The variant is called EG.5 and is a descendant of Omicron.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.
Idk what people are so worried about, I’ve been assured that the pandemic is over and we beat covid in
2020202120222023COVID-19 is now endemic, like influenza. However, we do have vaccines so every 6-12 months when we get a booster shot we can get a bivalent vaccine that contains some of the latest variant to help prevent serious illness. This allows us to recover much more easily, reduce transmission, and ultimately eliminate the clogging of hospitals.
The real danger is from people who refuse to vaccinate because they’re going to be more susceptible to the endemic virus and its subvariants.
Nah, the real danger is the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it. Long Covid is only beginning to be recognized for the mass disabling event it is, and the response of governments from the municpal all the way to the federal levels have been to let it rip, stop testing, shut down tracking sites, repeal mask mandates, and declare victory. Literally doing the thing they rightly mocked Trump for suggesting.
Now over a million people have died in the US alone, and our government has decided to force everyone back to work to sustain commercial real estate profits, and in the process condemned us all to a lifetime of body-destroying reinfections by a virus who’s key traits are infectiousness and rapid evolution.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it’s a crime of unprecedented scale.
The number of people ignoring this is terrifying. Study after study keeps showing its a problem.
There’s going to be a massive accumulated health crisis in 10-20 years where a quarter of the population has a wrecked vascular system. On par with diabetes, but in this case untreatable which is going to kill millions far earlier than they should.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate to explore my own anxiety about this situation.
My fears are exactly the same as yours.
The part that I cannot reconcile is this: I took my initial doses of vaccine, I had a booster. I did all the right things in terms of minimising exposure and the risk to myself and my family.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
My entire family have lived the same experience.
Most people’s thinking in my circle now seems to be: why would I expose myself to the risk of cardiovascular complications by being continuously vaccinated, when I am still going to get infected and face those same cumulative cardiovascular risks again.
From a risk management perspective if I am not in a disease cohort likely to face mortality from infection, am I not reducing my total risk by simply reducing my exposure to the spike protein overall and electing to skip vaccine boosters altogether? I am going to get infected either way, that much is clear.
I am massively concerned about the long term consequences of repeated infection with this pathogen but it seems the world has moved on from giving a fuck.
I don’t know a single person who has received a booster in the last 12 months and given the shift in media narrative here it is not hard to see why.
You’re assuming the booster is giving you the same (or anywhere even close) to the vascular damage caused by catching the virus. As far as the studies I’ve read, the vascular impact from catching COVID is dozens of times worse than a booster.
You say “Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows” The doctors know, that’s why boosters are being offered to everyone for free in Canada.
This is one of the reasons why Canada, which has a much higher vaccination and now booster rate than the US is doing better than the US with it’s abysmally low booster rate. Canada is losing about 50 people per week right now, the US is still at around 2000 (40 times higher, despite only having a little over 8 times the population)
What the world does or doesn’t do is completely irrelevant to your personal choices. If they all jumped off a bridge to their death, would you do it too? I’ve continued masking in crowded public areas, boosted regularly (last Monday was my most recent dose), kept my kids masked at school, boosted them regularly too, none of us have had COVID at all. Make your own choices.
Have you been boosting every 6 months? I’ve been mulling over getting another booster or waiting till the new one comes out. I’ve been more up to date than most, but last one I got was when the bivalent vaccine came out.
I did all the right things […]
I still caught CV19 twice.
One can do all the right things and still win the bad lottery. It’s about reducing risk on the whole so all our chances are reduced.
It was never claimed to stop you getting it. Same as many vaccines it doesn’t give sterilising immunity.
But it’s completely possible it stopped you dying or going to hospital.
The vaccine causes almost no damage but COVID 100% causes massive damage if you aren’t vaccinated.
It was never claimed to stop you getting it. Same as many vaccines it doesn’t give sterilising immunity.
They literally claimed that it prevented symptoms in 90+% of people. This is an outright lie.
Preventing symptoms is not the same as not catching it.
Also sources please.
The numbers are still in favour of getting vaccinated. Complications from the vaccine are as close to zero as any medical procedure could be. The complications from raw-dogging COVID are far greater, regardless of your cohort. Turning a life-threatening infection into an inconvenience is what the vaccines do. If your concern is minimizing total risk, getting a COVID booster each year with your flu vaccine is the way to go.
I still caught CV19 twice. Maybe it didn’t affect me as intensely as if I had not been vaccinated, who knows, but it fucked me up badly each time.
there being a few 2000 year old roman bridges doesn’t mean they were good at building bridges that last a long time, they built LOTS of bridges and a couple out of tens and tens of thousands survived
survivorship bias
Gonna be honest from the perspective of a current critical care nurse, as long as you didn’t end up proned face down in the hospital with a ventilator stuck down you and paralyzed on Nimbex and losing a lobe of your lung then you got out lucky.
