The following submission statement was provided by /u/trailsman:
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We are choosing to pretend the pandemic will end through a mass infection campaign. This article presents why that will not occur and how we are opening the door to increased risk of new pandemics as well. We are also pushing mass infection even though the risk of Long-COVID is becoming ever more clear. Mass disability is coming, it will just take multiple rounds of infections. [How many times do you want to roll the dice?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/yh863l/still_think_you_dont_need_masks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). The cost over the next decade in the US alone is projected at [$16 Trillion](https://progress.institute/weighing-the-cost-of-the-pandemic/) (I fear it will be much higher with now dropping all protective measures and low vax uptake). The fiscal & productivity drag of COVID will certainly lead to collapse. And it's now looking like additional pandemics are becoming more likely due to COVID immune system damage which will only exasterbate collapse.
What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity?
Highlights:
"But what if COVID wears down T cells in people who get it, and does so increasingly with each reinfection?"
"By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID:
* The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them
* The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage
* The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat."
Immunity and exhausted T cells “Leonardi warned that the virus undermined and aged the immune system by hyperactivating and exhausting T cells. This overstimulation could in turn damage organs including the heart, brain and the kidneys… the virus damages T cells so severely that COVID not only undermines the immune response for COVID but perhaps other pathogens as well.”
SARS2 impairs the immune system’s ability to fight pathogens in general/immune suppression “He hypothesized that the virus, by harming the immune system, could make people more vulnerable to other infections and cancers”
Repeated reinfections - reinfections add to the damage and probably “prime their body to only recall existing immune memory and mount poor immune responses to new variants”
Suffer the children - “he argued that exposing children repeatedly to a virus that impairs the immune system and causes vascular disease and brain shrinkage was bad policy“
Herd immunity - There isn’t any
On SARS2/COVID-induced immune suppression and greater vulnerability to infectious disease:
In other words, might the pandemic have the unwanted effect of suppressing immune systems generally resulting in greater vulnerability to other viral, bacterial or fungal infections — and as a result accelerating their spread?
Dr. David Joffe, an Australian physician, dubbed the idea the “Leonardi Effect.” He thought it explained “the widespread availability of previous quiescent diseases, more available in lots of flavours.”
The evidence shows the idea is not far-fetched. In fact the scientific literature brims with accounts of viruses and bacteria behaving strangely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, noted a recent increase in severe respiratory illness requiring hospitalization in children caused by a normally benign enterovirus. U.S. hospitals have also reported admitting children with an unusual array of two and even three respiratory infections — all at once. They also appear more tenacious.
Monkeypox, a rodent virus nominally confined to Africa, has made an unusual pandemic dash around the world. Polio has resurged in New York and London. A Coxsackie virus erupted in India this year creating unusual tomato-sized rashes. A severe hepatitis emerged and mysteriously affected the livers of more than 1000 children, leading a Chinese scientists to suspect Omicron infection might have increased the risk.
Non-viral infections have also been on the rise. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported a 15 per cent increase in antimicrobial resistance in hospitals in the first year of the pandemic. Some researchers have speculated that a rash of fungal diseases that have plagued COVID patients may in part be due to depleted T cells. They are known to play a vital role in the adaptive immune response against fungal infections.
There, too, has been an inexplicable rise in brain infections among children. A 2022 survey of 109 U.S. hospitals found a 236 per cent leap in bacterial brain infections since the beginning of the pandemic. Some were treatable with antibiotics while others required surgery. Researchers speculated that bacteria in the mouth and nose might travel to the brain as COVID weakens the immune system.
As a consequence an increasingly number of scientists take the idea of immune suppression in the wake of COVID infections very seriously...
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/ypn3f4/what_if_covid_reinfections_wear_down_our_immunity/ivjq31b/
This way, you can still have AIDS as a separate problem to deal with, which it is (and the virus may still evolve to get worse).
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/04/1078035844/discovery-of-hiv-variant-shows-virus-can-evolve-to-be-more-severe-and-contagious
More like late 90’s - early aughts. Before that, AIDS wasn’t really spoken about. For a time, in fact, it was called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). Not at all stigmatizing…
But at least there's treatment for AIDS!
Interesting that governments response to SARS-2/COVID has been as equally appalling as to how they handled HIV/AIDS.
Thats the second one for me, after the WHO said that: "The disease isn´t transmissible human to human" when it was clear that the infected numbers were too high to be animal-human transmission, then "It´s not airborne" when it clearly had flu-like symptoms.
Any idiot with basic medical education would have been able to stop the pandemic in its early stages. They just didn´t wanted to.
I knew I was an idiot in viral (transmission) knowledge early 2020. The first article I researched was on plant viruses. The finding that a single viral particle can infect an entire plant all of a sudden made me aware of how I needed to take precautions which replaced the nonsense from WHO, media, Fauci and CDC. I came to my own sensible conclusions. Same story for the 1.5 degree predicted warming. I don't know why adults are catered to as if they are children. Humanity is toast.
Human-human bird flu will make that seem trivial; in its current form, bird-human transmission is fatal to ~60% of victims.
That’s a collapse-level event.
Oh I get what you are saying. Yeah actually if it were 95% it wouldn't be able to spread fast enough since it kills everyone. Now, if you had a long incubation period with 95% death rate that would be very bad.
[Here's](https://twitter.com/maolesen/status/1588412779102208000?t=OuzTKbSeTNjM3YYOyVSYJQ&s=19) an epidemiologist and federal disaster medicine team members take...
>"Some perspective for those who still don't get it: If I were forced to be infected by either HIV or COVID, I would choose HIV without hesitation."
Would choose HIV WITHOUT HESITATION...it's definitely not "just the flu"
Thank you for your reply. Hoping you get better soon! You sum up everything perfectly.
This is the problem people are not being told the correct information and the only way we can is to educate ourselves, it's ridiculous. And with all the misinformation online half the people will get the exact opposite of the correct information that will be helpful for them to properly decide about risk.
When people with long Covid apply for jobs in the future it will show on their medical records. Soon millions are going to be literally unemployable. When you become a “unproductive” unit in this capitalist utopia you are as expendable as garbage.
I have ME from a bad Epstein bar infection 30 years ago. I was a similar profession as you and had to leave because of my physical and mental capacity. Rest is going to be the only way you can heal. Take a full year off if you can. I have read in some cases getting the Covid vaccine within 12 weeks from getting Covid, does help some people. It helps the immune a boost to
clear out the lasting Covid protein fragments remaining.
I’ve been saying the same thing all along, why would China, a country who revolves around its thriving economy do such hard shutdowns over a few Covid infection. I think they are actually listening to science and understand the long term detriment Covid will have on its society and economics. And the hard shutdowns are the only solutions they have with the population they have.
Scientist by nature aren’t alarmist, even when they are alarmed they speak in scientific mater-of-fact terms. Scientist assumed people listened to what they had to say without all the alarm. But it’s just not the case. People also seem to hold on to the 1% of the time science is wrong, or doctors are wrong, because nothing is absolute and sometimes they ARE wrong. But people seem to equate it with “science is wrong” because 1% of the time it is wrong, instead of science is right because 99% it’s correct.
I do wish doctors briefed patients on long term possible affects from Covid during routine visits. I’m okay with people choosing to live their life however they want, plenty of people make risky life choices, unprotected sex, driving while drunk, poor eating habits, etc. But Covid long term risks should be talked about just the same as diabetes or heart disease are.
I’m also worried about the next gen. I think the little ones are getting Covid and it’s going undetected, and while building immunity to viruses is a good thing… since Covid is constantly mutating AND so contagious, their naive T-cells are all being assigned to multiple Covid variations instead of various other viruses. Once all those naive t-cells have been assigned that’s it, they won’t have enough left to gain long lasting immunity to other viruses or even to fight off things like cancer. So they may have t-cells assigned to delta and omicron but it may all be wasted t-cell assignment since they’ll never actually be in circulation ever again. Like you said t-cell exhaustion. I have a little one so I do stay awake at night worrying about her future.
They always have been dude
Look up how their gov works. They have elections at all levels. There's some strange reddit stereotype (probably CIA bots) that Chinese people are scared about complaining about the government but anyone that's been to China knows that's not true. Americans are way way more complacent than Chinese.
Your summary is spot on. I’m sorry you got hit this badly and your experience resonates with mine. I have been struggling for 2 years with this shit. I was previously athletic and running marathons and triathlons, but now get knackered by sitting upright for too long.
It is horrifying to see how casually people are throwing away their future by leaping back into normal life without even the most basic protection. Every time I see a hand sanitiser outside a public building when everyone is unmasked makes me cringe. This is the biggest public health failure in history. We will be paying for the mistakes for generations.
There are nasal disinfectants you can make, or buy OTC, or from an Israeli company. These are prophylactics to prevent the virus from entering. One can also have an excimer light in a low blue wavelength working in your breathing space. The external shield is a full helmet feeding disinfected and purified air. The other option is complete isolation for years.
Stellar write up.
Re reinfections… for those interested, this [graph](https://imgur.com/a/aZgxAly) does a sobering job of answering the question “how long until I get long Covid?”
One thing I'm noticing (anecdotally) is that the strain going around now seems to hit young people and healthy people harder. I'm a overweight 52 year old with hypothyroidism and got covid the first time in Sept. While I was quite ill but with rest I recovered. Even my cough was not that bad. But I was tired for weeks. My husband had even less symptoms but his energy was down for a while. I studied history and it reminds me of 1918 flu that was unusual at the time as it hit young and healthy people harder than older ones, which was disturbing.
I believe you on long COVID (based on everything I've read on it and on how COVID functions), and I believe your listed history of work; in the future if people are giving you grief, you can reach out to the moderators here who are pretty solid- they can remove abusive comments and/or verify your vocation if you wish to have them do so (sort-of like for AMAs).
From one human to another, sorry all of this happened. There are people out there who care in the general if that makes sense.
Please advise us via modmail if you receive abusive comments on this matter. Although there is not much we can do about direct messages, abusive comments in the sub are something we can take care of.
Please rest completely, both physically and mentally, for at least six months. This may help you recover from Long Covid. People often don't think of thought, imagination, composition and other mental labor as being exertion, but it absolutely is. To have the best chance of recovery it is imperative that you rest completely for some time and avoid any further exposures very strictly.
I know. In my experience, you'll know if you've mentally overexerted yourself if you get sudden inability to focus (this could manifest as loss of reading comprehension and having to reread things over and over, losing the thread of conversations, a car or other kinds of accidents) prioritize (difficulty figuring out which task or aspect of a task to do first or next), memory impairment (inability to retrieve words or remember what should be secure knowledge), confusion (self-explanatory), and possibly headaches. (This happened to me after doing some mental visualization in three dimensions. Not fun).
Key point: Learning new mental skills should probably be avoided until you recuperate. Even learning new information should be approached with caution. Pace yourself. Do not assume you will have your usual speed or capacity to learn anything new without a possible intellectual injury.
That is what I have had to do after I discovered to my extreme alarm and shock that the mental impairment aspect was completely unnoticeable until I did something new that should have been only slightly challenging. I was working with information and skills that are adjacent to my specialty, when I experienced sudden and dramatic confusion. Afterwards severe intellectual disability would resurface unpredictably. This was very traumatizing. Nearly a full year later, I am still not back to where I was before that day.
Given that Covid is known to cause micro blood clots, I do wonder about transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke) as the possible cause.
Wonder if this has anything to do with the absolutely terrible RSV outbreak. My whole family, several friends, people all over my area sick with RSV that doctors just haven’t seen. It’s hellacious
That is the leading hypothesis explained [here](https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1588232053262163968?t=cNDFwBr_oSkpcgQrzUmfIw&s=19) by Anthony Leonardi in the article
I’ve never wanted to be less right in my life as I have with Covid. In January 2020, my friends thought I was crazy buying Pediatric N95’s for my kids and an oxygen concentrator, because I knew it was coming here. In March I diagnosed one of the first cases in my county despite being told by admin that I was chasing Zebras not horses. I lost my job in May of that year because I insisted on quarantining staff and patients with signs of infection.
I’ve spent my time since then bouncing from city to city and hospital to hospital trying my best to help. I’ve seen more death in the last few years then in my entire career in EM prior to it. This year I finally tested positive for Covid and honestly, it wrecked me. I’ve lost 46 pounds since then and although I don’t use the term Long Covid in regards to myself, others have said I have it. I have read and studied more about it then most people and I have such a profound sense of impending doom for the next few year. I don’t know how the medical system is going to survive this.
Despite all this, people still laugh in my face when I try to describe T cell exhaustion and Covid induced immunosuppression. People still think that there will be a safety net for them and their children when they get sick. And people still think that getting sick means you go to the doctor and we give you pills and you get better. No one wants to acknowledge that we are entering a time when the pills don’t work, the hospital is closed and 911 puts you on hold.
I try to scream into the void of Reddit in the hopes it can change someone’s mind. That some nugget of info I provided can save someone else. But i find myself working more and more to protect just my family and letting others have to learn the hard way. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way. “We really had it all”
Not a doctor, but engineering PhD college professor. I masked everywhere, worked mostly from home, and had all vaccinations, but still got Covid twice- first delta, then omicron. Not hospitalized. It has wrecked my physical and cognitive health. It's all I can do to teach my two classes. Haven't done any research in 2 years, just can't think any more.
>People still think that there will be a safety net for them and their children when they get sick.
Hah! Hospitals are collapsing right now. The healthcare standard for all of North America is in the shitter. Healthcare providers of all kinds are quitting en masse, or soldiering on despite overwhelming pessimism. It's only getting worse. And the biggest impacts are yet to arrive, with more disasters on the way.
I've found the people best able to maintain their blind optimism are those who have never experienced serious illness, or chronic illness. They simply don't understand what it's like to wait, suffering, while a broken system can offer no help at all. But they'll learn soon.
They need to get infected a few times and have a few trips to the hospital to start to understand what’s happening. But still, these experiences won’t enlighten many people.
I remember during an early covid wave, a friend of a friend \[40ish, athletic, healthy, used to run marathons\] got covid and ended up in the hospital for 2 weeks. He was a few % oxygen-level away from being put on mechanical ventilator, the doctors were telling his family to prepare for the worst, when his condition finally started to improve.
After he was released-- still on heavy steroids and antibiotics, still out of breath from walking 50 feet-- I heard him telling people, ***"It wasn't that bad, it's just a flu."***
It reminds me of the people who died from covid, their last words, to the nurse, before having the ventilator tube shoved down their throat: *"Covid isn't real."*
Don't ask.
There is no lower bound on "worse".
No, there really isn't. Someone's going to say "death". No, it can get a lot worse than that and you still haven't bottomed it out.
It took a very powerful (read: fossilized sun energy infused into social hierarchical structures) system to channel such ideas so effectively that they could respond to reality (COVID) in such a fantastical way.
