There are no conclusions to draw here. The study doesn't "show" anything -- it indicates a need for further research. I'm disappointed that Nature.com is engaging in this kind of sensational journalism.
From their own article:
> He praises the study, which was difficult to perform because of the amount and quality of data, but adds that it is limited because it does not break the data down by key factors, such as the participants’ medical history. “These are very important questions we need answers to,” Putrino says. “We don’t have any really well constructed studies just yet.”
The study also doesn't seem to control for comorbid mental health issues. The pandemic caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression, which (by themselves or due to medications) can result in the same symptoms used to diagnose long Covid in this study: brain fog and fatigue.
The problem is we've set-up asymmetric incentive structure. Say, there are some uncertainties regarding the risk and aftermath of COVID. If you genuinely underestimate the risk, then you are a pro-grandma killer and one of the worst human beings in the world. But if you overplay the risk, then you are an amazing human being whose only flaw is caring too much about human lives. Unfortunately this becomes another 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' story and also causes a lot of harm in the long run.
> If you genuinely underestimate the risk, then you are a pro-grandma killer and one of the worst human beings in the world.
I totally disagree with this. When omicron started spreading, a lot of scientists jumped to the conclusion that it was less lethal than previous variants. They were happy to share positive-sounding news, regardless of whether they turned out to be wrong. At the beginning, the evidence (from South Africa) was far from conclusive.
Huh, that's the opposite of how I remember it. Where on earth did you see that?
I couldn't see my family for Christmas this year because they freaked out over Omicron and insisted that me and my girlfriend would have to quarantine for 10 days before being able to visit them. This was driven entirely by "scientists" jumping to conclusions that Omicron would be as deadly as Delta but much more infectious and demanding more lockdowns, quarantines etc. They had no scientific basis for this doom-mongering, which appeared to be driven purely by some strange ideological desire for more restrictions.
I told family at the time - this is crazy. All the evidence about Omicron says it's a mild cold. There is no evidence pointing to any other conclusion. The people who discovered it in South Africa are communicating clearly that there's no crisis. Public health scientists are lying, again, because they're claiming there's no data when I was reading about that supposedly non-existent data in the press just yesterday and so you shouldn't listen.
Well, they listened to the "scientists" and not me. For a few weeks, at least. February comes around, nothing about the virus has changed but they suddenly realize that it causes a mild cold and nobody cares. The Queen gets it aged 95 and it's on the front pages for about half a day. She doesn't even stop working. Then they want us to visit so we can do the celebrations we didn't do at Christmas.
So the scores are:
South African doctors: 1
native_samples: 1
Public health: -a million, again.
The people from South Africa turned out to be completely correct.
Was this study also with an average age of 71? (cohort was US veterans with 3 week vax interval. Also baseline mortality in the group was 1% over 6mo - definitely an older, vulnerable population).
So yeah, not a representative study at all.
And I'm someone who's somewhat concerned specifically about long covid.
> I'm disappointed that Nature.com is engaging in this kind of sensational journalism.
I am too, but it is not surprising. It's getting them page views. We're also going to be seeing "long covid" articles for years to come as it's going to be a goldmine for research funding.
But why do they need page views??? It's not like they're going to go bankrupt if they lose advertising revenue. Their greatest asset is their brand name, and they're destroying it for... what?
Acutane? I remember having a conversation with my doctor as a teenager about it, and even he wasn't sure about cause and effect.
Does the medication cause depression? Or was the person already depressed due to having acne so bad it needed medical treatment? Either direction seems reasonable to me.
That said, he was careful to who he handed it out to, and we decided against it.
Accutane can cause severe depression and suicidal thoughts, but not for everyone. It should definitely be a near-last resort when dealing with severe or cystic acne.
That being said, the before/after pictures that get posted in the accutane subreddit are mind blowing.
yeah the big deal at the time was the 15 year old that tried to pull a mini 9/11, his mom sued the manufacturer of Acutane (later dropped) and it spooked a bunch of parents
> there's something deeply wrong when you get a feeling like that
Everyone knows that feeling depressed is deeply wrong.
Medications that can cause depression are often prescribed for serious illnesses, like debilitating mental illness. They don't always cause depression, and the small risk of temporary, treatable depression is determined by the doctor and patient to exceed the risk of the condition that's being treated.
Alcohol can definitely cause anxiety, and make anxiety worse.
I will also suggest alcohol can trigger depression - but that is a claim that is ripe for debate and not well accepted.
Alcohol can also "treat" (in the sense of suppressing symptoms) anxiety and depression, thus leading to a downward spiral since it tends to make these things worse, thus you get into the cycle of "Oh I'm feeling anxious, better have a beer - oh, now my anxiety is worse now that I have sobered up, better have more..."
Alcohol objectively causes physiological CNS depression. Whether or not it necessarily causes the mood of depression or 'major depressive disorder' as diagnosed by clinical psychologists or psychiatrists is another matter.
There's a big difference between "lab leak makes some sense given it was the same city and lab leaks are known to have spread respiratory viruses before" which is a reasonable starting point for an investigation and "clearly engineered".
