COVID-19 & Paxlovid: After Day 8

Today is day 8 of my COVID-19 + paxlovid personal experience, i.e., 3 days past the last dose. Time to check for rebound infection.

Paxlovid rebound

We hear a lot here at Chez Weekend about “paxlovid rebound”, and dark paranoid mumbles about how it proves paxlovid doesn’t work, or Pfizer has some dark scheme to keep us all sick forever, and so on.

There is a technical term for that sort of thinking: nonsense. Possibly “damfool nonsense”, depending on my state of pique in the moment.

The truth is, paxlovid works remarkably well. As we noted last June, empirical data from Israel on real patients shows it dramatically improves the situation for people over 65: a 4-fold reduction in deaths and a 3-fold reduction in hospitalizations.

I’ll take that.

In fact, I did take that. (Thanks to my on-the-ball PCP and nurse practitioner.)

But it may simply be that the course of paxlovid is just a bit too short: it knocks the viral load way down, but doesn’t knock it out. So the remnant virus can come back, at least a little. But your immune system is at that point trained to fight it.

The obvious move is another course of paxlovid, and that is indeed very sensibly what happened with the very sensible Tony Fauci. ^[1]

So… rebound, or no rebound?

So the question before us today is: do we need to ask for a second course of paxlovid, or not?

I am feeling a little off, and very tired. That could just be hanging over from extreme immune reaction to last week’s COVID-19 festivities, or it could be a rebound infection.

Fortunately, as shown in the RAT (“Rapid Antigen Test”, i.e., COVID-19 home test) result here, I don’t have a rebound case.

Phew!

Nothing to do now but get some rest. I can do that.

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Notes & References

1: A Mitropoulos, “Fauci says he’s taking 2nd course of Paxlovid after experiencing rebound with the antiviral treatment”, ABC News, 2022-Jun-29. ↩