Capitol Hill Blue Forums Science and Technology Health, Medicine & the healing Sciences Coronavirus: The Plague of The 21st Century?

This article summarizes a study of COVID.

It turns out that even mild cases like many vaxxed peeps are getting affects every organ in the body. (When I got boosted on November 1st, the next day, every organ in my midsection hurt front and back and sides) This is why some people are "long haulers" and some get "brain fog" because the virus crossed the blood-brain barrier.

I just hope this virus gets contained soon and we can go about our normal lives. This March 2022 will be the third COVID March.

Are Delta and Omicron two distinct viruses running in parallel? The data suggests yes.

That Bloomberg article says they found viral RNA in brains, not whole culturable virus. This is the problem with a lot of these articles about Delta and Omicron. They are measuring RNA fragments that could circulate in the blood after the immune system has deactivated the virus. Just like the studies that said people shed virus more or longer, when all they are doing is finding RNA fragments by PCR. Yes, those RNA fragments could hang around a long time in the body, especially if the person is dead and their body is chilled. There are tests that show the presence of competent virus, but they are more difficult and expensive. For example, to run one of the tests, you need a live culture of a human cell line or Green Monkey cell line, to see if your sample can infect those cells. Not a test a normal clinical lab could run.

The immune system does not react against RNA, be it human or viral, it reacts against proteins made according to the RNA. (Hopefully, it does not react against your own proteins or you get an autoimmune disease.) Vaccines or an infection introduce viral proteins (like spike) that elicit an immune response. Your immune system makes anti-spike antibodies or a lot of other antibodies from an infection. But it also does a bunch of other things, like make cytokines, activate killer T-cells, etc. Some of those kill infected cells, so they are fairly toxic. Continuing production of such things probably contributes to Long Covid. Simple anoxia can actually cause brain damage. That's why drowning victims and people on ventilators are often never quite the same. Anoxia is a common Covid symptom.

You have to parse statements from government and media very carefully. For example:
Sounds like big bad Omicron is seeking out the vaccinated. But it doesn't mention that those vaccinated people who get infected are a tiny fraction of people who get infected. Or that triple-vaccinated people may be less careful than the unvaccinated. Or that infections among triple-vaxxed people are generally mild or asymptomatic, no matter what variant. While infections among the unvaxxed are more severe, no matter what variant.

It's really difficult to get any reliable data from infection counts, because human behavior is so unpredictable. It's not like we can lock people up in isolation, and give them uniform virus exposures.

The Intercept article that I linked to suggests the the unvaxxed are not getting Omicron at all and the Omicron hospitalizations are all vaxxed and booted folks.

I guess it did a pretty good job of misleading you then. Anybody exposed to enough Omicron is getting infected. Almost all triple-vaxxed folks may not even notice or just think it's a cold, because vaccination works. Pfizer even came out with a study the other day that said their vaccine works against Omicron. People who were infected a while back and then vaccinated are in great shape immunity-wise. They typically have broad immunity that protects them from any variant. People who were infected and never got vaccinated are a mixed bag: Some get pretty good long term immunity, and some don't. People who have never been infected or vaccinated are at high risk. They WILL get infected unless they are living in a sealed isolation chamber with sterilized air, food, and water being supplied. There is no actual evidence Omicron is any less virulent that any other variant. There also is no evidence it is any more transmissible than any other variant! There IS evidence a lot more people have gotten tired of taking precautions, so they spread it a lot. As a result, there is evidence there is a lot of virus everywhere.

Highly immune populations like the UK (a lot vaxxed, and most of the rest infected) give you strange data when you look at just hospitalized or deaths. Those deaths or ICU patients tend to be ones with very weak immune systems, like old folks.

Said it before and I’ll say it again, I’ll always take the observations of front line workers over the arm chair quarterbacks or research academics. Front line workers deal with the real world results of policies or lack of em. Our currrnt reality, IMO.

Otherwise your liable to go down odd paths of speculation, untethered from the real world and say things like:

“ As for "super transmission ability" claims for Omicron (and every earlier variant), I doubt them. Those are based on epidemiological data like spread rate, but a major factor in Rt is human behavior. If people decide they are tired of PPE and distancing, and get together in big indoor gatherings, Rt will shoot up. If they all did what they have been told about not spreading the virus. it would drop to zero. Transmissibility among the vaccinated has also been overstated because some studies equated PCR detection of RNA fragments with shedding of infectious virus. Later studies looked for live virus, and found much less for a much shorter period. So vaccination does cut transmission to about 2 days. ”

My prediction for the New Years is this quote is going to age like raw fish left on the counter.

