They didn't argue the disease Covid is becoming like the disease flu. They argued the prevalence and common impact is. That's an important distinction.
Hospitalization and death is different, long covid is different, and they mention both, specifically.
Even WSJ coverage of this emphasized that point, and it's hardly a liberal rag, phrasing as "Treat it more like flu" not that the disease itself is flu-like.
On the contrary, WSJ point out:
However, public health officials cautioned that Covid still isn’t the same as the flu or other respiratory viruses. “Let’s be clear. Covid-19 is not the flu,” said Jackson at the CDC. “It still causes more serious illness and leads to more lasting effects,” he said.
Public-health experts and physicians note that Covid is still a disease that is cited as a cause of death in more than 1,000 people a week, according to CDC data. And long Covid, with symptoms that can linger months and even years, hasn’t gone away.
Finally, CDC didn't ditch 5 day precautions. The part most coverage isn't headlining, CDC say if you're not isolating, wear a well-fitting mask, keep your distance from people, for five days.
They also say during that 5 days have clean air, which they define as outside air, higher fresh air mix, and purification. An office demanding people come in should ask their building if they've adopted the post-pandemic ASHRAE directional guidance (not yet formalized).
With recent research attributing long covid brain-fog to leaking blood in the brain, and research is still finding other unexplained effects, it may be worthwhile to weigh that we have a pretty good handle on the flu, but ...
Comments suggesting the CDC is telling sick people to go to work or airports are not consistent with the recommendations. The CDC is recommending people stay home/isolate during fever and symptoms, and consider returning to work after the fever breaks and symptoms start to improve.
FTA: "The CDC acknowledged that the eased isolation guidance will create 'residual risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission,' and that most people are no longer infectious only after 8 to 10 days. As such, the agency urged people to follow additional interventions—including masking, testing, distancing, hygiene, and improving air quality—for five additional days after their isolation period."
Given that many people were ignoring the prior advice before this advice came out, I doubt it will effect little change. The same recommendations should have been applied to all influenza-like-illness even before Covid, but people mostly just try to work until they can't, then stay home until they can, and come back to work anyway.
The problem is people are infectious for up to 16 days and almost all are still infectious on day 12. Its not a policy based on the reality of the virus or the disease it causes.
I will agree with those numbers if you're including the incubation (presymptomatic) period which is quite long with COVID-19, estimated at 7 days on average.[1] Unfortunately that just stresses how little we can accomplish in preventing spread after someone has symptoms. They were already contagious (perhaps 1-4 days) before the onset of symptoms. 10-day isolation periods after infection don't reflect the reality of the virus either, and permanent isolation forever even less so. Like I said, I don't expect anything to change from this new guidance. They have different guidance for healthcare settings and very few people were following the previous general guidance anyway.
Sadly, this is what Corporate America ultimately lobbied hard for this and the CDC has caved to them. I'm sure this is a move to exploit workers even more, causing more preventable permanant sickness (Long COVID) and deaths as a result. [1] [2]
The CDC is saying it's okay to infect other people because pretty much everyone on earth has already been infected with the novel sars-cov-2 virus and taken their risk already with the first infection. Anyone that would have bad outcomes has died or been taken out of productive life so they don't matter. And the rare few of us that have still avoided any exposure to sars-cov-2 virus in our upper respiratory mucosal immune compartment don't matter because we are so few and the humoral immune compartment is protected by intramuscular vaccination.
A very pragmatic position but not one that has much to do with the science of sars-cov-2 shed duration or infective window.
True enough. I didn't want to complicate my message. I only meant the risk of the first exposure is much, much greater than subsequent ones.
It is unarguable that the risk of the first exposure to a novel virus is much greater than subsequent exposures. I say this because T-cells generalize across mutations. And T-cells stay tissue resident for years to decades (unfortunately sars-cov-2 IgG and IgA antibodies are gone by 6 months).