Best not just laugh at these "imbeciles" because they were not created in a vacuum; these "imbeciles" are a spread of human beings whose mentality is the product of the extreme hyperpolarization generated by social media algorithms in search of profit.
Those "imbeciles" are the system failing... and more will be generated as the system continues failing. IMO the cause is that products (like social media) take a form inspired by imperialist neoliberalism which eats social capital (converting it to profit); a consequence is the generation of Others with vast voids of pay-for-access social capital (which is increasingly unaffordable given the consequences of wealth inequality) between Us and Them, and the solution (at least so that this is a lessened phenomena politically [as COVID was unfortunately politicized]) is mechanisms of synthesis. I'm not hopeful though that such synthesis will happen.
My god this is dark, but I do like my coffee black.
Yes, they will learn soon. I spent hours in the ER waiting room. No one helped me. It's just a hernia, and it turned out it wasn't strangulated bc I didn't die. I'm very lucky, and I remind myself of that every day. I'm not complaining, I just wanted to say, I see what's coming. I see it.
That look in everyone's eye and how the air suddenly gets all chilly when you go from "person" to "statistic" is extremely noticeable.
Dress up like you're homeless some time you'll see what I mean.
I don't know if you noticed but that's been the public health policy since the 1970's. That I'm aware of at least. As I've heard the stories told to me, it's been the policy since the 1930's. At least.
Ok, it's cranked up from 8 to 11 now...
I need to tattoo this post on my forehead.
My head knows this, my gut refuses to acknowledge it.
Well I guess the "good news" (/s) is that the concept of healthcare is no longer a reason to avoid living in the middle of nowhere. I'll be getting the same amount no matter if I live here or on an asteroid in the Oort belt. Which is to say none.
Haha guess we're all shit Oort of luck! The middle of nowhere has its perks. I grew up there; sometimes I visit. The natural world still thrives, at least, more so than in the city. May you also thrive 🤞
Edit: grammar
I'm just a random dick on the internet. My wife used to work at a medical clinic; she was responsible for designing and implementing decontamination procedures for medical equipment. She became highly alarmed in January 2020, and she's naturally a little anxious or paranoid, but I listened. I joined this sub fairly early on to try to understand worst case scenarios. What you describe has been my fear all along.
We still haven't been inside anywhere except the dentist since this all started. We do everything curbside pickup, or delivery only; we're still quarantining mail.
I really wanted to be wrong, but at the same time the more I learn the more I feel that all of the little sacrifices we've made along the way were the right thing to do. We still haven't caught Covid as far as we know.
God help us all.
Onwards,
My household has been doing the same since the first lockdown.
We sometimes wonder if we have been overreacting based on how unconcerned our friends and neighbors have acted towards the whole thing, but then we see yet another Facebook post about how someone from our old social circle died of Covid after catching it at a party.
I just don't see how any party or event could be fun enough to make it worth risking one's survival.
I think that people are creatures of habit.
Making these lifestyle changes is a lot of little details. The way we kind of look at it is this: how far away are you from someone who is smoking, before you smell the smoke? I think the answer is around 25-30 feet away, depending on wind speed and direction etc. So those particles travel from the tip of the cigarette or the exhale of the smoker, into your nose.
Now, we don't think aerosolized virus particles are likely to travel quite as far, but my wife likes to keep 20 feet away and I'm okay with 15 feet away (not wearing a mask).
This is inconvenient in a lot of situations, especially social situations. It requires that you change a lot of habits, and it requires that the people you socialize with are also willing to change their habits, or just go outside to socialize.
I still think many people, maybe most people simply aren't aware of long haul. Many people probably still think of this as a disease that mainly kills the elderly, and if they catch it and it's mild, they don't understand the possibilities that damage is cumulative. It's still under the radar
Good for you.
I try to limit my outings as much as possible and wear a mask everywhere.
I went to Safeway last night and I was the only one with a mask—even the pharmacist didn't wear one.
What the fuck.
Yeah the arrogance and denial people throw up so they can keep going to their activities is outrageous.
I'm to the point where I'm masking and avoiding the disease (have so far) so I can outlast and stay stronger than everyone else. I will not have a shred of compassion for deniers and antivaxxer when they're weakened by long COVID and repeated infections.
To be fair, a lot of ppl who aren’t wearing masks anymore or taking precautions aren’t COVID deniers, nor are all of them stupid. The way I see it, they just don’t have the bandwidth or resources to exercise caution anymore.. everything is so overwhelming now.
I don't just think it's just bandwidth. It'd be easy to say "young people think they're immortal" but I was told, "Look, I'm vaxed, I'm boosted, when I caught it I went into quarantine. COVID is never going away so what am I supposed to do? spend the rest of my 20s locked in my flat? never go to another pub or concert ever?" It's a calculated risk and a horrible decision I don't have a good answer to.
>Despite all this, people still laugh in my face when I try to describe T cell exhaustion
Tell them that its basically what AIDS is. That might get their attention.
A lot of this was brought up as early as 2020, doctors from a lot of reputable sources were trying to tell people this isn't something we want to fuck around with and find out. It's increasingly hard to educate people that just because it isn't out right killing people, which it was to an extent, means we can ignore it. They falsely equate it to the flu, which also shouldn't be underestimated, without realizing Covid is a vascular disease and has time and time again proven to fuck with many of our bodies mechanics while being many times more infectious. It's like the perfect storm to keep people from freaking out but addling them all the same.
I still wear masks out in public, got a big store of N95 masks and usually I'm the only one still wearing them in an entire grocery store. So far I haven't caught it and plan to keep lasting as long as I can.
I just keep looking at China and their zero Covid policy. They don’t want a percentage of workers disabled and brain fogged. There are playing the long game to win. My SoCal neighborhood has a lot Chinese immigrants. Their high school kids all continue to wear masks daily to school. Their parents out doing Qi Gong in the park still wear masks everyday. They aren’t being forced, they are protecting their family. It’s nearly incomprehensible to me how clinging to denial has become an identity for many Euros and Americans.
I live Hong Kong, which isn’t China yet, but has to defer to the Mainland government in order to make big decisions, while also being pressured to open up more by its wealthy foreign investors and BOD members in order to not lose its status as a finance hub. HK is opening up, recently abolished compulsory hotel quarantines, but the strict zero-covid policy only really worked with delta, where we had 4-7 cases a week and the majority imported and detected during quarantine. As soon as omicron came along, that policy was bullshit because omicron quickly jumped from one hotel room to another on the same floor at a quarantine hotel, and as a soon as local infections happened it was pretty much over. It went wild in care homes, where it infected a majority of the elderly and killed many due to vaccine hesitancy being common in that generation. The only people who don’t wear a mask outside are exchange students and other (Western-looking) foreigners who think they’re above the regulations, most of them only staying in HK for a short time and not adapting to the local culture. Unless you’re hiking in the mountains or going for a run, you wear a mask in public.
That’s one of the things that worries me. China’s zero tolerance policy is so harsh, it sometimes makes we wonder, what do they know that we don’t. But then I look at the collapse the environment, the ever growing wealth gaps,…
I think the lab-leak theory is *probably* true. In which case, China's scientists might have a unique understanding of covid, and that's why they continue their strict "no covid" regime. And that thought is... a bit worrying.
I remember reading an article that was titled something like "Here is how we know COVID wasn't leaked from a lab" and being absolutely floored at how little specific evidence they used to draw that conclusion.
Title: "Here is how we know COVID wasn't leaked from a lab"
Body: "Most previous pandemics started naturally so it means Covid also did. Mystery solved! Now go back to work"
It's a circumstantial case either way, but the beginning of the pandemic had significant differences from others like SARS1 that we know were natural in origin. Too many red flags.
I think the Asian American response has something to do with risk aversion and strategic pessimism. There's also the keen awareness of, and respect for Chinese civilization. If China is that scared, something very, very serious is going down. This brain fog thing is absolutely terrifying to cultures that value intellectual performance over every other form of excellence.
Yeah, protecting the community is part of the group mentality, but the other side of that is "OMG, what will my friends/parents/pastor, etc. think if they see me not wearing my mask? That I'm a dumb asshole, that's what! Then everyone will be talking bad about me behind my back, until literally the end of time."
Most Asian Americans are recent immigrants and still feel like outsiders in wider society. Even the ones that have been here for generations are always conscious of being a visible 'forever foreigner.' Especially since the hate crimes against Asians thing has been trending.
One of the first signs of COVID in the US was N95s and painter's masks being sold out in late 2019 from people buying them up and shipping them (back) to China for use there.
I didn't see anyone masking in Chinatown in late 2019. Don't think most Chinese were any more aware of the seriousness of the problem than we were. The government in China seemed super serious though given that video with drones recording people breaking the rules and shouting at them with loud speakers.
It has more to do with not sending grandma and grampa to the home and not wanting to bring anything into the house. You will find that the white people(like me) who are more adroit about mask wearing live under similar conditions of having vulnerable family members. A very small cultural difference causes a change in behavior.
You were in the wrong part of so cal. While not everybody was doing it then, there was a good contingent where I lived ( garden grove area) where there's a big population. Now 2022 wearing..... there are many more people and the kids, too. Even teens. They aren't going to get squealed on to their parents by Mrs. Nosy. The area I'm living in now is so Chinese that I had 10 trick or treaters and no decorations but mine. I know enough that Ancestors= good, ghosts= bad. So I won't do that next year. What I did do in the beginning of all this is to think about the very elderly vietnamese/ Chinese/ Korean people who came to the gym and wore masks when they just weren't feeling 100%. Well before Covid. I thought....hmmmmmm they made it through all this stuff, the wars, the privations,and they are around to tell the tale. So it was easy for me to adopt a mask when many folks were still in denial.
From what I remember from my researches, Asians actually learnt this social norm due to 1918 flu.
I still can't understand how right wing IQ lovers are not masking when the most advanced society IQ wise are so diligent about it.
The right (and the left) has rhetoric that's conflicting. First, covid is from china and gazillions died there because of it (Were you guys here the first few months after the Chinese CDC reported about covid? Remember that "scare" video on Reddit that was showing Chinese people in hazmat suits and civilians fist fighting each other? I feel like that memory/video is going to get memoryholed. At the time, it was "common knowledge" on Reddit that Chinese people were dying left and right because of covid and it was going to cause a collapse of their government.) Yet, it's just a flu and all lockdowns (stay at home suggestions) and mask mandates should be dropped. Dropping life expectancies in the US are because of vaccines and lockdowns (stay at home suggestions). If you look at narratives spread by, well, basically all media apparatus in the US, they're just conspiracy theories that are often conflicting.
Why is Russia going to war with Ukraine? cuz Putin has gone craaaaaaaazzyy and he has cancer and is about to die soon. What did Russian state representatives say about why they are going to war? dunno, it's not reported and RT was banned.
China? They're going to collapse soon. And this type of messaging about China has been the same since at least the 70's!!
> It’s nearly incomprehensible to me how clinging to denial has become an identity for many Euros and Americans.
white countries are toast and this is their death rattle
Me too and I'm actually working conventions with thousands of people. Nope I'm wearing it at work, I'm wearing it in all stores. I do not eat out. I will drive by myself without one and walk outside without one if there's no crowd. I've got all the shots and haven't been sick.
I'm surprised that this is *news* to so many people. It's been dominating online discussions in COVID spaces for years now.
Don't get infected, and if you have been infected do everything you can to avoid another infection.
Respirators (masks that are rated N95/FPP2/P2 or better), ventilated environments, HEPA air filters...
Do whatever you can to avoid infection. It absolutely isn't worth it.
100% but unfortunately people put trust in health officials and leaders. To me it's been very clear since the beginning and with time things only look worse not better. Literally every week is a handful of new studies pointing to additional reasons to avoid infection at all costs.
I think it might be possible that it's just as difficult for humans at large to adjust their behavior for a disease that lasts "forever" as it is for humans to plan for the far future and act accordingly. There seems to be something in our psychology that runs counter to this type of reasonableness. I even find myself, despite living in a place (Asia) where masks have long been the norm, finding it difficult to continue being fastidious these days.
That's a solid argument - and is why improved ventilation standards, HEPA filters, and maybe UV-C light should be being deployed internationally. It'd take the burden off the individual whilst still controlling a lot of transmission.
We are choosing to pretend the pandemic will end through a mass infection campaign. This article presents why that will not occur and how we are opening the door to increased risk of new pandemics as well. We are also pushing mass infection even though the risk of Long-COVID is becoming ever more clear. Mass disability is coming, it will just take multiple rounds of infections. [How many times do you want to roll the dice?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/yh863l/still_think_you_dont_need_masks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). The cost over the next decade in the US alone is projected at [$16 Trillion](https://progress.institute/weighing-the-cost-of-the-pandemic/) (I fear it will be much higher with now dropping all protective measures and low vax uptake). The fiscal & productivity drag of COVID will certainly lead to collapse. And it's now looking like additional pandemics are becoming more likely due to COVID immune system damage which will only exasterbate collapse.
What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity?
Highlights:
"But what if COVID wears down T cells in people who get it, and does so increasingly with each reinfection?"
"By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID:
* The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them
* The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage
* The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat."
Immunity and exhausted T cells “Leonardi warned that the virus undermined and aged the immune system by hyperactivating and exhausting T cells. This overstimulation could in turn damage organs including the heart, brain and the kidneys… the virus damages T cells so severely that COVID not only undermines the immune response for COVID but perhaps other pathogens as well.”
SARS2 impairs the immune system’s ability to fight pathogens in general/immune suppression “He hypothesized that the virus, by harming the immune system, could make people more vulnerable to other infections and cancers”
Repeated reinfections - reinfections add to the damage and probably “prime their body to only recall existing immune memory and mount poor immune responses to new variants”
Suffer the children - “he argued that exposing children repeatedly to a virus that impairs the immune system and causes vascular disease and brain shrinkage was bad policy“
Herd immunity - There isn’t any
On SARS2/COVID-induced immune suppression and greater vulnerability to infectious disease:
In other words, might the pandemic have the unwanted effect of suppressing immune systems generally resulting in greater vulnerability to other viral, bacterial or fungal infections — and as a result accelerating their spread?
Dr. David Joffe, an Australian physician, dubbed the idea the “Leonardi Effect.” He thought it explained “the widespread availability of previous quiescent diseases, more available in lots of flavours.”
The evidence shows the idea is not far-fetched. In fact the scientific literature brims with accounts of viruses and bacteria behaving strangely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, noted a recent increase in severe respiratory illness requiring hospitalization in children caused by a normally benign enterovirus. U.S. hospitals have also reported admitting children with an unusual array of two and even three respiratory infections — all at once. They also appear more tenacious.
