![]() So with Paxlovid being a newsworthy topic right in the subject matter of this site, I'll give a personal report. One of the interesting things about the coronavirus pandemic is that the viral infection did not seem to provide an easy ramp into bacterial infection - there's no telling how many more deaths we would have had so far if that had been a common sequel (as it was in the 1918 influenza epidemic, which also took place under worse public health conditions in general). Zero out of five stars, would not try again, and if it weren't for modern antibiotics this blog might have come to an abrupt halt in early 2016 along with everything else I was doing, such as breathing. I cannot say enough bad things about bacterial pneumonia, by the way. And ever since a bout of double pneumonia a few years back, I have been rather protective of my respiratory system, since my lungs took some damage that is still easily visible to radiologists. Earlier this year I had my 60th birthday, and while that's not tremendously old, it ain't the first bloom of youth, either. ![]() Other factors are that I am not, in fact, the proverbial spring chicken. ![]() Those and other undesirable systemic effects of the infection are likely to be tied to (among other things) viral load and the time needed to clear the infection - you would have to guess that the more virus you are exposed to for a longer time, the more problems are that you could be facing. My reasoning (which is similar to several other people that responded to a Twitter post of mine on the subject) was that one of the main things I would want to avoid is "long Covid" type sequels to the infection. I went back and forth on the question of whether to take Paxlovid, and finally decided to go ahead although there's no well-controlled evidence either way for its use in vaccinated patients like me. But the wastewater readout is hard to dodge: everyone sheds viral mRNA if they're infected, and everyone goes to the bathroom. Case numbers are a more problematic indicator than ever these days, of course, since home testing leaves even more cases officially unreported. I've been watching the Boston wastewater mRNA counts for some time - while they are (fortunately) nowhere close to the levels that they hit during the earlier Omicron spike, they are climbing. So I made it a bit over two years without getting infected, but the latest variant has indeed caught up with me - as it seems to be catching up with plenty of people here in the Northeast, including plenty who have already been around that track before. A rapid antigen test on Saturday was negative, but in retrospect that was too early, because an RT-PCR test on Monday came back positive for SARS-CoV-2 (at which point a second antigen test was indeed a bright, glowing positive as well). Starting last Friday I began to show what felt like spring-cold respiratory symptoms, which kept getting nastier each day. When I wrote this recent update on Paxlovid, I had no idea how relevant I was going to find my own blog post very shortly.
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