The problem with a study like this is that they probably aren't doing a good job distinguish true long covid from psychosomatic long covid. And there is a lot of evidence that "long covid" correlates much more highly with pre-existing anxiety levels than disease severity.
I think long covid exists I just think there is also a lot of psychosomatic long covid and until we have a good diagnostic criteria to differentiate the two it'll be really hard to study it.
The two most easily diagnosable metrics are a blood test showing reactivated EBV and/or a POTS diagnosis (which involves measurements of how your blood pressure and heart rate change while changing positions). Just because someone doesn't have those doesn't mean they aren't suffering long term effects from COVID.
I've had both consistently for about 2 years now, along with some other neurological symptoms post-covid (no clinical anxiety or depression though). It's made me more of a believer in listening to other people's experiences.
Oh I'm 100% not arguing long covid doesn't exist I have several friends who have long term sequelae from covid. But judging by the research people like yourself and them are probably out numbered by people who have psychosomatic issues.
And that makes studying and treating cases like yours and their's more difficult.
I also 100% believe that psychosomatic diseases are real and need to be taken seriously, they just require a different treatment plan than persistent auto-immunity or permanent lung or heart damage.
It's not an easy distinction to make though. Actual "long COVID" itself is likely to be a collection of ailments (recovery from physical damage to lungs and cardiovascular system, post-viral trigger happy immune systems, possible opportunistic infection or symptoms of existing latent virus due to COVID-induced weakness) which differ from person to person and at least some of those ailments plausibly interact with anxiety (a psychological problem that has physiological effects on blood pressure, cortisol levels etc itself)
The media wants you to believe that the vaccine protects against longterm covid. If it doesn't many people would skip the upcoming 4th, 5th, 6th round because it is providing no additional protection against the latest variants.
But here is an actual study that goes against this story. Will you believe science or myth? Are there enough excuses to keep the myth alive?
The government isn't exactly rushing to 4th doses. They could authorize it for under 50s right now, but there's little evidence that it makes a significant difference, so they haven't.
Also note that we still don't have vaccines for kids under 5.
If the government wanted to line the pockets of pharma more, there's not a lot stopping them. So it's hard to take blanket statements about this seriously. I'm not denying that this has happened in the past, just that it's a lot more complicated than any single conspiracy theory.
There's probably more money to be made by treating lots of Covid patients in the hospital. Drugs, equipment, exotic treatments, doctor bills. Vaccines are less profitable. Get outta here with your conspiracy theories.
Hypermobility (cartilage dysfunction) and anxiety disorders correlate.
Vitamin D and K interact with cartilage.
Vitamin D deficiency and severity of covid infection correlate. As does obesity. Obesity causes vitamin D deficiency.
Brainfog is a symptom of covid and causes some people to fall down levels of maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Falling down maslow’s hierarchy of needs causes anxiety.
Anxiety depletes the body of B vitamins. B vitamin deficiencies can impact on glutathione production. Glutathione deficiency can impact immune function.
Spinal alignment/stability helps one maintain focus. Poor spinal alignment causes the brain to burn energy on proprioception. Causing mental fatigue, ie brainfog.
When the body is under stress the cellular membranes become less functional. I think this an immune protective mechanism (speculative). I think you can control cellular permeability with lipid ratio ingestion and calorie management. Cellular permeability affects the mitochondrial energy production and immunity. It makes sense that cellular protection is optimised over energy production when recuperating from a viral illness.
The brain impacts the immune system, there is immune memory stored in the brain.
I was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome 4 years ago after contracting a chinese flu.
I am writing this because when people write the word psychosomatic I think the same thing. I just think no-one in medicine has a comprehensive understanding of what psychosomatic is.
I also think long-covid is worse than chronic-fatigue. The base damage is worse, then there is the same viral borne psychosomatic condition layered over the top of it.
What the people safely ensconsed up maslow’s needs hierarchy often fail to understand is the immense stress felt by the people sliding down it.
Incremental motivation and autonomy is hugely important to mental health. The homeless and mentally discounted don’t get much. So there’s this often unarrestable downward spiral.
When you land literally on the floor. The way back up is swimmers stretchers an arm, then a leg, then a leg, then an arm. Build up that spinal strength and propioception with whatever spare energy the body has available to it. It takes at least six months and there are numerous crashes.
You need to eat really simple foods because the brain goes into ptsd mode and hypersensitivities emerge.
You need a really comfortable bed because you are in constant pain and can’t sleep.
You need to know you won’t be homeless because the anxiety will wipe out the b-vitamins faster than the you can ingest them.
The support groups will tell you you have a 5% chance of recovery.
I think it is a psychosomatic illness as well but medication won’t help. I also think some people’s immune systems end up in such a state of depletion that it is just a pure untreatable illness for them.
If you try and communicate any of this in the midst of brain-fog the natural assumption is that you are whinging and crazy. Forgiveness helps, anger management helps.
