Sars2 still evolving 6-10x faster than the other coronaviruses, and 2.5-9x faster than flu strains. And it hasn't slowed down (yet). No wonder we keep getting wave after wave, while the others have become more seasonal.
https://nitter.poast.org/JPWeiland/status/1717681840494940183#m
The #SARSCoV2 virus is accumulating mutations with amino acid substitutions faster than other endemic viruses, including 2.5 fold more rapidly than influenza (A/H3N2 HA1), the prototype of rapid antigen evolution
https://nitter.poast.org/EricTopol/status/1717576172459250085#m
In my region, wastewater shows covid present all the time, with waves roughly every 2-3 months. Flu mostly goes away after winter, covid is more or less a constant presence.
Until a sterilizing vaccine is created, which may not be possible, or a vaccine that drastically lowers how infectious people are if they get infected, it's just going to keep going on like this. The "let 'er rip" strategy adopted by the west has fucked the world and made containment impossible short of a scientific breakthrough.
I'm sure our ruthless capitalist overlords are all very sad that a large number of people will be dieing before retirement is possible thanks to covid cutting all our lives short.
For what it's worth in the fall of 2019 I got something that started from a respiratory weirdness that took me out for several months and also landed me in a hospital. I got sick at the same time with my partner about a week after a maintenance guy had been with us who had been travelling and was visibly sick and threw up while working. I had also been at a huge festival with my kid a few weeks prior.
CW Long personal rant
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Symptoms were 100% the same as I later heard longcovid has, neurological, physical, mental. For a few months I was in a state where I was sure I might not wake up the next day. When I was finally able to sleep from the palpitations, weird muscle twitches and a very non-charasteristic sense of doom that is. In hindsight I probably had hypoxia, lips were often bluish and hands and feet very cold.
I was never properly looked at and was prescribed physical therapy and all sorts of crap that never helped. Being both a woman and a fat person never helps. Kept going to the clinic only so there would at least be a record when I inevitably crash, it always felt like it would lead to that and it did. Kept being told its probably anxiety and the dizzyness and feeling out of breath when trying to exercise is neck related or anxiety. Bood pressure being all over the place was ignored, palpitations were ignored, aggressive GI symptoms were ignored. Losing massive amounts of bodyweight in just a few week was ignored. I got secondary infections in my eye, even a few of my freaking teeth eventually broke. It was wild and went on for months, I have forgotten many of the symptoms, but it felt like once I got over something, something new started. Could not even play my games because looking at the screen gave me intense motion sickness and a feeling of falling backwards.
I tried to push through it and I remember this one time I went to try and squat at the gym, I almost blacked out under the bar and had to sit on the floor after, it scared the crap out of me. Been lifting and powerlifting a long time and it was always my comfort zone. Tried to go to my martial arts classes and after 5-10 minutes felt so ill that I had to leave. I had a fever of 38C in the evenings for months.
The mildly flu like symptoms kept coming back everytime I went to try to exercise. I thought I was sick again each time, but learning about longcovid I am starting to think it was all the same. Last of these week long post gym flus I had in Feb 2020 so this went on well into the official covid time.
After a physical therapy session before Christmas 2019 where the guy manipulated my back quite a bit, I ended up in the ER later in the night peeing blood. They then decided I must have a kindey disease and put me in a line for two months to be assessed for that, in January 2020 got tested and my kidneys are fine.
The ER and hospital doctors were eventually so perplexed by what I might have they asked if they could keep following my case on my digital files. Then covid hit and I started to hear about the symptoms, especially the neuro-, and musculosceletar stuff, it all clicked for me then.
I have never fully recovered and all the new contacts with the virus have made my total health worse. In 2021 I did get to fair shape again, was running a few times a week and had a decent gym routine, not the bounce I used to have before, but still decent. Then we got Omicron and these days one gym a week and a few slow paced walks is enough to exhaust me.
But, my theory is that this thing was here far sooner. Easily could have come from a freaking fur farm right from where I live, I promise you they don't care.
Stuff like this just never gets properly tested for in a capitalist hell like ours, doctors have time to see you for 5 minutes and can treat onlt symptomps, there is no holistic approach. In my case I was even sent to an ear specialist because one young doctor thought the dizzyness might be ear related (and this thing came with tinnitus as well). Didn't listen to me when I told her that this isn'y spinny dizzy, but falling to one side dizzy. My ears were of course fine, but a month passed in that line waiting.
So each of these doctors looks at you from that one pov in one moment of time, nobody reads the files. There are no family doctors, history always starts from the moment they see you. That is all it takes for things to fly under the radar imo. My diagnosis from this reads as a "response to undefined upper respiratory infection". There are probably a lot of folks like me.