As one of my sources, Dr. Daniel Griffon says: "Multiple anecdotes are not data." Reporters like anecdotes because they can be attributed to individuals their readers can relate to. Dr. Griffon personally takes care of Covid patients. He is also in touch with hundreds of other doctors who take care of Covid patients. (He is currently accepting new patients in New York!) So he is in an excellent position to collect anecdotes. Much more so than any average nurse or doctor who is much less connected. But he also has a PhD and understands the difference between reporting anecdotes and real data from real research, with real peer-reviewed papers, published in real scientific journals.

If you want to learn some real stuff about Covid, again I would urge you to watch TWIV on YouTube, The virologists and immunologists on it have many decades of experience, they feel free to call BS on untrue or misleading media reports, and even on physicians who have no experience with either of their life-long specialties making such misleading or untrue statements. They will point out the many times their ideas have been taken up months (or years) later by authorities like the CDC.

I have just a BS in Biology, worked in medical research for 11 years, and have my name on a single journal paper. So I would not presume to present any of my original ideas as anything but an amateur hypothesis. All that stuff in my "raw fish" paragraph you quoted is from those virologists, immunologists, and Dr, Griffin.

All that credential flexing gets easily dismissed with:

“ Aerosol transmission does occur, but it's rare.”

Again, no public health mitigation strategies ( I admit you need a functioning health system for that. A flaw in my criticism) besides vaxvaxvax and othering those outside the boundaries of acceptable thinking.

I think we do have some public health strategies, but for every sensible suggestion like mask mandates in schools their are people willing to fight them all the way to the Supreme Court. What is Biden supposed to do when opposed by the Trumper death cult? Round them up and put them in concentration camps? Vaccination is by far the best public tool we have, and 1/3 of the country refuses to comply out of sheer oppositional disorder.

Aerosol transmission is indeed rare. So is fomite transmission. It would be pretty useless to spend a lot of money and time on those, when droplet transmission is overwhelmingly common, and can be cut significantly by people wearing masks and getting vaccinated. Classic public health contact tracing does not work well with this virus because most transmission takes place before the spreader has any symptoms (if they ever HAVE any symptoms). "Put on a mask when you feel sick." does not help much. By then they have already spread it to people, who have already started to spread it to even more people. And the spread is not at all uniform: Researchers have found that 80% of the spread is from 20% of those infected, so contact tracers will spend 4/5 of their time tracking people who are not producing infectious levels of virus. And miss the huge number of cases of asymptomatic spread.

Things like the tracer ap in the UK are nice, but most of those actually getting seriously ill don't have smart phones. I don't. Should we issue all of them smart phones? Should we issue all of them GPS location trackers for a government contact database? Good luck getting that through Congress and the Courts! But just look at how that has worked in the UK, and you will realize that it's just theater.

You can’t have a public health mitigation strategy without a scientific theory of disease spread. We don’t have one yet.

You continue in the old beards debate with ‘droplets’. You must live in the warmer winter region and not able to visualize aerosols pumped out of our lungs having transmissibility for a respitory infection. Or read the mountains of evidence.

The vaccines you claim are the most effective? The ones pushed thru with ‘Operation Warp Speed’ by the bad orange man? The program that was politicized by Libs pushing doubt and fear over it and then, after they won elections, proceeded to demand everyone take it or risk getting fired?

Is that your idea of public health mitigation strategy?

Both rightwing parties have been bad faith actors in this and most everything else related to public goods and services. Hell, most rightwing liberals can’t conceive why people would hesitate to use any health care system that is brutal in its costs.

But here we are. Two years in, over 800k dead. The rightwing geriatrics running the government continue to politicize a public health disaster at their peril. We’re sending kids back to school while the pediatric admissions climb and omicron is surging but how’s it go? Don’t let the poifect get in the way of getting the goods? Or something like it?

Isolate, blame and shame. That’s all they got for us. That’s all they know.