This is unreal - the new variant - anyone have it

[GreenPebbles]

I am not ill and I don't have it. I had COVID in the summer and I know it's likely only just around the corner again.

Did anyone have COVID recently? How was it?

I came across this on twitter. Apparently there's a new variant called XEN.

It looks a lot like the original Wuhan variant. It appears as if people are getting better and then by the second week there is respiratory distress.

I mean like WHAT THE HOLY FUCK?

I mean like how can this be allowed to spread if this is happening?

In vain, I'm afraid.

If that’s to me then yes it would be but schools are struggling to have enough money for books so no budget for air filters ( unless government supplied them )

"A University of Oxford-led study links a healthy pre-infection lifestyle to a 36% lower risk of long COVID, a 41% lower odds of death, and 22% lower chance of hospitalization"

I think this is what I've had. I'm on day 7 and while all the other symptoms have cleared now, the persistent fatigue is absolutely draining. The test just tests for Covid so I have zero idea what strain I have but so far I'm hoping things continue to improve.

This seems sensible for MoD, probably why it was actioned in 2020. Would also be sensible for schools.

www.purifiedair.com/case-studies/ministry-of-defence/

Flu can kill!

flu easily can kill

The flu is dangerous. It can cause respiratory distress quickly and easily

where have you got the info that flu is nothing?

Would be good @atownnamedalice

Don’t want to be negative but imagine how much it would cost for every state school in the UK.

Yes, but the definition of immunity seems to be a massive issue. You rightly point out vaccination reduces symptoms, but it seems people believe having had covid offers protection from contracting the virus again. It doesn't. The medical profession and gov't need to explain this, however I think a lack of consensus is also an issue.

What?

why on earth do you say that? Most of the population have built up immunity to covid…so they’re not the only person in the population

@Twiglets1 yes from government, although would help with staff absence and reduction of supply staff requirements. Would also help with concentration , grades, attendance, help kids with asthma.

@Mumtobabyhavoc I don't think it's in vain to look at your immune system if you're catching the same illness multiple times a year.

I caught a lot of colds a year or so ago so I've looked at my diet to increase vitamin etc. an average person should be able to get through cold and flu season without catching an illness multiple times.

We are merely further down the road with flu, we have decades more immunity to it and tweaking of flu vaccines is pretty embedded now. Some people are still extremely poorly from it and unfortunately die from it, but it's not going anywhere; just like covid isn't.

As anyone who's worked in a hospital/healthcare setting over winter will tell you, there's always lots of nasty respiratory illnesses going around that leave some very poorly.

Personally I think there's a bigger issues with workplaces having terrible sickness policies meaning people with any sort of gross illness feel forced in, the state of the health service and availability of vaccines for people who want them than wishing for any sort of lockdown type shitshow again. Access to healthcare is more worrying.

Equally, people with children who are currently housebound and suffering with a myriad of unexplained, worrying symptoms since catching covid also feel sad.

They feel very sad indeed. Which is why they would like the government to take clean air and ventilation in schools seriously (like it has done in the Houses of Parliament), to prevent other parents and children having to go through it too.

Link doesn't equate cure, I'm afraid.

Do you have a pulse oximeter @GreenPebbles ? Handy bit of kit to have, check your readings when well and then if you are poorly, you will know what your normal is and can get advice/help if they go too low.

Covid isn't a cold of flu.

I doubt anyone would be against that, would they? There's a difference between installing infrastructure that has no negative bearing on people (but lots of positive) and some of the sorts of lockdown like measures some seem keen on.

I don't know about the op but my phone always corrects covid to COVID and I have to manually override it. I used Google's keyboard on an android phone

I mean, there are millions of viruses living in us, so obviously this is about the new, harmful virus that's been added in the last few years. I don't think anyone is proposing to eradicate all viruses. I think it's disingenuous to talk about "viruses" as if they were all the same and they all deserve the same behaviour from us. Herpes is not the same as Ebola and we treat them very differently. Just because we treat common cold a certain way, it doesn't mean we should do the same with Covid. If you were sat next to someone and they told you they had bird flu, I bet you'd react differently than if they told you they had HIV. And so on. False equivalences are silly.

I hear the overpopulation thing a lot, but interestingly nobody is volunteering for themselves and their entire family to be sacrificed for the purpose of saving us from overpopulation. People always imagine it's some nebulous others who will die for the benefit of more spaced out populations. And I actually don't think overpopulation is a major factor in climate change. It's mostly about our lifestyle, unfettered capitalism, greed and overconsumption. The average Australian has a massively larger carbon footprint than someone from, let's say, Ethiopia.

I had a very healthy lifestyle before I caught Covid for the first time. My diet was good, I was a healthy weight, I ran regularly and was a regular gym goer. Unfortunately I still got long Covid and 4 years on I’m still on autoimmune hell. Sometimes what our immune systems do is luck of the draw.

I take the best possible care of myself now (much less exercise because I’m too ill), research the best supplements, no sugar in my diet and so on. I still catch everything going.

@Poffy my phone does that too! So annoying as I don't think I've ever written it in capitals.

Well we will have to agree to disagree. I disagree with destroying the economy in a vain attempt to save the lives of the small number of people who sadly and often unpredictability have a bad reaction to covid. I'm not against vaccines, not do I think covid is nothing. I simply don't think it's avoidable if we want our lifestyles to continue.

What measures do you think will ruin the economy more than doing nothing?

I had it last month. I was really unwell for about 5 days; shivering, fever, headaches, fatigue, cough. I felt rough. I will say I wasn't as bad as when I had it in 2021 as I have asthma and it really affected my breathing then and ended up on steroids which was the worst part.

But what good are the vaccines doing

They are doing a lot of good! They're just not perfect (and they are not going to be). If we didn't have vaccines, there would be many times more people getting seriously ill and dying.

Think about it like this. Pretty well everyone wears a seatbelt. But every week you read about some crash (like the one the other day on the M6, head-on with someone going the wrong way) in which multiple people are killed, sometimes everyone in the car. We don't say "What good are the seatbelts doing?", because we know that while they are great, sometimes they're not enough (and neither are the airbags or the crumple zones or all the other safety gizmos).

A lot of us grew up with a very simple model of how vaccines work. We were told (probably by our Mum) "If you have this injection, you won't get disease X". That was never really true. But Mum isn't going to say "If you have this injection, the amount of virus X that you need to be exposed to before you develop symptoms is on average 10 times larger, and the chances of you needing hospital treatment are 20 times smaller", or whatever. And we all got our MMR and polio vaccines, and we didn't catch M or M or R or polio, and so we made our little mental model of "If you get a vaccine you won't (ever ever ever, at all, even a bit) get the disease", and that's never actually been true, it's just been "good enough". But Covid is nasty and (especially) it's still fairly novel, so we don't have solid population immunity to it yet. Plus our bodies are not especially good at immunity to coronaviruses, which is why we get colds all the time - the common cold is a coronavirus.

I hope that's not too long an answer. The bottom line is that the vaccines do work, and they are improving all the time, but sometimes Covid can overwhelm even a multiply-vaccinated person's immune system. 🙏