How Often Do We Have to Get Covid to Stop Getting Covid?

[brooklynite]

Bloomberg

In October 2020, a few weeks before the experimental trial results for the BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccines were released, German virologist Christian Drosten cautioned that the shots would be of limited effectiveness in preventing the spread of the disease.

“We are dealing here with an infection of the mucous membrane, i.e., in the nose and the throat and then later the lungs,” he said on Episode 62 of Das Coronavirus-Update, the podcast launched by broadcaster NDR in March 2020 that helped make Drosten a household name in Germany. “The mucous membranes already have their own special local immune system. With the current vaccines, which are more likely to be injected into the muscle, you don’t reach this local immune system so well.” As a result, the vaccines “probably protect more against the severe course [of the disease] than against infection.”

Which is of course exactly how things played out. The vaccines have been spectacularly effective at preventing severe disease and death, much less so at preventing transmission.

Drosten has been described in the U.S. media as “Germany’s Fauci,” but the moniker seems a little unfair. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci was a top researcher in his day, but has been running a sizable government agency (fiscal year 2021 budget, $6 billion) for the past 38 years. His appearances in the media during the pandemic have mostly involved reciting the public-health consensus of the moment, which was useful when the U.S. president was a font of Covid-19 misinformation but not always especially enlightening. Drosten, director of the Institute of Virology at Berlin’s Charité medical school, is perhaps the world’s leading coronavirus expert, responsible for identifying the original severe acute respiratory syndrome virus in 2003 and devising the first diagnostic test for the Covid-causing SARS-CoV-2 virus in January 2020. His public commentary, delivered chiefly in podcast form after he grew frustrated dealing with some in the German media, has tended toward the cutting-edge and forward-looking — as indicated by what he was saying about vaccines in October 2020.

[exboyfil]

1. I am convinced that if I didn't have the vaccine and booster

and have lost 70 pounds, I would have ended up in the ER. As it was I went several days unable to use my CPAP because of nasal congestion.

Isolation gave me the time to lose the weight. I wish I hadn't let my guard down. I most likely caught it at work from a coworker in the next partition.

[MineralMan]

2. Mother Nature and Evolution Often Trump Science.

"Nature - Red in Tooth and Claw," as Tennyson put it, eh?

[SoonerPride]

3. How many times can you catch a cold or flu?

The "common" cold is also a coronavirus.

You can catch it and re-catch it and re-catch to infinity.

Covid is the same type of virus, with potentially worse outcomes only because it is novel to humans (so far).

The vaccine helps keep you from the worst outcomes in all but a diminishing percent of cases.

But the threat of catching Covid will always be >0.

It is here to stay and no amount of containment will stop it from being endemic.

You have to determine what your risk tolerance is and go live your life accordingly.

From the article:

Wondering what the right balance might be, I asked my primary-care physician (and college classmate) Bertie Bregman, who has been treating Covid patients in New York since the early days of the pandemic and contracted the disease early on, too. He had an interesting response: “In a nutshell, what I believe is that we have to stop being so neurotic about Covid and be more neurotic about everything else.”

[ananda]

4. Truth. Never.

It's a constantly mutating virus, like the common cold.

[TheRealNorth]

5. Exactly

I am expecting that I will need a Covid booster every year to go along with my flu shot.

[MineralMan]

6. Yes, I expect the same. I've had four Moderna vaccinations

already, and will get boosters as long as necessary. I haven't had Covid-19 yet, and hope never to get it. I'm still masking up in the supermarket, etc. I'll continue to do so.

[ananda]

7. Same. And no problem, really.

It's just sanity and reality to do the right thing.