I think permeability of the membrane inner ear is the underlying causitive mechanism of long-covid chronic fatigue syndrome. You need really good potassium concentration in the inner ear for proprioception to work effectively. Lying down plus the cellular stress permeability response depletes this concentration. Hypermobility exacerbates the problem, the membrane is partially cartilagenous.
This leads to brainfog and fatigue when moving. You have to build yourself up really slowly and there are alot of critics. Outwardly you don’t look that terrible.
I spent time figuring this out to get better. Now I work in telesales because a failure mode of the prefrontal cortex (requiring the most brain energy kind of) is that you tend to talk alot.
I’m getting better, slowly crawling back up Maslow’s hierrarchy. No doctor told me any of this.
I got lucky, didn’t believe my diagnosis initially. (Takes the average person 7 years to be disgnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome). I asked for the most alternative physio at the practice I went to for the constant pain. He wouldn’t discuss the condition at all but he got me doing swimmers stretches and propioception exercises.
I can do sideplanks now. What people don’t understand is that your energy doesn’t collapse immediately. It takes up to 72 hours post exertion for the mitochondria to be overwhelmed and the fatigue and brainfog to kick in.
It is very easy for people to arrive at a place of learned helplessness. It is very easy for family members to question your behaviours from the perspective of mental illness. When you yourself don’t understand why your own energy is collapsing.
You can’t differentiate psycho-somatic from the physical. All that will help it is treatment plans that assume there isn’t a psychological cure in and of itself. Physical therapy is hugely important. More research is required into the base damage of the corona-virus. Then the treatment plan needs to regularly tweaked till it gets to the point of basic health maintenance.
No-one’s getting rich of this so I can’t see it happening soon.
My dream is a better collaborative information system for treating chronic illness. I think people are overly focused on causative mechanisms. Body’s heal themselves given the right conditions.
I wish a company existed where people report their pre-existing conditions, symptoms and medical test and diagnostic result then get given a best-practice treatment plans. The results of the treatment plans are monitored using fitbits. Then incremental adjustments are made to the treatment plan using machine learning to search for symptom dopplegangers and discover what worked and what didn’t for other health dopplegangers.
I don’t know why this doesn’t exist. I think the returns on medical research are getting less and less. The body is multisystemic and everybody is unique. But with 8 billion people there are loads of symptom dopplegangers. We don’t need to know why something works to know that it works. The search for why has diminishing return with each level of complexity. A smaller and smaller percentage of the population can afford the latest medical treatments. Medical research is expensive and wasteful. The top of maslow’s hierarchy is really saying that there is no need for why just being.
I think collaborative sympton doppleganger machine learning optimised treatment plans should be the future of medicine. It is what computer innovation should be about.
There should also be a whole lot more research into vitamin-d vitamin k and cholesterol metabolism. This is an intersection of multi-systemic conditions where membrane permeability, hyper-mobility and anxiety correlate.
You can test for hypermobility by straightening your elbow. If it goes backward even a bit, delve further, you are bendy and may need to manage that bendiness proactively.
It seems like there must be a million confounding factors at thing point. Given that immunity eventually wanes and new variants show up, at what point is a person considered no longer 'vaccinated?' I get that people were excited to not need masks anymore, but I'm hanging on to my n95 in most indoor situations, even in my relatively low-risk region.
> Given that immunity eventually wanes and new variants show up
Immunity isn't one thing that wanes.
T-cells are largely permanent and cross-reactive. Somatic hypermutation means that you have B-cells to variants which don't exist yet which can be quickly activated if you encounter them.
There's more to the immune system than circulating NAbs.
The 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic was a bit of a nothingburger because after mutating in pigs for at least 50 years, people born before 1957 still had cross-reactive T-cells to the H1 protein so old people were already immunized.
This is not the human immune system's first goat rodeo with a pandemic virus.
Unfortunately I can't really afford "brain fog" at the moment, and we're still apparently finding out new information about long COVID and vaccines, so I guess it turns out this wasn't actually bonkers.
I'm sure there are lots of diseases that could dehabilitate you; my wife has brain fog from her multiple sclerosis and is still brave enough to go back to regular life because she understands that the risks of serious outcomes from the extant strains are incredibly low, and somehow she manages to be a successful professional with the brain fog.
Life is a risk. You have a lower chance of serious outcome -- assuming you're relatively healthy and younger than 80 -- from the extant strains than you have risk from driving. You can choose to face the risks of life and live, or grow old and die sad and scared.
I choose to be inspired by my wife's courage in the face of her brain fog. Our time on this planet is limited, and spending it afraid is a waste.
> You can choose to face the risks of life ... sad and scared
There are reasons to believe this public will be more than typically keen to consider, in general, risk mitigation.
Risk awareness does not bring «sadness» - on the contrary, it brings relief. Surely, many will also be «scared»: but that is not because of /one's own/ risk mitigation practices - it is an effect of "looking around". In fact, «spending... limited time on this planet afraid» is pretty much an objective perspective. It may avoid you worse predicaments.
And for the ever present mention of «risk from driving»: there are Cost/Risk/Benefits considerations involved. Easily, renewing them may not bring to a reconsideration of the advantage of driving.
