If anyone else here has actually treated COVID feel free to chime in. Not here to get political just to offer some counternarrative from what I see so often in crypto spaces.

2020 was a nightmare, constantly sending patients to the ICU. I stopped following up on the charts of those patients because they so often didn't make it out. Winter was scary and I honestly feel scarred a bit inside from the experience.

Throughout 2021 as vaccines became widespread, especially through the delta wave, the patients we were treating were majority unvaccinated, my unscientific guess 8:1 ratio, the latter vaccinated being majority elderly + immunosuppressed (renal transplants, etc). Saw a ton of unvaccinated younger patients in 40s who spent 3-4 weeks in the hospital but most young patients made it out eventually. The vast majority hospitalized were directly for COVID, outside of a small % of patients that matched the positivity rate in the local community.

With Omicron things have changed significantly. We saw our hospital of 500+ beds fill up to 180+ beds extremely quickly. This is an insane % of hospital beds for 1 disease given how many other things we need to treat. People were sick but not as sick as delta and prior waves. Fewer calls to ICU. Still majority unvaccinated. After that initial wave we saw the hospitalization bed # decay quickly- every week the number of beds occupied cut in half. Never seen anything like it.

Since then I've continued to see a trickle of COVID patients, but I haven't had to call the ICU specifically for COVID pneumonia since early February. We're just not seeing severe ARDS anymore with Omicron. Most of our patients with respiratory issues + COVID are here for a mix of COPD/CHF/pneumonia + being miserable with COVID but it is hard to disentangle WITH or FOR COVID hospitalizations. Compared to 2021 I would guess the majority of our patients are now incidentally miserable with COVID febrile symptoms + non-respiratory hospitalization especially as they are catching it more easily in our emergency departments. So far we've seen subsequent B.x waves in the community go up and down but FOR COVID hospitalizations have mirrored with only a small increase in amplitude.

The vaccine did a remarkable job preventing people from getting hospitalized in 2021. I think it's clear it does little to nothing to prevent reinfection and spread since the dominance of Omicron. As this thing continues to mutate (hopefully continues to get less mild) there is probably diminishing utility to an April 2020 strain vaccine.