I have a relative that got shingles on his face early last year, and in his case, it also took months to heal – something like six months. He’s retired, and for the first several weeks, about all he did was sleep.
And while we’re on this subject, another vaccination that everyone – especially those over 50 – should get is a pneumonia shot:
For US adults, pneumonia is the most common cause of disease-related hospital admissions. About 1 million adults in the US seek care in a hospital due to pneumonia every year, and 50,000 die from this disease.
I still say that in those places where the omicron “shock wave” hadn’t yet hit, or hasn’t yet hit, some or all of the initial rise in hospitalizations/ICU must have been due to delta, since in almost all areas the initial upswing (or decrease in the rate of decline) pre-dates omicron’s presence in the US, and there’s that nominal two-week offset between infection and severe disease.
ICU support and deaths in London haven’t at all followed the trend of cases, and some hospitalized patients are no doubt there for other reasons, as has been the case in reporting such numbers elsewhere.
Most of those places who haven’t experienced omicron according to the graphs are likely not reporting correct numbers (a number of data collection centers have complained over the last several months that less and less numbers are reported in particular from red states.) I know we had the discussion before and we disagree here but I think that the omicron variant is the dominant variant in pretty much every state for sometime now.
I won’t belabor our discussion about omicron dominance (meaning, greater than 50%), especially given the CDC’s latest (ahem – cough, cough) data.
But I do think that a good share, in fact likely a majority, of severely ill hospitalized patients in December – especially early December – were delta. And that some of those cases have been ongoing.
Where we have had data, it took Omicron only two or three weeks to supplant Delta.
Where you see a graph of cases where there was a modest curve up, that might have been Delta getting worse with the season, but as soon as you see the exponential spike, that was Omicron.
I agree with this. What I’ve been calling the “shock wave” of cases (true to my being a former professor of compressible fluid mechanics) is definitely Omicron.
Also, I’ll comment that I just finished reading the Intelligencer article that Honkman posted, and it’s excellent. Long, but very much worth a read-through for a balanced review and assessment.
Hubs got shingles in the face and ended up with a skin infection. In the Hospital for nearly a week. Not good times. The shot can be a doozy (And it’s a 2 parter)… but it’s worth it.
I didn’t have too much in the way of after-effects from either of the two Shingrix shots, if I recall correctly. (It was about three or four years ago.) But my DH companion was really groggy (and didn’t feel so hot) for a couple of days after the second one, which was just last month, about 30 days after her third covid shot. She had more after-effects than I did with all three covid injections, too. I think it’s because she has a more robust immune system than I do. But whatever the level of after-effects from Shingrix, it is, as you say, worth it.
Good grief. Surely something wrong here, I hope. I suppose the variants will just keep coming, but as the researchers speculate, this one might also be overtaken by omicron. And not every variant is a “variant of concern”.
Most of them won’t have an evolutionary advantage over omicron but it is highly unlikely that omicron will be the last variant spreading across the world. I am always surprised when people expect that everything will be over and we are back to normal once the omicron wave is over.
There were also variants between alpha and delta, and between delta and omicron, none of which were particularly troublesome. Also, there may be some error in the identification of these strains. We’ll see if the WHO decides to even give either of these Greek names. (I doubt that “deltacron” would be an official name.) Still, any new strain is an unwelcome development.