Risk evaluation is a matter of tradeoffs. Since I can easily avoid this particular danger and I don't benefit from engaging in it, it isn't 'brave' to get rid of my masks, just foolish.
I'd rather spend my risk budget on things more interesting than showing my chin off at the grocery store.
It sure seems like a lot of people in the medical community are taking it pretty seriously. Given the quantity of medical journal articles discussing long covid, I'm going to go with YES
It is in articles, and you will not have difficulties in finding anecdotal evidence. Of course, it will depend on the definition. It should be normal to believe that some can suffer semipermanent damages; it is more urging to assess and define the more subtle ones, for mild cases.
It is not clear (to some who follow the matter reasonably in their time) how permanent the damage will be, but for example the first article that results to a search, the "famous" recent "similar in magnitude to the effects of ageing between 50 and 70 years of age",
mentions 10 IQ points lost in a number of patients months after hospitalization... They note: «it is very possible that some of these individuals will never fully recover».
No and yes. Long covid is nothing special. All virus infections can cause the same symptoms. The Epstein-Barr virus for example can make people tired for months.
People definitely report it and genuinely believe they have it.. but similar problems occur in a small subset of all people who recover from infectious diseases.
So it may not be covid specific but it does seem to exist and with a wide ranging illness such as covid then obviously more overall people have it than from say pneumonia.
> People definitely report it and genuinely believe they have it..
This alone is not convincing, since hypochondriacs have never been rare in the first place and for the past few years have been encouraged and doubtlessly felt very vindicated.
If you understood how the brain creates pain and retains memory of the molecules that it interacts with you would understand that hyperchondria is a worse than useless diagnosis for anybody.
Certain people are going to recover faster from illness than other people. It isn’t because they have better mental hygiene.
They are fortunate. If you had long-covid you wouldn’t be able to type that because you would be mentally fatigued. Like Mike Tyson says, everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the face. If your mitochondia locks up on you one day and your energy starts collapsing within 72hours of mild exertion I’d love seeing you blaming your own thinking to fix the situation while everyone else does.
I don’t feel vindicated. I am beating chronic fatigue syndrome anyway, I have to do spinal strenthening exercises, I have to get plenty of sleep, I have eat healthily, I have to not do too much physical exercise in a day, I can’t sit for too long or I end up with post-exertional malaise.
I think the people diagnosing other people with mental-disorders to explain what they couldn’t are going to get progressively more and more exposed as people find non-obvious ways to overcome their chronic multi-systemic health conditions. People are figuring it out.
There is a psycho-somatic component. There is a physical component. It is brought on by viral illnesses.
People with anxiety are prone to it but they are also prone to hypermobility(joint dislocation).
One of us is right. I’d hope I’m not a delusional hyperchondriac. When my fibula pops out of my knee joint and I pop it back in and carry on with my day is that hyperchondria? Or could that be in some way related to managing chronic fatigue syndrome of which long-covid appears to be a sub-set.
60% of people with hyper-mobility have anxiety disorders.
It doesn’t matter to me whether I’m right or you are right. All that matters to me is that I can sustain employment to rise up maslow’s hierarchy. I know that your approach would not have allowed me to do this because I tried it. Believe me I tried it.
I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines?
This topic is left unadressed and is extremely worrying, being an existential risk.
Basically, the body has a limited amount of unspecialized naive T cells in its lifetime, mostly located/modulated in the thymus gland, which involute quickly with age.
I suppose that 1) vaccines increase the rate of specialisation of naive T cells to mature t cells (hence the number of naive t cells diminish supraphysically)and I also believe that
2) those specific mature T cells, generating covid spike protein specific antibodies, have lost some or total ability to fight non-covid diseases as a cost of specialization.
1) would increase thymus involution rate and therefore age speed of immunosupression.
2) would reduce generic immune ability (learning other pathogens)
3) I believe the increased immune profile after a vaccine induce a long lasting (at least 6 month) increase of accelerated aging process in humans, via increased inflammation and therefore apoptosis, DNA mutations and oxidative stress, although in a mild form and hence in the medium term asymptomatic.
Above all the premises I enumerated, the 2) is the one I would draw the most attention to, which can be reformulated as:
do the repetitive administrations of a vaccine (here the 3 mRNA doses), reduce the effectiveness of the immune system for future non-COVID diseases, and even more importantly, does those doses reduce the immune learnability budget and therefore do those vaccines reduce the effectiveness of future vaccines against the next non-COVID pandemic?
There has to be a limit to immune memory, the question is, after how many vaccines do the effect become non-negligible on aging?
Moreover, I have an issue understanding why would vaccine not massively lose effectiveness after the age of 70 since at 70 the thymus has ~completely involuted (although maybe the stem cells in the bone marrow suffice?).
> I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines? ... Basically, the body has a limited amount of unspecialized naive T cells in its lifetime
I'm not a medical professional, so I suspect that my opinion is just as much gibberish as yours clearly is, but with more self-awareness.
Anyway, why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ? Vaccines trigger the same mechanism as actual viral attacks, so you may as well ask "does the human immune system have a limited budget to respond to repeated viral attacks". It's the same question. And consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness.
