A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org

@bluebirdblvd Nothing rude about it. In fact, I quite enjoyed your writing there, even if it's on a tough topic. Thank you so much for sharing!

@hannu_ikonen @fitterhappierAJ

I honestly don't know whether I find someone as insufferable as Wen worse or Tufecki. At least Wen is just going all out on minimizing. Tufecki tries to pretend to be a long COVID advocate while minimizing at the same time.

@deonandan

I read somewhere earlier this week that the anti-vaxx crowd has all decided that he must have snuck off and got the vaccine in secret. The mental gymnastics must be hard.

@Resister2022

If I remember correctly late last year sometime he had to have heart surgery after multiple bouts of COVID(not that his heart was likely healthy otherwise...). I'd suspect he's convalescing somewhere.

@auscandoc

Thanks for posting this! I'd only seen results from the Chinese inhaled vaccine before. It's nice to see more work into this. I know it's being done, but most people don't even know that much. We need to keep working on inhaled and nasal vaccines until we get them out to the public as a matter of urgency.

@bookishbrews

I was thinking of making exactly this post earlier today and just got distracted. Needless to say, I think you're exactly right and the *reason* we have systems and structures designed to divide us is where the attention should be.

@zerocovid

Yet all of the data that I've seen shows the opposite:

https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/

Which means that they're far more concerned about their commercial real estate holdings than differences in productivity.

@masknerd @NilaJones

A sincere thank you for all of your work. You are on my short list of people that I credit for keeping my family safe the last few years.

@wdlindsy

In my personal experience, many(most?) southern Republicans will tell you, with a straight face, that the only racial issue in America is that white people are discriminated against. There's polling to indicate this as well.

https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/433270-poll-republicans-and-democrats-differ-strongly-on-whether-white/

"A significant majority of Republican voters, 75 percent, said that white Americans are subject to discrimination."

He's simply saying exactly what the average, rural Floridian believes. There's no gaffe there. Whether he believes it's true or not is kind of irrelevant to the larger issue that he believes it's a winning issue that will drive white Americans to vote him into the Presidency.

@mathew1927 @noyes @White_Bite

I suspect we need to define Long COVID more thoroughly. There's good scientific evidence for:

-Persistence of the virus
-Damage done by the virus
-Micro-clots
-Autoimmune/immune dysregulation

I'm pretty sure *all* are happening, and that's why there seem to be distinct Long COVID clusters of symptoms. Not everyone has all of them, but we will probably find that each Long COVID sufferer has at least one.

What I hope happens next is that the trials that are on-going for anti-virals to help clear viral persistence show good results against at least some types of Long COVID, because that will help everyone begin to define what Long COVID really is, and what's caused by what post-acute phase issue.

@White_Bite

I have two thoughts on this one.

One, the sample size is small and the individuals skew towards older people.

Two, there's no way that this persistence is found in someone who's 53, but not younger people as well.

It's a pretty worrying result that seems to insinuate that "getting over" COVID may simply be the passing of it from the respiratory system onto the cardiovascular system.

@bluebirdblvd

A sincere thank you for the detailed response. I guess one "positive" to come about is all of the ME/CFS people, reoccurring EBV people, etc. are finally having a moment in the sunshine where their problems are being actively discussed. Like you, I wish it didn't have to be under these circumstances. It must be awful to know what you've gone through personally and then having to watch so many go through it now.

Also really glad to hear that there are some existing treatments for the cognitive issues. My dad forgets to check in these days, but he is on his first attempt at clearing his brain fog with supplements, so I'll have to find out how it's going so far.

And thank you, personally. I am doing OK. Horrified for the people who are doing the continuous viral reinfection cycle, determined to help spread info about it as best I can, but also happy that in our home we have chosen a different path that's working for us at this point in time. We always kicked around the idea of homeschool for our kids, being in a state that doesn't take education seriously while being two highly educated people. We always kicked around the idea of homesteading. The pandemic spurred us to do both and we only wish we had started both earlier at this point.

@NilaJones @masknerd

Haha, yeah....

I know he teased some more testing a couple weeks ago on his Mastodon account, but I haven't him post any results yet. The good news is you can still get many of those masks. I checked his testing before buying all of our family's masks for a couple of years. Anecdotal, of course, but so far so good.

@SourPatchAdult

Not going to lie I read it. Slept on it. Read it again today and wondered what I was missing that I wasn't hearing everyone talking about it. If only studies like this got as much press as the ones that are (often wrongly) optimistic.

@fitterhappierAJ

I've been hoping to see more discussion of this paper. I've been thinking about it a lot since I read it yesterday.

Yes, it's a small number of individuals and they skew towards older(youngest was 53, I believe), but the implications are pretty bad if I'm reading it correctly.

@SourPatchAdult

Thanks for sharing that one! I've been thinking a lot about this one since yesterday:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/path.6035

Now, that's a bit different in that they're talking about still finding SARS-CoV-2 outside of the respiratory tract after people stop testing positive, but they're both related to the growing evidence that "getting over" COVID often does not seem to equate to clearing the virus from your body.

I've always been of the belief that there will be multiple causes of Long COVID in the end, but, the evidence for persistent viral presence is certainly compelling.

@ZeroCovidColin

The old cycle of "Sure, there's cases, but no hospitalizations" going to "Sure, there's hospitalizations but no one's dying" and then silence when deaths go up has just been replaced with "Holy crap! Where did all of these hospitalizations come from?" now that no one's testing anymore.

@NilaJones

Aaron Collins(aka Mask Nerd) would be where I'd look. He is on Mastodon(@masknerd) but not so active. @masknerd on twitter. He has a database of mask testing data at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1eE2BERAvRzs28kG87ft3a27FS9-gHvdC

@Billius27@mstdn.ca @Greengordon

To the original question, about immunity, this doesn't mean that your body is producing sufficient antibodies that will produce immunity, nor antibodies that "keep up" with new variants. Just that they exist within you, and can theoretically therefore be detected.

@Billius27@mstdn.ca @Greengordon

This was something I was interested in a while back and I just looked and it doesn't look like there's been anything new since then. So:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmed.2021.684864/full

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03647-4

The answer seems to be at least a year and possibly forever.

Caveat being that I'm not a doctor, or even a biologist, so sometimes I misinterpret these types of studies. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong.