"The ongoing risk of infection and subsequent acute and chronic illness is not negligible. The SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to circulate with evolving variants of concern .... with each SARS-CoV-2 reinfection, the risk of developing [Long Covid] is cumulative. That means two infections carry a greater risk than one infection and the risk after three infections is larger than after two infections. As of June 20234, two out of three Canadians had at least on COVID-19 infection and one in five Canadians had been infected multiple times."
COVID-19
This narrative review and meta-analysis summarizes a broad evidence base on the benefits—and also the practicalities, disbenefits, harms and personal, sociocultural and environmental impacts—of masks and masking.
Long COVID is an everyone problem because everyone has blood vessels, a gut microbiome, ACE-2 receptors, T cells and a blood-brain barrier. I wanted to demystify the words so finally they become real, and a part of you.
Long COVID is simply what happens when someone does not recover from COVID. It’s not imaginary, and it’s not even particularly mysterious. It is complicated, because bodies are complicated, and the virus is doing strange, fascinating things, going through forbidden doorways, entering sacred chambers.
Long COVID is blood vessel damage, brain damage, organ damage, immune system damage, and mitochondrial damage. It is real, it is devastating, and it is happening to people every day. And it can happen to you, after any infection.
"A 35-year-old acquaintance drops dead from a hemorrhagic stroke. A friend in her 40s, and another in his 70s, experience recurrent spells of extreme dizziness, their hearts pounding in their chests when they stand. A 21-year-old student with no prior medical history is admitted to the ICU with heart failure, while a 48-year-old avid tennis player, previously healthy, suddenly suffers a heart attack. A relative is diagnosed with pericarditis, an inflammation of the protective sac surrounding the heart.
I can’t confirm the exact etiology of all these cases. But every one of the people I mentioned had a history of COVID either days or months beforehand–and all of them experienced only mild cases of infection at the time.
Is it possible, despite everything we know, that we still underestimate COVID’s reach and danger? It is not normal for me to know so many people with severe conditions. Not normal at all."
When people with COVID-19 started getting strokes and heart attacks, scientists began researching the connection. They soon realized that the virus was attacking not just the respiratory system, but the vascular system as well.
There’s a good reason why: this novel coronavirus attaches itself to the human body via receptors called ACE-2. “Those ACE-2 receptors are quite prevalent in a lot of places in the body, especially the endothelium layer of the arteries and veins,” says Dr. Swartz. “The virus can get in there and inflame the blood vessels.”
The role of ventilation in removing exhaled airborne bio-aerosols and preventing cross infections has been extensively studied by multiple disciplines for decades and was looked at closely after the SARS outbreak in 2003. It has been shown that the SARS-CoV-2 virus (leading to the COVID-19 disease), and other similar pathogens, can spread through aerosolized particles and therefore airborne transmission of the virus must be addressed to curb its spread. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have made explicit references to this concern.