> I suspect that my opinion is just as much gibberish as yours clearly is, but with more self-awareness.
OK thank you layman for your ad-hominem, I have extensive expertise in medecine and pharmacology and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides and immune and aging biomarkers, so what seems to you as gibberish is actual valid statements or for a few ones, very reasonable and necessary to be asked speculations.
But indeed, an expert is often difficult to distinguish from a bullshitter when the layman lacks discernment, a formation in epistemology nor care to check any of the sourced premises.
> why would that "budget" be "for vaccines" _only_ ?
Well for starters I do not question wether there is a budget limit, there is it is a fact. I even explain in detail that a necessary component in the equation are naive lymphocite T and that aging and environement stressors induce an atrophy (involution/shrinkage) of the thymus and therefore of the total number of differentiated mature lymphocytes T.
Also obviously I do not say that this only apply for vaccines, real covid is not much different from the spike protein and in fact induce more damage, however the question has to be asked, regardless.
> consider what answer would have better evolutionary fitness
and yet having a limit is an evolutionary fitness as show the existence of thymus involution, both for reduced energy use and programmed aging evolutionnary benefits as shows the many papers on the topic.
Obviously, as you should have guessed, the limit only matter to not be reached before the age of reproduction, which is < 20 years old
While we should always question declarations of expertise without evidence, YCombinator is a place of curiosity and immediately dismissing someone's consideration as gibberish is counter-productive and rude.
> a) not present in your comment history - clearly that's not your focus area - and b) not even spelled correctly and c) I do not believe you
I disagree, there's a significant amount of detailed information in the comment history that suggests this (although I am not vouching for accuracy of any of it.)
> > and have extensively studied the thymus, spleen, associated peptides
> Uh uh. Heart, liver and associated oligosaccharides. Gotcha. (this is equally irrelevant gibberish when talking about immune system responses)
Wrong. You didn't even do a web search to check.
The thymus produces immune cells. The spleen generates lymphocytes in response to foreign micro-organisms/viruses. Spleen peptides are used for enhancing immune function after radiation therapy and chemotherapy.
> Yeah, you do say that, you say "I am wondering how much immune "budget" do humans have for vaccines?"
No. Wondering about an immune budget for vaccines does preclude the possibility an immune budget applies to natural immunity.
This doesn't mean every COVID infection is going to cause permanent heart damage for everyone. But increases in heart failure, etc. could definitely be from the massive, nearly unmitigated global spread of COVID-19.
I would love to compare these rates against other common respiratory viruses. Long term effects from viral infections is not unique to covid. The only thing unique about covid is we are watching it 1000x more than anything previous to it.
... if you look for something, you'll find it. Test everybody with a pulse for the flu and then track the long term effects the same way we are with covid and I'm sure you'll see a very similar result. It's just nobody gave a shit about it until covid put it on the radar.
COVID virus spike protein attaches directly to ACE2 receptors which are found all over the blood vessels in the body. It is uniquely evolved to target and damage the vascular system in the body.
edit: And people ARE tracking things like flu vs. COVID statistics. So far COVID-19 is roughly 10x as deadly as a bad flu year. Ten times...
> It is uniquely evolved to target and damage the vascular system in the body.
There is so much panic, hysteria and just mythos around covid that I have a hard time believing this. Calling this thing "novel" gave some of these experts a hell of a lot of artistic liberty in how they describe covid.
> And people ARE tracking things like flu vs. COVID statistics. So far COVID-19 is roughly 10x as deadly as a bad flu year. Ten times...
I'm still not fully convinced that due to the massive amount of surveillance we've built around covid, it is even fair to compare the IFR of the flu vs. covid. We've never measured the progress of any virus to this degree. If we tracked the flu the same way we tracked covid, what kinds of numbers would we be getting for that virus?
We have a massive river of data coming in for covid. Vastly more data about it than any other virus in human history. I don't think anybody knows how to process all of it in a way that lets us meaningfully compare it to anything prior.
First you say "we should compare COVID to the flu" and now you say "look there's no way you can compare COVID to the flu". And then top it all off with the classic, "well you just can't trust any science in the last two years".
You clearly are not arguing in good faith or of sound mind.
People in my area completely lost their minds. Like it was as if somebody cracked open their head and ran a stick blender up there. Some of the smartest people I knew bought so deeply into this stuff that when they'd harass me and call me a "grandma killer", it was basically word salad coming out of their mouth. It was nuts!
Of course I'm calling in suspect pretty much every bit of research conducted over the last two years. Nobody had a level head, myself included. It will be at least a decade before things cool down enough to actually look objectively at covid and our mitigations. And I strongly suspect when it is objectively looked at, it will be regarded as one of the worst public health fuckups in human history. Mass hysteria at a level never before possible.
We triply live in a post fact world. You can find “facts” and dismiss inconvenient “facts” in order to support whatever you happen believe. In fact you can even find a nice comfy echo chamber to keep you immersed in whatever you believe.
