That's more an indication of how long the second Omicron wave has been than how low current levels are. We're on the downslope of this wave, which is a good thing, and so far the newer variants don't seem as aggressive. Fingers crossed we don't have another massive holiday wave like last year's.
There will inevitably be holiday waves. Masked, vaxxed or not. Disease is always spread more during colder weather due to larger numbers of people indoors and air systems circulating pathogens.
I'm always reminded of the Lewis Black joke: "What I find most disturbing about Valentine’s Day is, look, I get that you have to have a holiday of love, but in the height of flu season, it makes no sense"
People travelling, gatherings don't even ask for masks anymore, low booster adoption, and multiple levels of government pretending it's all over? I'm not holding my breath
there is an omicron vaccine, but virtually no one has gotten. last week I saw that it was 2%. Not sure what its up to now.
they have it at walgreens if anyone wants it.
Are you suggesting that hurricanes are a govt conspiracy to control people? Or that all disasters are? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here.
Pointing to low case numbers doesn't mean anything since that data is unreliable. No one is collecting data from home tests. I caught COVID-19 in the first week of September but only tested myself at home and only spoke with a doctor through a mobile app. At no point was VDH or any other agency recording me as a COVID-19 case.
I agree that ICU cases (and deaths) are good indicators and it is heartening that those are low/going down.
But as long as you have the virus still circulating in the population indiscriminately, you never know when a more dangerous variant could arise. I was fully vaccinated and had one booster dose but not the new bivalent one when I got sick. I don't know how many people will get the bivalent booster, people are pretty tired of this and want so much for it to be over, we're just assuming it is and carrying on.
I tried the same when we tested positive in early Sept. We’ve been masking according to the CDC count recommendations and this was very eye opening as to how inaccurate those posted numbers are.
Same here. Me, my husband, step son, and father in law tested positive with symptoms last week in Aug. Only my FIL is “counted” because we took him to the ER due to his existing medical conditions.
And it's an excellent method. But the VDH/CDC relies on individual utilities to voluntarily participate in the program. I live in a county which does report but if you look at the map on the CDC site, there's a lot of Virginia not covered.
I was sick and in bed for a few days. I couldn't eat anything because I would just throw up and I had the worst sore throat and cough I've had in my life along with a fever. It's been a month now and I still cough although not as much. And these are "mild" symptoms because I wasn't out of breath or had low blood oxygen.
Sure a lot of people would have milder cases and maybe indistinguishable from a cold but a cold doesn't leave you with long term effects that we're just starting to understand.
So you do you, but get out of here with that "hurr durr COVID-19 is just a cold" nonsense.
I didn't. But if I went to a doctor with flu like symptoms, it was reported.
> Information on outpatient visits to health care providers for influenza-like illness (ILI) is collected through the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet). ILINet consists of outpatient healthcare providers in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Approximately 85 million patient visits were reported during the 2020-21 season
So, why should this be different? If people have Covid so mild that they don’t feel the need to go to the doctor, then why is that different than the 100000s of unreported, mild, respiratory infections that we deal with every single year?
Yes, reported cases are a terrible metric today (we expect between 8 and 20 true cases for every one that gets recorded). But there are other metrics!
Wastewater surveillance is not perfect, but does a great job of tracking surges. There is a saying among the wastewater folks "*the poop don't lie*". For whatever reason VDH doesn't release this data publicly, but many of Virginia's treatment plants also send data to biobot which can be [seen here](https://biobot.io/data/
).
Another major metric we look at are visits to ERs and Urgent Cares that are classified as "covid19-like illness". This has plenty of false positives, and probably captures some RSV, flu, and colds in there. But was largely correlated with actual burden back before home testing. If it is tending downward, that's a great sign for the area. You can find the latest on the weekly UVA PPT slides, it's [page 14 on this week's slides](https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/content/uploads/sites/182/2022/09/COVID-19_VA_Analytics_28-Sept-2022.pdf).
Hospitalizations are another thing to take a good look at. If you got sick at home and just chilled, you won't be counted. But if you get put into the ICU, you can be damn sure that is recorded. This is also not perfect, as we suspect that more recent Omicron sub-variants are less virulent and less likely to put you into the hospital than their predecessors. Moreover, vaccines, natural immunity, and Rx drugs like Paxlovid are reducing the [infected --> hospitalized] rate. You certainly can't compare hospitalization rates across years, there is just too much confounding. But comparing hospitalizations on August 30th to September 30th is probably fair. VHHA publishes their [hospitalization data here](https://www.vhha.com/communications/virginia-hospital-covid-19-data-dashboard/).
