BBC Article : Why Covid is still flooring some people

Title : Why Covid is still flooring some people

Link : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67726685

What is it like to catch Covid now? It is a question I have been pondering since a friend was surprised by how roughed up they were by it. Their third bout of Covid was significantly worse than the previous time they caught it.

"I thought every time you catch an illness it's supposed to be a bit better each time?" was the message from his sickbed.

That has certainly been said a lot during the pandemic. But I also know work colleagues and people I have interviewed or chatted to at the school gates, who have been hit hard by Covid in the past few months.

A familiar tale has been a week of coughing, headaches or fever followed by a lingering fatigue.

Rest of article : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-67726685

 

"If you are feeling rough with Covid - or rougher than you have done before - it could be this combination of waning antibodies and evolving viruses.

But this does not mean you are more likely to become critically ill or need hospital treatment.

A different part of our immune system - called T-cells - kick in once an infection is already under way and they have been trained by past infections and vaccines.

T-cells are less easily befuddled by mutating viruses as they spot cells that have been infected with Covid and kill them.

"They will stop you getting severely ill and ending up in hospital, but in that process of killing off the virus there's collateral damage that makes you feel pretty rough," says Prof Riley.

Relying on your T-cells to clear out Covid is what results in the muscle pain, fever and chills."

Interesting.

I always assume that for the sake of readability etc things are somewhat simplified for these types of articles? The article also mentions more people are ending up with long covid (are they? that is interesting too if so) but didn't want to, if this is correct, join the two up as there is no mention of these two factors actually being associated.

 

That's not true of the flu, which is the closest comparison. Why would it be true of COVID? This whole thing is so bizarre, and yes this has been the message for years now, along with how this target is just right around the corner, just one more infection ought to do it. And another. And another, it'll just get milder, because it has to. But also the next wave is sure to be the last, like every single one before, so no one has to worry about being infected anymore. But it's good for you, just get one more and you'll be done with it.

If this were a movie people would scoff at how unrealistic the plot is, how people aren't half as stupid as this. Especially as this isn't just random people deciding that for themselves, it's the public health and health care professions pushing this.

Right now health care systems in many areas are facing crisis levels, because of the double combination of adding a new strain, and that strain itself reducing the system's capacity to function. And health care systems were already barely able to fulfil basic demand, and that's with massive neglect of many issues. It's as if no one ever thought of what adding more strain would do, while being ideologically blinded to the fact that doing so would also reduce their capacity. What a disaster.

 

I thought the more times you got it, the greater the risk? That seemed to be the message from some people's experience.

 

The risk is cumulative, but each +1 infection may not be an additional +100% of the risk of the initial infection. Ziyad Al-Aly commented on this question

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMt6ZV-hHSE

 

It’s never about risks being cumulative (especially not with the LC definition that is being used), that’s just a trivial fact that would apply to any viral infection (in fact it applies to any health adverse event and it even applies to non-health adverse events as it applies to simply time passing by, because time passing by already creates medical risks), the question is how the incremental rates behave compared to the recovery rates. Some data is suggesting a rough equilibrium, but it’s too early to tell and the data has become pretty much absent.

What you want and this is essentially what you see with other infections as well, is that the incremental rates should converge to a limit similar to the recovery rates over a given timeframe, with the difference of these being those with truely long-lasting effects, i.e. from an epidemiological stand-point the incremental rates never even have to converge to 0 (because they never do) and risks will always be cumulative, because that's how basic mathematic works.

When public health officials talk about infections getting milder over the course of time this is the expected behaviour which appears to be backed by data. This doesn't mean that your third reinfection is milder than your second, or that the situation for individuals will dramatically change within the next 3 years, it means that we're seeing less hospitalisations, i.e. less severe acute infections on a national/global scale. This narrative isn't incorrect, it just neglects post-viral diseases by only focusing on very severe acute infections instead of long-term health outcomes that can be caused by mild infections.