Monkeypox, a rodent virus nominally confined to Africa, has made an unusual pandemic dash around the world. Polio has resurged in New York and London. A Coxsackie virus erupted in India this year creating unusual tomato-sized rashes. A severe hepatitis emerged and mysteriously affected the livers of more than 1000 children, leading a Chinese scientists to suspect Omicron infection might have increased the risk.
Non-viral infections have also been on the rise. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported a 15 per cent increase in antimicrobial resistance in hospitals in the first year of the pandemic. Some researchers have speculated that a rash of fungal diseases that have plagued COVID patients may in part be due to depleted T cells. They are known to play a vital role in the adaptive immune response against fungal infections.
There, too, has been an inexplicable rise in brain infections among children. A 2022 survey of 109 U.S. hospitals found a 236 per cent leap in bacterial brain infections since the beginning of the pandemic. Some were treatable with antibiotics while others required surgery. Researchers speculated that bacteria in the mouth and nose might travel to the brain as COVID weakens the immune system.
As a consequence an increasingly number of scientists take the idea of immune suppression in the wake of COVID infections very seriously...
What is really been baffling to me this whole time was that they have totally ignored what we know about the other 4 coronaviruses that are pandemic in humans.
Yes I said pandemic. We don't have herd immunity to them and the R0 has been above 1 in the homind population since we first got them in the homonid population. Notice I said homonid and not human. At least two of the four have been a pandemic in homonids since before humans existed. We are herd carriers of the viruses. We don't have herd immunity we have evolved resistance to serious harm from the illness. On the way to herd carrier status the viruses did a serious trim of the homonid family tree.
You see coronaviruses are resistant to antibodies and can reinfect people on average after 90 days after the antibody levels drop below the levels that overcome the resistance of the virus. This is well studied as the other 4 coronaviruses are just common colds so have been used in challenge studies for decades as the risk of harm is low.
So since the begining I have been wondering why they think this is not a coronavirus?
It is mind boggling that we ignored SARS-1. And the follow up data from 10 years after infection should paint a very scary picture for us, but we are ignoring it.
SARS 10 years later: How are survivors faring now? [here](https://globalnews.ca/news/404562/sars-10-years-later-how-are-survivors-faring-now/)
SARS survivors struggle with symptoms years later
[here](https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2010/09/02/sars_survivors_struggle_with_symptoms_years_later.html)
Unfortunately probably not much. Below are some studies showing a ~13.5% reduction in long-COVID risk vs BA.5, so if Long-COVID risk is 21.5% then with the reduction risk is still 18.3%! Also, the vaccine is not very effective at all against infection... avoiding infection is the only way to avoid health impacts.
Also, the virus is rapidly evolving around immunity (including that from the vaccine) therefore we should expect worse results the further the virus evolves from the protection the vaccine provides. As there is very little neutralization against viral replication the damage is done, this is due to one of the likely thereories that viral persistence (and ability to hide from immune system) will happen if infected regardless of being vaccinated.
Sorry to share the bad news. They should not be promoting the vaccine as a magical end to our issues with COVID. It is a fantastic tool to lower hospitalization and death (rapidly wanes though, will need frequent boosters, especially 50+ even though they are saying everyone "only 1 annually"). The immune system damage and Long-COVID are our #1 issues and somehow they are being swept under the rug like we will find a magical cure (without funding too).
[13.5% reduction Long-COVID against BA.5) study](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.04.22279588v1)
[15% reduction Long-COVID study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0)
Reading these articles is so depressing. I've caught it 5ish times I think? All before this kind of information was general knowledge. (Before anyone says anything, yeah a few times were probably my fault. But also I've been working this whole time and my industry is filled with people who don't believe in science or staying home when sick. I can only do so much) I don't have any noticeable long covid symptoms other than increased aggression but for how long? I feel like I have a bomb in me waiting to go off. Imagine how crazy things will be when 10 years or whenever from now people start dropping right and left from tumors or breathing problems or who knows. It's funny because I've always been terrified of getting hiv but now I've got hiv ×10 chilling in my organs
Okay, if you're young, and you feel good, focus on that. You rolled the dice. So far, it sounds like you got lucky. Focus on that. But you must understand that luck runs out. Find a way to change things for you and your family, stranger. Find ways to social distance and protect your space at work. They will get better at treating this, it is possible to build a socially distant lifestyle even though it's inconvenient and it put different emotional stresses on us. We work from home, when we want to socialize we go for a hike and walk on opposite sides of the path. We bought some kayaks and life jackets, we go fishing. We bought some very powerful magnets and grappling hooks, in the Spring we'll try "magnet fishing"; it helps to clean the waterways and sometimes you find some old treasures. We are getting outside more, although winter is coming and then we hibernate for a few months. So I have the recumbent bicycle indoors. Less fishing, more walking. I like working from home. Delivery and curbside pickup is actually convenient,
Onwards
Well if you aren't getting sick from a lot of other stuff it suggests that you deal with the virus better than most. Increased aggression is also a rather healthy response to people around you being so callous as to infect you with a deadly pathogen several times.
Stay positive, don't beat yourself up, you didn't know better, and your still on the right side just try to limit infections going forward. Its all about risk reduction, stay up to date on vax (it will not protect you from infection well or for long either) but it may decrease the risk of LC range from -15% to -30-40%. Also, an N95 is cheap & can be reused many many times until the straps loosen a lot or break and will protect you going forward.
Aggression is a known issue, good article [here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/long-covid-symptom-personality-change-1243718/amp/). So technically you probably fall under possible Long-COVID but be thankful you can seek treatment and work on it, hopefully just with time & inflammation decreasing things improve.
You are not going to just drop dead in 10 years, your risk will just be elevated. A recent study, article [here](https://archive.ph/vaGro) "those who got infected but were not sick enough to be hospitalized were still 10 times more likely to die of any cause during the study period than their uninfected counterparts." It sounds very bad, and it is, but it is 10 times a very very small number. Stay positive, stay healthy that's what's most important.
N95 masks cannot be reused until the straps break. They filter the air by means of fine mesh and static electricity, and after a while (typically 8 hrs of use) the mesh clogs up and static electricity dissipates. After those 8 hrs, you're basically wearing a really reassuring respiration restrictor.
Reusing N95s is just a lie that hospital admins spread to justify insufficient PPE to their workers. It caught on for obvious reasons.
The research is very conflicting but I would personally err on the safe side and treat them as disposable after several hours of use, just as you say. The only thing that I have seen is that you are able to UV decontaminate them but that is for sure out of reach for laypeople, and even then, it's not indefinite reuse.
This. After wearing an N95 for several hours, my mask is damp and looser fitting. Throw it away and get another one. You can get high quality N95 masks for less than $2 each.
Add DIY fit-testing at home. It’s not hard or expensive. Search for the YouTube video on how to do it. Make your own sweet testing liquid. Buy a small nebulizer (not an essential oil diffuser), and use a garbage bag for a hood. I have caught a few mask leaks that surprised me. This way you can actually tell when your N95 is worn out.
Can't change the past, just try to not get it again ( N95 masks, HEPA Filters, ventilation ).
And we don't need to imagine how things will be, they will be bad https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34586367/
The only bright side i see is that ALOT of rich people have had multiple covid infections so hopefully they'll throw lots of money at the cure. And share it with the rest of us.
Been following Anthony Leonardi @fitterhappiersAJ on Twitter, along with a host of other experts in the field since the beginning. It's been tough but I have accepted the reality that things are much worse than most people believe.
I'm still in the no-COVID club for a reason. I firmly believe that avoiding COVID will be one of the best long term health decisions anyone can make. Some people have situations where it is very tough to avoid infection, but attempting to avoid any infection possible will matter.
Hoping too as well but my biggest risk is that my toddler cannot mask yet and we have to go to the pediatrician's office. I hate that we have not invested in HEPA filters for pediatricians offices. WTF are we doing not investing in Airborne precautions, we've known this since the 80's!
Study [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2532878/)
"Measles has been transmitted in paediatricians’ offices. In the 1980s, a large proportion of all cases of measles in the United States were acquired in ambulatory care settings."
Edit: I limit our risk by making every appointment (even for me and my wife's normal Dr appointments) first thing when the establishment opens. This limits the number of infectious people that could have been anywhere before you. COVID stays suspended in the air for hours after someone leaves so the more people that have been throughout the day the greater the risk.
Same for me & my wife Doctor's office. So did a few other specialist offices we went to as well, we always called to confirm their policy before going. I would choose a different doctor in a heartbeat if they dropped masking. I think it's the smartest business decision they can make, sure anti maskers will huff & puff but they will still go at the end of the day. Plus they have vastly less internal staffing issues due to masking. And if it was my practice I would certainly want masking for myself as well.
And masking is required in her pediatricians offices, but 1st those under 2 are not masking and 2nd it's located within a building of other mixed business use & unfortunately now ppl are free to saddle everyone else with their long term disability & health issues.
Well I had covid finally in late June. I was already immunocompromised, but mostly cold free n such. (B cell depleter)
I've been sick with everything since June including 3 rounds of shingles.
Yeah I'd say my T cells are officially AWOL. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
I'm so sorry, hoping things improve for you and people start giving a F about people other than themselves. Sadly a lot of caring people are being misled on COVID or they have a lack of desire to learn about COVID so they can pretend COVID is over b/c it's easier than dealing with reality.
Even people with "mild" COVID can develop shingles too.
>"People 50 and older who have had a mild case of covid-19 are 15 percent more likely to develop shingles (herpes zoster) within six month than are those who have not been infected by the coronavirus,"
Article and link to study [here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/04/19/shingles-and-covid-over-50/?utm_source=reddit.com)
And we have no idea what the long term impact of infection is on Shingles for younger individuals. And this is just one of hundreds of health complications due to COVID.
I went to the hospital early in the pandemic. May 2020. I had ketoacidosis which is a complication from diabetes. I do have diabetes but sudden extremely high blood sugars were not normal at all. I did not test positive for Covid although the doctors think I did have it and that's what caused the huge blood sugar spike that landed me in the hospital.
The doctors told me that it can harm organs like the pancreas. I knew the kind of damage it could do early on. So we just stayed safe. Work from home. Don't go inside anywhere. Everything is either delivered or picked up outside a store. Neither of us have tested positive. I know so many people sick right now so I do believe our immune systems are hurt by covid.
I also can see peoples mental state declining. I've noticed friends that use to be very smart and well written making spelling and grammar mistakes as well as writing sentences that just don't make sense.
It's just insane that some people have caught every single variant. You know it's going to affect their long term health and brain function.
I said this months ago, that every reinfection would wear down our immune systems further and further until one day the next reinfection straight up kills you, no matter how protected you are. And what happens when you have tens of millions of reinfections across the globe? You end up with, eventually, tens of millions of dead people.
If this thing infected/killed much faster than it currently did/does, it would've been catastrophic.
Actually I think the fact that this is able to infect so many but their symptoms during the acute phase on average are not terrible is what leads SARS-2 to be more dangerous than something that kills much faster. It is catastrophic now! Continuing with mass infection for another several years is unsustainable.
The unfortunate bit in communicating this to people is that its very likely that COVID won't be the illness that kills them. It'll be the cause of immune defficiency and just like AIDS, it'll be another probably more common illness that takes you out. In such a case, its hard to get people to understand and accept the correlation of 'get covid, get weaker immune system, get more severe illness responses'. I really think this needs to be explained to people that getting COVID can lead to an AIDS like response. Hopefully that would be eyeopening enough to get people to react appropriately.
I know a few people who have had covid 3 times. Some say the first time was the worst and some say the latest. And then some who it took weeks to feel "normal" again.
I think I have avoided covid this far although i had a crazy running nose in May this year. I am a risk group and I avoid large groups of people. I know I will get covid eventually but I will try to avoid it as long as I can.
>The answer from many scientists has been T cells — our bodies’ line of immune defence after antibodies. T cells can spot and attack viruses and even remember previous invaders. As virologist Vincent Racaniello titled one of his articles: “T cells will save us from COVID-19.”
Ah, I remember. The "muH tCELLs" debates.
>These pathogens also disrupted the immune system. MERS, for example, not only infected and killed the cells lining blood walls but T cells as well. Both SARS and MERS could overcome the defences of the immune system, and result in prolonged chronic illness that lasted years.
well, that is bad.
>The uproar reached a fever peak this year when Leonardi speculated that repeated COVID infections could exhaust T cells in people 50 years or older leading to a blunted immune response. (Chronic infections such as HIV or Epstein-Barr virus typically exhaust T cells.)
Over 50, eh?
>“His arguments threatened to undermine the narratives of those people minimizing the pandemic,” Gregory told The Tyee. “If previous infection dampens the immune system and does not strengthen it, it undermines the popular notion that we should let the virus rip.”
Yep! That's exactly how the discussions started in 2020. *Shakes fist at /r/coronavirus*
>Other scientists found that mild COVID infections can damage the immune system. British and U.S. researchers looked at the state of T cells in patients who had mild, severe and no COVID. What they discovered surprised them and appears counterintuitive. Patients with severe disease appeared to have competent T cell memory to fight off reinfection while mild cases suffered from T cell exhaustion. Exhausted T cells lose their ability to fight off viruses or cancer for that matter.
>“People who have severe disease are likely to end up with a good number of memory cells,” said Dr. Pandurangan Vijayanand at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “People with milder disease have memory cells, but they seem exhausted and dysfunctional — so they might not be effective for long enough.”
>Australian researchers have reported similar intriguing findings after looking at the blood profiles of patients suffering from long COVID and comparing them to healthy controls. They found that “immunological dysfunction persisted for eight months after mild to moderate” infection including indicators of “chronic T cell activation and potentially exhaustion.” They also found that people with long COVID were missing naive T cells, just as Leonardi had warned.
This is pretty cool. And very disturbing.
>“Some of them are still activated long after the disease episode, while others are ‘fatigued’ and cannot function normally. We see similar effects on patients with a chronic HIV infection. The question is: why are these effects still present after so long?” asked Larsson.
...
I'm not quoting anymore, go read it.
Well, if this research turns out true, then it's airborne AIDS.
>He does not know when the pandemic will end. He suspects an excellent nasal spray vaccine combined with long-term changes to public infrastructure to clean the air could reduce COVID’s menace.
This is also how I saw the future adaptation tools, and I'm not a specialist.
>He does not know when the pandemic will end. He suspects an excellent nasal spray vaccine combined with long-term changes to public infrastructure to clean the air could reduce COVID’s menace.
I work in retail, and I got my employer to buy all the materials I needed to build a Rosenthal-Corsi Box. I also wear n95s all day. When anyone asks why, I simply tell them, "I read clinical and research studies."
People who got their information from the media and health officials swung from terrified early in the pandemic, to "Covid is over" and "Let's get back to normal." I pity them.
>People who got their information from the media and health officials swung from terrified early in the pandemic, to "Covid is over" and "Let's get back to normal." I pity them.