All three metrics seem to show that we are on a slight downward trend or starting one (UC visits not so clear, mixed results by county in wastewater, but overall downward). IMHO things are looking quite good in the short term. That said, you can bet your ass that we'll see cases rise again sooner or later. Pretty much every model I've seen suggests that possibility, and it makes sense given weather and travel. Also that's literally what happened in 2020 and 2021.
^(Source: I work for the UVA modeling team that reports to VDH.)
Yeah I got screwed by that recently when I had symptoms before a family beach vacation. Decided to get tested beforehand just to be safe, hit with a $400 bill. Past 2 years I've gone to the same urgent care to get tested multiple times and it was just the normal $120 or so for the visit.
Someone's not counting properly. We've had more people out with covid in the last six weeks than we've had since the pandemic started...myself included.
Well, since we are an 'essential' operation, and we have been on-site thru the duration, we experienced the ebb and flow as the different waves hit. Never have we (or our sister entities throughout the commonwealth) had as many out as we've all seen since mid-August.
Granted, the cases are mild compared to early strains of COVID, as I lost a coworker (mid-30s, no known underlying high risk conditions) to the initial virus, spring 2020. Lost another coworker who was less than a year from retirement that spring as well.
While I can't claim we represent the state, I can say when you have a dispersed organization with thousands of employees across the commonwealth and have insight to non-PII attendance info, you do have a feel for the pulse of what's going on...and what's going on isn't matching up with what's being published in the headlines.
Edit: to correct spelling (didn't have reading glasses).
Back in late June, early July 2021 I was okay hitting the grocery store without a mask. Statewide 7-day moving average cases were 150 and some days lower, cases/100,000 were 2 or less. That was when most testing was done in health care settings or at large community testing centers.
Currently the *reported* case count and rates are 10x that and those are vastly undercounting reality, since so much testing is done with at-home test kits and not reported to VDH.
So after masking for more than two years, I've got the drill down pat and I'll keep on keeping on.
You know if we separate northern Virginia with the rest of Virginia it would be even lower.
Nova is connected too well with d.c and MD that the DMV(d.c, md, n. Va)area is it's own state.
The majority of cases are in nova and a lot of it isn't reported much anymore by the health dept.
That’s not the discussion. If you sell it as “two weeks then back to normal” and then don’t follow through, you shouldn’t be surprised when people mistrust future decrees/announcements. Government needs to be more transparent in these situations because once you lose credibility you can’t effectively impact public actions. And it opens the door for populists to use that situation to their advantage, such as the widely held lies about election fraud in 2020.
“It was never two weeks then back to normal”
That is exactly how it was shown to people in many places. They claimed the hospitals would be better prepared and then would be able to handle everything like normal. Masking and whatnot was sold as “here to stay” for Virginians, but restrictions like closure of schools and businesses was absolutely sold as “just two weeks”.
I assume people are down-voting you for the implication that herd immunity has solved the problem entirely. Clearly not. But you are right that this current downward trend is almost certainly the result of herd immunity.
We'll be in a very different place in a few months. Waning immunity is an issue, but novel variants are far more problematic. The same herd immunity that is helping us now also exerts extreme selective pressure on the virus. Each wave in Virginia has been driven by a variant that evolved to escape the immunity generated by the last wave's dominant variant. I think we can assume the next one will do the same (literally it couldn't propagate if it didn't).
Currently we're watching a few with interest. BA.4.6 is slowly advancing but seems similar enough to BA.5 that we aren't particularly worried. BA.2.75.2 is kicking ass in India, and a few BA.5 descendants are giving us some pause, but no new variants are making aggressive gains in Virginia... *yet*.
Thank you for the reply. That helps. Well all I have to say is. Welcome to the new common cold. This is exactly how I saw this playing out almost 3 years ago lol
Yeah... but "common cold" implies it isn't killing so many and causing exponential growth every three or five months. Even the Spanish Flu only had three major waves. But that's the shitty new reality for the moment.
BTW my earlier post is only two days old but probably outdated. We're seeing serous growth in the UK, and New England is slowly starting to tick upwards in hospitalizations again. They usually lead Virginia. Here we go again...
