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.
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.
It warms my heart when I see someone still has the heart and the guts to wear a mask.
I feel this.
My immune system is shitty and terrible (suspected condition, but docs have no clue), so getting sick will cause a slew of awful things to happen to me. Last tiny sick bout I had a few months ago caused a chain reaction that landed me in the hospital. I was literally shitting blood due to a tiny infection! The specialist half-jokingly told me “Well, next time, just don’t get sick!” Ha. Ha ha. Ha.
I’ve only had a single person comment on me wearing a mask in 3 years, thank god. My response was “How about you mind your own fucking business?” Don’t wear a mask. Whatever. I won’t comment on it. But leave me the fuck alone if I choose the wear one. I’m not about to explain my medical history to some snide asshole. Fuck off. I like not suffering.
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??
Similar story. I was in the ER today and most staff weren’t wearing masks, despite another patient just a few curtains down testing positive for Covid!
That’s the reason I don’t enter a hospital without my fit-tested N99.
There are so many vectors for infection that it is kinda silly to try. That being said I still wear mine as a matter of professional ethics.
i only mask for drs offices, the dentist, and other high risk environments.
if i worked with the general public or lived/interacted with high risk individuals on the regular, i’d behave differently.
Make sure you get N95/KN95/KF94 masks, they are better than cloth or surgical masks. Personally I don’t wear a mask anymore except in doctor’s offices, although I did receive 4 doses of the vaccine and I think both myself and my family would almost definitely be okay if we did get it.
With that said, I also have a job where I work remotely 100% of the time so that probably helps too.
I still mask up. I get “you know, you don’t have to wear that any more” concern trolling from
and 
and 
alike sometimes.Yes. I work in a hospital and people tend not to bother anymore among the staff.
You do you, and don’t let anyone get you down. There’s something to be said about masking on the subway or whatever, I wouldn’t hate on anyone for that. I personally haven’t worn a mask for awhile, but anyone who freaks out about it, is just plain stupid.
I personally haven’t given a shit about COVID for over a year now. I haven’t even gotten sick in that time. I’m not trying to attack your position here, but at what point is it considered paranoia? I remember seeing the death numbers fall in line with other stuff like the flu. At what point do we just return to normal?
Last I saw, Covid death rates were still almost double that of influenza. And that’s even with (generally) higher vaccination rates for covid over the flu.
I think a lot of it depends on your personal situation. For some immunocompromised people, the risk may be legitimately higher. And so in terms of it being “just like the flu”, I think it’s maybe more of a realization for people in those groups that it probably would have been a good idea to wear a mask in crowded public places before covid too, to protect against things like the flu. Masking has long been common in East Asia.
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.
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.
This was the case with Cuba as well. They did the damn thing right and ended up in a position where they were exporting doctors and techniques to the rest of the world.
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.
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.
edit: this is also not at all meant to downplay/ be mean everyone that got covid and luckily avoided a vent, many that contracted “mild” covid suffer from long covid with no end in sight.
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.
The best informed benefit/risk of subsequnt boostes is cohort based.
https://www.health.gov.au/news/atagi-2023-booster-advice
If you are unsure what’s the best choice for you, you should chat with your doctor.
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.
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.
Mostly, we had to adjust the schedule to happen a little earlier to get the kids done a few weeks before school starts back up each fall.
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
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.
I remember when vaccines rolled out. I would have to sit down and go over it. But there was a time where I stopped having to process bodies for the morgue at my job and that was a nice change. We still saw lots of sick people, they just didn’t die nonstop. So vaccine all thr way.
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.
Dayjob Orchestra fan right there!
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.
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.
Even if you could have gotten an entire country to agree that this was a good idea and pull it off, you still have other countries to worry about. Stopping it in one country wouldn’t have stopped it anywhere else.
Now, what I do agree with is that the response could’ve been a lot better, and many lives would’ve been saved as a result. But completely defeating COVID was always a fantasy.
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.
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.
The idea that reinfections would be benign was inspired by politics and vibes. There’s plenty of evidence that reinfections are bad. It’s a virus that can damage all our organs, brain included, cause micro clots, vascular damage, and harm the immune system itself by trashing our t-cells, and it’s a virus we can catch multiple times a year and is mutating so rapidly we are having trouble knowing what to target when we develop yearly vaccines.
It’s kind of a problem if reinfections are bad for us when we are counting on perpetual infections to “build our immunity”.
US dept. of Health and Human Services https://twitter.com/HHSGov/status/1659589815887712256
New Zealand government covid updates https://nitter.kavin.rocks/covid19nz/status/1670943608428539905#m
Another study showing cumulative risk upon reinfection https://nitter.kavin.rocks/i/status/1688769749868490752
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)
surgical masks (useless)
This isn’t entirely true though. Yes they are far from perfect and yes they are worse than better masks, but they are still better than nothing and do actually reduce transmission.
you’re correct, i was being a touch hyperbolic. iirc it’s like 23-27% effective or some shit, maybe in the 30s (it’s been a while)
that said, a solid 70% of the doctors i see masking have it either under their nose or on their chin so
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.
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.
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.
At this point probably everyone has had omicron or one of the later less harmful variants. The trend of becoming more transmissible and less harmful is normal for corona viruses. Im with most people in being apprehensive about getting additional boosters. Why do you feel there’s a real danger?
I am one of the lucky few that has never had it.
I never had a noticeable case of it either. I think I probably had an asymptomatic case
I thought this was pretty clever and funny, nicely done:)
It’s kinda taboo to name it after places now. No more Spanish, Hong Kong, Wuhan flu.
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Huh. I did notice a sudden wave of infections, including me. I wonder…
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.
Sick right now in Florida, my symptoms pretty closely match yours. Killer headache, scratchy throat, congestion, and fatigue.
It started with being tired on Saturday, and the full brunt hit Monday. Feeling a bit better today. I didnt get much gastro stuff fortunately
Geez that sounds pretty rough- I hope you’re able to get out of Florida asap.Good luck w/ the covid, also. I kid, I kid.
How’s it going? I was essentially symptom free day 5, and today, day 6, if I popped into existence with no memory right now and sometone asked me if I was sick I’d say “nope”, although I’m taking it extra easy because I understand pushing yourself through the accute infection is highly correlated with long-haul symptoms (mailnly persistant fatigue)
That’s because we literally don’t know much. EG.5 has only had 183 sequences submitted to GISAID, and EG.5.1 has had 3400 sequences submitted. This means we only have about 3600 cases confirmed as EG.5, but it’s growth rate since May is crazy fast. 10% of sequences submitted to GISAID by the end of July were for EG.5, compared to 0.02% in May.
Part of the problem is that people have stopped going to the doctor when they can just do a COVID test at home, so we are less able to track individual strains and calculate things like transmission rates. When’s the last time you heard the phrase “contact tracing”?
Source: https://GISAID.org/lineage-comparison and also I work in COVID monitoring.
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.
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.
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.
“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?”
Pandemics over, actually
LoL
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.
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Well that’s concerning
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.
1.4 of 38-odd million is absolutely not rare, it’s nearly 1 in 50. The US figures are even worse. For something to be considered medically rare, it needs to be at most 1 in 10,000.
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.
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?
Don’t we have herd immunity now? Having caught it recently is just as good as a vaccination.
EG.5 -> G.5 -> 5G
YOU KNOW WHAT CAUSED THIS!!!Primes
1,2,3,5
E + 3 = H
G+ 5 = L
5 -2 = 3
Half Life 3 confirmed.
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!
Can we go back to naming them after countries? I was looking forward to the Micronesia variant
