyzed data for the the fall and winter of 2023 and 2024. Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, and his colleagues expected to find that the two respiratory diseases had finally equalized.
“There’s a narrative out there that the pandemic is over, that it’s a nothingburger,” Al-Aly said. “We came into this thinking we would do this rematch and find it would be like the flu from now on.”
The VA team examined electronic health records of patients treated in Veterans Affairs hospitals in all 50 states between Oct. 1 and March 27. They zeroed in on patients who were admitted because they had fevers, shortness of breath or other symptoms due to either COVID-19 or influenza. (People who were admitted for another reason, such as a heart attack, and were then found to have a coronavirus infection weren't included in the analysis.)
The COVID-19 patients were a little older, on average, than the flu patients (73.9 versus 70.2 years old), and they were less likely to be current or former smokers. They were also more likely to have received at least three doses of COVID-19 vaccine and less likely to have shunned the shots altogether.
Read more:Older Californians now eligible for another COVID-19 vaccine dose
Yet after Al-Aly and his colleagues accounted for these differences and a host of other factors, they found that 5.7% of the COVID-19 patients died of their disease, compared with 4.2% of the influenza patients.
In other words, the risk of death from COVID-19 was still 35% greater than it was for the flu. The findings were published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Assn.
“There is undeniably an impression out there that [COVID-19] is no longer a major threat to human health,” Al-Aly said. “I think it’s largely driven by opinion and an emotional itch to move beyond the pandemic, to put it all behind us. We want to believe that it’s like the flu, and we did — until we saw the data.”
Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco, said the study results are right in line with what he sees in his hospital.
"COVID continues to make some people in our community very ill and die — even in 2024," he said. "Although most will not get seriously ill from COVID, for some people it is like 2020 all over again."
That's particularly true for people who are older, who haven't received their most recent recommended COVID-19 booster, and who haven't taken full advantage of antivirals such as Paxlovid. Chin-Hong noted that only 5% of the COVID-19 patients in the study had been treated with antivirals before they were hospitalized.
Even if the mortality rates for the COVID-19 and flu patients had been equal, COVID-19 would still be the bigger health threat because it is sending more people to the hospital, Al-Aly said.
Between Oct. 1 and the end of March, 75.5 out of every 100,000 Americans had been hospitalized with influenza, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. During that same period, the hospitalization rate for COVID-19 was 122.9 per 100,000 Americans, the CDC says.
“COVID still carries a higher risk of hospitalization,” Al-Aly said. “And among those hospitalized, more will die as a result.”
Read more:Mistrust, fights and blood sport: How COVID-19 trauma is shaping the 2024 election
Yet Al-Aly noted with frustration that while 48% of adults in the U.S. received a flu shot this year, only 21% of adults are up to date with their COVID-19 vaccinations, according to the CDC.
Chin-Hong added that more than 95% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 this past fall and winter had not received the latest booster shot, according to the CDC.
Re: Despite its 'nothingburger' reputation, COVID-19 remains deadlier than the flu - Ted King - 05-16-2024
Chin-Hong added that more than 95% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 this past fall and winter had not received the latest booster shot, according to the CDC.
Wow.
Re: Despite its 'nothingburger' reputation, COVID-19 remains deadlier than the flu - Speedy - 05-16-2024
Ted King wrote:
Chin-Hong added that more than 95% of adults hospitalized with COVID-19 this past fall and winter had not received the latest booster shot, according to the CDC.
Wow.
Red hats clogging hospitals.
Re: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE - Black - 06-05-2024
At what point do we (as in those of us who are not medically compromised) start treating a Covid infection as a regular cold... wear a mask, go to work, keep your test results to yourself....
Re: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE - Ted King - 06-05-2024
Black wrote:
At what point do we (as in those of us who are not medically compromised) start treating a Covid infection as a regular cold... wear a mask, go to work, keep your test results to yourself....
I think that functionally most people are there with treating them pretty much the same in terms of prevention other than if a person is smart they get themselves vaccinated against Covid. I wish I could get vaccinated against regular colds.
Re: All COVID-19 Discussion GOES HERE - Tiangou - 06-05-2024
Black wrote:
At what point do we (as in those of us who are not medically compromised) start treating a Covid infection as a regular cold... wear a mask, go to work, keep your test results to yourself....
Use your best judgment and try not to contaminate anything/anyone.
Because it's still bad for some people.
Second time I got COVID, it was a sore throat and a fever for a few days.
But a friend of mine on her fourth infection was just hospitalized and on O2 (not a vent) for 2 days there, was sent home with a couple of O2 bottles and a prescription for more and was on bed rest for a week. Is just about able to walk again with a little help.