Its not supposed to be ground for generalisation, but it may be the discovery of interesting side-effects to learn more about:
(1) "Scientists discovered that the virus had destroyed endothelial cells by observing patients who died of Covid."
(2) "In the first instance, it should be pointed out that the deaths observed were rare and, above all, that the damage to the brain was potentially reversible."
(3) "The study shows this could be the case for patients who developed a severe form of the disease. For people who have had a more minor form of the illness, however, nothing is certain."
I.e. these people died ... so selection bias is quite likely.
“we sought to reproduce the findings in two animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In hamsters infected with SARS-CoV-2, the length of string vessels increased on day 4 after infection […]. Interestingly, _the_increase_was_transient_ and normalized at later time points. A similar finding was observed in K18-hACE2 mice”
⇒ patients who are seriously ill have brain damage. If you subsequently die, you won’t recover.
I read this more a (possibly tiny, possibly large; I can’t tell) contribution to the discussion on whether COVID enters the brain than about long-term damage.
Yeah COVID is definitely a vascular disease and unfortunately that effects all parts of the body. It is interesting that my wife's triage line is now handling manymany reports from single and double vaccinated people getting partial or full paralysis, or other serious neurological issues/syndromes within 24-36 hours post inoculation. Just when she thinks she's going to get the J&J so that she can keep her job after Dec. 8th (despite being 100% remote and already having natural immunity), she gets yet another call about serious and often unreported events from a vaccinated patient, which change her mind.
It (at least the spike protein generated by vaxx) definitely seems to cross the blood-brain barrier in some people to some degree, and I believe the bio-distribution study Japanese researchers carried out demonstrated that.
Billions of people have been safely vaccinated. Tell your wife to stop trying to do epidemiology from anecdotes. And you stop spreading that misinformation on the internet.
My wife is an RN that has treated over 9K COVID or vaccine-side-effect patients in the last 1.5 years, with her team and their AI managing over 122K cases. These are higher numbers than many of the "studies" propagated by the CDC (like the Kentucky study with 730 total people) pushing VE vs. unvaxx'ed outcomes. She's not doing epidemiology, she's a front line worker that's actually seeing what's happening in their hospitals, not parroting a state line, or "doing epidemiology" from an office hundreds of miles away from the nearest COV patient.
>And you stop spreading that misinformation on the internet.
You got a lot of nerve (or just a total lack of sense and perspective) telling me what to do, or not to do on the internet or otherwise. This is not misinformation, this is real life experiences of a couple hundred of RNs.
Your wife sounds smart. I appreciate her using her mind instead of giving into literally everyone and everything screaming at her to just get vaccinated.
Incredible how so many people feel so comfortable injecting some experimental fluid into their bodies just because the authority figure and the TV-man said so.
And they come in their high horses, saying "follow the science", "it is safe and effective". Making it super clear that they are just reading the titles or what the TV-man tells them the science says.
Because if they had read some of that science, they'd see that it is looking as clear as day that the vaccination is causing ADE and so much more and premise of having your cells exhibit spike proteins of its own so that you can develop immunity to it is a gun that we have jumped on without actually thinking about it.
But you know, it is easy to scream misinformation like others replying to post when the whole world is going to join the choir.
It is SUPER COMFY being on the wrong side of history. When all the large corporations and legacy media comes in to praise you and comfort you, that's how one one knows they are on the right side of history. Right?
Yes I do, and there is so much but we are way past the point of no return that if you haven't noticed what's happening by now, you'll never find the article titled "experts say global bankers are taking over the world through COVID" and the accompanying Snopes fact checking it true.
Global mass hysteria has been reached and this has nothing to do with logic now.
They wanted people to take the flu a lot more seriously by shifting the narrative around it so that they can roll out a social credit and digital identity platform alongside a new digital economy while managing to cash out with their printed gains by buying out anything that matters during a fire sale.
These are just unconnected ramblings. Check your own hysteria and sources. We are leaving Covid behind. With some luck it will become more like influenza.
Since elderly get vaccinated first and they are more at risk anyway. Gotta read news in the right context, or statistics get misinterpreted to confirm your own bias or fears.
Identical method that they use post-vaccine I would hope (though I doubt your MD's office would do this to actually validate vaxx efficacy, cuz cost): Full CBC plus differential.
I wish these type of articles referenced a benchmark or baseline, such as "Corona virus damages XX percent more/less braun cells than recent strains of influenza virus".
