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| Past the point of strange (Page 2/2) |
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rinselberg
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JUL 28, 03:25 PM
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"Spellberg and Gandhi"
| quote | “It is just not the same pandemic as it was,” Spellberg [Dr Brad Spellberg, Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center] said this month at a virtual town hall for hospital staffers. “A lot of people have bad colds, is what we’re seeing.”
Gandhi [Dr Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease doctor who conducts public health research at UC San Francisco] said that even steep increases in new infections have ceased to be a reliable predictor of hospital admissions for severe cases of COVID-19.
“We’ve started seeing a ‘decoupling’ of cases and hospitalizations,” she said.
That’s largely due to COVID-19 vaccines. Their ability to prevent infections has waned as new variants became less recognizable to the immune system, but they still confer solid protection against hospitalization and death. For the roughly 71% of Americans ages 5 and up who have had at least two shots, vaccination reduced their risk of death sixfold, according to the CDC.
An ever-growing majority of Americans has some immunity conferred by a past infection as well. In February, the CDC estimated that nearly 60% of Americans had been infected by that point, months before BA.5 was detected here in May.
On top of that, the use of the antiviral Paxlovid in the first five days following a positive test can reduce the chance of hospitalization or death by as much as 88%. For people with weakened immune systems — an estimated 3% of Americans — prophylactic use of a monoclonal antibody called Evusheld reduced the risk of COVID-19 by 83% over six months; when taken after the onset of an infection, it drove down the risk of severe disease by 88%.
Plus, the Omicron variant now dominating the U.S. is less dangerous than the coronavirus strains that preceded it. The CDC has observed that the Omicron variant “generally causes less severe disease than infection with prior variants.” A recent study in the medical journal Lancet even suggests that the risk of developing long COVID after an infection with Omicron is less than half what it was with Delta. |
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Los Angeles: A new face mask mandate for this stage of the pandemic not worth it, say some experts
Melissa Healy for the Los Angeles Times; July 28, 2022.
https://www.latimes.com/sci...tage-of-the-pandemic
Don't take a chance on being laid on a slab... go ahead and get that jab!
CDC Public Service Advisory[This message has been edited by rinselberg (edited 07-28-2022).]
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Wichita
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JUL 28, 04:51 PM
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We need $5 billion for Monkey Pox preparedness
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