Your T-cells from the first sars-cov-2 exposure will start killing infected cells much faster once you've been exposed. This limits the replication earlier and reduces the viral load. This reduces damage done.
Weird side effects like the collection of things called long-covid have been shown in study after study not to be related to viral load. So whatever risk is associated with reinfection does not decrease in that sense. But in the dying sense? It decreases a lot.
>And the rare few of us that have still avoided any exposure to sars-cov-2 virus in our upper respiratory mucosal immune compartment don't matter because we are so few and the humoral immune compartment is protected by intramuscular vaccination.
As one of the rare few, I'd rather not take risks, especially since there's still so much developing science behind the long term effects of COVID. Good to know the CDC does not in fact care about disease control for those who heeded their advice up until now.
> The CDC is saying it's okay to infect other people because pretty much everyone on earth has already been infected with the novel sars-cov-2 virus and taken their risk already with the first infection.
Spreading respiratory viruses is really called living in a normal human society, and for whatever reason medical professions abandoned every conventional advice and emergency plan of the past that was prepared for responding to novel respiratory contagious disease of the sort a coronavirus would be, that spares the vast majority of healthy people, and resorted to what I call Open Air Surveillance Fascism.
I'll never forget the absurdity of healthy people on a beach, which was probably the safest thing a person could do with maximum ventilation and full sunlight, with some moron shaming everyone while dressed in a reaper outfit.
I’m not a zero COVID person and just got on to living my life as normal after the acute pandemic, but about a year in I started developing autoimmune symptoms I’m still struggling to figure out. There’s a chance I was always going to develop it, but I definitely wonder about long term COVID dysfunction.
First I had muscle spasms and twitches, then intermittent joint pain, trouble sleeping, hives on occasion while running, now exocrine pancreatic insufficiency that seems like it’s idiopathic (MRI is confirming today). I’m scared as hell and any attempt at diagnosis or treatment is a dead end or makes things worse.
We have barely any idea what happens long term. Chicken pox becomes shingles later in life. One infection of covid can disable you, and it happens more often than people think. Basically for every dead person, there is now a disabled one.
NHS study from 2022: "Results
Of 206 299 participants (mean age 45 years, 54% female, 92% white), 15% were ever labour market inactive and 10% were ever long-term absent during follow-up. Compared with pre-infection, inactivity was higher in participants reporting Long Covid 30 to <40 weeks [adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 1.45; 95% CI: 1.17–1.81] or 40 to <52 weeks (aOR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.05–1.72) post-infection. Combining with official statistics on Long Covid prevalence, and assuming a correct statistical model, our estimates translate to 27 000 (95% CI: 6000–47 000) working-age adults in the UK being inactive because of Long Covid in July 2022."
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
* I know someone that contracted Covid late fall of 2020 and is still disabled from Long Covid/PASC with daily fevers and fatigue. If they don't get a good night's sleep and eat enough, they're wiped out for 1-2 days afterward.
* Have another friend that is still dealing with smell and taste changes a bit over a year out. Luckily the "rotting garlic" smell and most everything tasting "bitter" (their words) has significantly improved. Now most things have a little bit of normal smell and some taste has returned.
* Another friend's step dad, in his mid 60s, had a heart attack and died a couple months after a week long hospital stay due to Covid. Hard to say exactly if Covid damaged something that lead to it, but his doctor thinks it's probably likely but can't prove it. He was maybe 25-30lbs overweight, which of course does raise the chances of bad outcomes from Covid, but no other chronic conditions like diabetes or COPD. He walked a few miles nearly every day before getting sick.
I once saw someone point out that AIDS is "Long HIV" and Multiple Sclerosis is "Long Guillain-Barre Syndrome", so in 20 years we'll have a new name for Long COVID and people will memory-hole being dismissive of symptoms.
