Not sure why you’re downvoted. It’s not significantly more lethal at this point than seasonal flu. The only difference to the population that I see is that vaccines for COVID have less efficacy than those for influenza.
The big concern with covid is long covid which affects around 5% of people who got covid. Thats what scares me. When I got covid it were only 2-3 bad days and the rest was like a normal flu but I noticed it took me roughly 3 more weeks to feel 100% like I did before, mostly fitness and stamina.
I've never recovered. I permanently lost the ability to taste certain things and can literally get 10 hours of sleep the night before and feel exhausted by noon.
I look forward to people who pretend that it's the same as the flu catching it for themselves so that they can enjoy this "no big deal."
Sorry. I have a brilliant, extremely driven friend who did undergrad at an ivy. After getting covid, She had to drop out of her grad school program and her new life is a shell compared to what it used to be like. 2 years later, and there's a tiny fraction of improvement which she attributes to extreme rest. I forward her literature about emerging LC treatments and mechanisms of which her physicians are laughably ignorant.
Sorry that you're suffering this way. It's infuriating to me that people downplay Covid infections when the risk of suffering from long Covid effects is very real.
> The big concern with covid is long covid which affects around 5% of people who got covid.
Where did you get 5%?
Last I saw you have a 20% chance of long covid, but it seems that was with older variants.
The thing that scares me is:
> up to two years after infection, at an elevated risk for many long COVID-related conditions including diabetes, lung problems, fatigue, blood clots and disorders affecting the gastrointestinal and musculoskeletal systems.
My concern is that there isn't going to be much research on a proper vaccine since the Pharma companies are making money hand over fist on this half-assed one currently available.
It was good when it came out, but based on it's effectiveness, it seems more of a stop-gap than a proper vaccine.
“There were 8996 hospitalizations (538 deaths [5.98%] within 30 days) for COVID-19 and 2403 hospitalizations (76 deaths [3.16%]) for seasonal influenza,”
“Compared with hospitalization for influenza, hospitalization for COVID-19 was associated with a higher risk of death (hazard ratio, 1.61 [95% CI, 1.29-2.02]).”
> The only difference to the population that I see is that vaccines for COVID have less efficacy than those for influenza.
So far COVID vaccines seem to confer protection for longer than flu ones, and the initial protection is generally higher.
Not sure if it's your case, but people often forget that every year there's a new flu shot per hemisphere, and its effectiveness generally hovers at around 40-60%.
The difference is that flu vaccines actually prevent infection in many cases, whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
> The difference is that flu vaccines actually prevent infection in many cases
OK
> whereas COVID vaccines do not prevent them, but merely lessen the symptoms and risk of hospitalization.
Is this something I can read on a peer reviewed study, or is it yet another creative definition of what "infection", "vaccine" or "symptom" really means?
> Irrespective of vaccination and/or prior natural infection, SARS-CoV-2 breakthrough infections and reinfections remained highly infectious and were responsible for 80% of transmission observed in the study population, which has high levels of both prior infection and vaccination. This observation underscores that vaccination and prevalent naturally acquired immunity alone will not eliminate risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection, especially in higher-risk settings, such as prisons.