And the CDC now only recommends a 5 day isolation period if asymptomatic (followed by 5 days of wearing masks around others):

https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2...-guidance.html

I'm not sure if the evidence is strong enough to warrant this but clearly they're bowing to political pressures.

Or it's because they are hitting a wall called reality.

If we continue to have day-over-day of 2k+ flight cancellations for a bunch of mild covid infections, the political calculus starts to sour pretty damn fast.

I think they caved but obviously understand that society is ready to move on and this 5 day guidance is probably the minimum recommendation short of throwing it out the window. I don't know how many times the average person has been exposed but a 2-week quarantine each time is killing productivity.

Political pressure to start using basic sense is going to continue to weigh on the CDC, which is a tunnel vision organization full of germaphobes that should advise, NOT dictate public policy

It's literally their job to be cautious and encourage caution but they don't make policy and it's actually local, state and federal officials failing to weigh CDC's recommendations along with everything else. Even if you hate your vegetables and are overweight, it's still your doctor's job to tell you are getting too fat and need more greens in your diet.

^ Right, but the politicians (especially from one party) have literally just handed the CDC the keys and told them “drive it”.

And that’s why we are in such a mess with so much shitty, mixed messaging

Correct, the CDC should be only recommending stuff from a medical standpoint. But when the CDC says that people should follow state and local protocols, and then states enact regulations based on CDC guidance, you enter a death spiral where a recommendation becomes law. At least, that's the way it was about a year ago before vaccines became widely available.

Try roasting on very high heat. Give it a decent char. Add chilies and roasted garlic at the end and plenty of salt. :)

You do remember that this was my issue back in April 2020?

Covid: Evidence does not support more England curbs - minister

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59807241


Here’s the big “duh” statement:


The problem is not the virus, it’s all the testing and isolation rules when people aren’t actually getting sick anymore. Some people will still die but always will. They die of flu or even a bad cold, if they’re old and frail enough. That’s life.

Note the Easter timing mention. That seems consistent with the government moving to treat it like a cold/flu from end March as I was told a month or so ago (but that was from someone in government, not a public source).

^ nonsense. few are going to die, but many are going to require medical care of various levels that drives up costs for everyone else.

and then there are the lasting long covid issues:

https://nypost.com/2021/12/27/covid-...ve-for-months/

Illinois' governor is recommending people to have "toned down" NYE parties.

I recommend the opposite. Have a HUGE party. Get vaccinated, boosted, and have a ball. It's time to wake up from this garbage.

If you're deathly scared of Omicron then you can stay home and stay scared for the rest of your life, because you are just fighting inner demons at this point.

^^^^

Its going to be hard to stop. The "Cold" variant, and asymptomatic nature with a high as hell R-naught... folks are going to get it. Most asymptomatic given how mild it is!

Have they determined a R-naught for Omicron yet? I recall reading something that estimated Delta as 6-7, which is not that bad compared to Measles which was 15 or so. Which is insane when you think about it, 15. It means 1 person will infect 15 people, just bonkers!

I suppose the challenge with the R-naught is due to the asymptomatic folks. Might skew the true number. Omnicron must be high if viral replication occurs in the nasal area and in high numbers.... folks breathing/exhaling, sneezing, ect.

A doctor who works next to me just tested positive for COVID. She and her fully vaccinated and boosted family had a long planned trip to Costa Rica planned. Now she will have to cancel it.

Despite vaccination, boosting, and having mild symptoms. She is really disappointed.

All of this for no good reason, thanks to the knuckleheads at the CDC. Long lines of healthy, vaccinated people testing. One of the dumbest, most worthless things I have witnessed in my life time.

This is not necessary. This is a choice being made, by people who have no sense.

A cardiologist next to me and I were discussing this, and she totally agrees. She has planned an international trip and has to leave in 10 days, and now SHE is worried that she won't be able to go on her own trip because of the positive COVID test. Once again, she is not worried about she or her family becoming sick. She is worried about the unnecessary bureaucratic overreaction and excess testing that will impact her life.

I'm not traveling internationally until our society has regained its collective sense.

They threw in a lot of mitigatory measures, the mask wearing. But a lot of this is user dependent. If anything, will help to get us to herd immunity, which is key and the track we are on.