In reality, most people have never even had the flu. They often mistake a severe common cold for the flu. The true influenza hits you hard, like a brick wall, and has a significant fatality rate among the elderly. The primary contrast between COVID-19 and the flu has always been the R-factor, which indicates how many people an infected person will spread the virus to. The flu typically has an R-factor of around 1, just enough to sustain itself. On the other hand, COVID-19 has an R-factor closer to 2, meaning that one person can infect 2, then 4, 8, 16, and so on. This is why many countries implemented drastic measures initially. Now that vulnerable populations are vaccinated and the general population has some level of herd immunity, the situation is not as alarming. The CDC implemented severe measures, but the new guidance does not imply that "COVID-19 was not a big deal" as some individuals are suggesting. It falls somewhere in between - there were valid reasons for the initial actions taken, some measures may have been missteps, but overall the situation has improved.
"Researchers analysed blood samples from volunteers in Southern China, looking at antibody levels against nine different influenza strains that circulated from 1968 to 2009.
They found that while children get flu on average every other year, flu infections become less frequent as people progress through childhood and early adulthood. From the age of 30 onwards, flu infections tend to occur at a steady rate of about two per decade."
> In reality, most people have never even had the flu. They often mistake a severe common cold for the flu.
Really? My understanding is that high fever and body aches are the distinguishing factors between flu and other illnesses, and I distinctly remember having the flu a few times (including when I had it a few years ago and was given a test to confirm). I'd be very surprised if fewer than 50% of the population had ever had the flu.
I would agree that people sometimes use the word "flu" to refer to things that are not actually the flu, but I doubt that there are that many people out there who have been around for ~4 decades but never got the flu.
Sample size one, but I’ve only had the flu once in my life (29 yo). It was back in 2007 when the vaccine whiffed on the dominant strain. I remember a two week period of little energy at first and then some energy I could expend on one task a day (for example, a shower). The flu is no joke, but getting it seems pretty hard from my anecdotal experience.
The lockdowns were irresponsible (people didn't obey them anyway), and now this is stupid and irresponsible again. Don't judge a disease by it symptoms - most cancers don't have any until it's too late! The piling evidence of the damage every COVID-19 reinfection does is overwhelming! This is NOT flu-like! Many other diseases, some very serious, share similar symptoms, but they don't call them "flu-like", because it would be crazy!
I suppose that depends on your physical location to say if they weren't obeyed. It's true they weren't followed 100% in spirit or in practice, but they were to enough degree. At least in my area, from when lockdowns started until probably mid 2022 traffic wasn't something I had to worry about anymore. Now it seems to be back to normal. Stores seem even busier now than they were before Covid, etc.
In our lockdown capacity, it demonstrate how fast the virus spread and how much damage it did with a population largely immunologically naive to Covid). I can only imagine what would have happened in the US had it just been business as usual.
My family of 4 traveled internationally during COVID-19 and wore N95 and FFP3 face masks, didn't eat at the airplane, we only ate briefly at airports in secluded areas, and never got COVID-19. In fact, we only got COVID-19... at the pool, i.e., outside. My daughter was without a face mask and her friend, who was later tested positive, was 10-15 minutes away. We know for sure it was him infecting her outside in a larger than the standard "social distance", because she was home for 2-3 weeks and didn't see anybody else. Only she was positive and had symptoms.
There was enough science to avoid lockdowns. Face masks (not the surgical kinds though) work, but they needed to educate people to wear them consistently and that there's no point in wearing a mask and then taking it out to eat or drink water for 1 minute. They also changed it to "face covering," allowing people to wear germ-infested cloths and surgical masks.
Cloths masks really don't do anything against a virus that persists in tiny droplets that hover in the air making it airborne spread. They might have worked against droplets fairly well if both parties are wearing them but by the time they introduced cloth masks the authorities knew the science said it was airborne. However N95/FFP2 and definitely P100 masks are highly effective and there are plenty of people who have used them since the beginning of the pandemic who have never caught Covid as confirmed by antibody tests. Proper PPE works very effectively against Covid (and Flu, measles, colds etc) and reduces the risk drastically.
