Is there any light at the end of the tunnel

[SummersBreeze]

I know a family who are down with covid for the second time in a matter of a few short months. March was the last time. I had covid last week and it's no picnic.

Covid reminds me of a cold that has married a flu.

This can't possibly be ideal to have a flu type of illness every few months.

I'm someone who's not able to get sick. I don't tolerate sickness well and I don't have time to be sick. I have a lot of tricks up my sleeve to help myself. I remember in the winter of 2019 many people arou D me got cold after cold but I avoided them. I looked after myself so much to avoid colds.

But I wasn't able to avoid covid. I dread to think what this will be like every 3 or 4 months.

There has to be some sort of a let up surely. The world and its people needs a break from this.

Oops posted on wrong thread!

its all very well saying it's ok to get it multiple times but we don't know how it affects us internally. I had it mildly at Christmas, second time, and i now have ongoing heart issues from this mild case. If we get this multiple times what does that do to us?! This is NOT a flu. We are going to end up with huge numbers of people with long term health issues.

We have immune systems -mucosal immunity required frequent 'reminders' from exposure. Our immune systems will become adept at dealing with it after a few cycles, but we need to ensure it has that opportunity.

Isn't that what the vaccines were supposed to do?

The problem is each cycle takes lots of people out - chronic illness, organ damage, ageing of the immune system, death etc. How long until majority feel there's something not quite right with them?

The main light at the end of the tunnel for me is that we live alongside many other common viruses, including viruses which caused awful pandemics when they first appeared in humans, including viruses which infect us over and over again, including coronaviruses, and we’re not yet all dead from Long NL63.

It is easy to think that covid is some unique threat to humanity, like nothing we’ve ever faced before. But it’s not, in the bigger picture. It feels very different to us because the pandemic phase hit us, not our ancestors 100 or 500 or 7000 years ago. Many things that hit them and caused devastation, we’ve probably experienced as ‘just a cold’ multiple times over.

It also feels different to us because we’re aware of it in a way we don’t really think about other human respiratory viruses. It’s easy to forget that because people still say “scientists know so little about it” as though we were still in February 2020, but by this point, after so much covid-focused research and research funding, we know loads about it compared to what we know about so many of its virusy pals. But we don’t routinely test for those, so you’ll never know if you’ve had asymptomatic anything-else-but-covid recently.

And we don’t get news headlines and viral Twitter threads going “BREAKING 🚨🚨- OC43 can reinfect MULTIPLE TIMES! It probably caused a PANDEMIC in the recent past! Hundreds of millions of people get infected with OC43 EVERY YEAR!”, even though it can and it did and they do.

It’s possible that covid will act totally differently to all the other common endemic respiratory viruses. But it seems a bit arrogant to assume that it ^must* do, just because we feel (justifiably!) scared of it after our own experience. We aren’t the centre of the universe. Humans have been coexisting with viruses like this all of our lives.

Vaccines have been invaluable at preventing serious illness. But they don’t stop us catching it. I assumed most of us would have been more ill without them whilst faced with a novel virus that our immune systems don’t recognise.

Boosters for over 60s and the vulnerable are a good idea. I’ve read Modena are developing one more effective against Omicron? My friends (sample size of 3!) who had Moderna are the only people I know who haven’t had Covid. I thought there was talk of tweaking vaccines and making them more effective?

But for the rest of us.. it just needs to not be a novel virus to us anymore but one our immune system recognises and fights. Most of us aren’t there yet and it will be a bumpy road of more illness than normal to get there.

We can’t keep vaccinating the general population as it’s too expensive. But vaccines have done their job for now.

Thank you, this is a really clear and good explanation.

I don't think so.
www.thelancet.com/journals/ebiom/article/PIIS2352-3964(21)00582-X/fulltext

Yes spot on @GoldenOmber

We just haven’t lived through a pandemic before.

It would be very unlikely that this is the only virus in history that we don’t build any immunity to. It’s just going to take a while because it’s a coronavirus.

Yes it’s a bad situation, especially for clinically vulnerable and extremely vulnerable people,

Wear a well-fitting N85 mask and avoid casual social contact (e.g. browsing in shops).

I also think there’s a motivation for many to take the most pessimistic view possible of covid’s future, because of the very common belief that the main threat is people and governments not ‘taking it seriously’. You see it all the time: ‘all these deaths because of the government’, ‘no wonder cases are rising if people aren’t bothered any more’, ‘maybe we’d be out of this by now if people like you just did as you were told’, ‘why are people acting like it’s gone away’, ‘Covid is no joke’ etc etc.

If you believe the main threat is people not taking it seriously enough, then you’ll believe the best way to prepare and protect yourself, and be rational and good and caring, must be to take it more seriously than they do. And therefore you take the most pessimistic angle possible on anything related to covid.

It’s not wrong as such to think there’s a threat in underestimating it. Obviously many governments underestimated the threat, or miscalculated, and then panicked. And obviously for many individuals, going “oh I don’t need a vaccine, despite being in my 70s with lung disease on immunosuppressants I’m sure it’ll just be a bad cold”. Thank the heavens that the vaccine development teams thought it was worth starting work when they did, rather than waiting to see how things shook out.

But there’s also a side of that approach where it becomes more superstitious than anything else. And also, the idea that covid is mainly a threat because the uneducated/uncaring masses aren’t Taking It Seriously gives us a lot more power as humans than we really have. There isn’t an attitude we can have that will make it not be an infectious disease. It is infecting people because it is an infectious disease, not because people have been bad.

