Will it ever be reasonably safe for PwME to go back into society, post-Covid?

I am mainly housebound anyway but i have been out several times for various medical/dental appointments & necessary shopping. on a few occasions to a local lakeside just for change scenery/fresh air. In roughly July i stopped wearing mask outside & asking people with me to. We keep distance & i just couldnt sustain it all, it was really affecting my mental health i am so lonely & I just wanted to sit & eat my picnic with my friend & be able to see her face.

Indoors...

Yes this for me too, i have 2 diff carers & a cleaner all who follow these rules, only one does the testing but we all wear FFP2 masks & windows ajar while they're here.

I've had to have lots of urgent stuff done on the house - builders to install a new concrete floor, broken unsafe asbestos marley tiles removed in another room & new flooring laid. TWO! new toilets, a boiler fix, & about 5 other smaller things, these were a total nightmare - mainly because of having to get someone to come in & help me clean down everywhere they'd been after they left.

What i find hardest to cope with isnt the measures but other people's attitudes to them. People treating me as if i'm paranoid or crazy. One person in fact was so horrid to me i momentarily wished she'd get severe ME as a result of covid - 'that'll teach you' i thought & quickly repented i wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. But my new carer (who is immunocompromised), said to me that she thought a lot of my behaviour (around hand washing/wiping shopping etc was paranoid) & that she doesnt bother with that & it might well kill her .... as if death were the worst thing that could happen to you after getting a virus.

I couldnt care less if i die, its very severe ME that scares the crap out of me, & when i explained that to her & what very severe ME is, she understood better.

I know lots of other people dont take the measures i take, & thats fine but i am heartily sick of being judged to be 'over the top'/paranoid/stupid whatever because i do. Just because they cant see that someone holding my bath towel up so it rubs on their clothes before i use it, is like me drying my face on their shirt... doesnt mean it isnt real.

Just because they cant see the chain of transfer of virus particles.... that touching the shopping trolley handle, then my bag of sliced bread, then coming in & washing their hands... then touching the (possibly now contaminated) bread bag again, & then getting the actual bread out & touching that to make me a sandwich, is not that far away from wiping a slice of my bread across the trolley handle & then expecting me to eat it. Just because they dont see it & cant envisage it, doesnt mean it isnt real.

 

I feel the same. Unfortunately I have not really been able to get anyone to care about this except my parents.

 

Well i should say she said she understood. i dont yet know her well enough to know if that was really genuine or not.

@Ariel

 

I think that it is Oxford University that are now saying that 'herd immunity' is no longer possible and that they expect almost everyone will end up getting Covid-19 at some point.

 

That seems unlikely. We are just beginning to get to a state of herd immunity with 80% of adults vaccinated. The fact that the numbers of cases are flat despite hardly any restriction suggests that it is working, even with delta.

 

This isn't the same article that I previously read. In fact, I have a feeling it was an interview that I saw rather than something that I read where he mentioned everyone will eventually end up with covid-19.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ant-renders-herd-immunity-from-covid-mythical

 

Alberta was quick to declare the emergency over and drop all restrictions. Now they're admitting that they were too optimistic, and the big surge in cases is filling the ICUs.

I haven't noticeably changed my lifestyle due to Covid. I went to town only when I needed to before Covid, and still make about the same number of trips now. The main difference in my life is switching from physical library books to ebooks.

 

Jonathan - is this a regional assessment? In my community, the hospital ICUs are full. No kids under 12 are vaccinated. And in many parts of the world the majority of people haven't had the opportunity to be vaccinated yet. How are you determining this
"we" that's reaching herd immunity?

 

Re thread title IMHO it depends what the cause of ME is for any individual.

I can only speak for myself but I believe I have had COVID twice and two vaccinations. I am still here but I am a lot more sensitive to headache producing foods than I was i.e. proinflammatory, PEM is much more exaggerated and I have an aching right kidney which I believe is acting as a refugium for ongoing COVID virus replication as the kidney is a site of ACE2 receptor expression, but the symptoms of COVID have not been life threatening.

I have concluded after many years experience, the kind of ME I have (ME CFIDS) means I cannot clear viruses properly but my innate immune system is constantly active to compensate, triggered by recurring viruses. So when I got COVID the first time from my dentist in 2019 (early Dec, before it was recognised but after it had begun circulating) it was a nasty headcold but it did not cause sepsis because I was already fighting viruses with my innate immunity which limited its severity. My first Astra Zeneca jab was a strong reaction which made me ill but helped reduce the ongoing kidney ache etc a little and my second was not a strong reaction. Recently I have had another episode like the first AZ jab but without a jab and I believe it is because I caught a new strain from my neighbour who came back from hospital after being admitted for COVID related sepsis. It was nasty for me for a day, causing severe migraine and a cold sweat but this responded to pyrotherapy (hot showers and baths and electric thermal neck pad) and the condition improved over a week.

My view is that for PWME like mine, the virus is not as likely to be dangerous as it is for other people my age because my innate immune system is overactive already and this is similar to the reason it is not severe in the young. It is still harmful because of my immune dysfunction but its too late to worry about that for me. I am across the bridge as it were and living with COVID. The more exposure I get the more it triggers my defences so I am getting as vaccinated as possible and will be going for any boosters.