^ There is no "herd immunity" for this. You know that, right?

I'm sure she is disappointed, but is the only reason she's canceling because she "has" to, or because she thinks it's the right thing to do? Costa Rica doesn't have a negative test requirements for entry and airlines don't require negative tests either unless flying to the US as far as I know. So I think she's canceling because it's the right thing to do, not because it's being forced on her in any way (I suppose she would run the risk of being stranded in Costa Rica if still positive at the end of her trip?)

I just finished up 18 days of PCR and antigen testing and am ready for a rest. Had to test before we left for London, then test upon arrival in London, then test before returning to US. Then, because we were having three consecutive smallish (15-20 people) parties and I was subsequently visiting my 89 year old mother, I kept testing. Last test was on Christmas day. Done for now. Really only kept testing because of concern for her. I am fully vaxxed and boosted and if I get it, likely to be just an annoyance.

Meanwhile I caught a vicious cold that I passed to my husband. Still kept my distance from my Mom!

The testing was expensive, both for home tests and the cost for expedited PCR's for London. We are going to a NYE party and the hosts are encouraging antigen but not requiring it.

Mmm I love broccoli, I even loved it as a child.

I like it steamed, with some chopped garlic.

Or you can get broccoli, toss it in a bowl with olive oil and chopped garlic, and then roast it. Mmm...

I think she's just annoyed that she had to get tested for this stupid virus to begin with.

This is the most overanalyzed virus in history. I applaud people who are refusing to test for COVID. They have brains. The people who refuse vaccination are a different story.

I don't see why anyone would cancel a trip like that unless they actually feel like crap. Very few of the Caribbean or South American beach destinations have testing requirements.

The US requires a test before returning.

You also have to declare that you did not test positive for COVID within 14 days before boarding any commercial flight in the U.S. That could be a large federal fine if you get caught.

You can find Google questions for the sheeple out there still worried about Covid, but I found this one particularly informative:

Can I still have sex during the coronavirus pandemic?

If both of you are healthy and feeling well, are practicing social distancing and have had no known exposure to anyone with COVID-19, touching, hugging, kissing, and sex are more likely to be safe.

:tup:

Alright! The CDC hasn't banned sex yet!!!!

I actually sprinkle some pork rub on it and it is pretty palatable.

That's why I'm flying in and out of Tijuana on Presidents' Day weekend. I don't want to test positive and be forced to quarantine in a Mexican hotel for 5-10 days. If I were to require medical care, I would not want to receive it in Mexico, I'd rather return to the US for that. I won't have to take a test because after I land in TJ, I'll cross the border on foot, which does not have any testing requirements that I know of.

This is amusing since there was so much pushback on here recently around dialing back isolation protocols, which in many settings are very likely now causing more harm than the virus itself. A lot of the harms of isolation are being mitigated by a lack of testing capacity and people not bothering to get tested. I'd guess that around here if we could test everybody somehow, and followed the official protocols, the economy would pretty much shut down (and I think the federal sick pay may still be on the books so we'd accumulate even more debt).

It's perfectly reasonable that maybe in some setting you want to be 99% relative reduction of transmission but in another setting, 90% relative reduction might be OK, and imposing another 5-9 days of isolation might not be worth that last 10%. And we have to accept that a lot of cases aren't caught so imposing long isolation periods might take us from say 20% mitigation of spread to 21%. It could have virtually no impact on the eventual course of the pandemic. A lot of pandemic measures have this flavour, where there is some point of leverage for public officials so they max out the pain in that group for marginal gain while ignoring the other 80% and achieving mediocre to poor outcomes overall.

....Or you can just stop testing people altogether who are having no or mild symptoms.

Just a thought. Perpetuating utter stupidity doesn't make the utter stupidity any less foolish. Any real leaders right now would step in and say "enough is enough"

In our office half the doctors are out due to COVID (they'll be just fine). I'm the only one here. Patients left and right who are healthy and feeling fine went and got COVID tested and are now calling our manager saying "I'm positive, what do I do?" We are all baffled by this nonsense.