You have and are doing the right thing to protect your health against a virus where about 250,000 medical papers all show is very bad news for humans.
Slight exaggeration here. I have several older family members who have not had COVID yet. They wear masks in grocery stores and don't go to movie theaters anymore, but they live in the suburbs are several notches from living in a cabin in the woods.
In greater NYC area you can just make an appointment and walk into any CVS or Walgreens and add a booster of your choice, every 2+ months (which is the frequency CDC mentions, though research graphs suggest moderate booster effect doesn't disappear for 6 - 9 months), and supposedly your insurance will cover it if you're in a window the federal government isn't covering it, but so far they still seem to be covering it.
Visitors from outside the US are still being able to walk in and get it as well.
YMMV etc. etc., but this is accurate in greater NYC area as of January/February 2024.
Readit News
Hospitalization and death is different, long covid is different, and they mention both, specifically.
Even WSJ coverage of this emphasized that point, and it's hardly a liberal rag, phrasing as "Treat it more like flu" not that the disease itself is flu-like.
On the contrary, WSJ point out:
However, public health officials cautioned that Covid still isn’t the same as the flu or other respiratory viruses. “Let’s be clear. Covid-19 is not the flu,” said Jackson at the CDC. “It still causes more serious illness and leads to more lasting effects,” he said.
Public-health experts and physicians note that Covid is still a disease that is cited as a cause of death in more than 1,000 people a week, according to CDC data. And long Covid, with symptoms that can linger months and even years, hasn’t gone away.
https://www.wsj.com/health/wellness/covid-guidelines-2024-cd...
Finally, CDC didn't ditch 5 day precautions. The part most coverage isn't headlining, CDC say if you're not isolating, wear a well-fitting mask, keep your distance from people, for five days.
They also say during that 5 days have clean air, which they define as outside air, higher fresh air mix, and purification. An office demanding people come in should ask their building if they've adopted the post-pandemic ASHRAE directional guidance (not yet formalized).
With recent research attributing long covid brain-fog to leaking blood in the brain, and research is still finding other unexplained effects, it may be worthwhile to weigh that we have a pretty good handle on the flu, but ...
TL;DR: We are still learning about this thing.
FTA: "The CDC acknowledged that the eased isolation guidance will create 'residual risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission,' and that most people are no longer infectious only after 8 to 10 days. As such, the agency urged people to follow additional interventions—including masking, testing, distancing, hygiene, and improving air quality—for five additional days after their isolation period."
Given that many people were ignoring the prior advice before this advice came out, I doubt it will effect little change. The same recommendations should have been applied to all influenza-like-illness even before Covid, but people mostly just try to work until they can't, then stay home until they can, and come back to work anyway.
1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9396366/
[1] https://skepchick.org/2024/02/the-cdc-gives-up-on-covid-19/
[2] https://med-mastodon.com/@luckytran/112021781878554992
A very pragmatic position but not one that has much to do with the science of sars-cov-2 shed duration or infective window.
That's just not how it works though. Each subsequent infection increases the risk of bad outcomes (1)
The CDC must know this
1) https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/12/27/...
https://time.com/6553340/covid-19-reinfection-risk/
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/23/repeat-covid-i...
It is unarguable that the risk of the first exposure to a novel virus is much greater than subsequent exposures. I say this because T-cells generalize across mutations. And T-cells stay tissue resident for years to decades (unfortunately sars-cov-2 IgG and IgA antibodies are gone by 6 months).
Your T-cells from the first sars-cov-2 exposure will start killing infected cells much faster once you've been exposed. This limits the replication earlier and reduces the viral load. This reduces damage done.
Weird side effects like the collection of things called long-covid have been shown in study after study not to be related to viral load. So whatever risk is associated with reinfection does not decrease in that sense. But in the dying sense? It decreases a lot.
As one of the rare few, I'd rather not take risks, especially since there's still so much developing science behind the long term effects of COVID. Good to know the CDC does not in fact care about disease control for those who heeded their advice up until now.
