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.
Learning this while being one of the only people at the grocery store masking
The old Chinese people waiting outdoors in line at the foodbank near me still have like 2020 levels of masking rates
I literally love you. You are legit favourite person now. I need more people like this around me.
i've seen one person in probably a year. i only go real late when only 4-5 people are there, but still.
Has anybody else gotten a surge of headlines in feeds or sidebars about “long cold” or “long flu” ?
Yeah, covid is contributing to the realization that other illnesses we are used to also cause negative long term health effects. There was a paper that just came out showing that the flu also causes long term harm in some cases.
Is this leading to more careful attitudes towards repiratory illness? Of course not. It's being used by the media to normalize covid infections and long covid. Most people don't even have any idea what the difference between a cold and flu is.
Also, covid is a lot worse than the flu in all regards. It's killing more people by far, takes a more severe toll on the body, leads to more long term effects, is mutating several times more rapidly than the flu, is way more infectious than the flu, and will infect people several times more often than the flu typically does. 1-3 times a year for covid vs. once every 3-5 years for the flu.
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)
The virus has also evolved to replicate faster in the upper respiratory tract, which means it's more infectious but seems to have fewer longer term systemic impacts on the lungs.
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
I don't think most people are hoping for anything. They're normalizing and downplaying the pandemic. Collective normalization means the pandemic is over in most people's minds. "If nobody else cares, why do you?"
If we have something to hope for it's that the virus attenuates on its own.
Or leftists pulling their heads out of their asses and realizing it's the same fight we were already supposed to be fighting. Zero Covid is Class Struggle. It's our bodies being thrown in the refrigerated semi trucks while they live in a literal bubble of filtered air and tested interactions.
That's what a coherent organized left would do, yeah. But we don't have one of those and won't for at least a decade.
I spend about 50% of my non-work time trying to make that a reality and it is slow going, comrade.
I am 100% certain that disability will send me into poverty. Like, if I can't sell my labour, I'm pretty fucked in this world. It's why I still mask and take precautions.
Same, and I already watched it happen to someone I know. It's bleak.
Huh. I wonder how much it trends upwards with every infection. If a person not avoiding it can reasonably be assumed to get it 3-5 times per year how many times do they need to catch it before it can reasonably be assumed that a large proportion of a population becomes disabled? What are things going to look like in 25 years if this continues?
There's been a lot of quibbling about what long covid is recently, because so many people are having long term health problems following an infection. The WHO says it's about a 1 in 10 chance every infection. Recently the German health minister stated the risk was 3% per infection. If the German health minister is right, that's approximately the same chance of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. Every infection.
How many infections you get will depend on what variants you are exposed to, how much of it you were exposed to, the timing between exposures, and if you were vaccinated within the last few months. It's a combination of all those factors and how your body responds to them, which can vary significantly between people. It's safe to say at least once a year, probably twice a year now that almost nobody is trying to prevent infections, and three times a year if you are unlucky.
So best case you roll the dice once a year. Worst case three times a year.
Basically, everytime covid enters the bloodstream, it's down to luck as to wether or not our immune system responds before it does a bunch of damage to our body, and by not doing anything to prevent the spread of the virus outside of vaccines and prior immunity, we are selecting for variants of the virus that are best able to evade the immune system. In other words: The only evoluntionary pressure it's facing is to get around the immune system, and it has billions of hosts a year to train on. I believe we have seen the same mutations that make it easier for it to evade an immune response develop in different variants several times at this point. This situation is unique in modern history, and no one really knows how it will play out.
We are already seeing disability rates go up so much in the US and UK that they are preparing to redefine disability to exclude more and more people, so that's a bad sign.
·3 months agoThe latter parts of this comment with KP3.1 variants now is just... depressing really, not chefs kiss, its just depressing.
So a lot of doctors, researchers, and ppl on Twitter say that each infection brings a 10% chance of long COVID. I'm sure that the reality is more complicated, but it's a useful shorthand.