There is now a 4 hour wait in our urgent care center, and an 11 hour wait in the ED, all because of this.

This is just plain dumb.

One take on this will be "wow, looks like covid is really hurting healthcare.. we should double down on our measures to bring this under control". :)

I agree about testing. Aside from the excessive isolation that makes people miserable and causes problems with staffing it is causing problems with travel because some governments require tests for entry and they never set up dedicated testing capacity. I knew a few Americans planning to come to BC during the holidays and they just gave up (one paid for a test but getting the result took so long it expired; I'm not sure what the point of these 3 day old PCR results for asymptomatic vaccinated people is).

I'd guess that a lot of people around here believe we are in a permanent emergency and the economy doesn't really matter anymore because it is trumped by health concerns. Perhaps that can be true sometimes in the short term but economic productivity is what gives us the capacity to provide healthcare to people in the first place. We keep trashing our economy and quality of life over and over for smaller and smaller gains (our covid deaths are currently around 0.4 per million per day and 87% of eligible are vaccinated). It's unclear what the health gain for omicron is supposed to be or what we are waiting for to go back to normal. Are we trying to flatten the curve? Just do what we can, because any action is good? Maybe booster 4 will make everybody immune?

Or you can listen to an actual infections disease specialist: https://www.chicagotribune.com/coron...tqy-story.html

You can pick an actual infectious disease specialist to say whatever you want, but looking at that article, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

The TLDR is something like:

- If you have cold symptoms it's probably covid
- You need to isolate if you have cold symptoms whether you tested or not
- The test makes no difference to your isolation protocol and a negative test won't end your isolation early in most cases (except for healthcare workers who can maybe go back early?). If you get a negative antigen test you should go get a PCR test.
- "You can continue to test positive for COVID-19 on a PCR test for months, even though you’re no longer sick or infectious"

If the test makes practically no difference to the outcome, what is the point of it? And why would we recommend everybody try to test when they're isolating anyway and test capacity is strained in most places? I guess it's possible Chicago has tons of capacity so the advice makes sense there but not here where people were lining up for 4 hours in some cases and in some cases taking public transit to get to the test site.

As the CDC is loosening the recommended isolation protocols, my guess is many places will back off on testing (and contact tracing) and we will gradually move back to previous norms we followed for endemic illnesses that aren't all that threatening to most people. The test/trace/isolate strategy is for relatively high severity contagions with relatively low prevalence, the opposite of omicron.

:yes:

Exactly, that's silly. The naivety of people to think that there aren't differing opinions from medical professionals (yes, that also includes ID specialists) as to how to deal with this mess.

This clusterfuck was created by the CDC, and they are only making this worse for everybody. Throw these idiots out.....

Well no, you don't need to isolate if you have cold symptoms but tested negative, that's the whole point of getting tested if you have symptoms. But yes, if you prefer to just isolate and not bother getting a test at all that's also reasonable...

Read the section entitled "How can a PCR test be negative when an antigen test, which is less sensitive to the virus, comes out positive?", and contrast with "But with demand for testing on the rise at pharmacies and clinics, you may be in for a wait."

These are so many caveats and problems that this approach does not seem viable at a population level. And a lot of places unsurprisingly are running out of test capacity right now.

"Just isolate" if you have symptoms is the recommended normal way to handle being sick prior to 2020. Does it really make sense to go to work when you're sick just because you think it's not covid, thereby potentially triggering many other covid-like colds that will spawn more tests if people follow this advice? The only debate I guess is how long to remain isolated after your symptoms go away. The CDC now says you don't need to wait very long apparently.

Well the cold isn't nearly as contagious as COVID-19, so you would presumably respond differently, like going in the next day if you're no longer feeling symptoms. But yes, it's easy enough to get a test (plenty of walk-in places), but the response times vary a lot depending on where you get them. Some places are pretty good at giving you a response within 12 hours, though typically require appointments you may not be able to get until the next day, while other fly-by-night walk-in clinics will give you a test immediately but may take 2-3 days to get a result. I get tested at UChicago and have always gotten a result within 24 hours, though this is not available to the general public (and also unavailable if you're symptomatic... it's specifically for surveillance testing or travel).