Spreading respiratory viruses is really called living in a normal human society, and for whatever reason medical professions abandoned every conventional advice and emergency plan of the past that was prepared for responding to novel respiratory contagious disease of the sort a coronavirus would be, that spares the vast majority of healthy people, and resorted to what I call Open Air Surveillance Fascism.
I'll never forget the absurdity of healthy people on a beach, which was probably the safest thing a person could do with maximum ventilation and full sunlight, with some moron shaming everyone while dressed in a reaper outfit.
First I had muscle spasms and twitches, then intermittent joint pain, trouble sleeping, hives on occasion while running, now exocrine pancreatic insufficiency that seems like it’s idiopathic (MRI is confirming today). I’m scared as hell and any attempt at diagnosis or treatment is a dead end or makes things worse.
2021: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/covid-19-likely-res...
NHS study from 2022: "Results Of 206 299 participants (mean age 45 years, 54% female, 92% white), 15% were ever labour market inactive and 10% were ever long-term absent during follow-up. Compared with pre-infection, inactivity was higher in participants reporting Long Covid 30 to <40 weeks [adjusted odds ratio (aOR): 1.45; 95% CI: 1.17–1.81] or 40 to <52 weeks (aOR: 1.34; 95% CI: 1.05–1.72) post-infection. Combining with official statistics on Long Covid prevalence, and assuming a correct statistical model, our estimates translate to 27 000 (95% CI: 6000–47 000) working-age adults in the UK being inactive because of Long Covid in July 2022." https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/advance-article/doi/10.1093/...
* I know someone that contracted Covid late fall of 2020 and is still disabled from Long Covid/PASC with daily fevers and fatigue. If they don't get a good night's sleep and eat enough, they're wiped out for 1-2 days afterward.
* Have another friend that is still dealing with smell and taste changes a bit over a year out. Luckily the "rotting garlic" smell and most everything tasting "bitter" (their words) has significantly improved. Now most things have a little bit of normal smell and some taste has returned.
* Another friend's step dad, in his mid 60s, had a heart attack and died a couple months after a week long hospital stay due to Covid. Hard to say exactly if Covid damaged something that lead to it, but his doctor thinks it's probably likely but can't prove it. He was maybe 25-30lbs overweight, which of course does raise the chances of bad outcomes from Covid, but no other chronic conditions like diabetes or COPD. He walked a few miles nearly every day before getting sick.
"Researchers analysed blood samples from volunteers in Southern China, looking at antibody levels against nine different influenza strains that circulated from 1968 to 2009.
They found that while children get flu on average every other year, flu infections become less frequent as people progress through childhood and early adulthood. From the age of 30 onwards, flu infections tend to occur at a steady rate of about two per decade."
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/164239/adults-only-really-ca...
Oops, I was wrong there, thank you for the link.
Deleted Comment
Really? My understanding is that high fever and body aches are the distinguishing factors between flu and other illnesses, and I distinctly remember having the flu a few times (including when I had it a few years ago and was given a test to confirm). I'd be very surprised if fewer than 50% of the population had ever had the flu.
I would agree that people sometimes use the word "flu" to refer to things that are not actually the flu, but I doubt that there are that many people out there who have been around for ~4 decades but never got the flu.
On top, this is now the most contagious virus!
In our lockdown capacity, it demonstrate how fast the virus spread and how much damage it did with a population largely immunologically naive to Covid). I can only imagine what would have happened in the US had it just been business as usual.
Dead Comment
I was wearing a 3m respirator with p100 cartridges.
One because the paper masks were hard to find, two they reduce but do not eliminate the risk of infection, and three those cartridges last way longer.
Never caught it either.
You have and are doing the right thing to protect your health against a virus where about 250,000 medical papers all show is very bad news for humans.
Deleted Comment
Visitors from outside the US are still being able to walk in and get it as well.
YMMV etc. etc., but this is accurate in greater NYC area as of January/February 2024.