Why only recent strains? This may be the worst coronavirus outbreak in 100 years. It's reasonable to compare it with the worst flu strains. Which still killed more people btw.
On a side note, since we now know the Wuhan lab did do gain of function research after all, which we were first lied to about, there is a very real possibility this virus was engineered. So we should be comparing it to weaponized flu strains as well. Stuff like this, also founded by the NIH, interestingly enough: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/03/04/scien...
FYI, it took me two reads to realise that you weren't comparing the Wuhan's lab work to a biological weapons program. I see a fair amount of vehement downvoting on your comment, and I suspect at least some of that is people making the same mistake.
It is a bit risky to put "weaponised strain" and "Wuhan" in the same paragraph - there is no evidence that this is a bioweapon and while you don't claim otherwise it is an easy misreading to make.
Agreed. Difficult to claim that this is a bio-weapon given its lethality of around 1.8% (lousy weapon) and that even this figure is highly age and co-morbidity related as we are all aware. Huge numbers of people are asymptomatic. 50% according to this:
https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/journal-scans/2021/...
Not to add to the theories but a virus doesn't have to be lethal to be a weapon. If anything, MERS showed us that a more lethal virus is less dangerous globally as it burns itself out fast. To be an effective weapon the virus just has to cause economic disruption, or cause political changes, or impose some desired restrictions or limitations on opposing nations or the world economy in a way that is not as severe to the nation creating the virus. It should also be noted that this virus had the greatest impact on people that have been eating high carb, high sugar diets for a long time. Does that describe a set of demographics? But I am no expert in this area so certainly speaking out of turn.
I should also add the possibility that it doesn't have to be a government performing these actions. It could simply be one jaded semi-suicidal lab tech that is really mad at the world and realizes they are holding in their hands the power to F the world. Have people thrown their lives away for lesser causes? Or maybe even incompetence? Have lab techs ever mishandled dangerous material?
I don't think it's a weapon, but it doesn't need high lethality to be an effective tool. Terrorist attacks and school shootings are rounding errors when it comes to overall deaths, but it doesn't stop them from dominating the news and being used to scare people into accepting more restrictive laws.
High lethality isn't necessarily what a bioweapon is designed for. The US (allegedly) dropped tick-borne bioweapons on Cuba in the 60's with the goal of lowering sugarcane production.
If you want to use a bioweapon for clandestine economic warfare, you don't actually want to people to die, that draws attention. You just want everyone to be sick at crunch (harvest) time.
I assumed that was the intent behind writing the comment? After all, why does it matter where the virus came from unless you're more interested in assigning blame than fixing the problem?
None of these are contagious and thus threatening to large numbers of people (far) removed from the problem. It’s like a big fire… Put the damn thing out before worrying about who started it.
Forbes has a Medium-like program for writers, which is what that article was published under. It's more of a blog article than an actual Forbes article.
Is it possible that every illness, even the common cold, can have these side effects at some low level of incidence or low intensity? I feel like part of the reason we are speculating or noticing these issues with COVID is that it is so heavily studied and scrutinized, to an extent much greater than a typical seasonal flu or cold.
In a way, I'm glad that Corona lifted the awareness about post-infection issues. The common knowledge usually was "you're sick for a week and then you're fine".
I don't have ME/CFS, but my body started to react weird to some harmless common cold infections. My blood pressure drops and remains low, sometimes for weeks. Makes me feel dizzy, makes working out almost impossible.
Also, I had some stomach bug several years ago with some side effects lasting for 2 months. Most people don't believe that a "harmless" infection can cause side effects for weeks (and neither did I), but it's a thing.
I had a virus a few years back that put me on my arse for about 4 weeks. Docs only said that might blood showed I was fighting a virus and it would pass. But for about 3 years afterwards I remained feeling tired, I used to have heart palpitations multiple times a week, I'd get symptoms like I was ill every 3 or 4 weeks. Was bloody awful tbh. Weirdly the first AZ vaccination stopped it, it put me in bed for a day or two and then when I got up I started noticing I was feeling better than normal, but didn't really believe it was gone away. But it's now been months since the jab and I haven't had a single episode with my heart and my energy is way up.
The definitely need to do a little more research into this because my doctors were basically telling me it was just how I was going to be, and it does seem like, however accidentally, there was a solution to be had.