What is "the cold" and how do we know this? I don't think there has been SARS-CoV-2 style testing for any other virus.

We know this because there were virtually zero colds last winter but a ton of COVID-19 cases. Evidently, common cold has an R0 of 2-3, while Delta has an R0 of ~7 and Omicron ~10.

It keeps getting worse. And we're not even at New Years yet.

If there wasn't decent quality prevalence estimation done for SARS-CoV-2 and other potentially-cold-causing viruses, nobody really knows.

The people saying omicron has an R0 of 10 did a terrible job of predicting the course of infections in South Africa. They're already trending down and peak positivity was only moderately higher than in their pre-delta wave. R0 seems pretty useless as a real-world concept for understanding what will happen.

So much of this stuff is a house of cards and some major fields of experts don't do a good job of predicting anything or preventing bad outcomes. They invent post hoc reasons for why following their advice didn't prevent problems, e.g. deplorables or omicron. It reminds me a lot of "crazy uncle" investment tips that would have worked out well if only some unforeseeable freak event had not occurred. I don't blame people for not being able to make these predictions because they are hard, but I think more people should be epistemically humble about covid, experts included. And in such situations the default is to behave approximately as we did before 2020, or at least not add tons of disruptions. The default should not be "omg, somebody made a model that will be bad if true, we must disrupt society until we can rule it out".

^ Not only that, but there is also evidence that infection from some respiratory viruses tends to prevent infections from others. That is partly why Covid largely eliminated Influenza for the 20-21 season

The argument that “Covid spreads faster than the Cold” cannot be determined by such simple measures

Depends on how you define “worse”

I think that the rapid spread of Omicron is actually a good thing. Lots of immunity being generated in our population, and among the vaccinated relatively rare serious infection.

Best way to get our population immune is through a highly infectious virus

:tup:

That's what I was saying at work earlier. Today alone, 5 more people getting tested. If this keeps up, out of a building with 400 folks, were looking at a 20 percent positivity rate in the last three to four weeks.

I guess we will find out in a week or so the effect from Christmas.

And that's the thing that Omicron potentially offers... more antibodies. Its like a viral booster on top of a booster.

Stop testing if the workers that have no symptoms.

It makes no sense 2 years into this.

^^^

I can tell you this surge is way worse than December 2020. Much worse. Just the pure amount of folks testing positive.

For a lot of folks, its very mild. Probably Omnicron. But we also have a lot of tards that don't have the vaccine, because well... its the inner city culture. That might be causing a lot of this.

Usually what we hear, its sniffles, some coughing and fever. But goes away. No one has died.

The spread is much, much worse. Which is ironic because no one was vaccinated in December 2020.

Every case that I personally know of has been "mild", but mostly everyone I know who tested positive became symptomatic. I think the people testing positive without symptoms are the minority of cases, tbh. A lot of symptomatic people are saying that they didn't test positive immediately on the rapid tests, but got positive results from the PCR test.

Given the extremely high vax rates among at-risk older cohorts, the number of people testing positive is largely irrelevant, especially given that this strain isn't particularly lethal.

It's like there's no middle ground between the hysterics and the anti-science nuts. Mask, distance, vax and test, sure. Nothing else needs to be done.

The latest official guidance around here is not to test if: "You are fully vaccinated (two doses), experiencing mild symptoms and can manage your illness at home. Self-isolate for seven days and notify your close contacts so they can self-monitor for symptoms."

Of course, this isn't a question purely about "the science", it's that there's so much spread and so little consequence from testing mildly ill vaccinated people that it's better for those people not to go to the test sites and to use the capacity for something else.

Next door to us, Alberta has apparently said they will drop the isolation requirements for healthcare workers mildly ill with covid. So many people are getting omicron that they don't have the capacity for these workers to isolate for 10-14 days.

One factor that has changed, at least around here, is that people took the lockdown of December 2020 quite seriously (we locked down from around March-May 2020 and then again around November into 2021). But lots of people are having gatherings this year.

Around here we never really saw how fast the original version of SARS-CoV-2 spread around in the population given normal behaviour. Maybe some places like NYC or Wuhan got closer to that. We're still not at 2019 levels of interaction. And testing capacity has grown over time.