I'm glad I still haven't caught it (or at least never had a symptomatic infection)
I also haven't caught it. I don't take any particular precautions, I just got all my vaccin shots as soon as I could, and I don't go out more than necessary.
But at the same time, I lived and slept for 4 days with someone who was just diagnosed with covid and still didn't get it. So maybe there is a big part of luck, or maybe even genetic immunity? I really don't know.
Maybe I got it but didn't develop any visible symptoms, but it seems unlikely to me because I tested myself every time I had been at risk of exposure and it always came out negative.
Maybe, but as I said I tested myself every time I was potentially exposed and it was always negative.
We still mask up.. feels bad barely anyone else does. I feel like there's a faint aura of acknowledgement when i see another masker on the bus or at the store. Solidarity to us lone maskers keeping our spit to ourselves
I feel like there's a faint aura of acknowledgement
I've been vocally telling strangers that I appreciate them when I encounter them wearing masks (correctly, not with their nostrils exposed or some other halfassed nonsense) in public. Someone shouted, "hell yeah, mask up!" at me in a grocery store store a few months ago and it felt nice, so I've been trying to emulate that energy and hope it catches on.
I finally got it. After 3 years of avoiding it, working in an office job with very minimal contact with coworkers, masking religiously in public, and tracking my county's data and adjusting how much I'm socializing based on that data, etc. I honestly don't know how I got it, I've been more cautious this past month and none of my other friends/family had it or were symptomatic. Luckily it's been 'mild' for me, but the first couple days were still pretty hellish. It's been 3 weeks and luckily all I have left is brain fog which is getting better and should resolve in 90 days according to my pcp (jesus christ that's a long time). The long covid studies and the permanent brain fog really scares the shit out of me compared to the other stuff since i have a bunch of dementia/alzheimers in the family, but obvs it's all pretty alarming. Solidarity and love to the folks this has disabled and killed, if this eventually disables me I'm going to [REDACTED] an elected official.
We have east coast family visiting and among them are multiple doctors and libs who believe in climate change that call themselves "progressive". Whenever I mention any new study on long covid I am made to feel like an annoying shut-in who believes in chem trails. I don't even get into the details of the study, just the mention of the article title is enough to make these "trust the science" types imply that I'm spending too much time online and blowing things out of proportion. These people are great and smart and accepting in many other ways, but holy fuck. They are fucking DONE trusting the science. I honestly don't know what it's going to take, maybe one of them or their kids getting long covid and suffering before they'll actually shut the fuck up and start "trusting the science" again?? Like I know the media has been normalizing this for years so this is expected but like you'd think people with fucking MDs would be able to see through the media bias, denialism and normalization of this. guess not. it's literally fine
Oof. The only consistant advice I've seen is for people to get as much rest as possible while infected.
The people still concerned about covid get lumped in with the anti-vax wierdos all over social media blaming everything on vaccines. It seems deliberate. The CDC and WHO acknowledge the problem with long covid and all the negative health effects it can cause, but quietly, and most people are left with the impression that covid is a solved problem and anyone still concerned is an anxious nutter.
Agreed, tho I'm definitely an anxious nutter
I'm just shocked that even these highly educated PMC people who work in the field and are generally interested in research are going buck wild maskless this Christmas. I guess one of them just got sick (non-Covid) now while on vacation. In the beginning of Death Panel's Covid Year Four episode they summed it up pretty well calling it the 'sociological production of the end of the pandemic'.
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.
I'm not actually much of a fan of cth, but Matt hit on it a while back.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pSXUSFfU1zU
There was also that episode where they went to cpac on acid (i think) and talked about the normalization of Adaptation strategy... That was actually the speech I was looking for when I found this.
Kinda pissed I can't find what I was thinking of. Maybe it was an episode of Ashes Ashes? If anyone has any idea what I'm talking about, please share. So far all I found in the cpac episode was the CO2 society bit.
