Metl Mann
Augie Ray“Even a mild case of #COVID19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, a new study shows. Researchers found that rates of many conditions, such as heart failure & stroke, were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID than in similar people who hadn’t had the disease. What’s more, the risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes.” https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00403-0
Tamar Yellin@augieray But maybe it's just a viral infection issue and not a specific covid issue. It seems to also be true for influenza. https://www.houstonmethodist.org/blog/articles/2021/oct/flu-and-heart-disease-the-surprising-connection-that-should-convince-you-to-schedule-your-shot/#:~:text=Cardiovascular%20deaths%20and%20influenza%20epidemics,the%20year%20after%20the%20infection.
Flu and Heart Disease: The Surprising Connection That Should Convince You to Schedule Your Shot, Stat!
For patients with cardiovascular risk factors, getting the flu can substantially increase the risk of a serious or even fatal cardiac event. Getting the influenza vaccine can substantially reduce that risk, even if you do wind up contracting the seasonal virus.
@TamarYellin These issues are s associated with other viruses, so they're existence should be no surprise, but the affects are much worse than with the flu. Also, we are over flu surge a year, but people are getting reinfected with COVID multiple times a year, making them impact much worse.
@augieray Uhh... it's absolutely possible to get infected with influenza more than once a year/flu season.
@TamarYellin It's possible, but rarely happens. COVID, meanwhile, is quite common in infecting people multiple times a year. Moreover, flu evolves slowly with a new primary variant each year while the US has had three primary COVID variants in three months. There's really no comparison.
@augieray Every flu season I know at least one person who gets both Influenza A and B (sometimes at the same time!).
And you're incorrect about influenza and its evolution- the molecular structure of the HA and NA proteins of that virus changes in a way that evades prior immunity. " It also is possible for a single change in a particularly important location on the HA to result in a flu virus becoming antigenically different." https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/change.htm
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@augieray Whereas a single change on the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has not been shown thus far to create an antigenically different virus in the same way. Scientists have shown decreased immune response to some of the new variants and sub-variants vs the OG version, but they're still a partial antigenic match in a way that exposure to OG sars-2 virus or any of the variants still offers protection against other variants/subvariants. In a way that isn't true w/ influenza.
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@TamarYellin Regardless, I don't really think you can compare the frequency at which people get flu and COVID. Many people are infected twice with COVID in the past year; few get infected twice with COVID. The US average for flu infection is once every five years. Not sure we have credible numbers on average number of COVID infections, but I wouldn't be shocked if the average was 1.5-2 times in the past 12 months.
@augieray I think that's partially because of the seasonality of influenza, as well as the sheer number of covid cases (which I don't expect to last at these numbers for much longer).
@TamarYellin I've been hearing people claiming COVID numbers are about to decline since April 2020. Instead, we know vaccine immunity fades in 6 months, just 9% of Europe and 20% of the US has been jabbed in six months, and ever-more immune-evasive variants are growing. You do you, but I've had it with COVID minimizers.
@TamarYellin BTW, I'm also not sure you're accurate on how antigenically different the recent COVID variants are. "These observations suggest that XBB is antigenically different from the other Omicron subvariants including BQ.1.1, and therefore, remarkably evades the BA.2/5 infection-induced herd immunity in the human population."
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.27.521986v1.full.pdf
@augieray That article is a preprint and hasn't been peer reviewed. It's intriguing though and I think they did a lot of good work from what I can see.
And far from being a covid minimizer or denier (I was actually a participant in the OG Pfizer vaccine study), it's important to realize that the original Nature article you posted is nearly a year old and looks at a very specific subset of Americans- veterans- which is extremely skewed male (who we know have higher cardiac risks). /1
Also, the covid infected cohort in that Nature study was nearly COMPLETELY UNVACCINATED. I highly doubt that you would arrive at the same results if you used a larger population model (like Kaiser Foundation) and included vaccinated and boosted people.
I didn't realize at first that you were citing this older Nature article, of which people have poked a lot of holes in their methodology already.
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Vox Populi@augieray Agreed! And Covid can attack ANY organ or organ system. I had zero pulmonary symptoms when I had Covid, but it gave me myocarditis & pericarditis which exacerbated my pre-existing PSVT as well as causing a host of other issues including Dysautonomia which resulted in POTS. The microclotting caused by Long Covid is well documented & clearly leads to issues affecting any organ system.
@vox_n_thecosmos I'm sorry you had to be the example that proves the point.
@augieray Thank you!