The more we research the more ways we learn COVID infection harms you. I'm wondering if other infections are similar but havent been researched the way COVID has? Are there a bunch of was influenza harms you we dont know about because we havent looked?
and also how much is known to science and how much is known generally. The flu kills people and also has long lasting effects in some people, but you'd never know as a layperson because it's not like it's major headline news.
On another hand, people that don't take precautions get COVID maybe once a year, while the flu is more once every few years.
So even if the dangerosity of an infection was of similar magnitude, COVID would be more impactful because of its higher ability to infect and reinfect people.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't talk about other post-infection syndromes; if long COVID can raise awareness on those there's a small silver lining.
That's what I assumed was happening. Ever since Zika ended up having effects that (to my knowledge) we thought previously weren't possible, it seems like there's a lot of possible poorly understood additional effects to diseases that we are unaware of. I think the additional harms linked to COVID we've found is another data point in favor of that.
There seem to be associations between various other viruses and chronic conditions. Epstein-Barr virus seems to dramatically increase the risk of Multiple Sclerosis, likewise with Herpes and Alzheimer's. And of course HPV seems to cause various forms of cancer depending on where it occurs. I wouldn't be surprised if we come to the conclusion that certain conditions are effectively "long" forms of those viruses.
I wonder how many other, less visible infections cause similar kinds of damage undetected. Say, what if some of the most harmless common cold viruses do?
The reason I was afraid and still am of COVID-19 is precisely due to the decades it takes us to find the viral root cause of so many diseases, and a new disease means we may not live long enough to see what disease we've got was caused by it. HSV, HPV, and EBV are so common and are linked to so many types of cancer.
Good old Scarlet Fever can cause heart disease from complications, and there's no vaccine for it. Obviously it's noticeable if someone has it, but it's mostly a just a sore throat & fever.
