The book of covid

The precautionary principle could have guided us to keep up avoidance and containment practices until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And yet, the clearer the picture has become, the more we have reduced those measures, instead of ramping them up. Covid is more dangerous than initially expected, and yet we have continued to make ourselves more vulnerable.

Loss of deep sleep is particularly concerning, as this type of sleep reduces how tired we feel and strengthens concentration and memory. Lack of deep sleep may be partly responsible for the commonly reported "brain fog" during and after covid.

We have already reported on the shared pathobiology between stroke and covid-19 at a cellular level. So, it should not be surprising to see the long-term impact on the brain with a persistent inflammatory response (potentially due to viral persistence, immune dysregulation or autoimmunity).

The reason that we can provide only a rough estimate, with a wide range of surrounding uncertainty, is that calculating excess deaths for the entire world is complex and imprecise. Including statistics released by sub-national units like provinces or cities, among the world’s 156 countries with at least 1m people we managed to obtain data on total mortality from just 84. Some of these places update their figures regularly; others have published them only once.

Almost no public health measures remain in place, yet more people are in hospital with covid-19 in Alberta now than last year. CTV News Edmonton asked experts why that could be.

This is the challenge of science communication. Simple analogies stick in people’s minds, even when they are wrong. Our immune system is not like a muscle. It does not require constant poking and prodding from a germ to avoid lethargy.

Infants aged less than 6 months, who are ineligible for vaccination, have high covid-19–associated hospitalization rates compared with other pediatric age groups.

Or: SARS 2, the forever plague. outcomes in hospitalized patients during the acute phase of the disease, but even mild infections cause capillary clotting and vastly increase the risk of dangerous cardiovascular outcomes like heart disease and stroke, various neurological outcomes from damage to the brain and blood-brain barrier, and even metabolic outcomes like diabetes. Oh yeah, and it’s making tinnitus worse.

“There once was a Doctor AJ Who came onto Twitter to say It might be alarming But T cells are harming So, avoid reinfection, OK?”

In March 2020 I contracted a mild covid infection. I had just turned 30, was in perfect health and living “my best life.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told me it would take two weeks to bounce back. But it’s been 2½ years, and I’ve spent my entire 30s disabled by a post-infection illness — housebound and barely holding onto what little I can of my former life. I truly cannot relay the misery.

Raia Small on why the left in the United States and Canada has struggled to mount an effective response to the pandemic’s catastrophes, and where we might go from here.

@LauraMiers: Covid isn’t a single event. It’s a trigger. It triggers new medical conditions. Preexisting conditions are exacerbated. It reactivates latent viruses. You age decades. Dysfunctional immune systems may n...…

To combat viruses, one of humankind’s oldest threats, researchers are studying predators with the oldest adaptive immune system in the animal kingdom: sharks.

While most of the patients infected with severe SARS-CoV-2 cleared the virus within a few weeks of infection, some people have a persistent infection or persistent shedding viral RNA in the long term.

Patients with LC had highly activated innate immune cells, lacked naive T and B cells and showed elevated expression of type I IFN (IFN-β) and type III IFN (IFN-λ1) that remained persistently high at 8 months after infection.

Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and traumatic brain injury can cause changes in behavior by altering brain anatomy. Now it seems the coronavirus can too.

Covid-19 reduces the numbers and functional competence of certain types of immune cells in the blood, say researchers. This could affect responses to secondary infections.

Some patients are experiencing symptoms long after their covid infection – and for many, it's changing how they interact with the world.

Scientists are studying the potential consequences of asymptomatic covid-19 and how many people may suffer long term health problems.

Remarkably, previously hospitalized and nonhospitalized patients remained with decreased numbers of CD1c+ myeloid DCs and pDCs seven months after SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The neologism ‘necrosecurity’ describes the cultural idea that mass death among less grievable subjects plays an essential role in maintaining social welfare and public order. In the early months of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the United States, this perspective on the social value of death emerged in diverse contexts, particularly in claims that deaths were a necessary consequence of returning economies to normal. Necrosecurity discourse encourages audiences to perceive coronavirus fatalities as neither preventable nor exceptional, and to perceive themselves as facing little risk of infection or death.

Most people complied, but some pushed back (or poked holes in their masks to smoke).