As a immunocompromised individual. Thank you to everybody who is continuing to get boosted. I love you all
Isn’t herd immunity an amazing thing?
a single dose of the COVID vaccine reduced the likelihood of long COVID by 30 percent.
people who’d had three doses of the COVID vaccine were 68.7 percent less likely to develop long COVID
I’m so happy I got my fourth booster a while back.
“Today rates of long COVID have dropped, likely thanks to increased immunity, milder variants and improved treatment.” I’ve been listening to TWIV (This Week in Virology) since March of 2020. I don’t think they would agree with all of that statement. 1. Increased immunity makes sense given we’ve been exposed to the disease itself and/or vaccines. 2. Milder variants - every time this idea comes up, someone on TWIV will cite data (morbidity and mortality) showing it’s just plain not the case. 3. Improved treatment - perhaps, but not much has changed since Paxlovid, Molnupirivir were introduced in late 2021. Prevention, that is, Handwashing, Masking, Distancing, and in the case of infection Isolation all help to break the chain of transmission. These are behavioral changes, that anyone can choose to do. And they are effective, just take a look at rates of influenza in 2020, when everyone was being cautious, the rates were extremely low. When we got bored with prevention the numbers came back up, e.g. 2021, 2022, and 2023. And there’s a 5th measure, Jala Neti, or Nasal Rinsing, typically with salt water, mechanically removes the virus particles, and bacteria. Adding a small amount of 1% Baby Shampoo to the Neti solution does a lot to inactivate viruses, and kill bacteria.
Long comment just to try to get people to rinse out their nasty nose.
Ya gotta build a bridge to understanding, and then to action. Besides, I spent a fair amount of that verbiage reviewing the 4 Behavioral Changes That Effing Worked.
I got my fourth booster in October along with my flu shot and had no side effects at all. It was simple, and has saved me a lot of worry especially now that the flu is spreading so quickly. And in my view, it’s a matter of civic responsibility to take such precautions.
I’d be interested to see whether this holds for all the COVID variants. Especially since the virus is now endemic and will continue to mutate. Obviously, they’ll keep researching and we’ll see in time.
Glad I already had 3 shots before I finally caught it a couple of months back. Already got the new booster last Oct as well.
Devil’s advocate:
We still have quite some way to go before we fully understand long COVID and the lowered levels of long COVID could simply correlate with lowered levels of COVID related hysteria.
Before you downvote, I’m not saying long COVID isn’t a real phenomena, I’m saying that correlation doesn’t always equal causation.