Yeah I was convinced I was dying, I went to the hospital at first because I thought I was having a heart attack. All they said to me from the blood test was that it showed I was fighting a virus, but I don't know how they would have gone about working out which one, they just told me to get some rest. I basically slept for the 4 weeks, lost a load of weight because I had zero appetite, was a crazy time.
Afterwards I kept going back about the heart palpitations and they did all sorts of tests and scans but kept basically telling me the same, destress, eat better, get more sleep, etc. When I told them I was tired all the time they told me everyone feels like that. But now it's cleared I can tell there was definitely something abnormal going on.
> All they said to me from the blood test was that it showed I was fighting a virus, but I don't know how they would have gone about working out which one, they just told me to get some rest.
for myself, i went and got checked for natural antibodies for covid, thinking it was caused by asymptomatic (or long) covid or something... but the result was negative... maybe ill check for some others (west nile etc) if i had time.
> But now it's cleared I can tell there was definitely something abnormal going on.
one clue for me that also supports some kind of virus/infection caused autoimmune issue, was that i had a slightly higher temperature for several months and an elevated RF level (indicates overall inflammation) when doing my health checkups... that is, until getting the vaccine: full-stop no joke those issues all disappeared.
i know it sounds crazy to some people, but thats my experience...
and thanks for sharing yours, its great to be able to exchange notes with someone who may have had the same issue
I happened to have a very bad flu back in 2017 or so. I couldn't smell nor taste anything for at least 3-4 months. It slowly came back, first with coffee, then the rest.
So I've researched this, because this question was asked like 6 month ago.
The short answer is yes, mainly with viral infection. Note though that sometimes it might be symptoms, not the infection itself, that causes damages. But in the case of some viral infections, like the HxNx or SARS-CoV-2, but also varicella, it's the immune response that is too strong and attack the body.
I wouldn't just say possible, I'd say it's highly likely. We have a lot of diseases, infections, and illnesses that most likely have long term side effects but they're also likely small and poorly observed. I've had other illnesses during my life that I'm confident I never fully recovered from (it's not that the condition is horrible, just that I can tell the difference). I think we give human regenerative ability a bit too much credit. Regeneration is amazing in the big scheme of things but we often don't understand relative regenerative ability compared to baseline production and small variance in functional outcomes.
When star athletes have an injury that's more macroscopic we do expect it to heal but often the athlete can't or doesn't want to return because its higher risk for future damage and it's likely they won't be able to perform at their prior state. With less 'physical' injuries we expect a difference for some reason. Maybe the law of large numbers comes into play and we assume all the diseases and their damage is fully removed and replaced at cellular levels when we often have no idea if that's really occurring at full scale.
Overall, I think this is fine. Medicine doesn't promise full, better than new, recovery so to speak always (at least not from good practitioners). What it does often promise instead is a hope and empirical data of improvement and documented side effects with a lot of probabilities for risk and uncertainty quantification. What I think isn't fine is this notion that recovery is always 'complete.' Its likely, as you point out, we're only observing these sorts of smaller effects with COVID due to the widespread infliction it caused over the population and amount of resources humanity has thrown at it to study it in great detail. I suspect there are many other diseases with negligible fractions of resources for study that have similar unknown consequences.
Absolutely. Polio for example does not infect the nervous system in most of the cases, but in a few cases every 100 thousand people it does. And this can cause life long paralysis. Much of the fight to eradicate polio is because of this rare effect.
Contrast this to something like rabies, which always affects the nervous system (and always kills you and there is no cure, but vaccination shortly after a bite can avert that outcome).
I remember reading a few months back about the revealed toxicity of the spike proteins, how they pass the blood brain barrier. It lines up with Covid "brain fog" symptoms being reported and it draws strong concerns over the mRna mass manufacturing of the spike protein within the body.
We are in for many long term side effects popping up like this, when you rush new treatments to market this is expected.
The vaccine produces spike
protein within your deltoid muscle cells, where it is rapidly degraded and presented to your immune system. It’s not running around in your bloodstream. Unlike the virus. Which means, incidentally, that if this is a concern of yours you should definitely prefer getting the vaccine to getting an infection.
Unless they accidentally hit a vein and inject the vaccine directly into the bloodstream, anecdotal evidence[0] points to this for young men who get myocarditis. They often report tasting saline in their mouth shortly after the injection.
The age and sex disparity in post-vac myocarditis would seem to disqualify that hypothesis. It's not like young men have veins in their deltoids where other demographics don't.
Tasting saline after an IV injection in nonsensical.
