We have not had good experiences with PCR. My son is a musician and last year they batch tested all the wind instrument musicians at his school by PCR once a week. One week his PCR came back positive. He was not sick and neither was anyone else in the family. We took rapids, all negative. I call school, explained the situation and they said just send him in and we’ll rapid test him. It was negative. He never got sick and we later found out that they had multiple false positives with their batch testing. They eventually dropped this process. Whatever.
Daughter at college also got a positive PCR once due to weekly monitoring on campus, also not sick. Had to quarantine for at least five days until she could test out of quarantine with negative rapid. Missed some midterms. Good news, she was exempt from weekly testing for a couple of months after that. Whether sick or not.
Where are the double blind controlled studies that show efficacy of frequent testing either by rapid or PCR on the spread of the virus?
ETA: by double blind I mean a study that minimizes the effects of the psychology and biases of participants and researchers. I don’t know how I would structure it, but I’m not a medical researcher so please excuse the ignorance.
CDC report says that recipients of bivalent boosters are significantly less likely to be infected than those who only had monovalent ancestral virus mRNA vaccine doses.
Having had the bivalent booster does give some likely advantages in avoiding infection:
BA.5 is closer to recent Omicron variants than the ancestral virus.
Those who got the bivalent booster got their latest vaccine dose more recently than those who did not.
But the study notes that behavior and previous infection were not tracked, possibly confounding the results.
That’s a big “but”. Bivalent boosters have low adoption per CDC, so the question has to be asked: are those folks who sought out the bivalent boosters also aggressive in wearing masks, washing hands, staying away from crowded places, and the like?
The Alpha, Delta, and Gamma variants of SARS-CoV-2 appear to be circulating in white tailed deer, based on PCR tests of “retropharyngeal lymph node samples collected from free-ranging hunter-harvested WTD during the hunting seasons” in New York. 0.6% from the 2020 hunting season and 21.1% from the 2021 hunting season tested positive.
Yes, drug development is expensive. FDA approval is not easy, nor supposed to be. The rules/regs have been out there for years, for manufacturers to follow.
Eiger is a for-profit company with outside investors, so they have the ability to raise capital to be able to run trials for FDA approval. But perhaps they’d rather focus on their hepatitis research?
Glad to see this is finally making a major news. Medical lad has been telling me about it, though mostly with strokes, for quite some time.
The take away is if you’ve had Covid at all - even minor - stay very tuned in to symptoms of heart attacks, strokes, kidney issues, or similar for a few months (my guy told me 6, but he might have picked a number out of the air). Covid is a nasty virus, affecting the blood (clots, etc) in some folks, and when those get lodged, it can go horribly. Then add in the inflammation the article begins with.
Of course that increased morbidity/mortality has been co-opted by anti-vaxxers and linked constantly to the vaccines. If you die in a car accident, it’s probably because you had a heart attack or stroke behind the wheel caused “by the jab.”
Fortunately, the stats on it pre-date the vaccinations and continue afterward so it’s definitely not all vaxxes.
Not that those who are convinced they’re awful will ever change their minds, but for those who want to go by real statistics, it’s helpful to know.
H and I had our bi-valent booster late last month and haven’t grown our third arm yet. Maybe next time?
Reading this article makes me glad we still try to do what we can as we resume life. We’ve had Covid once last June - hopefully won’t get it again, or if we do, the vaxxes will help as I suspect they did before, esp for H.
No that is not the take away at an all. There is no connection to covid in this study. It is just a fact based statistical analysis of deaths. They did not account for those that had covid, or not. They did not acconut for those vaccinated, or not. The heart attacks may be related to covid & covid vaccines – likely, IMO – but this study does not even address that question.
This other study did compare the records of those who had COVID-19 and those who did not. However, it was of US veterans in the VHA system (mainly older men).
So ignore symptoms and wait to see what happens if you prefer.
I’m going to go with what my son sees in his hospital and the correlations personally. It hardly means we stop living due to fear. It means we’re aware of what’s going on and act accordingly.
I fully agree with the concept of increased cardio vascular issue bcos covid. This is not news. Even Fauci spoke of that; heck Fauci even admitted that vaccines resulted in a short-term increase.
OTOH, long-term cardiac problems would be news, and I can’t wait to see the peer-reviewed studies on this.
But on college confidential, we should be better than so-called journalism that purports to be backed by science, and is anything but. (Wannabe journalists should be required to pass AP Stats, IMO.)
I watched the video…65 million people with long COVID. I took my cousin to her oncologist today and the oncologist has long COVID, very fatigued but still working.
As a side note, the doc (in Boston) said "everyone around here has been out with COVID). It took a long time to get an appointment, even in an urgent situation, and pathology is so backed up due to staff being out, that the specimens had not yet been looked at in the lab.
I am a sufferer myself. Since diagnosis with Covid on Mothers Day, I’ve had pneumonia x2 (including 5-day hospitalization), bronchitis x3, and now unrelenting asthma. Waiting for pulmonologist to get approval for Dupixent, on and off prednisone for months. About to do one last nebulizer treatment for the night with albuterol. I have gone through 12 or 13 albuterol inhalers and lots of boxes of nebulizer treatments as well, and I am on a heavy duty steroid inhaler as well. Ugh, ugh, ugh.
@oldmom have you tried nebulized steroids (budesonide)? I just find nebulizer treatments so much better than inhalers. (When I nebulize albuterol I mix it with saline to make it gentler on my heart…)
Did imaging show what might be going on? My mther had those “ground glass opacities” typical of COVID. My cousin had early COVID and gasps for air going up stairs.
