Sticksboi05

YES! Good call. I have seen LOTS of women say the pain was far worse than child birth.

Rapid at home tests still work with Omicron - the question is at what viral load does Omicron becomes contagious, which will require more research to give more precise estimates. Because vaccination is causing people to get symptoms much earlier in their disease progression, if you have COVID-like symptoms best to assume you are positive for the purposes of interacting with others, and wait a few days to confirm once replication in your nose is high.

The amount of people who don't understand what communism is, is astounding.

In the past week the media has made people think the flu and SARS COV 2 can combine, which they cannot, and now hastily reporting a combined Delta/Omicron variant that does not exist and is merely sample contamination. The damage they are doing to people's psyches and their own reputation unnecessarily is scary at this point. This pattern of desperation to be the first to put something up without even five minutes of fact-checking is not high quality reporting and if you want to do it in something inconsequential like sports that's one thing, but this is a global pandemic and irresponsible.

Shipping the rapid tests out in one thing, they need to also educate people on their utility, and how best to use them so these 500 million aren't in vain. There's still tons of people who think they are there to replace PCR, or who will use them the day after an exposure needlessly. And that's not their fault because not enough has been done to explain how they work and what their primary goal is.

I'm not calling him "the world expert" or that nobody else's opinion/experience matters, all I meant (and I am happy to accept my wording may have been too strong) was I personally value his opinion on them a lot 🤷‍♂️

I said he knows as much about rapid antigen tests as anyone else not antibody tests. Was not meaning to imply he was the sole person whose opinion is worth hearing, just that I personally place his opinion above others because of how consistent he's been with his message for two years, and how far he's gone to educate the public on their utility and shortcomings - beyond anyone else I've seen with a public platform. If others are more skeptical or want to balance out with the opinions of others in the industry, that makes sense too.

I'm aware he recently moved to eMed. And if he'd been silent all this time, and then all of a sudden gone gung-ho on rapid testing when he moved that'd be telling and worthy of tuning out. But he's been lobbying for them for almost two years, long before he moved jobs, when he was at Harvard's school of public health and had no financial incentive. And if others disagree and think it was a longstanding ploy all along, they are free to think that.

Symptoms and viral load don't always match up - it is possible to be at the peak of your viral load as symptoms come down now because of vaccination.

Some of the concerns here are unfounded - throat swabs have already been normal in places like the UK for the tests they use and they have official guidance on how to do so safely. The biggest risk is potentially slightly higher false positives and making sure you haven't eaten or drank anything recently. Nobody knows rapid tests better than Michael Mina, if he says it's worth doing I'm rolling with him in this arena.

I just had an awful cold that was worse than getting Delta vaccinated, those viruses are still out there. If you're using at-home tests, would suggest swabbing throat first and then nostrils.

That I 100% agree with 🍻. I just didn't like that he was poo pooing vaccination as a non-doctor.

Fair (I'm agreeing with him) I'm just saying the author's sentiment is that nobody should feel safe right now in any way. When you tweet "the vaccine protects me is a comforting fairy tale" you are stoking panic and it's the kind of stuff that has hurt people's mental health the past two years. There's a responsible way to tell people the virus can have harmful impacts without essentially saying getting vaccinated doesn't do anything. And this guy isn't even an immunologist or related doctor, he's a software engineer.

There are many doctors who want people to behave as if that is the reality of the situation.

Agree with everything PeterMP just said – the best estimate of long COVID right now depending on how you precisely define it is10-30% of those who contract it, and not the symptoms are not necessarily forever. And of course we saw many people with long-term issues have their issues resolved after vaccination. COVID is definitely more of a risk for these issues than the cold but the idea that getting it automatically or even near automatically turns you into a shell of what you once were, especially after vaccination, is hyperbole that I think most virologists and immunologists would agree on. If you were able to go into your body when you had a cold like that Magic School Bus episode and see all that is happening you'd probably be mortified.

Abbott is a moron. F him.

Tweet him. Michael Mina - he responds to people.

If you can find a place with literally no other people, no reason you can't but if you are still positive, especially if the positive was on a rapid test, which signals high amounts of live virus in your nose, you cannot be around others. Lack of symptoms is not indicative of not being contagious.