However in this case, I am pretty damn sure history will be on my side. Absolutely none of what we did over the last two years made a lick of sense. It is the first real mass hysteria of the internet age.
Tissue fibrosis has been a leading factor and cause in mortality in developed nations far longer than covid has existed. Neither what you said or your parent said is false, but there does seem to be an awful lot of exaggerating the effects of covid.
"For the second year, COVID-19 was the third leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer."
It is no exaggeration to say that COVID is a significant cause of death and threat to the health of the public. Only two things kill more people a year--heart disease and cancer. Not car accidents, not gun violence, not suicides... all those kill far fewer people than COVID.
> COVID has been the #3 cause of overall death in the US for two years now
And yet two years into this I've yet to hear a solid answer to "is it 'died with' or 'died from'?" It's kind of funny that there is no answer to that because it dramatically changes how to interpret your figure.
All these "experts" just skirt right around that question and asking it gets you labeled as a horrible alt-right grandma killer (which isn't hyperbole either, I've literally been called this multiple times).
in countries that avoided hugely disruptive lockdowns the excess mortality barely moved at all. Sweden, a noteable example because the media attacked them for a year, was the worst faring non-lockdown country in the world and they still don't even break top 30 countries excess deaths during covid.
Not only that, but in 2021 sweden had the lowest excess mortality in the entirety of Europe.
So let's not pretend the math is simple here. Social disruption is lethal to vulnerable demographics. Even daylight savings time changes notoriously cause a large surge in heart attacks.
Ok. And how many covid deaths did they report? Was it also low, or did they report lots of covid deaths while their overall death rate magically stayed the same? Only the latter fits your "death with covid" scenario.
In the US, it seems rather unlikely that (a) doctors all over the US report a certain number of deaths that they say were caused by covid, and (b) we have about that many excess deaths, BUT (c) the excess deaths were from other causes and just happened to match the number of reported covid deaths.
Excess deaths which align with reported deaths with COVID not just in aggregate numbers, but in spikes. Spikes which also postdate spikes in infection by the roughly 30 days from infection to death observed in acute COVID patients (but don't align at all well with other things like lockdowns and economic downturns)
People die with cancer too, but few people are quite perverse enough to take that as evidence that the threat posed by cancer is exaggerated. Possibly the only comparable level of denial about the causal relationship between a well known ailment and people who don't normally die being likely to die afterwards for reasons well-explained by how that ailment affects the body I can think of is HIV/AIDs, and it's not coincidental that one's highly politicised too.
Your view of what happened in Sweden does not match the reality that their approach to COVID-19 caused excessive death and suffering: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-022-01097-5 Compared to the other nordic countries nextdoor to them Sweden had more death and worse outcomes overall.
you mean the neighboring countries that objectively had similar (or even lower) restrictions than sweden? The countries like norway, finland and denmark that got labeled as "strict lockdown" countries only because it was politically expendient? You mean those neighbors?
oh and here are some excess deaths you can compare across norway sweden and denmark - the difference is negligible - and this image doesn't even include 2021 where sweden had literally the lowest excess death in europe
Your stringency argument falls flat on its face when the source for your argument skips the first 24 months of the pandemic. That same timeframe was when the variants were much more lethal, and the vaccine didn't exist for the first 12 months.
Your excess deaths chart shows Sweden's rising by 5,000 people from 2019 to 2020, while Norway and Denmark's fell.
Ah, it's been a while since I looked at that chart, didn't realize they had pruned the data to 2022, which is _not_ how long the stringency index measured, which you would know if you had spent any time researching this category study as the oxford stringency index is by _far_ the most cited and utilized index of covid policy.
If you actually care about the subject feel free to look it up yourself, don't take my word for it as the measurements are all open source on github, including the methodology used to calculate the index.
That's the impression I get from the media. But if not for the media, I wouldn't know anybody was dying of anything. Nobody in any of my social circles have died in over 3 years. Going off what I've personally observed, I've seen no evidence of either a pandemic or the vaccines being dangerous.
To be clear, I don't think it's all made up. Just that it's been blown up, completely out of proportion. All of it.
> Just that it's been blown up, completely out of proportion
No, not precisely. Others have seen dozens. Still getting conversation lines like "I called that former colleague since it's been years... His wife told me he went, lungless, two years ago, at the beginning of the whole thing". Similarly for other more recent matters (it's not important to go in details here).
It was not really "blown completely out of proportion", more like "very badly managed, communicationally, procedurally, juridically, strategically, civilly, socially" - in some areas.
A serious matter dealt with clumsily, mindlessly and hysterically.
I suppose you must not count the news broadcasts from NYC showing refrigerator trucks filled with bodies stacked like cordwood as “personally observed” evidence of a pandemic.
Correlation is not causation. It's funny that folks point at vaccines while ignoring pre existing conditions, yet with COVID it was the pre existing conditions and not COVID that were killing people.
Covid certainly has far a higher risk of heart damage on its own, and anecdote is not evidence, but there is a small amount of research that careless vaccination can cause damage as well.
