Rachel 🏳️🌈 #DavosSafe for all
Augie Ray“We fundamentally do not know the extent of the long-term damage continual reinfection with #COVID19 will cause to children, and the data we have so far are upsetting. What are we willing to risk? Are we OK with more children contracting diabetes? Are we OK with many more children developing highly disabling orthostatic intolerance? How about chronic fatigue, cognitive impairment, sleep disorders and heart problems?”
Charles J Gervasi ⚡🛡️🥥@augieray Is there really evidence that COVID19 is worse than other perils in life, provided we use normal things like getting boosters, avoiding exposure to others when you're running a fever, coughing into your elbow, washing your hands, etc?
We can't know for sure if it's much worse than it seems. We don't 100% that there isn't some very unlikely hidden risk to the vaccine. We know telling kids to hunker down and avoid interacting isn't good for them.
We can't know for sure if it's much worse than it seems. We don't 100% that there isn't some very unlikely hidden risk to the vaccine. We know telling kids to hunker down and avoid interacting isn't good for them.
B Archer@cgervasi @augieray I have Long COVID. It's often a disability, and mine is on top of cancer related disability.
If Long COVID leaves the child too sick to work or go to school, they have the lifetime poverty of the always-disabled. I'm lucky my disabilities came late enough that I'm covered by the social toleration extended to the elderly. Young disabled people get no such toleration. I love my disabled friends, but I don't wish this kind of poverty and stigma on anyone.
SallyX@sallyexactly @augieray Does this mean COVID is way worse, in terms of increased long-term risk of other diseases, than is generally known?
Siderea, Sibylla BostoniensisOh, yes. I've been tracking media coverage of scientific study into the long-term consequences of COVID infection, and it's honestly hair-stand-on-end alarming - but most people aren't paying any attention to that coverage, and, frankly are putting their heads in the sand.
I did a big round up report of research very specifically into one subtype of long-term COVID effect: what COVID had been found to do to the immune system. Just that one thing - nothing about brain damage, nothing about cardiovascular consequences, just the immune system.
You can read it here if you want:
"Possible Post-COVID Immune Dysregulation & Its Epidemiological Consequences"
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1776773.html
Note, I wrote that almost a year ago, and only more in research has been done. Including headline news today:
"How COVID-19 Changes the Immune System"
https://time.com/6306361/covid-19-immune-system/
It looks like having COVID can increase your risk of future illness in three separate ways: causing autoimmunity (where your immune system gets confused and starts attacking your own tissues), decreased immune response to infectious agents (where your immune system fails to recognize and fight off other viruses, bacteria, fungi, etc), and directly attacking and damaging parts of the body that lead to malfunction, e.g. diabetes, POTS.
Additionally, there is some evidence that active COVID infection can hide in the body and persist much longer than either PCR or antigen test reveal.
@siderea
At first we thought it might be immediately deadly. It wasn't as bad as we thought. Then we got tests and vaccines and virus mutated to become less deadly. But you're saying it's stealth-deadly, not usually deadly by causing immediate sickness.
*Can anything be done?*
*Are there any general-audience summaries of this from CDC or top experts?*
@siderea
Shortly after the pandemic started conspiracy theorists came up with crap about the pandemic not existing or that cheap treatments were being suppressed to support the market for expensive treatments and vaccines.
But there's another group that appears to have had pre-existing anxiety about interacting, felt relief when most people experienced that anxiety, and held onto the pandemic like fetish. It was scary b/c there were no tests, vaccines, or treatments.
@sallyexactly @augieray
Shortly after the pandemic started conspiracy theorists came up with crap about the pandemic not existing or that cheap treatments were being suppressed to support the market for expensive treatments and vaccines.
But there's another group that appears to have had pre-existing anxiety about interacting, felt relief when most people experienced that anxiety, and held onto the pandemic like fetish. It was scary b/c there were no tests, vaccines, or treatments.
@sallyexactly @augieray
@siderea
There are certainly people who were disappointed that we (apparently) beat the pandemic. Like the vaccine conspiracy theorists who say "but you can never be sure there's not some unknown danger to the vaccine," another group says the same about the disease.
People could irrationally cling to the pandemic, and there still could be a real hidden danger that you describe. If there's a hidden danger, I'd like experts to spoon-feed me the details.
@sallyexactly @augieray
There are certainly people who were disappointed that we (apparently) beat the pandemic. Like the vaccine conspiracy theorists who say "but you can never be sure there's not some unknown danger to the vaccine," another group says the same about the disease.
People could irrationally cling to the pandemic, and there still could be a real hidden danger that you describe. If there's a hidden danger, I'd like experts to spoon-feed me the details.