Here is a visual explanation of why certain public health experts are concerned about the CDCs five day isolation guidance. TLDR the relationship between symptoms and viral loads is different now because of vaccination etc. And because I have a feeling there may be a strong push back reply on this ; ) ... I am going to state clearly this is one side of the argument from the experts, others are perfectly fine with the CDCs guidance as is, and all of us here are just rubes (myself included) trying to decipher information from the people who have dedicated their professional lives for this moment and are a million times smarter than all of us in this subject. This was made by a Harvard-trained immunologist.

If they're exceeding safe dosages off the advice of random people on Facebook, or if they're taking a version made for livestock and poisoning themselves we should absolutely get them to stop taking it. It's one thing to take Vitamin C when you have a cold even though it doesn't do anything meaningful, but this could be dangerous.

There is definitely a connection between mind and body, but if you have COVID pneumonia with an oxygen level at 91% you cannot positive thought yourself out of that. Better idea, instead of wasting time with Ivermectin, we find ways to boost the supply and lower the cost of proven treatments like antibody drugs and Paxlovid.

I convinced one of my vaccine hesitant co-workers to get vaccinated before Christmas. She wasn't anti-vax completely, just worried about side effects and wasn't convinced with how many people have still caught COVID after being vaccinated. I think the fact that we met her where her concerns were and didn't go on an attack did the trick. Simply said look it's your decision, just make sure you're doing it based on the right information, not the Joe Rogan podcast. I spent some time in Texas this year and met multiple people who were very COVID cautious to the point of saying they hadn't eaten out in over a year, but were not vaccinated. Of course in my head I was like uh this does not compute. But I do think we could get more people vaccinated by not doing the blame game thing the Biden administration was employing for a time late last year. (even if is it true, and I am tired of people without an autoimmune justification refusing to get vaccinated personally)

There's been media coverage of people unable to find booster shots due to surging demand as recently as December - whether in NYC, the Bay Area, Oregon etc. I was not saying antigen tests are our best hope - vaccines are obviously No. 1 and the rest of the toolkit includes rapid tests, PCR tests, masks, and air filtration. Anyway since you seem to be making it kinda personal I'm going to leave it at that.

Semantics because I said global? We are also a part of that. The CDC is going to be more stringent trying to curb COVID-19 transmission over the flu when a variant this contagious is spreading like wildfire. The flu is not risking complete overstress of hospital systems, if it was, you'd see similarly stringent rules. We should be preparing for the inevitable arrival of future VOCs - the virus unfortunately is replicating at will globally and as long as it does VOCs will pop up and make their way here - hopefully they will go in the less severe direction. We already have Omicron sublineages detected in the U.S. Even if the best our mitigations like antigen tests can do is delay eventual infections that gives people more time to get boosters, and more time to build up the supply of Paxlovid and Sotrimovab. There's benefit in that. When the guidance was announced lots of people in my friend groups said the concept of shortening isolation was nuts, and like you, I said actually there is no reason we should be making everyone sit out for 10 days. Correlation not causation. It's likely they recovered on their own and happened to get Ivermectin in that timeframe. Paxlovid will be the early treatment tool, it's just the supply needs to be boosted dramatically as it just recently was authorized.

Were these folks low on oxygen levels? There's lots of people now going to ERs for COVID when they don't need to. (not saying this was the case just if all you are offered is a cough suppressant, it seems like doctors didn't buy that it was an actual emergency) There is no evidence Ivermectin does anything for COVID-19, there have already been multiple studies done. The major basis is one study that showed some stopping of viral replication in a petri dish not even an animal model and it was at dosages that would be toxic in humans. Most people hospitalized are there because of COVID pneumonia and thus need oxygen. Right now the best treatment option is GSK and Vir's antibody drug, which is the only one to be highly effective against Omicron. AstraZeneca's new Evusheld has neutralizing activity as well but I think it's aimed to be more of a preventative for people who are at high risk of vaccine side effects. Soon, when supply is up we'll have more people on Paxlovid and prevent the need to ever go to the hospital but that will rely on good quick testing because it's only effective at the first onset of symptoms.