This sounds unlikely to be true, given that getting the vaccine increases your risk of myocarditis (i.e. there's some effect on the heart muscle). Or maybe there's just some (small) percentage of cases where the spike proteins escape into the bloodstream.
Given the two dozen or so known causes of myocarditis, the vaccine does not stand out here. The risks of complications from the virus do stand out, in stark contrast.
Of course, and I'm not debating vaccine vs virus here (I've had both, myself), but even a single case of myocarditis (if we can conclusively prove that it comes from the vaccine... in reality, we can at most statistically suspect vaccine causes it) disproves the idea that "spike protein doesn't enter the bloodstream".
The theory behind "it doesn't cross" was that the modification to the spike "anchored" it to the inside of the cell, and the cell only presenting "the pointy end" (i.e. the relevant dangerous ACE2 binding domain) to the immune system, close to lymph node near the IM injection point.
Where I got my doubts about the "doesn't cross" claim, at least concerning Pfizer, which I researched :
- The identification of the spike, its in-vitro re-engineering, the formulation of a vaccine recepy took approximately two and a half months, from early Feb., 2020 to Apr. 27th, 2020. They started animal testing (60 mice, 12 monkeys) and on human volunteer (21) in parallel. It ended on Jul. 27th, '20.
- According to CT doc and FT docs, and publications, no study of biodistribution, on the theory that intra-musculary jab doesn't spread... Even though the spike protein was studied in the past (IIRC 'twas even patented around 2012 !), I didn't find any publication related to it saying it didn't cross such barriers, quite the contrary.
- They started the 40K volunteers CT right after, because of the reported absence of unwanted effects on the 20 first volunteers. Reportedly no change in formulation. Still no study.
- They started mass manufacturing during the second half of october, still no change in formulation, still no study.
The only indication of such a study was started was in the famed re-authorization letter a month ago, about them doing it now.
How and why is that even possible ? BionTech team is perfect on their first try at making a vaccine, as opposed a tailored gene therapy ? Really ?
Also :
- How do they prevent a cell presenting an anchored spike to clump with another cell with an ACE2
- Where is the study of the quality of that anchoring (i.e. what percentage of spikes don't anchor ?)
1. The vaccine does not stay in your muscle - obviously. It spreads out from the muscle slowly and does indeed enter your blood stream.
2. It is not put spike protein. It is an exposed spike protein on a larger stable "base" that ensures the spike doesn't degrade easily - so while it's smaller than the virus, the entire vaccine protein is significantly larger than just the spike.
There is no spike protein in the vaccine. There is mRNA. That mRNA needs ribosomes to make the spike protein. So think about where there are ribosomes, and where the protein is made, and you’ll find the correct answer.
I don’t know where you heard the second point, but it is equally incorrect. The mRNA encodes just the spike, with two mutations to lock it into a pre-fusion conformation. Nothing there that qualifies as a “larger stable base”. The sequence is found here: https://web.archive.org/web/20210105162941/https://mednet-co...
You see the poly(A) sequence at the end? That is what stabalizes the entire structure so that it doesn't denature. I called it a "base", but you are right that it's not adding to the size of the overall structure much.
The point is that the normal virus protein obviously doesn't have that - it's human design to create stability.
My point was that there are not billions of covid spike proteins floating around the human body when you get the vaccine.
The polyA tail is in the 3′ UTR (after the stop codon) and is not translated. It doesn’t appear in the final protein sequence. It’s also a fairly standard feature.
To be clear, it's not translated into the final antibody, but it remains present in the vaccine, and hence in your body - it is what gives the vaccine structural stability in the body.
...and yes, it is standard - it is not covid-vaccine specific.
This is all covered in This Week in Virology - one of the recent episodes about 3 months ago.
>...It lines up with Covid "brain fog" symptoms being reported and it draws strong concerns over the mRna mass manufacturing of the spike protein within the body.
When the active virus invades, the whole body turns into its spike (and others) proteins factory. So, this should be lining up much stronger with the concerns outlined in such reasoning.
If anything objectively "rushed" in this case is, it's the rapid spread of the virus. I find it quite remarkable that the vaccines could be developed while the initial worldwide spread was still in progress.
Does that mean 75% of people that are hospitalised specifically due to effects of Coronavirus were unvaccinated?
Or does it mean that 75% of people that were hospitalised for any cause, and that then subsequently tested positive, were found to be unvaccinated?