I have a damn near knee jerk reaction to talking about covid in which I tell people that “still got it” that as long as they didn’t need serious medical intervention then they should be fucking thankful for not having to endure whatever the fuck fever dream of Hell existed in the first two years of covid in most hospitals in the US. Shit was and still is fucked beyond fucked.
You have said it very well.
In Australia even our absolute harshest lockdowns made allowances for millions of “essential” industries.
Unless you owned a business installing styrofoam nuns, you kept going to work in some capacity.
We’re an island for fuck’s sake! We could have stopped this thing in it’s tracks. But no, the flights must keep arriving. Business must business.
We could have stopped this thing in [its] tracks.
You’ll correct me for sure, but I remember Aus was banking on its internal vaccine and didn’t want to lock down in vain while the vaccine was imminent; only when that vaccine failed to be effective and on time did they have to start Plan B, and that put everyone way behind.
(I’m paraphrasing my nephew who lives there, so it’s second-hand at best).
But they seemed to start out with a fine, conservative fuck-the-plebes plan, at least.
That’s pretty much the gist of it. We also had a huge in-fighting between state governments and a stubborn refusal to work together or coordinate properly that led to some really bad outcomes.
Almost the entire time this was compounded by flight after flight of VIPs arriving in Australia for ‘diplomatic’ purposes, or of course to play sportsball. We barely even stopped normal tourist flights either, yet our own expats were not allowed to fly home until months later. None of it made any sense.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53776285
This incident in itself made me highly suspicious of our governments competence and motivations. This was one of our major seeding incident here. Under no circumstances should this have been allowed to happen, yet this is just one of a long string of borderline malicious decisions by those in charge. We all forget too quickly.
Dayjob Orchestra fan right there!
At the beginning of the pandemic someone very correctly predicted that America was going to do the plague the same way we did Vietnam: enthusiastically for a little bit, then once we realize how expensive it is we were gonna give up, run away and loudly declare victory.
Funny, I was just going to mention Vietnam; they did the lockdown as it should have been. Closed borders, no gatherings, the whole shebang. And wouldn’t you know it; economic damage from the pandemic was extremely minimal because of all the people (read: workers, read: customers) that didn’t needlessly die or were permanently disabled.
Everything is beyond fucked man, I know, you’re probably preaching to the choir. Theres no reload, no save, no do over. Find happiness the best you can and pray you die before we turn from sideways to upside down.
That’s my plan at least.
None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it’s a crime of unprecedented scale.
Yes it did. If all countries did this around the world many people would have starved to death. It’s simply not ethical. Without eliminating it everywhere it would spread eventually - just look at Australia.
You can’t even enforce a total lockdown in western countries without excluding “key workers” that would allow the virus to spread anyway.
Nothing you have suggested would work in the real world. The only solution to prevent this is new medicines and prophylactics. We have developed some of these in the form of antivirals but they are not used enough to stop the spread.
We already enjoy a level of health unknown to people 100 years ago even with COVID-19. There will always be new diseases and this is the nature of evolution unfortunately. Previous generations had to accept this, now we have to as well. I hate to say it but probably our current level of health and healthcare isn’t sustainable without further advances thanks to antibiotic and antiviral resistance. We will need to change our approach going forward using things like bacteriophages, increased sanitation, healthier life styles, less cattle antibiotics, and new treatments to keep up.
the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it
When I ask actual doctors, they disagree. Then we laugh about how anti-vax karen-convoy it sounds.
anyone with significant experience (even just as a patient) in the medical system can tell you doctors are not infallible. most medical professionals i’ve encountered in my area don’t even mask anymore and haven’t for about a year and some change now. of the ones that do, most are still just wearing surgical masks (useless)
Are these the same doctors who insist on taking a wait and see approach to Paxlovid? If so, I’m not sure they should even be allowed to call themselves doctors.
From an overseas perspective I can tell you that practically nobody in Australia is taking any form of booster. Elderly populations are, particularly those in a care setting but the general population are completely uninterested.
This is a combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once and not being particularly badly affected, and most people having had either direct or indirect experience of negative side effects from vaccination, and the now predominantly negative media coverage of the vaccination campaign.
If there is a marked shift towards increased mortality in any given strain, Australia is fucked. Thankfully that does not seem to be the trajectory of the virus at this time.
combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once
I remember when Americans were sending their kids to CoViD parties, thinking it was like the Measles.