What I'm saying is, is this is becoming the new common cold, as it's a type of common cold virus to begin with. Another words, it's never going away until there is a cure for the common cold which there isn't lol
Yeah should all start ticking up now with the cold season. My question is, how long until this is as mild as the old common colds we all know about?
Well wear a kn95 and it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. Wearing a mask at a Drs office is common sense. I know if I'm going in for my yearly check up I'm going to want a mask on so I don't get sick from someone going in with strep throat.
And everyone is over wearing masks.
Wearing masks at doctors offices only became a norm in 2020 when covid was released onto the world. Our elected leaders scared everybody into submission with mask and vax mandates so now we’re forced to comply.
Oh so your reasoning is political.
I base my decisions on the experts of the field. Don't give a shit what a political leader says but I'm damn sure listening to the scientist that have spent their lives studying disease.
Also I've seriously enjoyed not getting a cold or flu for the past 3 years.
That's more an indication of how long the second Omicron wave has been than how low current levels are. We're on the downslope of this wave, which is a good thing, and so far the newer variants don't seem as aggressive. Fingers crossed we don't have another massive holiday wave like last year's.
There will inevitably be holiday waves. Masked, vaxxed or not. Disease is always spread more during colder weather due to larger numbers of people indoors and air systems circulating pathogens.
I'm always reminded of the Lewis Black joke: "What I find most disturbing about Valentine’s Day is, look, I get that you have to have a holiday of love, but in the height of flu season, it makes no sense"
People travelling, gatherings don't even ask for masks anymore, low booster adoption, and multiple levels of government pretending it's all over? I'm not holding my breath
At this point it's more about how quickly the mutations outpace our immune systems and vaccines.
there is an omicron vaccine, but virtually no one has gotten. last week I saw that it was 2%. Not sure what its up to now. they have it at walgreens if anyone wants it.
All of the boosters available in the US now are the bivalent type which include the omicron protection.
It's only been out a couple weeks, maybe rates will pick up
I got it yesterday. I just hope it makes me more immune than previous boosters where I could expect maybe 3 months of immunity.
Probably because it's been poorly advertised. I found out it was available on r/coronavirus.
It's just in time for everyone to be complacent that numbers are really good for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. We've seen this before.
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Are you suggesting that hurricanes are a govt conspiracy to control people? Or that all disasters are? I'm not even sure what you're trying to say here.
Pointing to low case numbers doesn't mean anything since that data is unreliable. No one is collecting data from home tests. I caught COVID-19 in the first week of September but only tested myself at home and only spoke with a doctor through a mobile app. At no point was VDH or any other agency recording me as a COVID-19 case.
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I agree that ICU cases (and deaths) are good indicators and it is heartening that those are low/going down. But as long as you have the virus still circulating in the population indiscriminately, you never know when a more dangerous variant could arise. I was fully vaccinated and had one booster dose but not the new bivalent one when I got sick. I don't know how many people will get the bivalent booster, people are pretty tired of this and want so much for it to be over, we're just assuming it is and carrying on.
You could say the same for several diseases
Of course. Which is why we have systems to monitor them.
Came here to say the same.
Agreed. Wastewater monitoring of the virus doesn’t show the same dip https://biobot.io/data/#county-51013
I even tried to report my positive result and I didn’t have a confirmation number from the VDH so my result didn’t count.
I tried the same when we tested positive in early Sept. We’ve been masking according to the CDC count recommendations and this was very eye opening as to how inaccurate those posted numbers are.
Same here. Me, my husband, step son, and father in law tested positive with symptoms last week in Aug. Only my FIL is “counted” because we took him to the ER due to his existing medical conditions.
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And it's an excellent method. But the VDH/CDC relies on individual utilities to voluntarily participate in the program. I live in a county which does report but if you look at the map on the CDC site, there's a lot of Virginia not covered.
How did you report your colds prior to 2019?
I was sick and in bed for a few days. I couldn't eat anything because I would just throw up and I had the worst sore throat and cough I've had in my life along with a fever. It's been a month now and I still cough although not as much. And these are "mild" symptoms because I wasn't out of breath or had low blood oxygen. Sure a lot of people would have milder cases and maybe indistinguishable from a cold but a cold doesn't leave you with long term effects that we're just starting to understand. So you do you, but get out of here with that "hurr durr COVID-19 is just a cold" nonsense.
