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

"Pandemic is over" is the latest big lie. People are tired of the pandemic, so they WISH it was over. There are still a lot of infections, and a lot of people dying. Some places in the country are on the downslope. Others are not. Millions of people are still suffering from Long Covid. As I predicted about a month ago, the immunologically naive are almost depleted, so there are fewer opportunities for the virus to wreck havok. But there are still a ton of the immunosuppressed, older folks with co-morbidities, babies who were not passively immunized via breast milk, etc. Immunized people are going to continue to get mostly mild infections, but some will have a more difficult time. Some will die, since vaccination response is not uniform.

The latest news is we are starting to get more Paxlovid. It is reserved for patients with indications they will progress to serious illness, but I think that will change. Even asymptomatic cases can end up with Long Covid! So there is no such thing as "a case that won't progress". Just cases that probably won't progress. The percentage of people who get infected that end up with Long Covid is shocking.

You're looking at a COVID Long Haul Zombie right here.
I feel like 50% of what I used to be...brain reduced to mush, heart and lungs that perform like the equivalent of a V8 running on seven cylinders and which hasn't had an oil change in 80 thousand miles, still no sense of smell or...maybe 15% of what it used to be.
It's like that scene with Uncle Ellis in "No Country For Old Men"...

"All the time you spend trying to get back what's took from you, more is going out the door.
After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.”



I feel a lot like old Uncle Ellis now.

The world is going to move on anyway. I see the churches are starting to fill up a bit more. I pass 5 of them on my morning walk. Some wear masks, others don't. Schoolkids at the bus stops are mostly wearing masks.

Nothing seems to be chasing on Omicron's heels and the healthcare system has got a pretty good grip on how to handle the disease these days. They're no longer having to burn the bodies on the outskirts of town and I'll miss the smell of barbecue, but the crisis is over for now and we're mostly in the mop-up stages.

So sorry, Jeff. Yes, it really sucks. I hope they can figure out some good therapies, but prevention looks like the best thing so far. Some Long Covid victims find that getting vaccinated again helps, but that's under 50% of them that try it. Saying it's over and going back to normal condemns lots of people who will get it and have bad outcomes to an early death or poor health for who knows how long.

Many wild animals have contracted it and spread it throughout their populations. (Pigs seem to be the exception, so our valuable barbeque resource remains unthreatened. But they have their own deadly corona viruses.) There is some evidence Omicron spent a long time evolving in mice before spilling back into humans. We have no idea when or where the next spillover event could occur. We (humans) are really doing a piss-poor job of sampling wild animals and keeping an eye on these things. Note I did NOT saw "if": It's a sure thing

So we should all mask up, stay home and isolate, quit our jobs, stop doing everything and hunker down because it could return at any minute and we shouldn't be sidetracked by silly wars and economic realities. Not when a single case of covid exists in the world!

The world moved on from other plagues and pandemics, it will move on from this one.

The world moved on from other wars and it will move on from this one.

Caught COVID, then in March/April 2021 I received both Pfizer shots, then received my booster shot in November 2021.
I'm of course open to getting a second booster if they'll allow me, which I think they will.
But anyway, so far I am already outfitted with the highest level of immunity possible short of a second booster, although I am aware that some aspects of protection wane after
a while, but I am also aware of several sound arguments about the way T-cells and other cells work, as discussed right here on the Rant.

But sure, I can get another booster, I'd already decided to when they first announced it might be possible.

Hey, that's your strawman, not mine. I never said any of that. I said what we need to do is a lot more monitoring of wild animals so we have some advance warning when a spillover is coming. We should also be working on a general purpose polymerase blocker. Like the very successful protease blocker Paxlovid and the HIV proteases, but for a different enzyme that is highly conserved by all corona viruses. (That means it doesn't change much, if ever.) These are things that need government funding, because there is no immediate return on investment for a corporation. The way corporate duties are defined in America, it would actually be illegal for them to do these things! We could have started on that drug back when SARS1 showed up, but everybody just ignored it when standard public health methods contained it. For that matter, we in America need to bring back public health's powers to contain outbreaks early.

Yeah, agree wholeheartedly.
We cannot go through a repeat of the Putin-fueled Republican funded anti-vax hysteria.

I.
just.
can't.

It got so bad here for a little while that I actually considered concealed carry to protect my wife.
Thankfully I decided I wasn't cut out to be some hyper-vigilant cranked up guy always on alert and trying to
take matters into my own hands, but it got so bad that instead we just hunkered down for about a month watching
the hysteria.

Public health directives have the force of law, but the problem is, law ENFORCEMENT is decidedly on the side of the anti-vaxxers, so there's no teeth.
We cannot afford to go through this crap again...when public health says do something, people better damn well do it.
It's like that Army tee shirt:

"Saving your dumb ass whether you like it or not"

Some particularly bad news in the form of new papers about how Covid affects the brain: Researchers looked at MRIs of people who had brain scans both before and after Covid. They actually saw shrinkage, and not just in the seriously ill. Another paper said researchers found the onset of dementia is a very common result of serious Covid. Several researchers have found the virus is NOT neuro-invasive: It does not invade neurons in the body, the spine, or the brain. Nobody has found competent virions in nerve tissue. But they have found viral RNA fragments, which indicates they were floating around in the bloodstream after the virus was all "killed" by the immune system. The brain damage is probably a result of the cytokines and other agents that take part in the immune system over-reaction.

SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure

New Onset Dementia

These are from TWIV 874 on YouTube. The main presenter, Dr. Griffon, also said a neurologist personally told him loss of smell and taste that has persisted for more than three months will probably never come back.

In lower Ontario CA and upper Michigan, deer have been found to have COVID and there is a theory that it jumped to humans via hunters. Which is why Ontario and Michigan kept having surges.