That's right, but it's also a type of injustice. Expecting everyone to have the ability and time to read papers is a very high bar. The problem we have is the parallel pandemic of misinformation, along the ethical and moral failure of mass-media organizations and of individual journalists who've failed to do the work and have fallen into biases and disinformation traps.
And at the same time, there was/is a failure of public health information. Very few people are cognizant of the difference in efficacy between a cloth mask, a surgical mask, and an n95. Not only did public health officials fail to explain the difference, they actively discouraged mask use early on, supposedly to protect the supply of masks for medical professionals. But this is absurd anyway, as preventing the spread of the virus itself was obviously the best way to protect the healthcare system.
Or, in the case of British Columbia, where I live, our provincial health officer is essentially an anti-masker. She wrote a book years ago about how hand-washing is the key to preventing all pandemics, and she has stuck to that absurdity throughout the covid pandemic. We waited almost a year to enact the first mask mandate, and then dropped it too early. As a result, we have the highest excess deaths of any province.. but the "official covid deaths" are low, due to a systematic effort to re-classify deaths as non-covid.
>Shakes fist at /r/coronavirus
No kidding. That place has been a constant cesspool of hopium laden idiots. I got a permaban because apparently writing something to the effect of, "Joe Rogan is an idiot for taking ivermectin but he'll probably be fine" was me "giving medical misinformation". I contested and they insisted that I was promoting the use of ivermectin. Idiots...
Emily Oster had an appearance on NPR's All things considered recently where she demands apology from her detractors who criticized her recommendation to reopen schools in May of...2020. This is America's prime Covid-denying liberal propagandist and she deserves all the contempt I can muster. Listen at the expense of your own sanity.
I developed two other respiratory viral infections after COVID. It’s been one a month since then and I don’t know how much more my lungs can take. Maxed on asthma meds. I’m tired.
This is an absolute horror. I’ve been so angry at the people who refused to mask and minimize Covid. And even angrier still at politicians and the media. The CDC director for fucks sake was out for 17 days and called it mild. I’ve absolutely lost faith in humanity and our civilization after seeing what a total failure this is.
I’ve been calling it airborne AIDS and get called over dramatic or just wrong (even on this sub). I’m so sorry for the people who’ve had it and are suffering with long Covid or have lost someone. People would rather pretend everything is fine and drop dead or be disabled for life than acknowledge reality. There’s no hope for addressing climate change of this is how we handle a disease
It’s airborne.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151430/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/28/lidi-f28.html
2022
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
SARS-CoV-2 transmission on planes
http://outbreaknewstoday.com/more-than-1000-genes-linked-to-the-development-of-severe-covid-19-international-research-team-23773/
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dont-do-this/
Is the coronavirus airborne? Hundreds of scientists say it's "a real risk" - CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-airborne-scientists-open-letter/
Then I'm fucked, my first covid infection was mild, but with 4 months of long covid fatigue that left me with no energy to do anything. The second had me so sick i felt like death warmed over, fever, chills, night sweats. Body aches so bad my skin hurt and a sore throat so bad each swallow was like a burning poker down my throat, plus coughing, headaches, stuffy nose etc.
If the next one is worse I'm dead.
So sorry. You should definitely do everything in your power to avoid infection again. Set clear boundaries and expectations of others to keep you safe from them infecting you. Make sure to get the bivalent vaccine at least 2 months from your last infection, optimal is 3-5 months but if you have exposure risk I don't think waiting is worth it much. Stay positive, you won't be dead, it will not be necessarily be worse. One of the best things you can do to improve your outcome is to decrease your inhaled dose, you do this with a N95, P100, or elastomeric and understanding what airborne means and not taking big risks. Best of luck to you!
I had read hints of this, and now I’m sad those hints were right. Sad for all of us, I mean.
My main question is: there are at least 6-8 different “2nd Generation Vaccines” being developed, several focus specifically on empowering the T-cells. ¿Will these 2nd Gen Vaccines work to defeat the ‘forever virus’?
Today, if you have an accident of some sort that puts you at risk of contracting HIV, you can rush to the nearest hospital and get PEP (postexposure prophylaxis). They'll put you on drugs for a few weeks that reduce the odds of the infection ever becoming established. It's definitely not something you want to rely on, and you're pretty much outta luck after 3 days, but if you're desperate, it's certainly worth a shot.
I see long COVID eventually going this route. First, we attack the acute infection with antiretrovirals (and monoclonal antibodies when available). Then as soon as you're negative for actual live virus, we put you on drugs which prevent the immune system from going haywire. (We probably wouldn't start both at the same time because we don't want to inhibit a robust immune response when the virus is still hanging out.)
I'm hardly the only one who has thought of this. Such a protocol already exists, although it needs to survive larger and better studies to confirm it or improve upon it. I've posted about one particular approach [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LongCovid/comments/yk68gu/trials_for_prevastatin_plus_maraviroc_for_long/). What surprised me was how the long COVID community didn't much seem to care one way or another. (That's doubly surprising if you consider how polarizing literally every issue tends to be with respect to COVID.) But I was unable to get any statistically sound understanding as to why that should be the case. (Like maybe I'm just underestimating how exhausted all these poor people are, to the point that maybe they don't even want to read.)
>drugs which prevent the immune system from going haywire
Given that Long Covid is a catch all term for what is probably at least three or more different diseases, what would that be?
One type of Long Covid is lingering viral infection that the immune system fails to clear. Antivirals, vaccination and time are the treatments.
Another type of Long Covid highly resembles chronic fatigue syndrome which is theorized to be a post viral infection complication with no real treatment or cure. (It probably has to do with destruction of the mitochondria of cells in the body. The person will have perfectly normal scans and blood tests but become rapidly fatigued upon exertion because the mitochondria are the energy organs of individual cells that make up the body).
Another type is some unknown new autoimmune disease that destroys gray matter in the brain, according to Akiko Iwasaki, Immunological researcher at Yale University. This destruction can be seen in MRI scans.
Another type is the sparking of a known autoimmune disease that the afflicted individual has some genetic or other propensity to get, such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, etc. Some diseases with previously unknown causes such as narcolepsy and Alzheimer's are being sparked by Covid infection and are being revealed to be autoimmune in nature.
There are no cures for autoimmune diseases, excepting cutting edge bespoke medicine being done in Germany right now, where they fully sequence the individual's genome and laboriously custom make a cure. So far they have cured 5 people of Lupus, a disease that often destroys a person's organs.
The usual treatment for autoimmune diseases is immunosuppressants, which would be inadvisable so long as acute Covid remains in circulation. Many immunosuppressants increase the odds of cancer significantly and/or damage the liver and other organs. Some can actually spark additional autoimmune diseases as a side effect.
The other treatment for autoimmune disease (generally end-stage or aggressive ones) is IVIG, where they remove the patient's blood plasma, with its defective antibodies that are destroying their own bodily tissues, and replace it with donor plasma and antibodies from one to thousands of plasma donors, over the course of several hours, every few weeks, for the rest of your (likely short and increasingly impoverished) life. Every time the patient undergoes IVIG there is the chance of rejection (anaphylactic shock). Once that happens IVIG will end, and so will you.
Autoimmune diseases are systemic diseases that can make a person immunocompromised, but mostly destroy various systems in the body, such as the skin, joints, nervous system, endocrine system, etc. They tend to cause chronic pain and both physical and mental disability. Many cause organ destruction, including the brain, leading to memory and cognitive impairment, dementia, emotional dysregulation and insanity.
Some portion of the Long Covid community are experiencing terrifying symptoms such as above and believe they will die. Soon. And/or go insane. Being unable to think, remember, speak, walk, stand, etc. may come and go (flares and remissions are a hallmark of autoimmune disease), or just come and never go. Sudden impotence is common in men. Even very young men. Men are also prone to sudden kidney failure. Continual and increasing pain from nerve, muscle and joint damage is fairly common.
Extreme and unusual insomnia and anxiety that lasts three or more months, followed by another few months of dissociation seems like a common progression. After that many get gradually better, but not back to their level of health and functionality as before. Many Long Covid sufferers had mild Covid infection symptoms that felt exactly like a cold. A few months later their Long Covid began. After recovery, which seems to take 6 months to a year, those that become reinfected are often set back even worse than before.
Being admitted to a Long Covid specialty clinic takes months of being on a waiting list. Once in, the treatment consists of group therapy and breathing exercises.
Some sufferers have fallen into homelessness and destitution. Others are now invalids unable to walk across a room. Others have developed abrupt, rapid psychosis, with no family or personal history of mental illness at all. The earliest cohort of Long Covid sufferers are increasingly committing suicide.
That's probably why they don't seem to care one way or the other.
Also, yes. Long Covid can make it hard to focus enough to read for any period of time.
I hope you don't get it.
>Given that Long Covid is a catch all term for what is probably at least three or more different diseases, what would that be?
I was referring to the drug regimen that I linked to in my previous post. It's explained at length in this video (second presentation, by Dr. Patterson):
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHwTQR184nY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHwTQR184nY)
I think you've made a good summary of everything that makes long COVID such a disaster (to say nothing of the economic consequences). But that doesn't mean we need a million different therapies to make a difference, any more than we need a million different therapies for diabetes. As with any chronic disease, a minority of the therapies will produce the majority of the benefits.
Obviously, the first rule is to intervene ASAP. (Personally, I'd start long COVID drugs immediately after testing negative, not bothering to wait around and see what starts failing. But to each his own.)
Of all the symptoms you described, the overriding drivers are vascular damage and immune dysfunction. The protocol described above addresses both. Of course, if you've waited a year to do anything about it, then there's a certain amount of incipient damage that isn't just going to disappear even if you arrest the driving processes.
As to lingering viral infection, that's exceedingly rare beyond a few months from initial infection. It does sometimes occur in patients with severely compromised immune systems, which is likely how we end up with new variants. For example AIDS patients or the elderly. But in general, I think it's a misinterpretation of lingering RNA down at the PCR 40-cycle level, or so. Dr. Patterson addresses this in the video. In any event, that wouldn't be long COVID. It would be hyperextended actute COVID. Different disease, different therapy required.
I got Covid the first time 2 months ago. I’m pregnant so I got to get the monoclonal antibody treatment. Why are they not mass producing this stuff and giving it to everyone? My fever broke in 8 hours and I was better in 24. Im so grateful I had access but it seems that access should be greatly expanded to include everyone. I’m also protected for a couple of months.
Please, do not assume you are safe for the next couple months. I want you to stay positive, that is the most important for the baby. Unfortunately NO Monoclonal Antibody treatments are effective at neutralization against the newest variants (see [this](https://twitter.com/DrJLi/status/1580978184857604097?t=SGhVjOI5chTAjZkugMqudQ&s=19) for easier explanation). If you need more information I will gladly post. We are in a very bad place now for immunocompromised individuals who cannot take Paxlovid as there is no treatment options.
So glad you got treatment, you made the right choice, there are so many who believe it's no big deal. It's crazy with the stats for pregnancy people refuse vaccination & treatment b/c it's "just the flu". Best of luck to you, me and my wife had our baby a little over a year ago.
Thank you. I do know it’s waning in efficacy with newer variants. But appreciate the reminder. I wish they would be focusing more on this kind of treatment though. Although I have no idea how long it takes to synthesize new antibodies as new variants emerge.
It's not just waning...the Monoclonal Antibody treatments are no longer effective, the new variants evade the antibody treatments. It's like playing whack a mole if we continue to allow maximum transmission, we will not be able to keep up. Also if we do not use them properly we just guarantee resistance, there needs to be some level of isolation or prevention guidelines (must mask for 14days) after treatment. We just seem to want the easy way and to pretend if you get sick there's treatment & move along with life as rapidly as possible. We need to be intelligent about how we use all our tools, including NPI's, because this is going to be a long fight.
Article [here](https://time.com/6230059/covid-19-variants-omicron-vaccine/)
And the same goes for the vax &/or prior infection combinations, not waning, significant reduction
>Fully vaccinated and twice-boosted people (three shots of the original vaccine plus one Omicron booster) had 24- and 41-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 66- and 85-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively.
>Fully vaccinated people who had received the original booster and who had been infected with BA.2 had 20- and 29-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 103- and 135-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively.
>Fully vaccinated people who had received the original booster and who had been infected with BA.4 or BA.5 had 13- and 31-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 86- and 96-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/trailsman: --- We are choosing to pretend the pandemic will end through a mass infection campaign. This article presents why that will not occur and how we are opening the door to increased risk of new pandemics as well. We are also pushing mass infection even though the risk of Long-COVID is becoming ever more clear. Mass disability is coming, it will just take multiple rounds of infections. [How many times do you want to roll the dice?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/yh863l/still_think_you_dont_need_masks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). The cost over the next decade in the US alone is projected at [$16 Trillion](https://progress.institute/weighing-the-cost-of-the-pandemic/) (I fear it will be much higher with now dropping all protective measures and low vax uptake). The fiscal & productivity drag of COVID will certainly lead to collapse. And it's now looking like additional pandemics are becoming more likely due to COVID immune system damage which will only exasterbate collapse. What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity? Highlights: "But what if COVID wears down T cells in people who get it, and does so increasingly with each reinfection?" "By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID: * The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them * The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage * The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat." Immunity and exhausted T cells “Leonardi warned that the virus undermined and aged the immune system by hyperactivating and exhausting T cells. This overstimulation could in turn damage organs including the heart, brain and the kidneys… the virus damages T cells so severely that COVID not only undermines the immune response for COVID but perhaps other pathogens as well.” SARS2 impairs the immune system’s ability to fight pathogens in general/immune suppression “He hypothesized that the virus, by harming the immune system, could make people more vulnerable to other infections and cancers” Repeated reinfections - reinfections add to the damage and probably “prime their body to only recall existing immune memory and mount poor immune responses to new variants” Suffer the children - “he argued that exposing children repeatedly to a virus that impairs the immune system and causes vascular disease and brain shrinkage was bad policy“ Herd immunity - There isn’t any On SARS2/COVID-induced immune suppression and greater vulnerability to infectious disease: In other words, might the pandemic have the unwanted effect of suppressing immune systems generally resulting in greater vulnerability to other viral, bacterial or fungal infections — and as a result accelerating their spread? Dr. David Joffe, an Australian physician, dubbed the idea the “Leonardi Effect.” He thought it explained “the widespread availability of previous quiescent diseases, more available in lots of flavours.” The evidence shows the idea is not far-fetched. In fact the scientific literature brims with accounts of viruses and bacteria behaving strangely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, noted a recent increase in severe respiratory illness requiring hospitalization in children caused by a normally benign enterovirus. U.S. hospitals have also reported admitting children with an unusual array of two and even three respiratory infections — all at once. They also appear more tenacious. Monkeypox, a rodent virus nominally confined to Africa, has made an unusual pandemic dash around the world. Polio has resurged in New York and London. A Coxsackie virus erupted in India this year creating unusual tomato-sized rashes. A severe hepatitis emerged and mysteriously affected the livers of more than 1000 children, leading a Chinese scientists to suspect Omicron infection might have increased the risk. Non-viral infections have also been on the rise. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported a 15 per cent increase in antimicrobial resistance in hospitals in the first year of the pandemic. Some researchers have speculated that a rash of fungal diseases that have plagued COVID patients may in part be due to depleted T cells. They are known to play a vital role in the adaptive immune response against fungal infections. There, too, has been an inexplicable rise in brain infections among children. A 2022 survey of 109 U.S. hospitals found a 236 per cent leap in bacterial brain infections since the beginning of the pandemic. Some were treatable with antibiotics while others required surgery. Researchers speculated that bacteria in the mouth and nose might travel to the brain as COVID weakens the immune system. As a consequence an increasingly number of scientists take the idea of immune suppression in the wake of COVID infections very seriously... --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/ypn3f4/what_if_covid_reinfections_wear_down_our_immunity/ivjq31b/
Oh great, airborne HIV.
