Through the miserable years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bob Wachter, the University of California-San Francisco medical department chair, became a beacon of guidance to hundreds of thousands who followed his social media tips on avoiding the virus that killed more than 1.1 million Americans.
Though he works in a hospital that treated COVID patients, Wachter managed to avoid the respiratory disease through a regimen of crowd avoidance, medical-grade mask-wearing, vaccination and boosting — as well as a little luck.
But this week, he told his 274,000 Twitter followers: “my luck ran out.”
“My case is a cautionary tale, particularly for the ‘just a cold’ folks,” Wachter tweeted in a long thread about his ordeal Wednesday evening. “Mine definitely was not… I literally have scars to show for it.”
Few today pay much mind to the virus that upended life around the world from 2020 through 2022. But Wachter noted the virus is still out there and still poses a threat, though not as great as it did before mutating into less virulent variants and before widespread population immunity from vaccines and prior infection led to declining deaths and an end to public health emergencies.
Now that the federal and state public health emergencies are over, COVID cases are no longer being tracked, but people hospitalized with COVID reached an all-time low in California in recent weeks. There have been fewer than 1,000 COVID patients in the state’s hospitals since early June. Since an all-pandemic low of 611 hospitalized patients on July 2, it has risen to slightly over 800 by July 8. Federal authorities are planning an updated COVID-19 vaccine booster for the fall.
Wachter said he received his second “bivalent” vaccine booster tailored to protect against the more recent omicron variants in April, but he noted that the two-to-three month “window of protection” it offers “had passed.” He also acknowledged he “let down my guard a bit,” — he…
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