I was quadruple-vaccinated due to being on immunosuppressants, and yet when I finally caught the virus (ironically at a medical science conference) it resulted in a stay at hospital, and now 18 months later I still have rapid heartbeat and heavy breathing after walking up a single flight of stairs, and real trouble concentrating on my work.
For the vast majority of people, yes Covid is on the level of a cold. However for some of us, it's f*** scary. I knew in advance that if I caught it, then it would likely be bad. It's a scary proposition watching the political decisions and individual decisions being made and seeing that the country has basically decided that my life should be written off in favour of a little bit of crowd-pleasing and avoiding mild inconvenience. I have now had 7 vaccines, yet I still have no confidence that I would survive a second infection. That's a level of dread that is unhealthy having hanging over you all the time.
I was teaching at a course a while back, and I saw that the professor in charge of the department running it (who wasn't actually providing any of the teaching and didn't really need to be there) was sniffling all the way through the whole thing, and then a couple of days later I was contacted by an organiser saying that a whole load of people who attended had caught Covid. I could not believe the stupidity from someone who is actually very intelligent. It's an example of very mild inconvenience to just stay at home if you're unwell, because you have no idea if there's someone vulnerable that you're going to infect and potentially kill. I have seen multiple people in the last couple of months visibly unwell, admitting that their other half tested positive for Covid a few days ago, but not believing that they had it themselves and still going out and meeting up with people. That level of wilful ignorance is (in my mind) atrocious in this day and age.
I'm extremely lucky to have a job where I can work from home almost 100% of the time. I can't see this changing in the next couple of years at least. Partly because people believe that "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu".
I'm sorry that you had such a terrible reaction to COVID. Were you wearing a mask at the time you were infected?
I think you need to understand that COVID is never going away. It will always be around and it will always mutate. "In 2023, COVID is a bad cold/flu" is completely true for 99.9% of the entire world, and people like you will need to figure out how to protect yourself, and it's obvious we need to do more research to figure out how to protect people like you.
It's obvious vaccines and masks did nothing to protect you which is really unfortunate because that has been the only strategy they have taken over the last 3 years. This is why I think studying what makes you different from others will help doctors and scientists figure out how to treat it.
But for the vast majority of us, we don't need to keep thinking it's more than a flu and we should figure out how to free ourselves from things like over-quarantining.
> Famously, Covid is different in that it can be spread asymptomatically.
This is another fallacy. All they did was test for the presence of the virus through PCR tests. But that doesn't show anything about infectivity. Every study I could find showed decreasing confidence over the years since 2020 that asymptomatic patients are actually infectious/contagious. Just because they can find the virus on you doesn't mean that you're infectious, those are two different things, and something that actually hasn't been measured properly.