There's a big difference between the two. It would still be interesting if it were the latter, as that might indicate vaccination was somehow protecting the vaccinated against hospitalisation for causes that weren't immediately identifiable as being related to Coronavirus. I mean, it could be the case that the unvaccinated were suffering cognitive effects of infection that made them more likely to be in car crashes, for example.
The more successful the rollout, the more the ratio goes up - this is counterintuitive, but happens because the number of unvaccinated people around that could possibly catch it in the first place becomes comparatively tiny.
I think we might be getting our negatives confused. A perfectly successful rollout sees 100% of people vaccinated, so 100% of admissions are vaccinated, so 0% of admissions are non-vaccinated.
Anecdotally, my home city's hospitals are so full that they're turning away people from the ER who have a low chance of survival, like heart attack victims.
It's gotten so bad that the military was called in to restore peace.
The doctors there were on a news segment, completely burnt out and in tears, saying that 0% of their COVID patients are vaccinated and they're overrun.
Is this actually true? Would you care to name the city?
Sorry for being sceptical, but I've seen similar claims propagated on twitter "hospital so full, that gunshot victims are turned away". It was untrue both on accounts of being full and there being any gunshot victims.
Google “COVID triage”. Several us states and Canadian provinces have airlifted COVID cases to different places that have open beds. Elective surgery was on hold, and even procedures involving nursing participation were not occurring. Fortunately the current wave seems to be stabilizing at least here in Canada.
Why do the vaccinated accept this? Honest question, because I imagined the breaking point for vaccinated folks to be before there's literally zero space for their medical emergencies due to folks who made a different choice.
I mean, you don't want anyone left behind. But if you're forced to leave someone behind, the question becomes "who?". If you have one emergency bed and in comes a drunk driver from an accident, shortly followed by the pregnant woman he ran over, I'm not a big fan of "first come, first served".
If and when doctors are forced into heinous choices, I'd think such considerations should play a role - for society allocating scarce resources, at the very least.
IANAD and don't have a great source for this, but I've both heard and read about some variety of "professional code" or "best practices" where MDs are expected to leave their personal convictions aside when deciding and prioritizing who gets what care.
I may personally agree with the exact situation you describe, but relying on "common sense" breaks fast at scale. If the doctor(s) making the call are devout adherents of some religious sect, would you prefer that they prioritize the drunken driver above the pregnant woman who needs an abortion of the child that was conceived out of bedlock?
Or denying care to the heroin addict ODing?
IMO, completely removing moral judgment from the medical evaluation process is a net positive.
This doesn't have to mean "first come, first serve", and I assume it doesn't in most places.
I agree, so long as we’re not expecting doctors to do triage, which I believe they generally don’t. Triage is generally don’t by specially trained nurses, as I understand it.
What steps have your local hospitals taken to increase capacity since the pandemic began nearly two years ago? Our for-profit healthcare system is tuned to extract and retain as much wealth as possible, not provide as much care as possible. Any unused capacity goes against that goal.
Considering many hospitals seem to be in a perpetual construction mode what else can they do? You can only build and more importantly staff new buildings so quickly and two years isn't going to cut it for that
Biggest thing is they're basically out of masks, gloves, etc. and are sleeping at the hospital at this point. The hospitals won't pay to get them better break rooms and until recently didn't even have a great place to sleep.
What the, I was thinking you would say Romania, I just read vaccination is only 30% over there and they are planning to move patients to neighboring countries.
From which vaccine? There are a number of vaccines, and it is expected for the body to "fall ill" a bit since the anti-bodies are being built. This is usually the case with all vaccines in general. I was an infact when I had received the various mandatory vaccines in India, but I recall taking the yellow fever vaccine when I was 32 and I had five days of fever
Similarly, I had a fever + 4 days of 20 hours of sleep after receiving the second Pfizer-Biontech dose.
He can't be sure of it, but it's the way it works, so its expected.
