According to this article there are now three large scale studies analyzing covid risk, and they all indicate that your risk of negative health consequences goes up every infection.
While this risk starts (relatively) low for most of us, particularly those vaccinated and in younger people or children, there are concerning signs it may not stay low. If each new invasion of our bodies allows this insidious virus a greater chance to cause damage, such small risks will eventually add up to a big one.
Even if you only experience the symptom of the initial infection mildly.
"Each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure and even mental health problems," physician Rambod Rouhbakhsh warned journalist Sara Berg in an American Medical Association podcast earlier this year.
"This dispels the myth that repeated brushes with the virus are mild and you don't have to worry about it. It is akin to playing Russian roulette."
Long COVID is defined as a multisystem disease that have a devastating effect on any organ system, with potentially lifelong consequences. Rates of long COVID among people who have contracted SARS-CoV-2 vary controversially between studies and regions, from about 10 percent to a staggering 50 percent of people who've had the virus reported as having long term symptoms.
We are basically ignoring the risks and hoping for a science miracle to save us before things get too bad. Same approach we are taking with global warming. What an interesting time to be alive.
disclaimer: I've made like 10 major predictions about COVID that were all proven right months or years later
I think that people from the very first round of COVID (March 2020 and earlier) have the worst effects, because they breathed in full loads of the virus
After March 2020, people started masking, and while masking doesn't stop infections, it severely lowers the viral load of each infection.
Somewhere around August 2021, people were basically unmasking totally, but by this time everyone had either inhaled COVID already or been vaccinated.
My conclusion is based on years of talking to long-COVID people on forums, and also observing people in March 2020 IRL in New Jersey. There's a distinct cluster of people from NEUSA who got completely fucked around Feb-March 2020. I saw many young people walking like dementia patients, and the amount of ambulance sirens that month basically x1000 (I heard several a day instead of baseline once a week)
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How does that follow? Is there a lower amount of viral replication in the rest of the respiratory tract, compared to previous lineages?
Also, not to be rude, but I think the focus on respiratory tracts is completely defunct now (if it already wasn't years ago). It was always a whole-body disease, but killed via lung failure. But I believe everyone susceptible to dying like this is already dead. (Personally I suspect that lung failure is simply the apex of the multi-organ disease progression, and it seems that the people who die of lung failure aren't only having their lungs fail)
The problem now is all the other "lesser" stuff COVID does, which is still worse than literally any other disease save ebola and marburg