Covid isn’t going to disappear because we’d like it to. But it’s also not going to be an extinction level event just because we’re scared it will be. It isn’t actually bothered about us at all. It’s another virus among many.

I completely agree. I’m not a doomsayer but a lot of hospitals are on black alert right now, with long waits for ambulances. I’m young and healthy and was exhausted for weeks afterwards when I got it.

My perfectly healthy mother of 67 with no risk factors had a minor stroke 5 days in to her “mild” covid. It is not a cold or flu, it’s a vascular illness that can have far reaching implications for anyone whatever age they are.

Meanwhile the government ignore it.

There’s no doubt the NHS is suffering and not in a good place right now.

But with regards to Covid, what do you want the government to do?

I think we need to realise that there will be some disruption due to higher levels of illness for a few years. Do we need to provide better sick pay? Should the government invest more in certain areas (such as health?).

A highly contagious virus will do what it will do. There are no measures which will stop it. Short of a China strategy and good luck to them in a few years when this is not a novel virus to us but it is to them. Are they planning on continuing these lockdowns for one case forever?

Before I had COVID I was steadily losing weight with a sensible combination of a small reduction in calories along with increased exercise. Covid has proper screwed up the extremely important exercise side. I now get breathless walking up the stairs. Hoping it will be a short term problem.
Although I dread to think what subsequent infections will do.

@Rocky2022 I don't know how long you've had Covid but don't panic just yet. I had huge difficulty with stairs for a few weeks, and then it just got better on the breathing front. It's really hard to know though, and if you have pre-existing breathing issues, it must be more of a risk. Keep going with the other side of things and you might find you plateau a bit and then can keep on with losing weight a bit later down the line. I did lose weight with Covid due to finding all food horrible, but sadly this has worn off and now I'm eating for England again!

Thank you @FarFarFarAndAway . Yes it is early days so hoping it will improve soon. Just so frustrating as I want to get back out there.

I’m concerned about this too.

I feel sure part of the virus has been tinkered with to make it act in a way that is worse for us. Why do the Chinese continue to try to suppress?

yes it is mild for many but do we know what repeated infections do? If our kids get infected every six months with a spike protein, does this cause longer term issues.

it’s not exactly keeping me
up at night but I’m really hoping for a vaccine that does what is says on the tin!

Think that I too saw than on a baby centred forum. And was shocked at the comments.

We won't make covid go away, but if we all made a bit more effort with things like ventilation and good masking we could definitely reduce how much there is about. Every break in a chain of transmission prevents some (potentially many) cases.

Ventilation is so much the best thing to do, but it hardly gets mentioned. Where there's poor ventilation, masking makes sense too if the masks are good (FFP2/3), but it's summer right now and the ventilation side should be much easier.

I could feel optimistic about covid while acknowledging it's looking like a really nasty disease, if I felt we were really trying to act against it. But it feels like the government is so invested in the 'it's over' narrative that they've completely given up on encouraging any kind of precautions at all, even the easy ones.

Reassurance that humanity has lived through pandemics before doesn't do much for me. Humanity as a whole has lived through earthquakes, plagues, volcanic eruptions and so on. But if I discovered that I lived near an awakening volcano or new earthquake zone, I wouldn't think "oh that's OK, humanity will be fine" - I'd think "right, what do I need to do to keep me and my family safe?".

@starcatfish I agree, things like good ventilation/filtration and appropriate mask use in high risk places is really sensible. I wear a mask when I'm going into hospital for example as it's both a place with lots of vulnerable people and there's lots of people with Covid. Was really silly to have stopped this, you could also give clinical staff proper PPE masks instead of some silly piece of paper ones.

What @starcatfish said!

if we all made a bit more effort with things like ventilation and good masking we could definitely reduce how much there is about

Could we, though? I know it makes instinctive sense that this should work, but we have two and a half years of experience at what does work, and it does not seem to be match those intuitions a lot of the time. (Like, for one example, requiring everyone to wear masks in healthcare settings. England mostly dropped that earlier in 2022, Scotland never has, and it’s just… not really made any difference.)

Not saying we shouldn’t do these ‘small’ things necessarily. Better ventilation for example seems like a generally good idea for all sorts of reasons. But we should look at what we’re trying to achieve with it. Letting people feel more protected by giving them free decent masks? Maybe works for those individuals. Less Covid overall in society? Doesn’t seem to work.

But if I discovered that I lived near an awakening volcano or new earthquake zone, I wouldn't think "oh that's OK, humanity will be fine"

That’s not really a reasonable comparison, though, since the OP issue isn’t “should we be worried about an emerging pandemic?” but rather “does this particular pandemic mean we will be increasingly ill forever, in a way that hasn’t happened with any of the previous pandemics like this?”

Yes, the word 'definitely' is doing a lot of work there. I am more supportive of improvement in ventilation with every day though!

Personally I think we should be adopting a zero covid strategy as China have done successfully and aiming to eradicate covid. Otherwise we are going to end up with indefinite waves causing death and disability.

What's needed is a sharp proper lockdown (which we've never had in the UK) until covid is eradicated and then the continuation of light touch measures to keep it at bay such as N95 masks, social distancing, no indoor mixing and caps on large events.

Tbh these light touch measures should never have stopped. The desperation to prioritise the economy has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of long covid cases. There has to be an acceptance that life has changed- i.e. that large events and family gatherings will need to be via zoom from now on.