It ended horrifically.
Talk to a doc and follow those recommendations.
Just a note that “Measles parties” are also likely to end badly.
The problem is that the latest vaccines don’t contain the latest variant - they’re always going to be behind the curve because it takes time to develop them after a new variant emerges.
For example, here in NZ, we’re still giving people the bivalent mix designed for the omicron BA.4/BA.5 variant (and the ones before it) which is now about 2 years old and hasn’t been seen here for about 9 months.
There’s a non-zero level of protection from those vaccines, but they’re not keeping up with the virus in real time.
This is another major reason I have not stayed current with my boosters. What is the point of using something based on a strain that has not been seen for 9 months, and is in fact 2 years old? It doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me.
Sure it will offer SOME ability to improve the immune response to a CV19 variant given how short-lived the protection from natural infection and vaccination seems to be, but it certainly isn’t going to be anywhere near as good as it could be. I’m still going to get horrifically sick again.
Yearly boosters
HA!
I should be so lucky. My last booster was over a year ago, and there are no plans to introduce them for any but the oldest and youngest people in Britain.
Oh, man, the UK was an absolute disaster for getting vaccinated. In 2021 in my area there were literally crowds of young people at “walk-in” vaccination centres getting turned away and being told to wait for another 1-2 months. Meanwhile about 3 elderly patients were getting the shot per hour and the Guildhall looked empty besides.
My friends in other countries were vaccinated months before me. Ended up getting all my boosters outside the UK because they couldn’t give a fuck about anyone under 65.
I thought this was pretty clever and funny, nicely done:)
Another few months and we’ll have beaten it for 2024 too!
It’s kinda taboo to name it after places now. No more Spanish, Hong Kong, Wuhan flu.
“it’s only for a few weeks! Flatten the curve!”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A new COVID-19 variant has emerged, serving as a reminder that the coronavirus continues to mutate and spread around the world, disproportionately affecting vulnerable populations.
The World Health Organization (WHO) added EG.5 to its list of currently circulating variants that are under monitoring on July 19.
The latest data from the UK Health Security Agency suggests that EG.5 makes up approximately 14.6 per cent — or one in seven — of all COVID-19 cases in the U.K.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that EG.5 accounted for roughly 17.3 per cent — or one in six — of new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. in the past two weeks.
Dr. Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist at University Health Network in Toronto, said he expects cases of EG.5 to pop up in Canada soon, if they aren’t already.
Some of the best defences against COVID-19 have been and continue to be masks, vaccination and good ventilation or air quality in indoor spaces, Bogoch stressed.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
No indicator on severity of this strain in the article
This is my issue with the article.
Headline: Here’s what we know about EG.5 so far
Body: Apparently not much. We uhh, know the name of it? Severity, how contagious it may be, symptoms, breakthrough rate…like umm, anything??
sick right now in Ireland (can’t be sure but we’re exploding with this variant)
for me, fatigue, stuffed & runny nose which is making me cough. on day 1 I had a headache but only for that day. I had a fever for about 6 hours. sneezing, gastro fun.
Wife has a dry cough. she had a wicked fever with chills. also gastro fun, which is fun for me by proxy.
Presumably as a descendent of omicron… It is probably easier to catch and less serious. But you’d think they’d address it…
“I don’t know that it’s time to worry about this (EG.5) just yet. We know very little about this new variant. There’s currently no evidence to suggest that it causes more severe illness. And the CDC is indicating that it does appear to be susceptible to COVID vaccines, which is good news.”
From an AMA gathering on July 26, (speaker is Andrea Garcia, JD, MPH, vice president, science, medicine & public health, American Medical Association)
Less serious than what? If my aged brain remembers correctly, Omicron severity is comparable to the original strain, only making it less serious than Delta. As I understand it, the primary factor in reduced severity was that vaccines were available and most people got the vaccine.
Other articles has said it’s nothing special. Not any deadlier.
Huh. I did notice a sudden wave of infections, including me. I wonder…
Covid cases are rising everywhere right now, stay safe out there lemmings!
Well that’s concerning
Is it though? It’s an omicron subvariant that doesn’t seem to be any worse that its predecessors and the annual booster update is likely to get authorized in a few weeks.
This is the new normal. Covid mutates like flu, and each year will have covid and flu shots in the fall.
Long covid implications are worrisome, multiple reinfections are one of the few things we know are not good
Thanks for being the only voice of reason. Everyone else is just like “ya but we don’t die so who gives a fuck” attitude.
I’m glad some people are still looking at COVID as a whole.
I mean you need only look at the people in your daily life to realize there aren’t many people who care anymore. Simple things like wearing a mask are off the table for the vast majority.