@sallyexactly @augieray
The thing is, they're both right. It is possible there are some terrible long-term consequences to the vaccine, and it is also possible there's some terrible long-term consequences to the virus. The world is full of terrible possibilities. The question is what do we do, given that our knowledge is imperfect.
I actually talked through my own personal reasoning about risk and the vaccines, back in 2021, here:
https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1704946.html
Meanwhile, there's all this evidence from other infectious diseases that, actually, getting them turns out to be worse than we knew. A lot of this information is known to science, but hasn't passed very well into medicine, and passed almost not at all into the general public.
@siderea
I knew all vaccines had a very small risk, less than the risk of diseases, so I get all shots on the recommended schedule for me and my kids.
I knew all vaccines had a very small risk, less than the risk of diseases, so I get all shots on the recommended schedule for me and my kids.
"There are certainly people who were disappointed that we (apparently) beat the pandemic."
I think you and I have had very different experiences of the pandemic, but I would not say that we beat it. Decided to ignore it, certainly-- but in my area there are a lot of people with deep, painful-sounding coughs right now, and August is not traditionally peak bronchitis season. Did we beat it? Or did we just decide to lie to ourselves that this was normal and acceptable?
@sallyexactly @siderea It feels like we best it, but that's because no one I know has immediate problems from it. My anecdote is not a random sample.
It's a hard philosophical question how many deaths I would accept in exchange for normal human interaction.
It's a hard philosophical question how many deaths I would accept in exchange for normal human interaction.
@sallyexactly @siderea Before vaccines were a available, I knew people who said they didn't want to come to a meeting but they could have house parties; they restricted guests to the living room, dining room, and bathroom as a protection against COVID. In other words, COVID was the way out of anything you wanted to skip or just phone in, but your stupid token actions allowed anything you really wanted to do. I am sick of it.
I know none of this nonsense affects the reality of COVID.
I know none of this nonsense affects the reality of COVID.
I don't think you're wrong about people using COVID as an excuse to get out of things they don't want to do, but I'm also aware that some of what maps to your observations was also explicable by idiocy and neuroticism.
I had a patient who had huge amounts of health anxiety very much predating the pandemic, who wound up making some extremely weird choices in the face of COVID. Things that were clearly unhelpful, and at odds with the actual recommendations. Some of that was their psychopathology, but other aspects of it were social: they were navigating a situation in which some NPIs were acceptable to other family members, and others were not, and they were doing their best - which was, admittedly, not necessarily very good - to both protect themselves and keep the peace.
@cgervasi @siderea Hmm. I notice this is the second time you've mentioned people you know using COVID as an excuse for various choices. Perhaps you have more of a problem with the specific actions of the specific people you know (which none of us can address, obviously) than with the scientific evidence for the long-term effects of COVID?
@sallyexactly @siderea Right. Their going over-the-top does not mean there aren't hidden dangers to COVID. It's argument from fallacy (aka the fallacy fallacy) to say because an argument uses a fallacy it must be false.
@sallyexactly I don't get the impression that @cgervasi has any problem with the scientific evidence around COVID, except for not perhaps being exposed to as much of it as one might like - a common and regrettable problem. After all, this is someone who is up on all their shots and takes it seriously.
@siderea
It's really unfortunate that there is been so much nonsense surrounding the pandemic, that even someone like me who works in biotech doesn't understand the basics of how much risk there is now that we have tools to fight the disease.
@sallyexactly @augieray
It's really unfortunate that there is been so much nonsense surrounding the pandemic, that even someone like me who works in biotech doesn't understand the basics of how much risk there is now that we have tools to fight the disease.
@sallyexactly @augieray
> But you're saying it's stealth-deadly, not usually deadly by causing immediate sickness.
This may sound like a strange idea, but in the field of infectious disease it's actually pretty common. It's just most people have never heard about post infectious syndromes. But lots of infectious diseases have post infectious syndromes. You've probably already heard of post-polio syndrome, and hopefully you have heard that shingles is post chicken pox syndrome (and there's a vaccine for it); there's evidence that some amount of Parkinson's is post-influenza, and it was headline news some months ago that Multiple Sclerosis had been found to be post-Epstein-Barr.
Also, please note I'm not exclusively talking about lethality: morbidity is just as consequential a problem as mortality. When polio leaves someone paralyzed, that's not really an acceptable health outcome by anybody's measure.
If you've not heard how crippling Long COVID aka PASC can be, you might want to look into that. It's reasonably harrowing.
> *Can anything be done?*
Yes. Try not to get COVID. Try not to give it to anybody who you care about. Get vaccinated, wear masks.
If you do get infected, try to get Paxlovid if you qualify in your jurisdiction; in the US you need to present within 5 days of onset of symptoms to qualify for it.