Also, 2nd dose usually causes a stronger reaction from the body (you get the symptoms without the risks).
all throughout the pandemic i visited with nurses, emts and have even been in many hospitals here in seattle and surrounding areas. you know, ground zero or first reported spot.. the hospitals were empty, still are and they were laying people off right and left. but yeah i guess i kept missing the rush or was at the wrong hospitals. it was strange
In a large teaching hospital where I did some consulting work, a plurality of people at the hospital site were visitors (followed by staff, then patients). It is not surprising that hospitals feel empty when you remove most of the people in them.
thats true, i just kept meeting personal who told me otherwise, they weren't conspiracy theorist either, this was before all that started. i actually dated one nurse for a bit she was super bored at work half the time. not saying thats a bad thing, i just would watch tv, hear one thing and then experience something entirely different but you've been around it and saw something different so i just might have been there during weird times or something idk
> During April 4–July 17, a total of 569,142 (92%) COVID-19 cases, 34,972 (92%) hospitalizations, and 6,132 (91%) COVID-19–associated deaths were reported among persons not fully vaccinated,
That rate is going to vary widely as more people get vaccinated. In a country with 100% of its citizens vaccinated, 100% of those hospitalized will be vaccinated. And likewise for 0%/0%. So keep we must always be looking at the whole picture.
Without a doubt, most of the approved COVID-19 vaccines are extremely effective at preventing hospitalization/death due to SARS-CoV-2 infections, this has been shown time and time again across the world.
> In a country with 100% of its citizens vaccinated, 100% of those hospitalized will be vaccinated. And likewise for 0%/0%. So keep we must always be looking at the whole picture.
According to the Dutch government, 87.1% of the Dutch over 18 are partially vaccinated, and 83.5% is fully vaccinated. For people over 12, those numbers are 84.9% and 81.4%.
I don't know if the difference comes from "our world in data" using older data, or because they also count children under 12.
Jokes aside, the study seems more like a Coronavirus can cause long term damage to parts of brain. Vaccinated people would likely end up with less likelyhood of this happening (by a big factor) compared to unvaccinated.
Nevertheless this does not seem to be a big deal that you should worry about.
> Is this happening to people who have been vaccinated, or unvaccinated? Or both?
This seems to be related to the severe cases of the infection. However it's not certain in milder cases, that is it may still be the case. Also the neural damage may be reversible (observed for hamsters).
Obviously, the key here is to survive it first.
Vaccination, when effective, is supposed to reduce the chance of a severe case of the infection.
Lest we despair too much, it's important to remember that vaccination reduces the severity, even if you end up infected.
I remember at the start of the year, when the vaccines first came out. A doctor shared some lung X-rays of infected, presumably hospitalised, patients. The vaccinated ones were far healthier.
For people that have received the vaccine in the last 6 months ("within date") the per-capita infection rate is an order of magnitude lower (per capita of ~1-4 vs ~15-30) than both the expired vaccinated and unvaccinated.
But when you look at ICU cases, the expired vaccinations are closer to the within-date vaccinations.
So keeping up to date on vaccine means you don't get infected at all. But having even an expired vaccine means you'll have a milder case.
Once the virus enters our body, we are infected. Having antibodies helped us fight the infection.
The efficacy of the vaccine indicates how well the vaccine has taught the body to make antibodies for the virus.
Thus, those vaccinated have a better chance of fighting the infection. That is why there are higher survival rates among those infected but vaccinated.
Since even vaccinated people can be infected, and since infection has a higher spread via inhalation and exhalation, wearing a mask keeps the virus out to a high extent, and helps keep the virus in as well (preventing the virus from spreading around via the infected person's exhalation).
I'm saying this potentially without base, but I interpret them as making the distinction of 'infected with Covid-19' vs 'having Sars-Cov-2 in your body'. They're not exactly equal, and that distinction potentially drives how asymptomatic spread happens.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think this is quite the right distinction.
Asymptomatic infection, and presymptomatic infection, are both forms of infection. However, yes, they differ from symptomatic infection in terms of severity, no doubt due to lesser viral load.
The distinction I would personally make is exposed vs infected. Being exposed to a virus doesn't mean you'll get infected, where infection is quantifiable tested with a PCR test.
I have a grandparent who's in a very high-risk category for Covid. She's not a hardy person who can weather a complicated disease, and post-vaccination she caught Covid. But she's still alive.
It's impossible for me to know for certain, people who are that high risk do still die post-vaccination. And obviously not all of them die when catching Covid even if they haven't been vaccinated. But I do credit the vaccination for potentially saving her life. She was in intensive care for a single day and never had to be put on a ventilator. It was only briefly touch-and-go, within 24 hours we knew that she was going to live.
Not catching Covid is great, we're all hoping for that. But when my family got the news that she was stable, that felt really good. It's not even just about stabilizing; there was a brief period where she wasn't lucid, and then it became obvious that she was getting more lucid and was going to recover and that she was recognizing people again.
