Master Scalir has COVID. He almost surely got it from a New Years Eve party which he attends each year. It's a massive indoor party and exactly the type of thing where you'd catch COVID (similar to the WSOP).
He had COVID once before, in October 2020. He is almost 53 years old.
It is likely he got the new XBB 1.5 variant, which mutated from Omicron BA.2.
This is important because Master Scalir is obsessed with vaccines and has gotten 5 shots, including the bivalent booster. Yet he got COVID XBB 1.5 anyway. But there's a good reason for this:
The bivalent vaccine developers made a huge mistake! They only developed it to fight a combo of original COVID (??) and BA.4/BA.5. For some reason, they did not consider BA.2, which was mostly gone but still active in the population!
The incorrect thinking at the time was that BA.2 and its offshoots accounted for less than 5% of all cases, and seemed to be on a slow decline. They assumed that would never be the variant to mutate and beat the then-dominant BA.5.
Turned out that's exactly what happened. BA.2 combined with the XBB variant (which never made it to the US), and became the super contagious XBB 1.5, which easily has been beating out the BA.5 offshoots (BQ.1 and BQ.1.1). Soon almost all of the COVID cases in the US will be XBB 1.5. It is already the most common variant in 2023. And it busts right the fuck through the bivalent vaccine.
The good news? It is no more severe than previous Omicron variants, and in fact may be less dangerous, because the mutation which allows it to evade antibodies also makes it less virulent.
Originally Posted by BartHanson
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