There’s another reason why some scientists think that a SARS-CoV-2 infection — whether first or fourth — is worth avoiding. Some argue that even mild cases of COVID-19 can cause lasting damage to the immune system, which could make people more susceptible to other kinds of infection. This has been floated as an explanation for the surge in cases of influenza and other respiratory illnesses in the Northern Hemisphere beginning in October last year. Such evidence “dispels the myth that repeated brushes with the virus are mild and you don’t have to worry about it”, says Rambod Rouhbakhsh, a physician at the Forrest General Hospital in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, in a press release. “It is akin to playing Russian roulette.”
Many immunologists, however, say that evidence for that hypothesis is lacking. Immune abnormalities do seem to accompany long COVID and linger after severe cases of COVID-19, but for most people who have recovered, there is no sign that the virus causes a long-lasting immune deficiency. “We know what immunodeficiency really looks like,” says Sheena Cruickshank, an immunologist at the University of Manchester, UK. Only a few common viruses have the ability to suppress the immune system: HIV infects and destroys immune cells such as T cells, leaving people more vulnerable to other types of infection; measles infects immune memory cells, making them targets for destruction and prompting the immune system to forget pathogens it has previously met.
I think the first one is probably the most straight forward one. The others are linking covid/long covid to other issues, which seems to be strongly suggestive of the problem and prove correlation, even if not proving the specific cause.
That seems…not good. As a 23 year autoimmune disease patient I can confidently say that wearing a mask and taking other precautionary measures is way way way better than adding even the smallest risk of developing an autoimmune disease.
Yeah I find it really concerning and I really don’t understand why the media and society continue to downplay it. Like, we’re really just letting this rip with all these risks.
I guess the hope is that some of this data pre-dates vaccines and it’s all fine now and studies in another year or two will show that? But I’m not even sure all of this data does pre-date vaccines at this point.
This makes it look like people with long COVID had various increased inflammation markers but don’t think there any way to know form this study if these folks who get long COVID had abnormal markers before getting COVID. Would make sense that they probably didn’t have “normal” markers prior
Lot of it is because on various medical topics there are literally 100s of thousands of various papers finding this or that immune “abnormalities” and then over time they either aren’t reproducible or turn out aren’t clinically relevant despite sounding important.
People can have wildly different immune “numbers” without clinical differences. Like in Benign Ethnic Neutropenia people have substantially abnormally low neutrophils and the only issues is that their ancestors were from certain parts of Africa and they aren’t at higher risk of infection despite those same numbers being a potential emergency for a white person
COVID certainly could be problematic in this regard just going to take a lot to know if this is noise or real
Or supplementing various vitamins C / D / etc should have pretty substantial benefits for like 100 conditions based on immune studies but then clinically doesn’t pan out
In this case we also have very strong supporting evidence in the real world in a surge in a variety of illnesses over the last couple of years. That’s why I was speculating a while back that it was immune system damage, and now we have studies that support that hypothesis.
Unfortunately, waiting to get more and more studies backing that up is just allowing covid to rip around more and more, as society risks letting it weaken immune systems more and more if the hypothesis is true.
I think we’re drawing live to giving up ~10 years of life expectancy due to covid, then trying to claw it back through medical advances in covid treatments and/or vaccination.
I think you’re way, way too pessimistic. Lot of studies probably mostly showing the impacts resulting from when the early variants were ripping around with no vaccines or treatment. The deaths substantially decoupled from cases last surge.
Seems vaccines + viral evolution have made current COVID an almost unrelated situation to the original COVID surges
Life involves risk. After three years, COVID is endemic, and the vast majority of people want to live their lives and not spend a lot of time and energy restricting their activities due to the very small chance of death and the small but unknown risk of developing long COVID.
Yeah this is where I kinda fall, unfortunately the world is now inherently more dangerous than it was 5 years ago.
But at same time my kids are only X age once and holding them out of school indefinitely, not letting them go to friends houses, the aquarium, etc for an entire phase of childhood would be a pretty substantial loss. Obviously clearly would be way worse if they died and I would have regrets forever, but the costs of living a COVID-safe life are pretty substantial.
I get it, I’m a weirdo. This has been made abundantly clear to me by family, friends, and strangers on the street. I’m probably going to have to give up soon because of financial pressure, but I don’t see this ending well for society.
It’s this or we’re fucked, basically. I’m hoping it’s this obviously, but I find it deeply disconcerting that even most experts are just going with a head in the sand approach until we have more data instead of following the data we do have until we have more data. Also, booster rates are damn near zero, so most people are happily going back to no vaccines given the waning immunity.
And we’ve already lost three years of life expectancy. It continued dropping, even after vaccines.
iirc a pretty substantial chunk of that was to overdoses and violent deaths of young people so we may be having issues on multiple fronts but it’s not just COVID
I’m not entirely sure this an accurate way of looking at it, the experts “see” the real life experience that becomes data as it is created in how peoples illnesses present to ERs, if the hospitals ICUs are overflowing/etc before it is formally collected and written about. Obviously thats not a fool proof way to view the world but seems pretty clear that on average people don’t get as sick with omnicron as they were previously. @CaffeineNeeded you seeing way less critically ill folks with current variants/vaccine than you did at first right?
I’m not really talking about the risks from acute cases. I’m talking about long COVID and other post-covid risks. These aren’t going to be presenting as infected patients, they’ll be people presenting with various long COVID symptoms, heart problems, strokes, and weaker immune systems. None of which is likely to be directly linked to COVID in any individual patient.
But in studies, you’d see elevated rates after COVID. We do. Societally you’d see more strokes, more other illnesses, etc. We do. You’d see more disability claims, we do.
This sort of thing is not new phenomena though. I think the stat is you have 600% higher risk of heart attack in the 6 weeks after flu. What is new so many people got sick at the same time and for the first time in history of mankind we were testing massive percent of population for a viral illness that we can now more accurately attribute stuff to. COVID also obviously riskier than lot other respiratory viruses but what are we going to do at this point,
So yes obviously the world more dangerous having another virus running around, there is no denying that. But that is just the nature of the earth.
It didn’t have to be this way, there were relatively easy/cheap changes that made ~no difference on quality of life or even improved it, but if anything I’d say we’re now more committed to spreading our germs now and more opposed to preventative measures as a society.
Obviously I want it to be one way and Marlo is going to shoot me for it and that’s just the way it is, but it’s a pretty fucked up situation when you stop and think about it and look at the numbers. Like, HEPA filters and staying home when we’re sick and wearing a mask in medical settings, grocery stores, and on public transit would have killed everyone?