Nah, the real danger is the result of repeated cumulative reinfection damage from a still-poorly-understood virus that causes more and more damage to the vascular system and every organ connected to it. Long Covid is only beginning to be recognized for the mass disabling event it is, and the response of governments from the municpal all the way to the federal levels have been to let it rip, stop testing, shut down tracking sites, repeal mask mandates, and declare victory. Literally doing the thing they rightly mocked Trump for suggesting.

Now over a million people have died in the US alone, and our government has decided to force everyone back to work to sustain commercial real estate profits, and in the process condemned us all to a lifetime of body-destroying reinfections by a virus who's key traits are infectiousness and rapid evolution.

None of this had to happen. We could have had a real quarantine, just a month or two back in 2019, but that would require making slightly less money for a brief period of time, so instead we get to live in eternal plague world. The hobbling of any effective covid response by our ruling class in favor of more lucrative half-measures and non-measures is beyond a humanitarian disaster, it's a crime of unprecedented scale.

Yearly boosters

HA!

I should be so lucky. My last booster was over a year ago, and there are no plans to introduce them for any but the oldest and youngest people in Britain.

The problem is that the latest vaccines don't contain the latest variant - they're always going to be behind the curve because it takes time to develop them after a new variant emerges.

For example, here in NZ, we're still giving people the bivalent mix designed for the omicron BA.4/BA.5 variant (and the ones before it) which is now about 2 years old and hasn't been seen here for about 9 months.

There's a non-zero level of protection from those vaccines, but they're not keeping up with the virus in real time.

From an overseas perspective I can tell you that practically nobody in Australia is taking any form of booster. Elderly populations are, particularly those in a care setting but the general population are completely uninterested.

This is a combination of most people having been infected with CV19 at least once and not being particularly badly affected, and most people having had either direct or indirect experience of negative side effects from vaccination, and the now predominantly negative media coverage of the vaccination campaign.

If there is a marked shift towards increased mortality in any given strain, Australia is fucked. Thankfully that does not seem to be the trajectory of the virus at this time.

sick right now in Ireland (can't be sure but we're exploding with this variant)

for me, fatigue, stuffed & runny nose which is making me cough. on day 1 I had a headache but only for that day. I had a fever for about 6 hours. sneezing, gastro fun.

Wife has a dry cough. she had a wicked fever with chills. also gastro fun, which is fun for me by proxy.

"I don't know that it's time to worry about this (EG.5) just yet. We know very little about this new variant. There's currently no evidence to suggest that it causes more severe illness. And the CDC is indicating that it does appear to be susceptible to COVID vaccines, which is good news."

From an AMA gathering on July 26, (speaker is Andrea Garcia, JD, MPH, vice president, science, medicine & public health, American Medical Association)

link to PDF here