Corona was again – Maurice de Hond

Read the full article: Has Corona returned again?

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November last year – as far as I know – I contracted Corona for the first time. In my case, it was limited to a cold, strange cough, and two days of mild fever. My family members got it after three days and their complaint was a little different from mine. That was during the delta period. I had already decided not to take a booster shot after my baseline vaccinations in April/May 2021. I have continued to take D3+K2 and zinc supplements consistently.

In the last 12 months – I think – I have not had coronavirus. I’ve had a cold several times, but it often bothers me. My family members got it again, but lighter than the first time.

I am not reinforced anymore. But also, after I had Corona the first time, I no longer used a CO meter when I was in rooms with many people. I thought it was unnecessary, given that I already had covid and Omicron Much less harmful than the previous variants.

Last Monday I caught a cold and had a very mild fever. Actually, I wasn’t planning to check if it was due to Corona or not, but I had dinner two days ago at my football club with more than 100 people, and I was curious if I could catch Coronavirus there. The test was positive, so there’s a very good chance it happened on that occasion. Especially because in those previous weeks I had not spent much time in a limited indoor space with many people.

After one day, the fever was gone, and after two days, the cold. If I hadn’t taken a corona test, I wouldn’t have noticed anything other than a “normal” cold. I checked if many other people that evening had experienced something similar, but that was not the case. Precisely because so many people have already been infected with Corona, there will be no super spread events to the extent that there were two years ago.

The situation has returned to normal

In many ways, this is an indication that we have entered a phase in which corona should not be viewed differently from the flu, cold, or other respiratory disease.

I am always annoyed by those who say they have corona, but fortunately it wasn’t so bad, because they were vaccinated twice and boosted three times. Therefore, I will not relate my personal experience to my personal decisions. There is a laundry list of possibilities as to why someone may or may not have an infection and whether or not it is something serious.

It is really time to stop treating Corona differently from other problems that may befall you from the organs of the respiratory system.

Influenza and RSV

In a number of other countries, we are seeing the number of RSV infections in young children rising sharply again. Seems like a kind of “catch-up” kind of thing. In Australia, influenza played a strong role in the winter, but we saw that wave again in March-April this year.

The end of November is the usual time when influenza begins to arrive in the Netherlands. It will be interesting to know if and when that will happen in the Netherlands. But it is also certain to see how the medical experts, who have worked in the media for the past 2.5 years, will act, and whether there will be a smooth transition from a Corona alarm to a flu alert.

And what has become interesting is the question of whether you have contracted corona in recent months, your chance of catching the flu has become smaller or greater. This also applies to the Corona vaccine, so what effect does this have on the chance of contracting the flu? Although I think it’s hard to tell, because the vast majority of those over 60 who take a third booster shot will also have a flu shot.

In the US, I hear that in many places the new booster vaccine and the flu vaccine are being administered at the same time.

Wastewater figures show a clear decline, at least in the Netherlands.

This development can be best seen with our hospital admissions:

We rarely see influenza in the Netherlands at the moment. But in the United States, these numbers are already very high. The site where these developments can be followed week by year It shows that the current numbers for influenza came in 8 weeks earlier than usual. In Los Angeles, measures have already been announced to start wearing mouth masks in certain places.

Why this is the case now in the US and not (yet) in Europe is not clear. But I wouldn’t be surprised, especially now that the weather is getting colder (and drier in absolute terms), and that the flu will also break out in Europe in the short term. (In the United States, it is also associated with a significant increase in RSV in young children.)

How severe the consequences of influenza will be depends on which variant then becomes dominant. But we’ve made it through bad flu seasons (like 2015 and 2018) without newspapers being filled with them or society disrupting. The big question will be whether the flu is severe now – which will exacerbate staff problems in health care – we will continue the way we did before 2020 or whether we will pick up aspects of the approach from 2020. Let’s be alert to these signs and make sure we (and others) ) We are not driven to madness again.

It may also happen in the future that the RSV corona chain will appear in Rhinovirus and influenza, but it seems that if one is so prominent, the other is not, so that in a year the net effect will not be of anything. bigger than before. This means that the prominent role of Covid-19 in the past 2.5 years should be a thing of the past.