I think a lot of us are, I just feel folks who are thinking big-picture aren’t the type to make a lot of noise on the internet about it, ya know?
Agreed. I guess I’m saying is that it’s no more concerning that what is currently floating around. It’s what most epidemiologists expected to happen.
It isn’t, really. Barely newsworthy, but it’s something.
How come Canada still has no many anti-vax/lockdown nut jobs still?
Ours went away faster than the virus, what’s going on in Canadian society that they’re still falling for that shit? Kinda had more respect for youse than that.
Canadians are, more than ever before, influenced by American media and social media and that includes the dogmatic and polarizing rightwing anti-science narratives rooted in conspiracy theories and anti-intellectualism. We’re being absorbed into the American weltanschauung since the advent of the Internet and our culture diluted. You can see it in our politics.
Is weltanschauung actually a word you Canadians use?
I want to say yes, but it’s the first time I’ve heard of it, and my vocabulary’s not bad :P. Kudos to @NathanielThomas for sharing it! I think the only German loanword I know is schadenfreude
Yeah I dunno. It’s gross. I found one at work unfortunately. He started going off on 15-minute cities and I’m just like, “Dude, you’re telling me an insane misinterpretation of the concept. I’ve heard it. I like you, but stop with this shit. I’m just trying to work.”
So this is the first time I’ve heard of the 15 minute city concept, especially as a bad thing. I live on a farm but if I wanted to move to the city… 15 minutes to everything sounds great. Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?
My ex lives in Moose Jaw and that’s a pretty good description of it, it’s 15 minutes drive from edge to edge and it’s honestly a really nice little city. No traffic jams and you can also walk or bike most places you want to go, as long as the weather permits.
The idea is that you’d be able to walk or bike to all your necessities - Doctor, Grocery Store, etc etc - within 15, reducing the need for cars.
A 15-minute city would describe a neighbourhood in a larger city, really.
They’ve somehow turned that in to “you will not be allowed to leave your 15-minute city”
The counter argument is simply “who profits from you believing that?” I got a couple people to drop it by turning the conspiracy theory around on them.
Isn’t that sort of convenience kind of the whole point of a city?
That’s the point of a small town.
The point of big cities is to concentrate capital so that a few people can become exceedingly wealthy.
“We don’t have the funding that the US government does… How exactly do you propose Canada will fund the creation of 15 minute cities?”
Are you quoting someone else or asking me?
Canadian cities only have to zone stuff appropriately and provide infrastructure. It’s not that wild of a concept.
Lead poisoning with the boomers and christofacists funding the Conservatives up here. Keep them dumb so they can further attack healthcare and other Canadian values so they can turn us into Americans.
Who the fuck is in charge of naming these?
This last one was named after a famous battle Droid
(But really the new strains seen are given greco alpha numeric names. There are a bunch of strains that get named that we don’t hear about because they Peter out.)
I am the only person, literally the ONLY person who wears a mask anymore. No one in the city, no one during grocery shopping or in schools and no one public transportation. I get looks but I already got covid once, due to my „skeptical“ parents and I don’t intend to get it again.
I had to visit the ER a few weeks ago. Aside from me, there were two or three other people in masks, and they were patients.
I just don’t understand it. Medical professionals should know better, but somehow don’t??
Okay when are we gonna be done with omicron? We got alpha, delta, then we hit omicron and just stopped, now we just get omicron v2 and omicron v3. We need some new ideas, when are we gonna get the xi variant?
Someone get the marketing team on this. We need fresh new ideas!
I dunno if we need to worry in Canada. There’s been almost no deaths al associated with COVID in a while now. Worst case, people get hospitalised but that’s it. We’ve built a pretty good social immunity thanks to vaccination.
It’s the other countries who don’t have our resources that are more at risk. We need to send them vaccines so the can immunize themselves properly.
I mean there’s plenty to worry about besides death. I don’t understand why people discount all the other potentially life altering effects of COVID.
Ah yes, you’re right. There are potential lifetime effects to COVID. I forgot about those. A couple of friends of mine have been permanently affected with various problems like asthma since catching it.
I know there’s “long COVID” and there’s the potential to overload our hospitals. Those are valid concerns.
But here’s why I don’t worry. Long term symptoms from COVID are rare. Immunization has helped keep many out of hospitals (but we can definitely do better on this front).
Lastly, I’ve got kids in daycare and I cannot count the times I’ve been sick - so much sicker than I ever was from COVID - from what Doctors will just say “it’s a virus”. If a viral infection can leave one with long term effects, then how many of those unnamed pathogens have the potential to leave me with long term effects? Did you know that there is research suggesting that being infected with influenza while pregnant might be a cause of schizophrenia for the child later in life? That’s fucked up!
