@newsfeed Probiotics increased populations of guf bacteria which might alleviate some Long COVID:

a distinct and statistically significant probiotic-responsive functional signature was identified exclusively in long COVID participants. Predicted enriched pathways were predominantly related to microbial energy metabolism, including redox balance and quinone biosynthesis, indicating potential enhancement of microbial respiratory capacity and energetic efficiency

and people with LC responded to probiotics much more than COVID-19 recovered people without LC:

likely reflects persistent microbial and metabolic perturbations and greater ecological plasticity in long COVID, consistent with previous reports of sustained dysbiosis in this condition. In contrast, the limited response observed at the overall cohort level suggests that individuals without persistent symptoms may have a more stable and less responsive microbial community, in line with evidence of microbial recovery following SARS-CoV-2 infection

edit to add direct link: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-2607/14/4/734

#LongCOVID #probiotics #SARSCoV2

@CliftonR @blogdiva also note from that first link that while SARS-CoV-2 DOES have a mutation correction mechanism, that mechanism's effectiveness is focused:

the mutation rate is significantly reduced in regions that form base-pairing interactions and that mutations that affect these secondary structures are especially harmful to viral fitness

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61555-x

#SARSCoV2

@CliftonR @blogdiva

There are many viruses which cause the "common cold"; some of those are coronaviruses and mutate fast, which is why there's never been a vaccine for the cold and might never be

Cliffton really nailed it here.

(Meanwhile there are microbiological reasons for the shared high mutation rate, but I know I don't understand implications of https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61555-x )

But this base fact is MULTIPLIED by two more things:

1) as jdm2 said the sheer number of hosts

corollary 1.A) Rare per person is not rare at pandemic billions-of-infections scale. People with rare one-in-a-million immune dysfunction can suffer long term SARS-CoV-2 infection and serial passage https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.14.21263564v2 . The mainstream hypothesis says that these conditions are the origin of variants containing large jumps of 20+ mutations at a time

2) the viral volume per host while contagious. (Note re-gaining contagiousness does rarely occur.). And to my understanding, it turns out that since SARS-CoV-2 is a vascular disease, and our bodies have blood vessels everywhere, there's a lot of viable host tissue; simultaneous to that it has a higher viral copy count than several other common viruses https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7476607/figure/fig2/

#COVID19 #COVID #SARSCoV2 #CovidIsNotOver #virology