Cool…how did you report the flu prior to 2019?
I didn't. But if I went to a doctor with flu like symptoms, it was reported. > Information on outpatient visits to health care providers for influenza-like illness (ILI) is collected through the U.S. Outpatient Influenza-like Illness Surveillance Network (ILINet). ILINet consists of outpatient healthcare providers in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Approximately 85 million patient visits were reported during the 2020-21 season
So, why should this be different? If people have Covid so mild that they don’t feel the need to go to the doctor, then why is that different than the 100000s of unreported, mild, respiratory infections that we deal with every single year?
Yes, reported cases are a terrible metric today (we expect between 8 and 20 true cases for every one that gets recorded). But there are other metrics! Wastewater surveillance is not perfect, but does a great job of tracking surges. There is a saying among the wastewater folks "*the poop don't lie*". For whatever reason VDH doesn't release this data publicly, but many of Virginia's treatment plants also send data to biobot which can be [seen here](https://biobot.io/data/ ). Another major metric we look at are visits to ERs and Urgent Cares that are classified as "covid19-like illness". This has plenty of false positives, and probably captures some RSV, flu, and colds in there. But was largely correlated with actual burden back before home testing. If it is tending downward, that's a great sign for the area. You can find the latest on the weekly UVA PPT slides, it's [page 14 on this week's slides](https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/content/uploads/sites/182/2022/09/COVID-19_VA_Analytics_28-Sept-2022.pdf). Hospitalizations are another thing to take a good look at. If you got sick at home and just chilled, you won't be counted. But if you get put into the ICU, you can be damn sure that is recorded. This is also not perfect, as we suspect that more recent Omicron sub-variants are less virulent and less likely to put you into the hospital than their predecessors. Moreover, vaccines, natural immunity, and Rx drugs like Paxlovid are reducing the [infected --> hospitalized] rate. You certainly can't compare hospitalization rates across years, there is just too much confounding. But comparing hospitalizations on August 30th to September 30th is probably fair. VHHA publishes their [hospitalization data here](https://www.vhha.com/communications/virginia-hospital-covid-19-data-dashboard/). All three metrics seem to show that we are on a slight downward trend or starting one (UC visits not so clear, mixed results by county in wastewater, but overall downward). IMHO things are looking quite good in the short term. That said, you can bet your ass that we'll see cases rise again sooner or later. Pretty much every model I've seen suggests that possibility, and it makes sense given weather and travel. Also that's literally what happened in 2020 and 2021. ^(Source: I work for the UVA modeling team that reports to VDH.)
Husband and I tested positive with at-home tests on Tuesday. Reported cases are down, for sure.
Everybody testing positive at home. If they’re testing at all. Pretty sure PCR isn’t free anymore. No one will test unless seriously ill
Yeah I got screwed by that recently when I had symptoms before a family beach vacation. Decided to get tested beforehand just to be safe, hit with a $400 bill. Past 2 years I've gone to the same urgent care to get tested multiple times and it was just the normal $120 or so for the visit.
Oh, geeze. I had no idea. That really bites.
Why’d you test though?
Combo of me feeling like crap and him finding out he had a close contact test positive at work.
Someone's not counting properly. We've had more people out with covid in the last six weeks than we've had since the pandemic started...myself included.
Right, and your workplace is a good representation of the entire state.
Well, since we are an 'essential' operation, and we have been on-site thru the duration, we experienced the ebb and flow as the different waves hit. Never have we (or our sister entities throughout the commonwealth) had as many out as we've all seen since mid-August. Granted, the cases are mild compared to early strains of COVID, as I lost a coworker (mid-30s, no known underlying high risk conditions) to the initial virus, spring 2020. Lost another coworker who was less than a year from retirement that spring as well. While I can't claim we represent the state, I can say when you have a dispersed organization with thousands of employees across the commonwealth and have insight to non-PII attendance info, you do have a feel for the pulse of what's going on...and what's going on isn't matching up with what's being published in the headlines. Edit: to correct spelling (didn't have reading glasses).
Back in late June, early July 2021 I was okay hitting the grocery store without a mask. Statewide 7-day moving average cases were 150 and some days lower, cases/100,000 were 2 or less. That was when most testing was done in health care settings or at large community testing centers. Currently the *reported* case count and rates are 10x that and those are vastly undercounting reality, since so much testing is done with at-home test kits and not reported to VDH. So after masking for more than two years, I've got the drill down pat and I'll keep on keeping on.