If it follows the course of previous viruses, like swine flu, it should slowly attenuate and give way to my ongoing recurring virus HSV2, which is still causing me prodrome pain like it always does, interestingly this is currently ongoing and located in my left foot! Which, if you look at the human body like a petri dish, is about as far away as you can get from my right kidney and it looks as if the immune response to COVID is suppressing HSV2 close to the COVID refugium in my kidney but is less effective further away. So the two viruses are in a sense competing with each other to survive triggering my innate immune defences which are thankfully working just well enough to keep me alive and being tested constantly as per usual because my adaptive immunity is not as effective as it needs to be. Its like quasi AIDS. Good news is it doesnt kill me, bad news is I am considerably disabled by it.

Bottom line is that I dont think PWME like mine are in life threatening danger but not all forms of ME as diagnosed with current criteria are necessarily like mine so it depends on an individual's situation and whether they have indications of ongoing immune activity normally suggesting they have CFIDS.

So its relatively safe for people like me to engage with a COVID carrying society, unfortunately I do not have the energy to do so anyway as I must pace now more than ever and avoid exertions which trigger PEM, so its pretty academic afaiac.

 

I am primarily talking about UK. ICUs are full at present so things are being run at the absolute limit of what might be justifiable (if you even think one person in ICU is justifiable). My point is that despite pretty much letting loose the numbers are high but not rising. That means that because of vaccinations and a whole lot of unknown factors that limit rates of spread because of behavioural sub patterns and maybe innate immunity further exponential increase is not going to happen.

The question then is how long it takes to get everyone immune or for other reasons not involved in the spread process. I am guessing 100 days - by the end of the year. At the present rate another 3 million would be infected. My estimate is that once another 3 million have been infected the spread rate will have been weakened very considerably. The time scale is a guesstimate but once spread starts falling it will tend to go into quite a rapid fall before finally tailing off very slowly.

The rest of the world is a different issue but looking at the graphs it looks to me as if a number of countries like Brazil are now seeing rates plummet - probably because vulnerable subpopulations have already been saturated. There is always the possibility of further waves and some countries, like Mauritius, are only now going into a big wave, but after 18 months I doubt there are many subpopulation pockets that could fire up entirely afresh.

 

Jonathan - what do you think now that the case numbers are rising again?

 

I am more confident than I was. The case numbers are still much the same and deaths are falling slightly. Countries that had a recent wave earlier than us are seeing numbers drop right off. I think the current wave will be the last and will Peter out some time at the end of the year.

 

A question I've been meaning to ask:

As the virus evolves and viable mutations emerge, is it all down to pot luck whether new variants prove to be more, or less, dangerous, both in terms of infectiousness and harmfulness? Or is there a natural tendency for new variants to be less dangerous?

 

I would have thought that would be related to the r value, and population density.

My reasoning is that if the r value is low enough then severe variants will kill their hosts, and therefore be less successful than less serious ones.

Over time you'd probably end up with less serious viruses being dominant.

A case where this doesn't work is a serious variant with a high r value, in areas with high population densities.

But I'm not a virologist, or a virus psychologist.

 

I'd somehow picked up the impression that this was often the case, but I've since read press articles written by virologists saying that it isn't necessarily so, and it can be rather a dangerous assumption.

The articles seemed to be saying that, as long as a virus has enough time to replicate and find other hosts before it kills the original one, it's a success. If it gains mutations that make it more infectious, so much the better. If it also gains mutations that make it less likely to kill people, that's great for us, but the virus doesn't care. If this does happen, though, we may contribute to its success by relaxing precautions against becoming infected, as we do with minor illnesses like colds.

 

One way populations achieve equilibrium with a virus is because all the susceptible people die off. The Spanish flu killed so many people with TB there were never such high rates in the population in the UK again.

Other epidemics came in waves and repeatedly killed people off so the genes changed over generations. I read that there was less AIDs amongst Europeans than expected because our population was skewed to a certain genetic makeup because of the Black Death.

If there is a limited number of people to infect then viruses who mutate to be less deadly will be more successful but if there is a continual source of new victims that does not apply. Our cities are so large that a virus can start at causing infections in one place but carry on until it mutates and then infect everyone again.

We now have travel that is so fast an infectious person can spread the disease everywhere a plane lands and then at their destination in a few hours.

None of this is controversial or unknown so I can only assume that all the talk about the pandemic being over is political or to make the fast production of vaccines seem like a triumph for the kudos. It was a brilliant achievement but will be worth nothing if a new variant appears which can evade it.

We are continually vigilant about flu which can be mild or deadly and we will need to be exactly the same for covid. Simple measures coming from a change in attitude such as adequate hand washing, less hand shaking and hugging as social gestures, even coughing into an elbow will make a big difference for most infections. Mask wearing in crowded places and adequate ventilation are great investments for the future too.

All these things will help against covid but also antibiotic resistant bacteria and other viruses. As we develop more drugs for conditions which need immunosuppression it will be good for those patients too, not to mention an elderly population who are at risk from all infections.

So much good with so little effort it infuriates me it is not being done and that the public are not being educated.

 

What set me wondering was Omicron, which seems to be less harmful but much more infectious. So if you have a virus with a much higher reproduction rate, then presumably the mutation rate is also going to be higher (not sure if that is necessarily a valid assumption?). So with a higher mutation rate, presumably therefore higher chances of viable variants emerging. So even though Omicron is less harmful, what are the chances of a much more deadly variant evolving from it, given its higher reproduction rate?

 

There ia new variant. How deadly it usxremains to be seen .

 

It isn't "much more infectious", it is in the same ballpark as Delta. The difference in daily case numbers is the partial evasion of pre-existing (due to vaccination or prior infection) immunity.

But yes, the increased transmission does lead to increased chance of new variants emerging. Whether they will be more deadly or not is a matter of chance.