Moody Monday: SARS-CoV-2, in other words

[mellowtigger]

Let's hear what notable doctors are saying about this pandemic, what I claim is a 1) blood clotting and 2) immune suppressing 3) persistent infection.  I wish doctors wrote blog pages, but they're using Twitter instead, so that's where I'm finding their observations and suggestions.

Some resources: There's this excellent thread on "what you should do" by Dr. Kashif Pirzada, this recommendation by Dr. Arghavan Salles on how to interpret CO2 monitoring as a proxy for infection danger, and this recommendation by Dr. James Smith on 5 things you can do to improve air ventilation.  If you're looking for therapeutics, this thread is the best summary I've seen so far, but new studies are already in the works.

1) COVID-19 (not even the long term illness, but the acute phase of infection) is still killing over 400 people in the USA on average each day.
2) Life expectancy has dropped here by the largest amount since World War II, and we were already in bad shape compared to civilized countries. Amurrika!
3) President Biden has secured in history his own idiotic "Mission Accomplished" announcement, with 64 days now until the 2022 mid-term election.
4) Back in 2020, one retirement benefits organization decided to "temporarily suspend open enrollment for the Long-Term Care Program".  It's still suspended today. (archive copy)  They don't want to pay for the disabled population they know we're creating.  Yay, capitalism!  It's a great system for privatizing profits while externalizing costs.
5) Australia is now calling for child labor (and elderly labor) to fill their worker shortage, after abandoning its previous Zero Covid policy to follow the USA example.  Hooray for freedumb.
6) In this study of hamsters, "all SARS-CoV-2 variants were found to be neuroinvasive, regardless of the clinical presentation they induce".  Reminder: The brain is an immune privileged site, and your body will not rid it of viral infection.

I've told you my fears about "covid brain" already.  Responding to this Financial Times article about long term consequences of infection:

We need to prepare for large increases in cardiovascular, neurological & mental health disorders in countries affected by the #SARSCoV2 #pandemic
- Twitter, Soumya Swaminathan, Chief Scientist, World Health Organization

My translation: "You can never achieve herd immunity with a virus that damages the immune system. Wear your [long expletive rant] mask!"

Political thinking about COVID

- Twitter, Professor Steve Robson PhD, President of the American Medical Association

From someone hearing the same immune dysfunction alarm (some knew since 2020) that I've been warning about lately:

I do lymphocyte subsets on all long covid when possible. Many have low cd4 lymphocytes just like hiv.. I have documented reactivation of cmv. Ebv zoster. This is scarily similar to hiv induced immunosuppressive
- Twitter, Dr. Jack Lambert, 2022 July 03

Quoting this report from 2020 (meaning that we've known for a long time):

“No symptoms doesn’t mean there’s no problem” Virtually all children infected with COVID-19 show signs of blood vessel damage, study shows.
- Twitter, Lee Welton Croll PhD Child Psychiatry, 2022 August 29

Stay safe out there.