Ancestors

Toot

Written by Dr Sorcha O’Brien on 2023-12-28 at 07:42

Does anyone in Ireland have any data or anecdotal evidence on how long Covid infections are lasting in this current surge? I have someone here on Day 9 and we’re wondering when it is likely to end 🫠

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Descendants

Written by Graydon on 2023-12-28 at 13:27

@_sorcha length of the acute phase is highly dependent on the variant you have. Wild type would be around fourteen days; some of the Omicron variants were down around five.

In the current surge, it matters if you've got JN.1 or an XBB.* or something else, and I have no idea how you'd find that out.

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Written by Dr Sorcha O’Brien on 2023-12-28 at 15:22

@graydon From memory, I think you would need to have a PCR test done and picked to be sequenced, to find that out for sure, but you can’t really get one outside of hospital. I only know one person who had a PCR sequenced by the HSE last year, because she picked hers up in Italy right when there was a new variant coming in and they wanted to check if she had caught that.

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Written by Graydon on 2023-12-28 at 17:45

@_sorcha It's about like that, here; the technical ability to find out which variant it is exists, but is inaccessible even to most doctors. (and the reasons such a test will be ordered aren't individual-care reasons.)

That drops back on "two negative tests, two days apart" to be sure it's over; a lot of COVID variants have a two-phase acute infection. (This comes up in the context of Paxlovid effectiveness and the argument about the standard five-day course being too short.)

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Written by Dr Sorcha O’Brien on 2023-12-28 at 18:13

@graydon Interesting about the two phase acute infection - she had strong lines on the antigen tests for 5 days, then one faint one, and then it went back to being medium strong again since then, with no sign of fading yet on day 9. Do you know which variants have two phases?

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Written by Graydon on 2023-12-28 at 18:24

@_sorcha https://hms.harvard.edu/news/two-phase-infection describes the two phases as "most of the immune reaction is in the lungs" for the first phase and "everywhere else" in the second phase. (There isn't much viral replication in the lungs; it seems to infect your nose and fall into your lungs.)

I don't know which variants have biases towards two phases; I doubt there's anything that isn't not-yet-published-lab-work for the current circulating variants. Experiencing two acute phases is more concerning for severity.

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