Hm.. for all the people downvoting, did you check out the research and article on risk of not aspirating/poor injection point? It seems like a legitimate concern. I can locate some more citations as well if you wish.
My grandmother was in rehab recovering from an unrelated surgery and was vaccinated because there was a mandate in her state. She was 90, and suddenly died the next day. Nobody will tell us the cause of death.
But you know. Correlation is not causation! The vaccines are just as safe and effective as promised! Oh, wait, not effective. They're safe though! Trust us, we're the government, we wouldn't lie!
No, they tell you there’s excess mortality. They don’t tell you if it is a result of Covid, of skipping medical care, of lockdowns, of substance abuse, etc.
Some countries experienced essentially no excess death even without vaccines, and some experienced non-Covid attributed excess death independent of vaccines. You really can’t read anything off excess death, except that it exists (where it exists)
The media generally reported the numbers of hospitalisations and deaths and the pressure on hospitals pretty accurately.
I leave it to you as to whether you think 1 million deaths over 2 years in the US is something you should have been fearful of, or whether it is pretty trivial
Excess deaths correlate with covid infection levels — not with vaccination rates. If the vaccine caused excess deaths then we would expect to see that number increasing starting in 2021 — instead deaths have been decreasing, and only went up temporarily during subsequent covid infection waves (and the great majority of those cases unsurprising may bring the unvaccinated).
Very easily because in every developed country, vaccine-related illness was tracked with extraordinary care. By last summer in the UK, for example there were 9 investigated cases where vaccination had lead to deaths https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/10/04/how-many-people-have-died...
I'm nowhere near an expert in this field but it's something I do a lot of research about because of my family history.
Heart disease has been the leading cause of death (mostly for men over 30 and women over 60) for a very long time [1].
According to [2] and [3] the world's number of deaths by cardiac illness was about a million people larger in 2021 than in 2017, but because of the delayed effect that heart issues can have we might not be able to see the true increase the last year has had until it's well behind us.
The sad fact is that a lot of us are going to die of a heart problem we didn't even know we had. And since heart health is affected by so many things it's very difficult to find a single root cause for it in anybody. That said there's already research showing that cases of arrhythmia and atrial fibrillation are increased in people who had covid within 1 year of contracting it [4]. Which makes sense because heart problems increase in people who contract many life threatening illnesses, such as certain types of cancer [5].
Our hearts take hits from just about everything that happens to us and everything we do, and our means of identifying, preventing, curing, or (someday I hope) reversing heart illness is still far behind where it needs to be. Please remember to get physicals at the recommended pace for your age group (ask your doctor) and try to do things to get your heart pumping in a good way when you can.
I live in Ontario, Canada. For a long period of time the province reported deaths _with_ COVID, not necessarily deaths _because of_ COVID [1]. So when public health officials and the govts do stuffs like this, I cannot blame people when they are skpetic of COVID data.
It's funny how two years into this we have absolutely no solid answer to "with" vs "from". You'd think these "experts" would realize how absolutely critical it is to know the difference because you'll get a dramatically different picture of covid depending on which way you measure.
That so many of these "experts" dance around this question and shame the person asking it has made me very, very suspect of their motives.
And between 2014-2018 617 footballers died according to FIFA SDR, that's 123 per year. The Wikipedia list is pretty short for that years, because nobody cared to enter them on Wikipedia.
> There were a lot more sudden deaths in football in 2021 than in any other year.
That's a claim not supported by your link. Recency bias (and perhaps a greater media and Wiki-editing focus following a player suffering non-fatal cardiac arrest on the pitch in the World Cup) means there are more listed names in 2021.
But the article also points out that FIFA investigated 617 deaths over a previous 5 year period, which implies far, far more deaths in regular years than itemised on Wikipedia...
> Recency bias (and perhaps a greater media and Wiki-editing focus following a player suffering non-fatal cardiac arrest on the pitch in the World Cup) means there are more listed names in 2021.
My only claim is that Wikipedia catalogues a lot more sudden deaths in Football in 2021.
You have repeated possibility #3 of my comment:
> 3. No increase in sudden heart failure, but in 2021 we observed and catalogued cases more meticulously than ever
I quoted the claim you actually made. My point is that the 21 footballers Wikipedians identified as dying in 2022 is actually substantially fewer annual deaths than the authoritative source the same Wikipedia page cites as investigating for the period 2014-18, so provides no reason to entertain hypotheses 1 and 2. (Of course it also provides no particular reason to assume actual deaths fell and seek an explanation for that either; there's just enough evidence on that page to confirm Wikipedia "selected" name lists aren't data)
"3. No increase in sudden heart failure, but in 2021 we observed and catalogued cases more meticulously than ever"
but I am not sure anymore who is more stupid the anti vaxxer or the vaxx worshipper who will down vote and be against anything that could hint at the vaccines not being perfect.
>There were a lot more sudden deaths in football in 2021 than in any other year.
This is the part that is wrong. There not more sudden deaths in football 2021, there are just more entries on the wiki page for the year 2021.
Between 2014 and 2018 617 players died according to the FIFA SDR, but the wiki page is rather short for that years.