Reducing severity really matters. You're still playing a statistical game, nothing is certain, but... when someone you care about is in the hospital, statistics become important to you.
Glad she survived. As you say, these things are statistical, not guaranteed, but vaccination massively improves your odds.
I know of a few people who can't be older than their ?late fifties? or early sixties? that caught COVID. It was horrendous for them, despite them having the fortune to be double vaccinated.
Eh, I don't think we can say that with certainty. We know that vaccination is driving down cases. It really feels borderline whether it's enough for herd immunity.
(Rich) countries are already rolling out third doses, at least for the most vulnerable. Longer term, we'll have revised vaccines, even more effective against Delta.
Maybe you're right, we can't avoid catching COVID long term. But if that's the case, hopefully its severity is (even further) attenuated by then, due to further vaccination.
If influenza were a novel virus, there would be daily stories on all the ways it adversely affects the body, and we would be under restrictions for decades from fear of "long influenza".
The infection fatality risk of short-COVID for the 18-49 demographic is 0.05%. For under 18 years it's 0.003%. And this is for unvaccinated people. For the vaccinated it's at least one order of magnitude lower.
Under no sensible cost-benefit analysis, would you restrict the entire population with risk profiles like this.
0.05% is huge. That's one death per 2000 infected. If you extrapolate that out to the world population, it's one-third of a holocaust. To me that handily justifies restricting the entire population.
Then again, lots of things kill more people and don't mobilize nearly this level of response. Which I guess has to do with them only killing people in third world countries, cough malaria...
None of these problems, including COVID, could be permanently fixed with the COVID restrictions. COVID is endemic.
The reduction in quality of life for the 99.95% as a result of the restrictions is far too high a price to pay even if it saved the entire 0.05% of this demographic who die from COVID.
The costs to mental health, economic well-being, education, as a result of the restrictions, are also staggering.
Any rational person would trade a 0.05% increase in chance of premature death, which is only 1/2,000, to live without the COVID-motivated restrictions for the remainder of their 80 year lifespan. Basic math tells you that. 0.05% of an 80 year lifespan is only 14 days. Would you endure all the COVID-related restrictions, for your entire life, just to add 14 days to your life?
And this thought experiment is under the absolute best case scenario for the restrictions which is that they completely eliminate the risk of dying from covid which they do not in reality.
I would bet for most people, the COVID restrictions reduce quality of life by at least 5%. Meaning people would be willing to shorten their lifespan by 5% in order to not live with them. A 0.05% risk of death doesn't even come close to justifying the restrictions.
The simplistic narrative that supports these restrictions is simply wrong. It's unscientific and irrational and only supported due to the inertia of public opinion.
Isn't the problem that trying to save someone dying from the flu requires less human resources than trying to save someone dying from Covid-19 ? And that Covid infects more people than the flu, making more people sick than the flu so Covid reduces our economic capacity more than the flu would ?
COVID hospitalization rates are 1-5% and much lower still for lower-risk demographics like those under 49. And hospitalization generally lasts a couple weeks, not more.
Moreover, COVID burns itself out as the population lacking immunity dwindles with the pandemic's advance. It's a transient phenomenon. The economic damage it causes would seem to pale in compairson to the damage done by severe restrictions imposed for months/over-a-year on the entire population, including the majority who are healthy and relatively unsusceptible to it.
What I observe often happening in the public debate is that the unknowns related to long-COVID are the backup argument that the case for restrictions falls back on when the risks of short-COVID are presented and seen to be insufficient to justify such a severe government response.
I think I agree. Strangely I don't see it hammered a lot, at least in Europe. It's usually more about lessening pressure on healthcare.
Well, on a personal level it is long Covid I fear the most (or even long term consequences of a mild covid) and yet I am uneasy about the argument that restrictions are put in place only to soften the impact of the pandemic on hospitals. It means that maybe if hospitals weren't full then our leaders wouldn't care about people getting covid ?
SMH, no scientist would label self as "EU scientist". They are from different countries, so it's "international team of scientists", or "european team of scientists".
If you were actually curious, you’d have clicked the link and read the article. The very first sentence states:
> A European study has found that Covid-19 can affect blood vessels in the human brain
Next paragraph:
> Research by French, Spanish and German scientists published Thursday in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience reveals that, in addition to attacking the lungs, the virus can also can kill certain brain cells.
Not to sound like a Covid braindamaged idiot here (from getting infected, cured, then getting a vaccine), but this kind of "news" won't help raise vaccination rates.