Also, if you do get infected, you can try to talk your PCP into prescribing you metformin, a common diabetes drug which was found to reduce risk of Long COVID by about a third.
https://covid19.nih.gov/news-and-stories/can-diabetes-treatment-reduce-risk-long-covid
But you really do want to just try not to catch COVID in the first place, because there are no scientifically validated treatments for Long COVID/PASC yet. Clinical trials are happening. It will be a while, even if they're successful, to get results to us. But, frankly, we've not been really good at finding treatments for post viral syndromes. Until recently (like the last half century) science hasn't really known what it's been looking for. You'll notice most of those post viral conditions I listed, they don't have much in the way of treatments, and those treatments are mostly just managing the condition not curing it. Shingles is kind of an exception, and that's because it's the one where live virus hides in the body.
*Are there any general-audience summaries of this from CDC or top experts?*
Well, the CDC has a page on Long COVID - it's here: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/index.html - but it doesn't say the first damn thing about the immune system, itself, being compromised. It says under "Health conditions":
> Some people experience new health conditions after COVID-19 illness.
>
> Some people, especially those who had severe COVID-19, experience multiorgan effects or autoimmune conditions with symptoms lasting weeks, months, or even years after COVID-19 illness. Multi-organ effects can involve many body systems, including the heart, lung, kidney, skin, and brain. As a result of these effects, people who have had COVID-19 may be more likely to develop new health conditions such as diabetes, heart conditions, blood clots, or neurological conditions compared with people who have not had COVID-19.
This is only the umpteenth time in the last 3 years the CDC has shown a disappointing lack of leadership.
@siderea
Without real knowledge, I think of "long-COVID" as a rare effect of the disease, and if you recover from the initial infection, then you'll have no effects.
Apparently I was wrong about that.
Without real knowledge, I think of "long-COVID" as a rare effect of the disease, and if you recover from the initial infection, then you'll have no effects.
Apparently I was wrong about that.
@siderea
I did most of that. I got all my shots, but I still caught COVID last year. I avoided all contact with people for 14 days. I chose not to get anti-viral med b/c my doc said it can cause relapses. It felt like a cold that dragged on and clouded my thoughts, but on about 20 I felt like I was back at 100% and have had no problems. I've been lucky so far.
I did most of that. I got all my shots, but I still caught COVID last year. I avoided all contact with people for 14 days. I chose not to get anti-viral med b/c my doc said it can cause relapses. It felt like a cold that dragged on and clouded my thoughts, but on about 20 I felt like I was back at 100% and have had no problems. I've been lucky so far.
@cgervasi I think your doc was mistaken about that. Perhaps he was confused about the rebound thing. It's not that Paxlovid *causes* that, it's that if you only take an antiviral medication for 5 days in a disease that can last for weeks, it can in fact spring back. I really wish the FDA had approved a second course for another 5 days.
Paxlovid basically works like an antibiotic works, stopping the replication of the infectious agent, so if you discontinue it too soon, it can come roaring back. Basically Paxlovid gives your immune system a chance to catch up with the situation and realize that it should be doing something about all this SARS-CoV-2 in your face/chest, by tamping down its replication. If one's immune system is slow to cotton on, or if one's infection is exceptionally bad, when you stop taking the Paxlovid, one's immune system will not have already taken care of the infection, and it will rebound.
"At first we thought it might be immediately deadly. It wasn't as bad as we thought."
It... wasn't?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean, but I certainly remember the horror of watching the death toll rise in Italy, and then in New York City. I remember the horrifying reports of overcrowded hospitals, military trucks full of bodies, and people dying from lack of oxygen. Seems like that was plenty bad.
Alexx Kay@cgervasi @siderea @sallyexactly @augieray
I'd like to point out an issue in your discussion that I see a lot of: people treating COVID as a binary -- either it kills you or it doesn't. Whereas the reality is more of a spectrum. The far end of it is, indeed, immediate death. And that's being pretty well mitigated by vaccines. But there's a *lot* of effects COVID has that damage one's quality-of-life to a lesser-but-still-large extent. And the vaccines aren't doing well at preventing those.
I'd like to point out an issue in your discussion that I see a lot of: people treating COVID as a binary -- either it kills you or it doesn't. Whereas the reality is more of a spectrum. The far end of it is, indeed, immediate death. And that's being pretty well mitigated by vaccines. But there's a *lot* of effects COVID has that damage one's quality-of-life to a lesser-but-still-large extent. And the vaccines aren't doing well at preventing those.
Clifton RoystonYes, there is such evidence, several sets of it.