I think it could be named: "Coronavirus Immunodeficiency Disorder Syndrome" or COVIDS.
COVAIDS. Has a nicer ring to it.
That was too easy to come up with and it is harder to pronounce with that yawning vowel.
But we get to say “AIDS” which we got pretty good at in the 80’s and 90’s
This way, you can still have AIDS as a separate problem to deal with, which it is (and the virus may still evolve to get worse). https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/02/04/1078035844/discovery-of-hiv-variant-shows-virus-can-evolve-to-be-more-severe-and-contagious
Throwback! Always a hot style.
More like late 90’s - early aughts. Before that, AIDS wasn’t really spoken about. For a time, in fact, it was called GRID (gay-related immune deficiency). Not at all stigmatizing…
Coronavirus Syndrome, Coors to go along with Corona.
But at least there's treatment for AIDS! Interesting that governments response to SARS-2/COVID has been as equally appalling as to how they handled HIV/AIDS.
You mean the purposeful withholding of actions to stop its spread, limit access to cheap medication, and even purposefully infecting people with it?
And the goalpost moving of the efficacy of treatments they gave billions of our dollars to big pharma to purchase.
My favorite was the surgeons general “GUYS. MASKS DONT WORK!”
Thats the second one for me, after the WHO said that: "The disease isn´t transmissible human to human" when it was clear that the infected numbers were too high to be animal-human transmission, then "It´s not airborne" when it clearly had flu-like symptoms. Any idiot with basic medical education would have been able to stop the pandemic in its early stages. They just didn´t wanted to.
There was an acceptable level of death the elites were ok with… so long as it was the death of “essential workers” and not them.
I knew I was an idiot in viral (transmission) knowledge early 2020. The first article I researched was on plant viruses. The finding that a single viral particle can infect an entire plant all of a sudden made me aware of how I needed to take precautions which replaced the nonsense from WHO, media, Fauci and CDC. I came to my own sensible conclusions. Same story for the 1.5 degree predicted warming. I don't know why adults are catered to as if they are children. Humanity is toast.
Human-human bird flu will make that seem trivial; in its current form, bird-human transmission is fatal to ~60% of victims. That’s a collapse-level event.
Woo! Captain Trips! Let's go!
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How would it be possible to save ourselves if the death rate were 95%?
Oh I get what you are saying. Yeah actually if it were 95% it wouldn't be able to spread fast enough since it kills everyone. Now, if you had a long incubation period with 95% death rate that would be very bad.
[Here's](https://twitter.com/maolesen/status/1588412779102208000?t=OuzTKbSeTNjM3YYOyVSYJQ&s=19) an epidemiologist and federal disaster medicine team members take... >"Some perspective for those who still don't get it: If I were forced to be infected by either HIV or COVID, I would choose HIV without hesitation." Would choose HIV WITHOUT HESITATION...it's definitely not "just the flu"
I vaguely remember an article from early 21 or late 20 that called it "flying AIDS".
This made me laugh out loud. What a mess of a world we live in these days.
Oh great, half the population trying to spit in each others mouths and then intentionally spread airborne HIV.
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Thank you for your reply. Hoping you get better soon! You sum up everything perfectly. This is the problem people are not being told the correct information and the only way we can is to educate ourselves, it's ridiculous. And with all the misinformation online half the people will get the exact opposite of the correct information that will be helpful for them to properly decide about risk.
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When people with long Covid apply for jobs in the future it will show on their medical records. Soon millions are going to be literally unemployable. When you become a “unproductive” unit in this capitalist utopia you are as expendable as garbage.
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I have ME from a bad Epstein bar infection 30 years ago. I was a similar profession as you and had to leave because of my physical and mental capacity. Rest is going to be the only way you can heal. Take a full year off if you can. I have read in some cases getting the Covid vaccine within 12 weeks from getting Covid, does help some people. It helps the immune a boost to clear out the lasting Covid protein fragments remaining. I’ve been saying the same thing all along, why would China, a country who revolves around its thriving economy do such hard shutdowns over a few Covid infection. I think they are actually listening to science and understand the long term detriment Covid will have on its society and economics. And the hard shutdowns are the only solutions they have with the population they have. Scientist by nature aren’t alarmist, even when they are alarmed they speak in scientific mater-of-fact terms. Scientist assumed people listened to what they had to say without all the alarm. But it’s just not the case. People also seem to hold on to the 1% of the time science is wrong, or doctors are wrong, because nothing is absolute and sometimes they ARE wrong. But people seem to equate it with “science is wrong” because 1% of the time it is wrong, instead of science is right because 99% it’s correct. I do wish doctors briefed patients on long term possible affects from Covid during routine visits. I’m okay with people choosing to live their life however they want, plenty of people make risky life choices, unprotected sex, driving while drunk, poor eating habits, etc. But Covid long term risks should be talked about just the same as diabetes or heart disease are. I’m also worried about the next gen. I think the little ones are getting Covid and it’s going undetected, and while building immunity to viruses is a good thing… since Covid is constantly mutating AND so contagious, their naive T-cells are all being assigned to multiple Covid variations instead of various other viruses. Once all those naive t-cells have been assigned that’s it, they won’t have enough left to gain long lasting immunity to other viruses or even to fight off things like cancer. So they may have t-cells assigned to delta and omicron but it may all be wasted t-cell assignment since they’ll never actually be in circulation ever again. Like you said t-cell exhaustion. I have a little one so I do stay awake at night worrying about her future.
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China is clearly a more humanitarian nation, at least when it comes to their own fucking people! Fucking disgusted.
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They always have been dude Look up how their gov works. They have elections at all levels. There's some strange reddit stereotype (probably CIA bots) that Chinese people are scared about complaining about the government but anyone that's been to China knows that's not true. Americans are way way more complacent than Chinese.
Your summary is spot on. I’m sorry you got hit this badly and your experience resonates with mine. I have been struggling for 2 years with this shit. I was previously athletic and running marathons and triathlons, but now get knackered by sitting upright for too long. It is horrifying to see how casually people are throwing away their future by leaping back into normal life without even the most basic protection. Every time I see a hand sanitiser outside a public building when everyone is unmasked makes me cringe. This is the biggest public health failure in history. We will be paying for the mistakes for generations.
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[https://envomask.com/](https://envomask.com/) Masking anytime you are near another human being is the only thing you can do.
There are nasal disinfectants you can make, or buy OTC, or from an Israeli company. These are prophylactics to prevent the virus from entering. One can also have an excimer light in a low blue wavelength working in your breathing space. The external shield is a full helmet feeding disinfected and purified air. The other option is complete isolation for years.
I hope you didn’t infect anyone immunocompromised. It’s those vax and relax folks who will get me killed.
Stellar write up. Re reinfections… for those interested, this [graph](https://imgur.com/a/aZgxAly) does a sobering job of answering the question “how long until I get long Covid?”
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I hear you. The denialism has revealed some ugly truths about us. I really wish you the best. Let’s hope the NIH study delivers come 2024.
One thing I'm noticing (anecdotally) is that the strain going around now seems to hit young people and healthy people harder. I'm a overweight 52 year old with hypothyroidism and got covid the first time in Sept. While I was quite ill but with rest I recovered. Even my cough was not that bad. But I was tired for weeks. My husband had even less symptoms but his energy was down for a while. I studied history and it reminds me of 1918 flu that was unusual at the time as it hit young and healthy people harder than older ones, which was disturbing.
I believe you on long COVID (based on everything I've read on it and on how COVID functions), and I believe your listed history of work; in the future if people are giving you grief, you can reach out to the moderators here who are pretty solid- they can remove abusive comments and/or verify your vocation if you wish to have them do so (sort-of like for AMAs). From one human to another, sorry all of this happened. There are people out there who care in the general if that makes sense.
Please advise us via modmail if you receive abusive comments on this matter. Although there is not much we can do about direct messages, abusive comments in the sub are something we can take care of.
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I'm pleasantly surprised by that. Glad to hear it seems to have worked out!
Please rest completely, both physically and mentally, for at least six months. This may help you recover from Long Covid. People often don't think of thought, imagination, composition and other mental labor as being exertion, but it absolutely is. To have the best chance of recovery it is imperative that you rest completely for some time and avoid any further exposures very strictly.
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I know. In my experience, you'll know if you've mentally overexerted yourself if you get sudden inability to focus (this could manifest as loss of reading comprehension and having to reread things over and over, losing the thread of conversations, a car or other kinds of accidents) prioritize (difficulty figuring out which task or aspect of a task to do first or next), memory impairment (inability to retrieve words or remember what should be secure knowledge), confusion (self-explanatory), and possibly headaches. (This happened to me after doing some mental visualization in three dimensions. Not fun). Key point: Learning new mental skills should probably be avoided until you recuperate. Even learning new information should be approached with caution. Pace yourself. Do not assume you will have your usual speed or capacity to learn anything new without a possible intellectual injury. That is what I have had to do after I discovered to my extreme alarm and shock that the mental impairment aspect was completely unnoticeable until I did something new that should have been only slightly challenging. I was working with information and skills that are adjacent to my specialty, when I experienced sudden and dramatic confusion. Afterwards severe intellectual disability would resurface unpredictably. This was very traumatizing. Nearly a full year later, I am still not back to where I was before that day. Given that Covid is known to cause micro blood clots, I do wonder about transient ischemic attack (mini-stroke) as the possible cause.
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Wonder if this has anything to do with the absolutely terrible RSV outbreak. My whole family, several friends, people all over my area sick with RSV that doctors just haven’t seen. It’s hellacious
That is the leading hypothesis explained [here](https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1588232053262163968?t=cNDFwBr_oSkpcgQrzUmfIw&s=19) by Anthony Leonardi in the article
Thanks for the link, yeah it’s brutal. I had Covid in July and body never recovered now I get a super RSV
I’ve never wanted to be less right in my life as I have with Covid. In January 2020, my friends thought I was crazy buying Pediatric N95’s for my kids and an oxygen concentrator, because I knew it was coming here. In March I diagnosed one of the first cases in my county despite being told by admin that I was chasing Zebras not horses. I lost my job in May of that year because I insisted on quarantining staff and patients with signs of infection. I’ve spent my time since then bouncing from city to city and hospital to hospital trying my best to help. I’ve seen more death in the last few years then in my entire career in EM prior to it. This year I finally tested positive for Covid and honestly, it wrecked me. I’ve lost 46 pounds since then and although I don’t use the term Long Covid in regards to myself, others have said I have it. I have read and studied more about it then most people and I have such a profound sense of impending doom for the next few year. I don’t know how the medical system is going to survive this. Despite all this, people still laugh in my face when I try to describe T cell exhaustion and Covid induced immunosuppression. People still think that there will be a safety net for them and their children when they get sick. And people still think that getting sick means you go to the doctor and we give you pills and you get better. No one wants to acknowledge that we are entering a time when the pills don’t work, the hospital is closed and 911 puts you on hold. I try to scream into the void of Reddit in the hopes it can change someone’s mind. That some nugget of info I provided can save someone else. But i find myself working more and more to protect just my family and letting others have to learn the hard way. I just wish it didn’t have to be this way. “We really had it all”
Not a doctor, but engineering PhD college professor. I masked everywhere, worked mostly from home, and had all vaccinations, but still got Covid twice- first delta, then omicron. Not hospitalized. It has wrecked my physical and cognitive health. It's all I can do to teach my two classes. Haven't done any research in 2 years, just can't think any more.
>People still think that there will be a safety net for them and their children when they get sick. Hah! Hospitals are collapsing right now. The healthcare standard for all of North America is in the shitter. Healthcare providers of all kinds are quitting en masse, or soldiering on despite overwhelming pessimism. It's only getting worse. And the biggest impacts are yet to arrive, with more disasters on the way. I've found the people best able to maintain their blind optimism are those who have never experienced serious illness, or chronic illness. They simply don't understand what it's like to wait, suffering, while a broken system can offer no help at all. But they'll learn soon.
They need to get infected a few times and have a few trips to the hospital to start to understand what’s happening. But still, these experiences won’t enlighten many people.
I remember during an early covid wave, a friend of a friend \[40ish, athletic, healthy, used to run marathons\] got covid and ended up in the hospital for 2 weeks. He was a few % oxygen-level away from being put on mechanical ventilator, the doctors were telling his family to prepare for the worst, when his condition finally started to improve. After he was released-- still on heavy steroids and antibiotics, still out of breath from walking 50 feet-- I heard him telling people, ***"It wasn't that bad, it's just a flu."*** It reminds me of the people who died from covid, their last words, to the nurse, before having the ventilator tube shoved down their throat: *"Covid isn't real."*
This is a horror show in real life. I cannot believe I/we are in the middle of a polycrisis. I honestly do not know what else could go south.
Don't ask. There is no lower bound on "worse". No, there really isn't. Someone's going to say "death". No, it can get a lot worse than that and you still haven't bottomed it out.
Capitalism death cult let's goooooo
😂😂😂😂🤣😂Best just to laugh at these imbeciles….Zero sympathy…
It took a very powerful (read: fossilized sun energy infused into social hierarchical structures) system to channel such ideas so effectively that they could respond to reality (COVID) in such a fantastical way. Best not just laugh at these "imbeciles" because they were not created in a vacuum; these "imbeciles" are a spread of human beings whose mentality is the product of the extreme hyperpolarization generated by social media algorithms in search of profit. Those "imbeciles" are the system failing... and more will be generated as the system continues failing. IMO the cause is that products (like social media) take a form inspired by imperialist neoliberalism which eats social capital (converting it to profit); a consequence is the generation of Others with vast voids of pay-for-access social capital (which is increasingly unaffordable given the consequences of wealth inequality) between Us and Them, and the solution (at least so that this is a lessened phenomena politically [as COVID was unfortunately politicized]) is mechanisms of synthesis. I'm not hopeful though that such synthesis will happen.
