Americans will be able to get free virus test kits mailed to their homes, starting in late September.
U.S. households will be able to order up to four COVID-19 nasal swab tests when the federal program reopens, according to the website, COVIDtests.gov.
I know a few people who have caught Covid this summer. The Senior Center was just shut down to avoid spreading Covid. There has been a summer surge of Covid every year since 2020 which is lower than the winter surge but still significant.
I’m back to full Covid precautions, masking and shopping first thing in the morning when the stores are empty. I plan to get Covid and flu shots in mid-September (since immunity takes a couple of weeks to kick in and the Jewish High Holidays are in early October this year). Medicare pays for these vaccines but I’d get them even if I had to pay out of pocket.
This may be on-topic since Covid is constantly mutating and could infect enough people to have macroeconomic impact. This latest variety seems to be very contagious.
Wendy
Funny you should mention this. I am primed for it but rather conspicuously I have not heard peep #1 about Covid shots this year and am wondering is there even a shot we actually need to get?
I have been under the impression that Covid is “officially” being treated like the flu. i.e There will be a shot for it every year forever. Get it. But then I noticed they don’t really beat the drum for it like they do flu shots. What gives?
A key question is how serious is Covid infection this year. Most who test positive stay home with mild symptoms for a few days. Nothing like the early days when no one had antibodies.
Infection rates don’t mean much when symptoms are mild. What is happening with death rates?
This seems like a marketing program to sell vaccine more than a health program.
Moderna stock is terrible these days. Pfizer is not doing so well either. They are trying to recover from Covid.
Well, I seem to recall back when the merits of the annual flu shot was under discussion on the old H&N boards, more than a handful of posters used exactly this argument to justify their own decision not to bother.
DH and I will both get vaccinated against Covid (and the flu while we’re there) because we are both over 70 and have lung disease so getting sick could be fatal.
Wendy
Sure. Yet there are thousands of deaths attributed to flu complications every year. Some do catch pneumonia or otherwise have health conditions.
Is a flu shot appropriate for everyone to limit spread? Even though we know they miss about a third of the time. Benefits are not so obvious. Benefits to seniors are especially dubious. Studies find that only 9% develop antibodies. Take two aspirin and drink lots of water is a better use of limited resources.
I’ve had a question for some time. Annual flu deaths in the US are said to range from 15K to 50K. Deaths from breast cancer are about 40K per year. Over the years I’ve known a number of women (10-12) who have died from breast cancer and yet nobody who has died from the flu. Does anybody here know multiple people who have died from the flu?
I know of at least one who died of the flu due to a weak heart.
Pneumonia is still a serious illness. You are in for a fight for your life. So secondary infections probably case deaths. Covid pneumonia is still a killer if it goes that far.
I was vaccinated last March. Just the other day the vaccine came out for the current strain. It is around five months late. I had Covid one and two weeks ago.
I was hoping to ride the next wave of a variant to receive a good vaccine. But it seems only long after the wave and damage done will they update the vax.
Right Wendy, but we already had the numbers. I was wondering about people’s personal experiences. What has been your experience vis a vis flu and breast cancer deaths?
How did vaccines, once hailed as essential tools for global peace, security and international cooperation, become something that some now fear could kill them?
This is the focus of the latest episode of the Global Health Matters podcast, hosted by Garry Aslnyan. In an interview with author Peter Hotez, the discussion delves into how misinformation and politics, particularly in the United States, have led to a deadly distrust of vaccines.
Hotez and his colleague, Maria Elena Bottazzi, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their work to develop and distribute a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine to people of the world without patent limitation.” Hotez is a vaccine scientist, biochemist and paediatrician from Texas. He also wrote several vaccine-related books, including “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science.”
What utter nonsense…I’m surprised you’re repeating this nitwittery after the number of times it was refuted on the H&N board.
Benefits to seniors aren’t especially dubious…and enough Old Wrinklies turned out en masse to make it difficult to get the Industrial Strength version (developed to combat the reduced immune response in the elderly) back when we got smacked with Covid to suggest that they truly believed that.
As for the take two aspirin… Srsly? There’s no comparison between an effective vaccination programme as prevention and marginally effective treatment.
Well, i can say yes to the two of them…but, as Wendy has mentioned, data are important not anecdotes (depending upon the reason for the question, of course)
The two, though, are an example of the False Equivalence fallacy used by anti vaxxers when discussing vaccines in general or flu in particular…and are an example of JAQing off (a term I read in context of Covid denialism…Just Ansking Questions, geddit?) and are intended, I guess to imply that flu isn’t a disease to be concerned about. A bit like measles, mumps, rubella etc. Goes hand in hand with Survivorship Bias…“Well I had ****** and lived to tell the tale”. Yep, another bit of tomfoolery oft repeated on the H&N board…and even about Covid in the early days!
Peter Hotez and a good few other scientists in the anti anti vaccine movement put in regular appearances on TWiV during the worst of Covid. Worth scrolling back through the past episodes to become acquainted with how stuff works. Including…but not limited to…the impact of vaccine denialism on community health and well-being
The answer to this lies in the numbers and statistics.
Given a population of 330 million, 50,000 is not 1%, not even a 10th of a %, but 1.6 thousandths of percent. It seems very unlikely that any individual knows particular case let alone multiple cases in any given year. Over time an individual might know several.
Won’t stop me from being vaccinated for everything available.
The whole death thing is very tricky. That’s partly because for older people, you expect death to come at some point soon, but for younger people, you do not. So, that’s why I personally know of perhaps 10 women that died from having breast cancer. On my father’s side, it seems like ALL the female cousins had breast cancer and a bunch died from it, at ages ranging from 35 to 66. My father’s mother died at age 64 from breast cancer (that eventually spread elsewhere). So when you know 10 women that died of breast cancer at relatively young ages, that is something that sticks with you, and that you talk about more often, than knowing 10 (or 100) elderly people that died of a random virus while also having the usual maladies that come with age.
When an elderly person, with an already weakened immune system, and overall weakened organ systems, etc, and perhaps with some sort of background disease (heart, diabetes, blood pressure, etc) contracts the flu, or the covid, and dies, how does that death get recorded exactly? Does the hospital or nursing home want to record almost all their deaths as “flu” (or covid) indicating that perhaps inadequate protection from the virus was provided (or even that it may not be reasonably possible to provide enough protection in any case while providing adequate care for the other maladies they have). Airborne viruses, especially very small ones are really difficult to protect from very well. Sure you can wear a good mask all the time, like the doctors and nurses do (for their 8-12 hour shift), but if you are already weakened and it is difficult for you to wear a mask 24/7 (when you are a resident in a hospital or nursing home, your shift doesn’t end, it’s 24 hours a day), you probably won’t wear that mask all the time, and you probably won’t be wearing it properly.
I don’t know what the solution is, or if there even is a practical solution.