There was a massive study last year going over the medical history of US Veteran's Administration patients with and without Covid (because the VA patients number more than the whole population of many countries, and have very well-recorded medical histories.) It found that *each* time someone gets Covid significantly raises their risk in the coming year of hospitalization, of death, and a whole series of specific issues. +
There was another study more recently which used essentially the *entire* population of Estonia, because Estonia has universal health-care and keeps good records. It found substantially the same thing - if you get even a "mild" case of Covid, even if vaccinated, your risk of death from a number of seemingly unrelated causes in the following year jumps very substantially.
That's just not the case for something like a cold. +
Here's a link to the Nature Medicine article with a summary of the first study:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-022-02051-3
Here's the Lancet article with the Estonian study:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(22)00087-4/fulltext
It found a *tripling* of all-cause death rates after Covid-19 infection, affecting all age groups.
BTW, you know what *really* affects kids' mental health, and their mental health as adults? Believing that the adults around them don't *care* about their health and well-being.
Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection - Nature Medicine
A new analysis using US Department of Veterans Affairs databases showed that reinfection is associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality, hospitalization and a wide range of long COVID complications in individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2 compared to those with no reinfection.
@CliftonR @augieray I hope I didn't hurt my kids' mental health by letting them ride their bikes alone to school and the park at age 7, as I did. People now think of it as child abuse because they're less like to die at home. I tried to do things as I remember doing them, which isn't perfect. I shudder to think some mistake I made could lead to mental health problems.
BTW if that last sounds like a "gotcha", it's not really.
I say it from personal experience and from knowing others who've experienced childhood neglect - even well-intentioned - end up with significant trauma and CPTSD.
In my early '60s, I'm still trying to fully reconcile some of the neglect I experienced in my childhood and my teens with the belief that my parents, and my mother in particular, were probably trying the best they could at the time. +
And I see your reply - no, I'm not talking about giving your kids more freedom to do kid things.
I grew up in the era of "go play outside, come home when it gets dark", I was riding the bus or subway all over Tokyo at age 8 or 9, and that part of my childhood was great.
What I'm talking about is being more protective of basic fundamental needs & safety.
(BTW, I think you're sincere, but that part of your reply came off a bit passive-aggressive. Pls think about tone.)
KanaMauna@augieray Considering all the really horrible damage we have already seen in only three years, I am terrified of what things will look like in thirty years.
Nicole ParsonsThe Republican billionaire donors who fund pandemic denial, also fund climate denial.
They are prepared to make a planet uninhabitable & murder the 8 billion people who live on it.
They helped to kill 1.17 million Americans by funding covid disinformation.
Dr. Oz called the covid deaths of 2% of school children a "delicious opportunity".
So yes, Republicans are fine with mass death events.
roque (ロク)@Npars01 @augieray Their goal is to have enough power and money so that they, their families, and their descendants can have the best health care and air conditioning.
Yes, they do delude themselves that their wealth insulates them from consequences.
Air conditioning systems rely upon a complex systems of education, skilled trades, & supply chains to install & maintain.
What happens when the latest pandemic causes a lock down & an air conditioner needs parts from China? Or your repairman died? Or no one is literate enough anymore to read the repair manual?
Health care is even more reliant on complex systems of training, staff, & supply management.
@Npars01 Yes. All of that, exactly. Delusional.
LindaMarie@Npars01 @roque It’s already happened. Trades and medical practitioners have been decimated. Is the decrease in workers is from illness, burnout, a better opportunity? I don’t know. But what I’ve found is that lead time for services has grown quite dramaticly. I’m sure the well connected have other options. But for how long? And in case of flood or fire? Still, they’ve been trying to achieve this for so long. Nothing but a tsunami of majority rule is going to stop them.
@augieray I’ve been teaching full-time the entire pandemic, and my classroom has still (so far 🤞) not been the site of a mass infection event because we have plenty of ventilation. Not even air filters, just doors and windows that we’re allowed to keep partially open even when the aircon is on. I’m lucky, my school is lucky—that it was built by people who remembered past epidemics. Never would have thought of windows as a privilege, but that’s our era.
Daniel BrotherstonThe thing I've learned in the past decade is that the "think of the children" folks generally don't care one iota for children at all.
COVID is the most recent case, but we poison our children with air pollution, with lead, we run them over at schools...and when we ever consider fixing these things, its too expensive or too inconvenient.
Just look at the rhetoric around housing, boomers/genxers even older millennials are gleefully opposing improving affordability of college or housing...
And now calls to raise the voting age in the US...
By our behaviour we HATE our children. The ONLY thing that certain groups are concerned with their children is controlling them.
Rev. GothAlice@augieray Ooh, don't forget organ fibrosis! Who needs their kidneys, anyway? /s
beforewisdom 
You may find this feed useful.
Each Friday the total number of Americans killed by Covid 19 is updated.
Each Friday the number of Americans killed in the last week by Covid 19 is posted.
J.H.Noyes@augieray What kid doesn't want an aortic aneurysm, really?