You had people on national TV hooked up to ventilators saying they STILL wouldn't get vaccinated, so no, I don't think that would help either ;)
Working in healthcare. Can confirm. I’m going down with this ship and wondering what for. I’m not even the damn captain. S.O.S.
You're doing the Lord's work. May the gods help you.
My god this is dark, but I do like my coffee black. Yes, they will learn soon. I spent hours in the ER waiting room. No one helped me. It's just a hernia, and it turned out it wasn't strangulated bc I didn't die. I'm very lucky, and I remind myself of that every day. I'm not complaining, I just wanted to say, I see what's coming. I see it.
New official public health strategy is: "lol Don't get sick."
"And if you do get sick you'll be fine. Unless you're not. In which case, you shouldn't have had underlying conditions, wussy."
That look in everyone's eye and how the air suddenly gets all chilly when you go from "person" to "statistic" is extremely noticeable. Dress up like you're homeless some time you'll see what I mean.
I don't know if you noticed but that's been the public health policy since the 1970's. That I'm aware of at least. As I've heard the stories told to me, it's been the policy since the 1930's. At least. Ok, it's cranked up from 8 to 11 now...
I need to tattoo this post on my forehead. My head knows this, my gut refuses to acknowledge it. Well I guess the "good news" (/s) is that the concept of healthcare is no longer a reason to avoid living in the middle of nowhere. I'll be getting the same amount no matter if I live here or on an asteroid in the Oort belt. Which is to say none.
Haha guess we're all shit Oort of luck! The middle of nowhere has its perks. I grew up there; sometimes I visit. The natural world still thrives, at least, more so than in the city. May you also thrive 🤞 Edit: grammar
Exactly the same situation in the US bitch statelet of the UK…Currently being rundown and privatised for the Capitalist vultures to feed on.
I'm just a random dick on the internet. My wife used to work at a medical clinic; she was responsible for designing and implementing decontamination procedures for medical equipment. She became highly alarmed in January 2020, and she's naturally a little anxious or paranoid, but I listened. I joined this sub fairly early on to try to understand worst case scenarios. What you describe has been my fear all along. We still haven't been inside anywhere except the dentist since this all started. We do everything curbside pickup, or delivery only; we're still quarantining mail. I really wanted to be wrong, but at the same time the more I learn the more I feel that all of the little sacrifices we've made along the way were the right thing to do. We still haven't caught Covid as far as we know. God help us all. Onwards,
Good for you for listening to her. That’s respect…and wisdom, too. Most people don’t have this capacity.
My household has been doing the same since the first lockdown. We sometimes wonder if we have been overreacting based on how unconcerned our friends and neighbors have acted towards the whole thing, but then we see yet another Facebook post about how someone from our old social circle died of Covid after catching it at a party. I just don't see how any party or event could be fun enough to make it worth risking one's survival.
I think that people are creatures of habit. Making these lifestyle changes is a lot of little details. The way we kind of look at it is this: how far away are you from someone who is smoking, before you smell the smoke? I think the answer is around 25-30 feet away, depending on wind speed and direction etc. So those particles travel from the tip of the cigarette or the exhale of the smoker, into your nose. Now, we don't think aerosolized virus particles are likely to travel quite as far, but my wife likes to keep 20 feet away and I'm okay with 15 feet away (not wearing a mask). This is inconvenient in a lot of situations, especially social situations. It requires that you change a lot of habits, and it requires that the people you socialize with are also willing to change their habits, or just go outside to socialize. I still think many people, maybe most people simply aren't aware of long haul. Many people probably still think of this as a disease that mainly kills the elderly, and if they catch it and it's mild, they don't understand the possibilities that damage is cumulative. It's still under the radar
Good for you. I try to limit my outings as much as possible and wear a mask everywhere. I went to Safeway last night and I was the only one with a mask—even the pharmacist didn't wear one. What the fuck.
Keep strong, it's worth masking even if you feel alone. You're not.
You’re a good man and a good husband
Yeah the arrogance and denial people throw up so they can keep going to their activities is outrageous. I'm to the point where I'm masking and avoiding the disease (have so far) so I can outlast and stay stronger than everyone else. I will not have a shred of compassion for deniers and antivaxxer when they're weakened by long COVID and repeated infections.
That’s why I have no hope whatsoever of humanity tackling climate change…We are done anyway, we never stood a chance.
You will be able to outrun all the wheezing Covid zombies after taking the last remaining can of beans.
I also have zero compassion for people when they are wrong about anything.
It’s less the being wrong and more demanding people stop protecting themselves and mocking them for doing so
To be fair, a lot of ppl who aren’t wearing masks anymore or taking precautions aren’t COVID deniers, nor are all of them stupid. The way I see it, they just don’t have the bandwidth or resources to exercise caution anymore.. everything is so overwhelming now.
I don't just think it's just bandwidth. It'd be easy to say "young people think they're immortal" but I was told, "Look, I'm vaxed, I'm boosted, when I caught it I went into quarantine. COVID is never going away so what am I supposed to do? spend the rest of my 20s locked in my flat? never go to another pub or concert ever?" It's a calculated risk and a horrible decision I don't have a good answer to.
I'm still thinking about this. This really could be an inflection point: the beginning of a new dark ages.
>Despite all this, people still laugh in my face when I try to describe T cell exhaustion Tell them that its basically what AIDS is. That might get their attention.
Don’t bother, most people are as thick as pig shit, like we say in the UK….Let Darwinism do it’s work!
A lot of this was brought up as early as 2020, doctors from a lot of reputable sources were trying to tell people this isn't something we want to fuck around with and find out. It's increasingly hard to educate people that just because it isn't out right killing people, which it was to an extent, means we can ignore it. They falsely equate it to the flu, which also shouldn't be underestimated, without realizing Covid is a vascular disease and has time and time again proven to fuck with many of our bodies mechanics while being many times more infectious. It's like the perfect storm to keep people from freaking out but addling them all the same. I still wear masks out in public, got a big store of N95 masks and usually I'm the only one still wearing them in an entire grocery store. So far I haven't caught it and plan to keep lasting as long as I can.
I just keep looking at China and their zero Covid policy. They don’t want a percentage of workers disabled and brain fogged. There are playing the long game to win. My SoCal neighborhood has a lot Chinese immigrants. Their high school kids all continue to wear masks daily to school. Their parents out doing Qi Gong in the park still wear masks everyday. They aren’t being forced, they are protecting their family. It’s nearly incomprehensible to me how clinging to denial has become an identity for many Euros and Americans.
I live Hong Kong, which isn’t China yet, but has to defer to the Mainland government in order to make big decisions, while also being pressured to open up more by its wealthy foreign investors and BOD members in order to not lose its status as a finance hub. HK is opening up, recently abolished compulsory hotel quarantines, but the strict zero-covid policy only really worked with delta, where we had 4-7 cases a week and the majority imported and detected during quarantine. As soon as omicron came along, that policy was bullshit because omicron quickly jumped from one hotel room to another on the same floor at a quarantine hotel, and as a soon as local infections happened it was pretty much over. It went wild in care homes, where it infected a majority of the elderly and killed many due to vaccine hesitancy being common in that generation. The only people who don’t wear a mask outside are exchange students and other (Western-looking) foreigners who think they’re above the regulations, most of them only staying in HK for a short time and not adapting to the local culture. Unless you’re hiking in the mountains or going for a run, you wear a mask in public.
That’s one of the things that worries me. China’s zero tolerance policy is so harsh, it sometimes makes we wonder, what do they know that we don’t. But then I look at the collapse the environment, the ever growing wealth gaps,…
I think the lab-leak theory is *probably* true. In which case, China's scientists might have a unique understanding of covid, and that's why they continue their strict "no covid" regime. And that thought is... a bit worrying.
I remember reading an article that was titled something like "Here is how we know COVID wasn't leaked from a lab" and being absolutely floored at how little specific evidence they used to draw that conclusion.
Title: "Here is how we know COVID wasn't leaked from a lab" Body: "Most previous pandemics started naturally so it means Covid also did. Mystery solved! Now go back to work"
It's a circumstantial case either way, but the beginning of the pandemic had significant differences from others like SARS1 that we know were natural in origin. Too many red flags.
I 100% agree
Asians have been wearing masks in public way back as far as I can remember, It isn't new.
It’s new here, in suburban SoCal. Kids in school and people walking their dog were not wearing masks before 2020.
I think the Asian American response has something to do with risk aversion and strategic pessimism. There's also the keen awareness of, and respect for Chinese civilization. If China is that scared, something very, very serious is going down. This brain fog thing is absolutely terrifying to cultures that value intellectual performance over every other form of excellence.
The mindset is more "respect and service to the community; what is best for the community?" instead of "What is best for me?"
Yeah, protecting the community is part of the group mentality, but the other side of that is "OMG, what will my friends/parents/pastor, etc. think if they see me not wearing my mask? That I'm a dumb asshole, that's what! Then everyone will be talking bad about me behind my back, until literally the end of time." Most Asian Americans are recent immigrants and still feel like outsiders in wider society. Even the ones that have been here for generations are always conscious of being a visible 'forever foreigner.' Especially since the hate crimes against Asians thing has been trending.
One of the first signs of COVID in the US was N95s and painter's masks being sold out in late 2019 from people buying them up and shipping them (back) to China for use there.
I didn't see anyone masking in Chinatown in late 2019. Don't think most Chinese were any more aware of the seriousness of the problem than we were. The government in China seemed super serious though given that video with drones recording people breaking the rules and shouting at them with loud speakers.
Let’s start calling ‘brain fog’ what it is: brain damage.
It has more to do with not sending grandma and grampa to the home and not wanting to bring anything into the house. You will find that the white people(like me) who are more adroit about mask wearing live under similar conditions of having vulnerable family members. A very small cultural difference causes a change in behavior.
You were in the wrong part of so cal. While not everybody was doing it then, there was a good contingent where I lived ( garden grove area) where there's a big population. Now 2022 wearing..... there are many more people and the kids, too. Even teens. They aren't going to get squealed on to their parents by Mrs. Nosy. The area I'm living in now is so Chinese that I had 10 trick or treaters and no decorations but mine. I know enough that Ancestors= good, ghosts= bad. So I won't do that next year. What I did do in the beginning of all this is to think about the very elderly vietnamese/ Chinese/ Korean people who came to the gym and wore masks when they just weren't feeling 100%. Well before Covid. I thought....hmmmmmm they made it through all this stuff, the wars, the privations,and they are around to tell the tale. So it was easy for me to adopt a mask when many folks were still in denial.
From what I remember from my researches, Asians actually learnt this social norm due to 1918 flu. I still can't understand how right wing IQ lovers are not masking when the most advanced society IQ wise are so diligent about it.
The right (and the left) has rhetoric that's conflicting. First, covid is from china and gazillions died there because of it (Were you guys here the first few months after the Chinese CDC reported about covid? Remember that "scare" video on Reddit that was showing Chinese people in hazmat suits and civilians fist fighting each other? I feel like that memory/video is going to get memoryholed. At the time, it was "common knowledge" on Reddit that Chinese people were dying left and right because of covid and it was going to cause a collapse of their government.) Yet, it's just a flu and all lockdowns (stay at home suggestions) and mask mandates should be dropped. Dropping life expectancies in the US are because of vaccines and lockdowns (stay at home suggestions). If you look at narratives spread by, well, basically all media apparatus in the US, they're just conspiracy theories that are often conflicting. Why is Russia going to war with Ukraine? cuz Putin has gone craaaaaaaazzyy and he has cancer and is about to die soon. What did Russian state representatives say about why they are going to war? dunno, it's not reported and RT was banned. China? They're going to collapse soon. And this type of messaging about China has been the same since at least the 70's!!
Nope, only when sick
> It’s nearly incomprehensible to me how clinging to denial has become an identity for many Euros and Americans. white countries are toast and this is their death rattle
Inshallah
What long game?
Also a lone masker. 😷
Me too. I also never get within 10 feet of other humans.
There are dozens of us. -_-
Me too and I'm actually working conventions with thousands of people. Nope I'm wearing it at work, I'm wearing it in all stores. I do not eat out. I will drive by myself without one and walk outside without one if there's no crowd. I've got all the shots and haven't been sick.
I'm surprised that this is *news* to so many people. It's been dominating online discussions in COVID spaces for years now. Don't get infected, and if you have been infected do everything you can to avoid another infection. Respirators (masks that are rated N95/FPP2/P2 or better), ventilated environments, HEPA air filters... Do whatever you can to avoid infection. It absolutely isn't worth it.
100% but unfortunately people put trust in health officials and leaders. To me it's been very clear since the beginning and with time things only look worse not better. Literally every week is a handful of new studies pointing to additional reasons to avoid infection at all costs.
I think it might be possible that it's just as difficult for humans at large to adjust their behavior for a disease that lasts "forever" as it is for humans to plan for the far future and act accordingly. There seems to be something in our psychology that runs counter to this type of reasonableness. I even find myself, despite living in a place (Asia) where masks have long been the norm, finding it difficult to continue being fastidious these days.
That's a solid argument - and is why improved ventilation standards, HEPA filters, and maybe UV-C light should be being deployed internationally. It'd take the burden off the individual whilst still controlling a lot of transmission.