There are a lot of unknown viruses out there just waiting to give you long term effects, but you have to live your life. Try not to worry about what you can’t control.
You know I really wish I hadn’t caught COVID at some point and lost the ability to sleep properly at some point.
That sucks :( What happened?
Welcome to long covid, where your body has adrenaline attacks at random points in the middle of the night.
Long term symptoms aren’t rare. It’s at least one in ten people. And a lot of people are in denial and refuse to accept they’re scewed.
The death count is low because immunity is up. If we relax on things like vaccinations or quarantine orders it will come back.
There’s already an uptick from wastewater testing for the past few weeks according to CBC.
Seems like we need to be a hair more responsible for a while.
I think if we get a yearly immunization shot for influenza and covid we should be fine. And people should just quarantine if they’re sick, COVID or not. I hate it when people go to work sick when they have the option to work from home. Especially in an office setting. Like haven’t they learned anything? Why spread the disease to all your colleagues?
Do people even follow quarantine orders anymore? My employer stopped giving us covid sick days.
Don’t we have herd immunity now? Having caught it recently is just as good as a vaccination.
Unfortunately as well, there is likely a much higher percentage of nutjobs who think vaccinations are a conspiracy, who are also probably the type of people who don’t use RAT tests and who prioritise themselves over others (so even if they suspect they are sick, they’ll go attend major events, etc).
Whilst 2 people I know genuinely are good people who don’t believe in vaccination (which again, was at least likely partially facilitated by our dumb PM at the time and Trump), another two I know (who legally SHOULD have gotten vaccinated for work actually, since they work for the government), are two of the worst self-centered people I know
herd immunity relies on people maintaining immunity. if you can get the vaccine, you should, regardless of if you’ve caught the virus.
Agreed. Both don’t last forever. I got it 4 times, for reference, since I seem to have come a across as an antivaxxer. Either way though I think the pandemic proper is over.
Can we go back to naming them after countries? I was looking forward to the Micronesia variant
Pandemics over, actually
That’s true, it is, but you need to check your definitions. A pandemic is an emergency when something dangerous and new spreads rapidly, threatening to overwhelm health care systems. Now that we have vaccines, treatments, and are working on health care capacity, the emergency is over.
That doesn’t mean the danger has passed or that our “death from disease” rate has fallen to pre-COVID levels. In fact, it looks like the new normal will be to have about twice as many COVID deaths each year as flu deaths. All of those COVID deaths are new deaths that would not have occurred in the absence of COVID.
That death rate will continue until the vulnerable populations have been nearly wiped out, forever changing our demographics and life expectancy. By that time, we’ll start seeing whether long COVID is as disastrous as it looks like it might be. If it goes the way many reasonable people think, we’ll still need all the long term care programs that aren’t being used by the elderly and infirm who got wiped out by the immediate effects of COVID infection, because we’ll have a new class of infirmity requiring care.
On the plus side, all those 50- and 60-year old people forced out of the workforce will open up a lot of good jobs and promotions for the youth. On the downside, it’ll still be demographically difficult, with too many in care, not enough working.
So, yeah, pandemic is over, but the endemic isn’t going to be all that much fun for millions of people.
It’s 2023 I stopped caring after a year of BS
Don’t worry. CoViD still cares about. And if you don’t care about yourself, CoViD will use you to go meet your friends.
Sorry you’re bored of responsibility.
How does following every protocol and mandate make me not responsible?
Saying you’ve “stopped caring” is irresponsible.
Do you need a policeman to tell you every day to not speed, or to put your seat belt on?
Just because the government doesn’t tell you to mask up doesn’t mean you shouldn’t mask up when it seems like a good idea. I’m glad you listened to the government, but just because they stopped holding your hand doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make informed decisions for yourself and those around you.
We know you don’t, though. You’ve already made it clear you’ve stopped caring. Maybe one day you’ll think about those around you and not just about yourself.
You didn’t care about masking up for viruses before COVID. You only care because the government told you to care, get off your high horse and be real. Covid is just annother viral disease that comes in waves every year, like the rhino and influenza virus now.
Hey bud, I have plenty of photos of me with a mask on years and years before COVID.
Thanks, though.
Nice mask with a vent that literally does nothing to stop Covid, bahaha.
You do realize that’s an n95 with an EXHAUST valve, right?
You’re so ignorant.
I also wear different n95 masks now. I was just proving that I wore masks before COVID.
Your back must be aching from moving the goal posts.
