games on sale

[mellowtigger]

Now's a good time to buy some games.  Keep isolating during this winter holiday season, for safety's sake.

No Man's Sky is currently 50% off on Steam, and they are also revisiting all of the Expeditions.  If you only pick one to do, the current Expedition #1 is definitely that one, because you get an excellent quality spaceship out of it.  You can freely claim that spaceship on any of your new games, even other Expeditions.  It's available on other platforms too, but not Nintendo Switch yet.  It runs well on Linux Mint, although that hasn't always been the case.

There are also heavy discounts on other games I've enjoyed playing, like Sims 4 (88% off), Nebuchadnezzar (30% off), Valheim (20% off), Pathfinder:WOTR (15% off), Rimworld (10% off), and still-in-development Timberborn (10% off).

Now, I'm off to get my flu vaccine in an hour.  Reminder: Don't get covid.  I'm still predicting that this flu season will see an unusual rise in covid symptoms and complications, because my theory is that many people who have been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 are now carriers for life.  If the virus reached their heart, then I just don't think that the body has any good methods for safely eradicating the virus from that organ.  A weakened immune system (cold, flu, etc.) will see a resurgence in their covid symptoms without any new exposures, because their hearts are the eternal wellspring of viral load now.  So don't get covid.  I'll give up my theory if this winter passes without headlines like "Cold symptoms include unusual covid-like features" or "The flu is coinciding with an unusual number of blood clots" or "Why are so many people dying of heart attacks and strokes this winter?"

Go play computer games at home instead of mingling with humans.  ;)

Comments

[mellowtigger]

"can be eradicated from it"

This is the part that is new to me. It was my understanding that human cells (I'll speak to organs in a moment) never actually cured themselves of any viral infection. They followed only 1 of 3 general paths after viral infection: engulfed and destroyed (phagocytosis), signaled to destroy themselves (apoptosis), or signaled to suppress (interferon) the production of molecules that the infection wants to produce.

As for the heart itself, I thought it had a special status like neurons throughout the body that the immune system essentially "agreed" not to attack it. Attacking such vital tissue was essentially a sign of another disorder in itself, a sign that the truce is broken. The heart regenerates only 1% of cells per year, so it can't endure a carpet bomb immune response. Human lungs barely survive the worst encounters with covid (susceptible at the same ACE2 pathway as heart cells), and they are far more regenerative.

Am I wrong about these points? My behavior for the last 1.5 years has been motivated entirely by the idea that covid infection could be lifelong. It would be less stressful to think otherwise. :)

[mtbc]

A good example might be https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-020-00435-x which speaks of, primary cardiotropic viruses that can be cleared from the heart … vasculotropic viruses that are likely to have lifelong persistence … lymphotropic viruses with lifelong persistence. They have a later section on coronaviridae but, to my layman's reading, it seems to shrug a bit about what's going on. The article's also over a year old though so maybe we now know more about the prospect of persistence. Your could remains unrebutted but it may yet be that one's body can eradicate SARS-CoV-2 from the heart just as it can, apparently, some other viruses. One wants it cleared from the body wholly though, especially given, These coronaviruses are also suggested to indirectly trigger myocarditis … (emphasis mine).

a special status like neurons — note that SARS-CoV-2 has also been found in brain tissue and seems generally able to infect the CNS. Again, it seems that at least some can be cleared, e.g., https://febs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/febs.15871 has, While the majority of CNS infections are successfully cleared by the immune response, some viral infections persist in the CNS, and I've yet to see indication of if SARS-CoV-2 might be one of those, rather than simply leaving lingering damage. My inexpert understanding is that there is immune system activity up there, it's just moderated rather.

[mellowtigger]

I forgot to say earlier, but thanks for these links. I've learned from them the magic key words to include in my web searches: "viral persistence" and "cardio myocytes" are a great start.

Not related to my specific idea of sars-cov-2 infection within heart cells, but this Western Australia presentation makes it fairly clear that covid-19 is a lifelong illness for many people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UzOav3x8Q0