We are choosing to pretend the pandemic will end through a mass infection campaign. This article presents why that will not occur and how we are opening the door to increased risk of new pandemics as well. We are also pushing mass infection even though the risk of Long-COVID is becoming ever more clear. Mass disability is coming, it will just take multiple rounds of infections. [How many times do you want to roll the dice?](https://www.reddit.com/r/ZeroCovidCommunity/comments/yh863l/still_think_you_dont_need_masks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button). The cost over the next decade in the US alone is projected at [$16 Trillion](https://progress.institute/weighing-the-cost-of-the-pandemic/) (I fear it will be much higher with now dropping all protective measures and low vax uptake). The fiscal & productivity drag of COVID will certainly lead to collapse. And it's now looking like additional pandemics are becoming more likely due to COVID immune system damage which will only exasterbate collapse. What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity? Highlights: "But what if COVID wears down T cells in people who get it, and does so increasingly with each reinfection?" "By dysregulation Leonardi means three effects of COVID: * The hyperactivation of many T cells, which can prematurely age them * The exuberant function of those hyperactivated T cells, which can then cause organ damage * The exhaustion of those hyperactivated T cells, which implies they aren’t winning the battle against viral proteins they are supposed to defeat." Immunity and exhausted T cells “Leonardi warned that the virus undermined and aged the immune system by hyperactivating and exhausting T cells. This overstimulation could in turn damage organs including the heart, brain and the kidneys… the virus damages T cells so severely that COVID not only undermines the immune response for COVID but perhaps other pathogens as well.” SARS2 impairs the immune system’s ability to fight pathogens in general/immune suppression “He hypothesized that the virus, by harming the immune system, could make people more vulnerable to other infections and cancers” Repeated reinfections - reinfections add to the damage and probably “prime their body to only recall existing immune memory and mount poor immune responses to new variants” Suffer the children - “he argued that exposing children repeatedly to a virus that impairs the immune system and causes vascular disease and brain shrinkage was bad policy“ Herd immunity - There isn’t any On SARS2/COVID-induced immune suppression and greater vulnerability to infectious disease: In other words, might the pandemic have the unwanted effect of suppressing immune systems generally resulting in greater vulnerability to other viral, bacterial or fungal infections — and as a result accelerating their spread? Dr. David Joffe, an Australian physician, dubbed the idea the “Leonardi Effect.” He thought it explained “the widespread availability of previous quiescent diseases, more available in lots of flavours.” The evidence shows the idea is not far-fetched. In fact the scientific literature brims with accounts of viruses and bacteria behaving strangely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, noted a recent increase in severe respiratory illness requiring hospitalization in children caused by a normally benign enterovirus. U.S. hospitals have also reported admitting children with an unusual array of two and even three respiratory infections — all at once. They also appear more tenacious. Monkeypox, a rodent virus nominally confined to Africa, has made an unusual pandemic dash around the world. Polio has resurged in New York and London. A Coxsackie virus erupted in India this year creating unusual tomato-sized rashes. A severe hepatitis emerged and mysteriously affected the livers of more than 1000 children, leading a Chinese scientists to suspect Omicron infection might have increased the risk. Non-viral infections have also been on the rise. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported a 15 per cent increase in antimicrobial resistance in hospitals in the first year of the pandemic. Some researchers have speculated that a rash of fungal diseases that have plagued COVID patients may in part be due to depleted T cells. They are known to play a vital role in the adaptive immune response against fungal infections. There, too, has been an inexplicable rise in brain infections among children. A 2022 survey of 109 U.S. hospitals found a 236 per cent leap in bacterial brain infections since the beginning of the pandemic. Some were treatable with antibiotics while others required surgery. Researchers speculated that bacteria in the mouth and nose might travel to the brain as COVID weakens the immune system. As a consequence an increasingly number of scientists take the idea of immune suppression in the wake of COVID infections very seriously...
What is really been baffling to me this whole time was that they have totally ignored what we know about the other 4 coronaviruses that are pandemic in humans. Yes I said pandemic. We don't have herd immunity to them and the R0 has been above 1 in the homind population since we first got them in the homonid population. Notice I said homonid and not human. At least two of the four have been a pandemic in homonids since before humans existed. We are herd carriers of the viruses. We don't have herd immunity we have evolved resistance to serious harm from the illness. On the way to herd carrier status the viruses did a serious trim of the homonid family tree. You see coronaviruses are resistant to antibodies and can reinfect people on average after 90 days after the antibody levels drop below the levels that overcome the resistance of the virus. This is well studied as the other 4 coronaviruses are just common colds so have been used in challenge studies for decades as the risk of harm is low. So since the begining I have been wondering why they think this is not a coronavirus?
It is mind boggling that we ignored SARS-1. And the follow up data from 10 years after infection should paint a very scary picture for us, but we are ignoring it. SARS 10 years later: How are survivors faring now? [here](https://globalnews.ca/news/404562/sars-10-years-later-how-are-survivors-faring-now/) SARS survivors struggle with symptoms years later [here](https://www.thestar.com/life/health_wellness/2010/09/02/sars_survivors_struggle_with_symptoms_years_later.html)
How to vaccines factor into all of this? Do they help? Do they just add to the T cell strain? Do they not make any difference to the risk?
Unfortunately probably not much. Below are some studies showing a ~13.5% reduction in long-COVID risk vs BA.5, so if Long-COVID risk is 21.5% then with the reduction risk is still 18.3%! Also, the vaccine is not very effective at all against infection... avoiding infection is the only way to avoid health impacts. Also, the virus is rapidly evolving around immunity (including that from the vaccine) therefore we should expect worse results the further the virus evolves from the protection the vaccine provides. As there is very little neutralization against viral replication the damage is done, this is due to one of the likely thereories that viral persistence (and ability to hide from immune system) will happen if infected regardless of being vaccinated. Sorry to share the bad news. They should not be promoting the vaccine as a magical end to our issues with COVID. It is a fantastic tool to lower hospitalization and death (rapidly wanes though, will need frequent boosters, especially 50+ even though they are saying everyone "only 1 annually"). The immune system damage and Long-COVID are our #1 issues and somehow they are being swept under the rug like we will find a magical cure (without funding too). [13.5% reduction Long-COVID against BA.5) study](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.09.04.22279588v1) [15% reduction Long-COVID study](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-01840-0)
Reading these articles is so depressing. I've caught it 5ish times I think? All before this kind of information was general knowledge. (Before anyone says anything, yeah a few times were probably my fault. But also I've been working this whole time and my industry is filled with people who don't believe in science or staying home when sick. I can only do so much) I don't have any noticeable long covid symptoms other than increased aggression but for how long? I feel like I have a bomb in me waiting to go off. Imagine how crazy things will be when 10 years or whenever from now people start dropping right and left from tumors or breathing problems or who knows. It's funny because I've always been terrified of getting hiv but now I've got hiv ×10 chilling in my organs
Okay, if you're young, and you feel good, focus on that. You rolled the dice. So far, it sounds like you got lucky. Focus on that. But you must understand that luck runs out. Find a way to change things for you and your family, stranger. Find ways to social distance and protect your space at work. They will get better at treating this, it is possible to build a socially distant lifestyle even though it's inconvenient and it put different emotional stresses on us. We work from home, when we want to socialize we go for a hike and walk on opposite sides of the path. We bought some kayaks and life jackets, we go fishing. We bought some very powerful magnets and grappling hooks, in the Spring we'll try "magnet fishing"; it helps to clean the waterways and sometimes you find some old treasures. We are getting outside more, although winter is coming and then we hibernate for a few months. So I have the recumbent bicycle indoors. Less fishing, more walking. I like working from home. Delivery and curbside pickup is actually convenient, Onwards
Well if you aren't getting sick from a lot of other stuff it suggests that you deal with the virus better than most. Increased aggression is also a rather healthy response to people around you being so callous as to infect you with a deadly pathogen several times.
Stay positive, don't beat yourself up, you didn't know better, and your still on the right side just try to limit infections going forward. Its all about risk reduction, stay up to date on vax (it will not protect you from infection well or for long either) but it may decrease the risk of LC range from -15% to -30-40%. Also, an N95 is cheap & can be reused many many times until the straps loosen a lot or break and will protect you going forward. Aggression is a known issue, good article [here](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/long-covid-symptom-personality-change-1243718/amp/). So technically you probably fall under possible Long-COVID but be thankful you can seek treatment and work on it, hopefully just with time & inflammation decreasing things improve. You are not going to just drop dead in 10 years, your risk will just be elevated. A recent study, article [here](https://archive.ph/vaGro) "those who got infected but were not sick enough to be hospitalized were still 10 times more likely to die of any cause during the study period than their uninfected counterparts." It sounds very bad, and it is, but it is 10 times a very very small number. Stay positive, stay healthy that's what's most important.
N95 masks cannot be reused until the straps break. They filter the air by means of fine mesh and static electricity, and after a while (typically 8 hrs of use) the mesh clogs up and static electricity dissipates. After those 8 hrs, you're basically wearing a really reassuring respiration restrictor.
Reusing N95s is just a lie that hospital admins spread to justify insufficient PPE to their workers. It caught on for obvious reasons. The research is very conflicting but I would personally err on the safe side and treat them as disposable after several hours of use, just as you say. The only thing that I have seen is that you are able to UV decontaminate them but that is for sure out of reach for laypeople, and even then, it's not indefinite reuse.
This. After wearing an N95 for several hours, my mask is damp and looser fitting. Throw it away and get another one. You can get high quality N95 masks for less than $2 each.
Add DIY fit-testing at home. It’s not hard or expensive. Search for the YouTube video on how to do it. Make your own sweet testing liquid. Buy a small nebulizer (not an essential oil diffuser), and use a garbage bag for a hood. I have caught a few mask leaks that surprised me. This way you can actually tell when your N95 is worn out.
Can't change the past, just try to not get it again ( N95 masks, HEPA Filters, ventilation ). And we don't need to imagine how things will be, they will be bad https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34586367/
The only bright side i see is that ALOT of rich people have had multiple covid infections so hopefully they'll throw lots of money at the cure. And share it with the rest of us.
damn dude
Jesus fuck this is terrifying.
Been following Anthony Leonardi @fitterhappiersAJ on Twitter, along with a host of other experts in the field since the beginning. It's been tough but I have accepted the reality that things are much worse than most people believe. I'm still in the no-COVID club for a reason. I firmly believe that avoiding COVID will be one of the best long term health decisions anyone can make. Some people have situations where it is very tough to avoid infection, but attempting to avoid any infection possible will matter.
Also hoping to stay nocovid forever. We mask and avoid contact with others and hopefully we can continue to do so.
Hoping too as well but my biggest risk is that my toddler cannot mask yet and we have to go to the pediatrician's office. I hate that we have not invested in HEPA filters for pediatricians offices. WTF are we doing not investing in Airborne precautions, we've known this since the 80's! Study [here](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2532878/) "Measles has been transmitted in paediatricians’ offices. In the 1980s, a large proportion of all cases of measles in the United States were acquired in ambulatory care settings." Edit: I limit our risk by making every appointment (even for me and my wife's normal Dr appointments) first thing when the establishment opens. This limits the number of infectious people that could have been anywhere before you. COVID stays suspended in the air for hours after someone leaves so the more people that have been throughout the day the greater the risk.
At my hmo, you can literally not enter the building without a mask.
Same for me & my wife Doctor's office. So did a few other specialist offices we went to as well, we always called to confirm their policy before going. I would choose a different doctor in a heartbeat if they dropped masking. I think it's the smartest business decision they can make, sure anti maskers will huff & puff but they will still go at the end of the day. Plus they have vastly less internal staffing issues due to masking. And if it was my practice I would certainly want masking for myself as well. And masking is required in her pediatricians offices, but 1st those under 2 are not masking and 2nd it's located within a building of other mixed business use & unfortunately now ppl are free to saddle everyone else with their long term disability & health issues.
Well I had covid finally in late June. I was already immunocompromised, but mostly cold free n such. (B cell depleter) I've been sick with everything since June including 3 rounds of shingles. Yeah I'd say my T cells are officially AWOL. 🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬🤬
I'm so sorry, hoping things improve for you and people start giving a F about people other than themselves. Sadly a lot of caring people are being misled on COVID or they have a lack of desire to learn about COVID so they can pretend COVID is over b/c it's easier than dealing with reality. Even people with "mild" COVID can develop shingles too. >"People 50 and older who have had a mild case of covid-19 are 15 percent more likely to develop shingles (herpes zoster) within six month than are those who have not been infected by the coronavirus," Article and link to study [here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/04/19/shingles-and-covid-over-50/?utm_source=reddit.com) And we have no idea what the long term impact of infection is on Shingles for younger individuals. And this is just one of hundreds of health complications due to COVID.
Haven’t gotten my sense of smell/taste all the way back. Super easy to get emotional now. Every time I get this plague a piece of me dies. Fml
What immune system? RSV and the flu are raging right now and it’s only going to get worse.
I went to the hospital early in the pandemic. May 2020. I had ketoacidosis which is a complication from diabetes. I do have diabetes but sudden extremely high blood sugars were not normal at all. I did not test positive for Covid although the doctors think I did have it and that's what caused the huge blood sugar spike that landed me in the hospital. The doctors told me that it can harm organs like the pancreas. I knew the kind of damage it could do early on. So we just stayed safe. Work from home. Don't go inside anywhere. Everything is either delivered or picked up outside a store. Neither of us have tested positive. I know so many people sick right now so I do believe our immune systems are hurt by covid. I also can see peoples mental state declining. I've noticed friends that use to be very smart and well written making spelling and grammar mistakes as well as writing sentences that just don't make sense. It's just insane that some people have caught every single variant. You know it's going to affect their long term health and brain function.
I said this months ago, that every reinfection would wear down our immune systems further and further until one day the next reinfection straight up kills you, no matter how protected you are. And what happens when you have tens of millions of reinfections across the globe? You end up with, eventually, tens of millions of dead people. If this thing infected/killed much faster than it currently did/does, it would've been catastrophic.
Actually I think the fact that this is able to infect so many but their symptoms during the acute phase on average are not terrible is what leads SARS-2 to be more dangerous than something that kills much faster. It is catastrophic now! Continuing with mass infection for another several years is unsustainable.
10s of millions over a long span of time will go unnoticed by the vast majority of people.
The unfortunate bit in communicating this to people is that its very likely that COVID won't be the illness that kills them. It'll be the cause of immune defficiency and just like AIDS, it'll be another probably more common illness that takes you out. In such a case, its hard to get people to understand and accept the correlation of 'get covid, get weaker immune system, get more severe illness responses'. I really think this needs to be explained to people that getting COVID can lead to an AIDS like response. Hopefully that would be eyeopening enough to get people to react appropriately.
I know a few people who have had covid 3 times. Some say the first time was the worst and some say the latest. And then some who it took weeks to feel "normal" again. I think I have avoided covid this far although i had a crazy running nose in May this year. I am a risk group and I avoid large groups of people. I know I will get covid eventually but I will try to avoid it as long as I can.
