His advice: Get the vaccine, wear an n95 indoors, and avoid public indoor spaces.
“I find it very distressing that we, as a society, aren’t willing to talk openly about COVID,” Dr. Dick Zoutman declared.
“The media are almost completely silent, and it’s really perplexing,” Zoutman said of the disappearance of COVID-19 from the headlines in the fourth year of the pandemic. “We are missing a huge opportunity to protect our loved ones, our children, our elderly, our vulnerable … by taking simple interventions.”
Although the mortality rate for COVID-19 has declined thanks to mass vaccinations, the infectious disease specialist stated that long COVID threatens the health of the general population.
“We don’t understand all the implications of long COVID,” he said of the lingering symptoms that may develop after the acute phase of the illness. “Basically, this virus gets into your body and it doesn’t leave. …And it invades the lining of the blood vessels and every organ of your body,” he explained.
“Long COVID syndrome occurs in at least 10 per cent of every infectious episode and may be as much as 30 per cent. Stop and think about that: if you get COVID twice a year, that’s a 20-60 per cent chance that you’re going to get long COVID. And the next year, it’s now 40-120 per cent. Almost certainly … you’re guaranteed statistically to acquire some form of long COVID.”
"You can't wear a mask forever" coughs in your face "I'm following CDC recommendations and washing my hands."
Hopefully someone smarter than me can clarify things more, but no. Lots of viruses are gone from your body after infection clears up, although retroviruses like HIV are permanently embedded in the DNA of infected cells.
My understanding is that the virus for covid isn’t one of this class of virus, but the doctor is talking about how it causes permanent damage to infected tissues. So even once the virus is gone, patients will experience symptoms due to the damage to lung tissue, blood vessels, etc. More knowledgeable comrades, please correct me if any of this is wrong
Correct, most viruses get cleared out by our immune system (by the immune system killing infected cells and mopping up viral particles). Some viruses csn integrate into the genome and stay a long time that way, like retriviruses.
SARS-CoV-2 appears to infect a huge amount of the body, so many orgsn systems, and in many people seems to not really get cleared after the acute infection phase. Not just damage seen after infection, it seems like for many people they still basically have a long-running lower-level infection in various organs. This is often associated with long COVID, but is found in other people too.
Thank you for the better information comrade. Do you happen to know if there’s an answer to why the lower level infection occurs? I know permanent tissue damage can make it easier to be infected in the future due to pockets of scar tissue allowing new infections to take hold, is it something like that?
I'm not sure if people know why the low-level infections remain exactly. It hits a lot of systems because it binds to a very common receptor. I also know that it does bad things to the immune system and that might be related.