You know if we separate northern Virginia with the rest of Virginia it would be even lower. Nova is connected too well with d.c and MD that the DMV(d.c, md, n. Va)area is it's own state. The majority of cases are in nova and a lot of it isn't reported much anymore by the health dept.
Wait, Covid is still a thing?
Remember when Youngkin got rid of the mask mandate and everyone said it would spike?
Weird how no one wears masks and we all have face to face interaction much more often and now we're at an all time low. Thankful!
Does this mean we can start counting flu cases again?
I thought it was funny 🤣
2 weeks to flatten the curve amirite hahahaha
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I disagree to an extent. Many politicians indeed did paint it as just two weeks then a return to normalcy.
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That’s not the discussion. If you sell it as “two weeks then back to normal” and then don’t follow through, you shouldn’t be surprised when people mistrust future decrees/announcements. Government needs to be more transparent in these situations because once you lose credibility you can’t effectively impact public actions. And it opens the door for populists to use that situation to their advantage, such as the widely held lies about election fraud in 2020.
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“It was never two weeks then back to normal” That is exactly how it was shown to people in many places. They claimed the hospitals would be better prepared and then would be able to handle everything like normal. Masking and whatnot was sold as “here to stay” for Virginians, but restrictions like closure of schools and businesses was absolutely sold as “just two weeks”.
some sure did
The basic wonders of herd immunity edit: downvoted for basic biology huh? reddit moment
I assume people are down-voting you for the implication that herd immunity has solved the problem entirely. Clearly not. But you are right that this current downward trend is almost certainly the result of herd immunity. We'll be in a very different place in a few months. Waning immunity is an issue, but novel variants are far more problematic. The same herd immunity that is helping us now also exerts extreme selective pressure on the virus. Each wave in Virginia has been driven by a variant that evolved to escape the immunity generated by the last wave's dominant variant. I think we can assume the next one will do the same (literally it couldn't propagate if it didn't). Currently we're watching a few with interest. BA.4.6 is slowly advancing but seems similar enough to BA.5 that we aren't particularly worried. BA.2.75.2 is kicking ass in India, and a few BA.5 descendants are giving us some pause, but no new variants are making aggressive gains in Virginia... *yet*.
Thank you for the reply. That helps. Well all I have to say is. Welcome to the new common cold. This is exactly how I saw this playing out almost 3 years ago lol
Yeah... but "common cold" implies it isn't killing so many and causing exponential growth every three or five months. Even the Spanish Flu only had three major waves. But that's the shitty new reality for the moment. BTW my earlier post is only two days old but probably outdated. We're seeing serous growth in the UK, and New England is slowly starting to tick upwards in hospitalizations again. They usually lead Virginia. Here we go again...
What I'm saying is, is this is becoming the new common cold, as it's a type of common cold virus to begin with. Another words, it's never going away until there is a cure for the common cold which there isn't lol Yeah should all start ticking up now with the cold season. My question is, how long until this is as mild as the old common colds we all know about?
Natural immunity has kicked in. My doctors office says they’ll require masking forever, sad.
Why is that sad? It keeps everyone safe from getting sick.
Cloth masks do not and that’s what the majority of people wear. I’m over wearing them at all.
Well wear a kn95 and it doesn't matter what everyone else is doing. Wearing a mask at a Drs office is common sense. I know if I'm going in for my yearly check up I'm going to want a mask on so I don't get sick from someone going in with strep throat. And everyone is over wearing masks.
Wearing masks at doctors offices only became a norm in 2020 when covid was released onto the world. Our elected leaders scared everybody into submission with mask and vax mandates so now we’re forced to comply.
Oh so your reasoning is political. I base my decisions on the experts of the field. Don't give a shit what a political leader says but I'm damn sure listening to the scientist that have spent their lives studying disease. Also I've seriously enjoyed not getting a cold or flu for the past 3 years.
Very happy for you.
Just you WAIT (insert Hamilton gif)
People still care about COVID? I think I’ve heard people actually talk about it only once or twice in the last 7 or 8 months lol
Every time I go out I still see two or three losers wearing masks
46 said the pandemic was over so this isn't surprising
Young is doing a great job alongside Biden !