In what universe would getting vaccinated be getting conned? It's the smartest thing you could have done. AFAIK covid vaccines are not connected with heart issues beyond rather rare and generally mild cases of myocarditis, but getting covid is strongly connected to heart problems.
Many people had to make the choice of being fired if they refused the vaccine. I'm not sure that is "being conned" more like being coerced. Even though some employers have walked back or not followed through on those threats, employees had to make the choice without benefit of that hindsight.
A world where the public was told getting this one vaccine will prevent you from getting covid and everything can go back to normal if 70%,80%,90% take it so pressure others.
Mysterious heart problems are being reported after the vaccine and those mild cases can persist months/years. Not rarely.. unexpectedly often.
Tons of people have atrial fibrillation or other easily managed or mild heart conditions. Many people have no idea they even have issues until they get an Apple watch and it starts alerting them that their heart rate is fluctuating unexpectedly.
Your risk of heart failure is much greater with infection than with vaccination. It turns out that Covid messes up your immune system and will reinfect you multiple times, so there will be no natural herd immunity. And with each infection , your heart failure chances goes up.
> It turns out that Covid messes up your immune system and will reinfect you multiple times, so there will be no natural herd immunity.
I have an incredibly hard time believing this. Either this is true for basically every other virus we've dealt with since time began or covid is so unique and so novel that it somehow managed to do what no virus has done in the millions and billions of years viruses have existed.
Quite frankly, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence no matter what "expert" says it's true.
What is it exactly that you do not believe? Reinfection potential? The flu does. Presumably to the layman, because of evolution. It is what you would you expect from biologic code selected to persist in time, to escape extinction.
The risk of heart failure is much higher with the actual disease. 8X higher for some population segments. This is correlated from data from 40 independent health care systems.
Do you mean co-depending from anonymous internet opinions and advice is a form of mental illness? I agree.
Have to see the mistmach though you point out.
I just see some scientifically based decissions, recomendations and solutions to really well studied problems, and also see lot of people making noise since the 70s about vax, chemtrails, MMS, Chakras, ivervectine, himalaian salt, bach flowers, ozone, and whatever looks like shiny new to solve all your problems all together.
You are putting way more faith into some "experts" who have a very strong incentive to carry the narrative they are carrying. It isn't really a conspiracy theory when what comes out of their mouth doesn't match the data coming from their own damn public health dashboards. You don't need to be a credentialed "expert" to start asking basic questions about that.
I call experts to people that have devoted their education and life to study and search for solutions, without quotes.
You call experts to people that some day have a health, work or family issue, went to see several gurus, realised they can create their own discourse on the issue and start selling their book.
Data from 40 health care systems participating in a large network found that the risk for cardiac complications was significantly higher after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination for both males and females in all age groups.
I have taken both jnj and Moderna. But I have to admit that the grandparent has a point. It feels it’s almost heretical to say, but the vaccines were terribly over-sold. In the beginning they were sold as traditional vaccines - prevention against infection not just serious disease. But very soon we saw “breakthrough infections” (not even written about anymore as they are so common) and the goal posts started being moved.
Public health establishment deserves a D- for their handling of the pandemic starting basically on day 1.
The virus mutated and became more resistant, nobody should have to explain that to a grown-ass adult. The General Public deserves an F for civic-mindedness, being able to ascertain good sources of information on the internet, and scientific literacy.
It's a miracle the vaccines were available as soon they were and it prevent hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths globally. And you are mad about 3rd party marketing. We all collectively deserve what's coming.
It sort of seems we now have more tame variants than the first several, at least. This news about long term effects even after vaccination is pretty concerning, though.
> Public health establishment deserves a D- for their handling of the pandemic starting basically on day 1.
D- for clear communication and providing leadership to the public? Definitely!
D- for the vaccines though? Definitely not!
The vaccines have dramatically reduced the death rate from the disease. The disease mutated to bypass the vaccine -- yet the vaccine still provides a lot of protection despite that. What more can you realistically expect?
> Covid was a novel virus, which means it was and still is a poorly understood virus.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. In what way is covid so new that we need to throw out our entire body of knowledge surrounding viruses and respiratory illnesses?
> But very soon we saw “breakthrough infections” (not even written about anymore as they are so common) and the goal posts started being moved.
It's almost as if we learned new things as time went on and more observations were made, and adjusted expectations and actions based on that new information. I know, total crazy talk.
You act like I am inventing the concept of credibility.
If you routinely say things you then have to walk back (don’t wear masks, vaccines prevent infection) then you have to expect that your credibility is damaged.
From their own article:
> He praises the study, which was difficult to perform because of the amount and quality of data, but adds that it is limited because it does not break the data down by key factors, such as the participants’ medical history. “These are very important questions we need answers to,” Putrino says. “We don’t have any really well constructed studies just yet.”
The study also doesn't seem to control for comorbid mental health issues. The pandemic caused a massive spike in anxiety and depression, which (by themselves or due to medications) can result in the same symptoms used to diagnose long Covid in this study: brain fog and fatigue.
There really is nothing to report here yet.