A combination of luck and perseverance has kept me safe from COVID-19 infection during the past 33 months, a status I consider both comforting and disturbing. I’m relieved that my safety measures have been effective while aware that I can’t count on luck to be consistently good. As I’ve watched my county’s rate going from 1 in 10,000 infected, down to 1 in 100, and now to single digits over the last year, I’m constantly reminded that COVID-19 is omnipresent. Each time I ponder reducing my safety measures, something happens to snap me back, most recently it was my daughter getting COVID from her coworker (she’s fine now). A new study I read yesterday found that we who have avoided infection are, by far, in the minority.
If you have persisted in your efforts to avoid COVID for nearly three years, you likely have very good reasons to continue, such as immunocompromised, elderly, or other high risk factor. While everything I see around me locally says “the pandemic is over,” it really is not. People are still getting infected and reinfected, some are dying, hospital rates are increasing, and 1 in 20 infected people will stay sick with long covid. Thanks for novapsyche who sent me a kosmail about that datum on long covid and offered a correction, that about 20% of infected people (1in 5) get long covid defined as symptoms that occur/persist consequent to Covid after 3 or more months. The CDC press release from July 2022 goes into more specifics.
Overall, 1 in 13 adults in the U.S. (7.5%) have 'long COVID' symptoms, defined as symptoms lasting three or more months after first contracting the virus, and that they didn’t have prior to their COVID-19 infection.
What about you? In the poll at the end, tell us how well you’ve dodged infection and if you plan to continue your safety measures.
Researchers found that 94% of people in the U.S. have been infected with COVID-19 at least once, reports the San Jose Mercury News in Just 1 in 20 people in the U.S. have dodged COVID infection so far, study says. The data for my NorCal county is even more stark with 1 in 5 people infected. In two other California counties (Kings, Imperial), the ratio is 1:2.
The big reason for the surprising surge? The omicron variant’s record-shattering case rates early this year and middling booster rates that fell short of what experts had hoped to see.
While that’s far from good news, there is a silver lining: As of early November, the percentage of people with some protection from new infections and severe disease is “substantially higher than in December 2021,” according to the authors. [...]
The team estimated that 29.1% of Americans have been vaccinated and infected, 55.7% are vaccinated and re-infected, 2.4% are unvaccinated and infected, 7% are unvaccinated and re-infected. Of those who have never been infected, about 63% are vaccinated: 3.5% of Americans, as opposed to 2.1% who are unvaccinated and never infected. [...]
The study estimated that in less than a year there were 116 million first infections in the country and 209 million reinfections, nearly all from omicron sub-variants.