Either deny hospitalization to unvaccinated people, or just fucking mandate vaccination.
Just stop with the lockdowns and restrictions, just stop.
People seem fine with ~10 vaccines for babies and several vaccines throughout their lives, but not the COVID one.
It's a different technology. Just because we use the same word for it ("vaccine"), it doesn't mean our knowledge about e.g. the polio vaccine is applicable also to mRNA vaccines.
No. It won't be like MMR vaccines for kids. It will become like the common cold which we don't vaccine kids against because they are at low risk. We will only booster the elderly and immunocompromised. But don't listen to me, listen to this doctor:
Yes, deny hospitalization to unvaccinated people, at least in publicly funded hospitals. This is a much fairer way to deal with it than a mandate that forces people to vaccinate under duress.
And stop worrying about the unvaccinated transmitting to the vaccinated. The risk to the vaccinated is sufficiently low that it should not be a dominating concern any way. Also, vaccination doesn't stop COVID transmission enough to create herd immunity even at near 100% coverage, so we have to resign to COVID being endemic, especially given how rapidly a single strand RNA virus mutates.
The caveat is we could potentially eliminate COVID, influenza and a host of other viral infections, if we take the reigns off the pharmaceutical industry, by eliminating FDA approval requirements for vaccines. Machine learning has made enormous paradigm shifting breakthroughs in other fields, like natural language processing and protein folding, and could very well do the same for drug discovery and testing. Drug development could potentially keep up with the viral mutation rate if it could subsist solely on faster processes, and jettison the slower FDA mandated ones.
Can we also start denying hospitals to smokers and drunk drivers and along the way stop treating kidney and liver issues for alcoholics. I'm not a fan of anti vaxxers, but this is a slippery slope that can truly create a hunger games outcome.
Forcing people to get a vaccine to be able to procure a wide range of private services, including eating at a restaurant and attending a cinema, is a more slippery slope.
They can still use hospitals for non-COVID related stuff. I would purposely support making government healthcare program taxes/coverage opt-in, but that's less politically feasible than what I proposed.
Well, you're right, i did overstate. I think the researchers and journalists did too. Perhaps i would not be so annoyed with this, had the journalists specifically, just worded it in less bombastic terms.
Maybe its time for you to find a therapist, because having these kind of thoughts really isn't mentally healthy. Sounds to me youve given far too much attention to the 24/7 doom and gloom covid news cycle.
> I decided a while back that if I ever developed long covid, I'd off myself. This just confirms my priors.
I generally support the right for people to choose euthanasia under appropriate circumstances, but this is a really disappointing and frankly entitled comment.
Countless millions of people are born with or acquire from disease or injury chronic illnesses and conditions that can significantly impact their quality of life. Some of these are treatable but many in parts of the world these treatments are not accessible.
Most of those people don't off themselves. They move forward in life, as difficult as it might be. And some of them not only find ways to survive life, many make incredibly meaningful contributions to their families, communities and the world at large.
Nothing good comes out of being pessimistic (by definition), sometimes I get into a state where I confuse my pessimism with realism, but remember: everywhere you look you see what you are looking for.
We don’t know what kind of treatments will be available in a few years to treat long Covid. As long as life is bearable, I would suggest to continue living even if you get long covid, and hope for the best in rapid technological improvement.
Even though the damage is potentially reversible? If you have such a hair trigger for suicide, have you considered it might be caused by mental illness?
I'm in a group for long covid sufferers, and there's quite a few who have had neurological damage confirmed by a neurologist. It's not the most common symptom, but it certainly seems to be happening to some people.
As I understand it, damage from the initial covid infection that causes ongoing symptoms is exactly what people mean when they use the term "long covid". People with long covid are (as far as we know) no longer infected with covid. Long covid is distinct from having covid in that covid doesn't cause this damage in everyone who is infected.
In this way it is similar to ME / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome that can also be caused by other viruses, although in the case of covid the damage is not limited to causing fatigue and can cause issues with a host of other parts of the body including the lungs, heart, nervous system and immune system.
(1) "Scientists discovered that the virus had destroyed endothelial cells by observing patients who died of Covid."
(2) "In the first instance, it should be pointed out that the deaths observed were rare and, above all, that the damage to the brain was potentially reversible."
(3) "The study shows this could be the case for patients who developed a severe form of the disease. For people who have had a more minor form of the illness, however, nothing is certain."
I.e. these people died ... so selection bias is quite likely.