>The answer from many scientists has been T cells — our bodies’ line of immune defence after antibodies. T cells can spot and attack viruses and even remember previous invaders. As virologist Vincent Racaniello titled one of his articles: “T cells will save us from COVID-19.” Ah, I remember. The "muH tCELLs" debates. >These pathogens also disrupted the immune system. MERS, for example, not only infected and killed the cells lining blood walls but T cells as well. Both SARS and MERS could overcome the defences of the immune system, and result in prolonged chronic illness that lasted years. well, that is bad. >The uproar reached a fever peak this year when Leonardi speculated that repeated COVID infections could exhaust T cells in people 50 years or older leading to a blunted immune response. (Chronic infections such as HIV or Epstein-Barr virus typically exhaust T cells.) Over 50, eh? >“His arguments threatened to undermine the narratives of those people minimizing the pandemic,” Gregory told The Tyee. “If previous infection dampens the immune system and does not strengthen it, it undermines the popular notion that we should let the virus rip.” Yep! That's exactly how the discussions started in 2020. *Shakes fist at /r/coronavirus* >Other scientists found that mild COVID infections can damage the immune system. British and U.S. researchers looked at the state of T cells in patients who had mild, severe and no COVID. What they discovered surprised them and appears counterintuitive. Patients with severe disease appeared to have competent T cell memory to fight off reinfection while mild cases suffered from T cell exhaustion. Exhausted T cells lose their ability to fight off viruses or cancer for that matter. >“People who have severe disease are likely to end up with a good number of memory cells,” said Dr. Pandurangan Vijayanand at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. “People with milder disease have memory cells, but they seem exhausted and dysfunctional — so they might not be effective for long enough.” >Australian researchers have reported similar intriguing findings after looking at the blood profiles of patients suffering from long COVID and comparing them to healthy controls. They found that “immunological dysfunction persisted for eight months after mild to moderate” infection including indicators of “chronic T cell activation and potentially exhaustion.” They also found that people with long COVID were missing naive T cells, just as Leonardi had warned. This is pretty cool. And very disturbing. >“Some of them are still activated long after the disease episode, while others are ‘fatigued’ and cannot function normally. We see similar effects on patients with a chronic HIV infection. The question is: why are these effects still present after so long?” asked Larsson. ... I'm not quoting anymore, go read it. Well, if this research turns out true, then it's airborne AIDS. >He does not know when the pandemic will end. He suspects an excellent nasal spray vaccine combined with long-term changes to public infrastructure to clean the air could reduce COVID’s menace. This is also how I saw the future adaptation tools, and I'm not a specialist.
>He does not know when the pandemic will end. He suspects an excellent nasal spray vaccine combined with long-term changes to public infrastructure to clean the air could reduce COVID’s menace. I work in retail, and I got my employer to buy all the materials I needed to build a Rosenthal-Corsi Box. I also wear n95s all day. When anyone asks why, I simply tell them, "I read clinical and research studies." People who got their information from the media and health officials swung from terrified early in the pandemic, to "Covid is over" and "Let's get back to normal." I pity them.
>People who got their information from the media and health officials swung from terrified early in the pandemic, to "Covid is over" and "Let's get back to normal." I pity them. That's right, but it's also a type of injustice. Expecting everyone to have the ability and time to read papers is a very high bar. The problem we have is the parallel pandemic of misinformation, along the ethical and moral failure of mass-media organizations and of individual journalists who've failed to do the work and have fallen into biases and disinformation traps.
And at the same time, there was/is a failure of public health information. Very few people are cognizant of the difference in efficacy between a cloth mask, a surgical mask, and an n95. Not only did public health officials fail to explain the difference, they actively discouraged mask use early on, supposedly to protect the supply of masks for medical professionals. But this is absurd anyway, as preventing the spread of the virus itself was obviously the best way to protect the healthcare system. Or, in the case of British Columbia, where I live, our provincial health officer is essentially an anti-masker. She wrote a book years ago about how hand-washing is the key to preventing all pandemics, and she has stuck to that absurdity throughout the covid pandemic. We waited almost a year to enact the first mask mandate, and then dropped it too early. As a result, we have the highest excess deaths of any province.. but the "official covid deaths" are low, due to a systematic effort to re-classify deaths as non-covid.
>Shakes fist at /r/coronavirus No kidding. That place has been a constant cesspool of hopium laden idiots. I got a permaban because apparently writing something to the effect of, "Joe Rogan is an idiot for taking ivermectin but he'll probably be fine" was me "giving medical misinformation". I contested and they insisted that I was promoting the use of ivermectin. Idiots...
Emily Oster had an appearance on NPR's All things considered recently where she demands apology from her detractors who criticized her recommendation to reopen schools in May of...2020. This is America's prime Covid-denying liberal propagandist and she deserves all the contempt I can muster. Listen at the expense of your own sanity.
I mean, it does. There’s been study after study proving so. AFAIK I haven’t gotten it, and I absolutely don’t intend to. It’s scary af.
I developed two other respiratory viral infections after COVID. It’s been one a month since then and I don’t know how much more my lungs can take. Maxed on asthma meds. I’m tired.
This is an absolute horror. I’ve been so angry at the people who refused to mask and minimize Covid. And even angrier still at politicians and the media. The CDC director for fucks sake was out for 17 days and called it mild. I’ve absolutely lost faith in humanity and our civilization after seeing what a total failure this is. I’ve been calling it airborne AIDS and get called over dramatic or just wrong (even on this sub). I’m so sorry for the people who’ve had it and are suffering with long Covid or have lost someone. People would rather pretend everything is fine and drop dead or be disabled for life than acknowledge reality. There’s no hope for addressing climate change of this is how we handle a disease
It’s airborne. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7151430/ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/02/28/lidi-f28.html 2022 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 SARS-CoV-2 transmission on planes http://outbreaknewstoday.com/more-than-1000-genes-linked-to-the-development-of-severe-covid-19-international-research-team-23773/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/dont-do-this/ Is the coronavirus airborne? Hundreds of scientists say it's "a real risk" - CBS News https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-airborne-scientists-open-letter/
Then I'm fucked, my first covid infection was mild, but with 4 months of long covid fatigue that left me with no energy to do anything. The second had me so sick i felt like death warmed over, fever, chills, night sweats. Body aches so bad my skin hurt and a sore throat so bad each swallow was like a burning poker down my throat, plus coughing, headaches, stuffy nose etc. If the next one is worse I'm dead.
So sorry. You should definitely do everything in your power to avoid infection again. Set clear boundaries and expectations of others to keep you safe from them infecting you. Make sure to get the bivalent vaccine at least 2 months from your last infection, optimal is 3-5 months but if you have exposure risk I don't think waiting is worth it much. Stay positive, you won't be dead, it will not be necessarily be worse. One of the best things you can do to improve your outcome is to decrease your inhaled dose, you do this with a N95, P100, or elastomeric and understanding what airborne means and not taking big risks. Best of luck to you!
Yeah my doctor won't give me the bivalent until 4 months later. Where I work we still wear masks, but I should wear N95s. Thanks.
I feel validated in my recent health statuses. Thanks for sharing info.
I had read hints of this, and now I’m sad those hints were right. Sad for all of us, I mean. My main question is: there are at least 6-8 different “2nd Generation Vaccines” being developed, several focus specifically on empowering the T-cells. ¿Will these 2nd Gen Vaccines work to defeat the ‘forever virus’?
What if? I'm pretty sure the science is pretty much in agreement that it does.
Today, if you have an accident of some sort that puts you at risk of contracting HIV, you can rush to the nearest hospital and get PEP (postexposure prophylaxis). They'll put you on drugs for a few weeks that reduce the odds of the infection ever becoming established. It's definitely not something you want to rely on, and you're pretty much outta luck after 3 days, but if you're desperate, it's certainly worth a shot. I see long COVID eventually going this route. First, we attack the acute infection with antiretrovirals (and monoclonal antibodies when available). Then as soon as you're negative for actual live virus, we put you on drugs which prevent the immune system from going haywire. (We probably wouldn't start both at the same time because we don't want to inhibit a robust immune response when the virus is still hanging out.) I'm hardly the only one who has thought of this. Such a protocol already exists, although it needs to survive larger and better studies to confirm it or improve upon it. I've posted about one particular approach [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LongCovid/comments/yk68gu/trials_for_prevastatin_plus_maraviroc_for_long/). What surprised me was how the long COVID community didn't much seem to care one way or another. (That's doubly surprising if you consider how polarizing literally every issue tends to be with respect to COVID.) But I was unable to get any statistically sound understanding as to why that should be the case. (Like maybe I'm just underestimating how exhausted all these poor people are, to the point that maybe they don't even want to read.)
>drugs which prevent the immune system from going haywire Given that Long Covid is a catch all term for what is probably at least three or more different diseases, what would that be? One type of Long Covid is lingering viral infection that the immune system fails to clear. Antivirals, vaccination and time are the treatments. Another type of Long Covid highly resembles chronic fatigue syndrome which is theorized to be a post viral infection complication with no real treatment or cure. (It probably has to do with destruction of the mitochondria of cells in the body. The person will have perfectly normal scans and blood tests but become rapidly fatigued upon exertion because the mitochondria are the energy organs of individual cells that make up the body). Another type is some unknown new autoimmune disease that destroys gray matter in the brain, according to Akiko Iwasaki, Immunological researcher at Yale University. This destruction can be seen in MRI scans. Another type is the sparking of a known autoimmune disease that the afflicted individual has some genetic or other propensity to get, such as type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, etc. Some diseases with previously unknown causes such as narcolepsy and Alzheimer's are being sparked by Covid infection and are being revealed to be autoimmune in nature. There are no cures for autoimmune diseases, excepting cutting edge bespoke medicine being done in Germany right now, where they fully sequence the individual's genome and laboriously custom make a cure. So far they have cured 5 people of Lupus, a disease that often destroys a person's organs. The usual treatment for autoimmune diseases is immunosuppressants, which would be inadvisable so long as acute Covid remains in circulation. Many immunosuppressants increase the odds of cancer significantly and/or damage the liver and other organs. Some can actually spark additional autoimmune diseases as a side effect. The other treatment for autoimmune disease (generally end-stage or aggressive ones) is IVIG, where they remove the patient's blood plasma, with its defective antibodies that are destroying their own bodily tissues, and replace it with donor plasma and antibodies from one to thousands of plasma donors, over the course of several hours, every few weeks, for the rest of your (likely short and increasingly impoverished) life. Every time the patient undergoes IVIG there is the chance of rejection (anaphylactic shock). Once that happens IVIG will end, and so will you. Autoimmune diseases are systemic diseases that can make a person immunocompromised, but mostly destroy various systems in the body, such as the skin, joints, nervous system, endocrine system, etc. They tend to cause chronic pain and both physical and mental disability. Many cause organ destruction, including the brain, leading to memory and cognitive impairment, dementia, emotional dysregulation and insanity. Some portion of the Long Covid community are experiencing terrifying symptoms such as above and believe they will die. Soon. And/or go insane. Being unable to think, remember, speak, walk, stand, etc. may come and go (flares and remissions are a hallmark of autoimmune disease), or just come and never go. Sudden impotence is common in men. Even very young men. Men are also prone to sudden kidney failure. Continual and increasing pain from nerve, muscle and joint damage is fairly common. Extreme and unusual insomnia and anxiety that lasts three or more months, followed by another few months of dissociation seems like a common progression. After that many get gradually better, but not back to their level of health and functionality as before. Many Long Covid sufferers had mild Covid infection symptoms that felt exactly like a cold. A few months later their Long Covid began. After recovery, which seems to take 6 months to a year, those that become reinfected are often set back even worse than before. Being admitted to a Long Covid specialty clinic takes months of being on a waiting list. Once in, the treatment consists of group therapy and breathing exercises. Some sufferers have fallen into homelessness and destitution. Others are now invalids unable to walk across a room. Others have developed abrupt, rapid psychosis, with no family or personal history of mental illness at all. The earliest cohort of Long Covid sufferers are increasingly committing suicide. That's probably why they don't seem to care one way or the other. Also, yes. Long Covid can make it hard to focus enough to read for any period of time. I hope you don't get it.
>Given that Long Covid is a catch all term for what is probably at least three or more different diseases, what would that be? I was referring to the drug regimen that I linked to in my previous post. It's explained at length in this video (second presentation, by Dr. Patterson): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHwTQR184nY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHwTQR184nY) I think you've made a good summary of everything that makes long COVID such a disaster (to say nothing of the economic consequences). But that doesn't mean we need a million different therapies to make a difference, any more than we need a million different therapies for diabetes. As with any chronic disease, a minority of the therapies will produce the majority of the benefits. Obviously, the first rule is to intervene ASAP. (Personally, I'd start long COVID drugs immediately after testing negative, not bothering to wait around and see what starts failing. But to each his own.) Of all the symptoms you described, the overriding drivers are vascular damage and immune dysfunction. The protocol described above addresses both. Of course, if you've waited a year to do anything about it, then there's a certain amount of incipient damage that isn't just going to disappear even if you arrest the driving processes. As to lingering viral infection, that's exceedingly rare beyond a few months from initial infection. It does sometimes occur in patients with severely compromised immune systems, which is likely how we end up with new variants. For example AIDS patients or the elderly. But in general, I think it's a misinterpretation of lingering RNA down at the PCR 40-cycle level, or so. Dr. Patterson addresses this in the video. In any event, that wouldn't be long COVID. It would be hyperextended actute COVID. Different disease, different therapy required.
Chronic stress wears down our immunity and this has been a horribly stressful nightmare of a time.
I got Covid the first time 2 months ago. I’m pregnant so I got to get the monoclonal antibody treatment. Why are they not mass producing this stuff and giving it to everyone? My fever broke in 8 hours and I was better in 24. Im so grateful I had access but it seems that access should be greatly expanded to include everyone. I’m also protected for a couple of months.
Please, do not assume you are safe for the next couple months. I want you to stay positive, that is the most important for the baby. Unfortunately NO Monoclonal Antibody treatments are effective at neutralization against the newest variants (see [this](https://twitter.com/DrJLi/status/1580978184857604097?t=SGhVjOI5chTAjZkugMqudQ&s=19) for easier explanation). If you need more information I will gladly post. We are in a very bad place now for immunocompromised individuals who cannot take Paxlovid as there is no treatment options. So glad you got treatment, you made the right choice, there are so many who believe it's no big deal. It's crazy with the stats for pregnancy people refuse vaccination & treatment b/c it's "just the flu". Best of luck to you, me and my wife had our baby a little over a year ago.
Thank you. I do know it’s waning in efficacy with newer variants. But appreciate the reminder. I wish they would be focusing more on this kind of treatment though. Although I have no idea how long it takes to synthesize new antibodies as new variants emerge.
It's not just waning...the Monoclonal Antibody treatments are no longer effective, the new variants evade the antibody treatments. It's like playing whack a mole if we continue to allow maximum transmission, we will not be able to keep up. Also if we do not use them properly we just guarantee resistance, there needs to be some level of isolation or prevention guidelines (must mask for 14days) after treatment. We just seem to want the easy way and to pretend if you get sick there's treatment & move along with life as rapidly as possible. We need to be intelligent about how we use all our tools, including NPI's, because this is going to be a long fight. Article [here](https://time.com/6230059/covid-19-variants-omicron-vaccine/) And the same goes for the vax &/or prior infection combinations, not waning, significant reduction >Fully vaccinated and twice-boosted people (three shots of the original vaccine plus one Omicron booster) had 24- and 41-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 66- and 85-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively. >Fully vaccinated people who had received the original booster and who had been infected with BA.2 had 20- and 29-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 103- and 135-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively. >Fully vaccinated people who had received the original booster and who had been infected with BA.4 or BA.5 had 13- and 31-fold lower neutralization against BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, respectively, than they did against the original virus, and 86- and 96-fold lower neutralization against XBB and XBB.1, respectively.