Global Covid-19 cases up 80% as new sub-variant emerges

WHO warned that the reported number of cases and deaths do not reflect the true numbers. Read more at straitstimes.com.

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Dang it.

At least the new vaccine is supposed to protect against the newest variant. Not looking forward to another shot, though.

https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/what-to-know-about-the-eg5-variant
- In a way, people are right. It's just the flu now. Not in symptoms or severity, but in the way that we'll just have to keep doing regular vaccinations.
  
  Just think, if we had shut down for 2~weeks at the beginning and enforced vaccination at gunpoint, we wouldn't be in this mess.
  
  The UK doesn't even do that anymore, unless you're over 65. Otherwise you can't get vaccinated.
  
  Well you don't get long COVID from the flu so it's not like the flu at all.
- The ongoing problem with new variants is that vaccine research has to forecast which mutations are going to be dominant by the time that the research has been undertaken. The boosters from a year ago were focused on BA5, but the latest EG5 variant quickly becoming dominant is from the XBB path.
  https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-summary
I caught it last week after three years evading all the other variants. My husband brought it home from his delivery job, and he was fully vaccinated and boosted.

Shit sucks yo. I mostly feel better now after ~2-3 days of hell last weekend, but I'm tired and the cough just won't go away. My continued existence is enabled only by all the tea, ramen, cough drops, and menthol vapor products I'm consuming.

90 comments