A Concerned Scientist @BE@qoto.org
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
Seems like a good place for a periodic reminder that there's ~$200 BILLION in federal government money sitting out there, for nearly two full school years now, designated for air quality in schools and as of the last accounting that I saw only ~15% of it has been actually used.
https://www.ed.gov/improving-ventilation-schools-colleges-and-universities-prevent-covid-19
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7123e2.htm?s_cid=mm7123e2_w
https://khn.org/news/article/covid-funding-pries-open-a-door-to-improving-air-quality-in-schools/
@glaist@mstdn.im @hesgen
I think the pace of EV batteries being scrapped is currently outpacing using them for something else. The insurance industry is really the ones getting in the way at this point. They aren't going to allow you to put it in your suburban solar powered home for storage without cancelling your home insurance. I know quite a few off-grid people who repurpose them for home storage, so it happens. You have to really know what you're doing, though, as the high voltage is a totally different beast than your standard 12, 24 or 48V battery system so it scares a lot of DIYers off.
You know, since you mention anxiety, I've been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm really struggling with what to call the emotional state that I'm at with it all.
It's not anxious. I used to be in the early days, in particular, and am no longer.
It's not really acceptance, I don't think. I'm mad that I'll eventually be put in situations in which I have no choice but for myself and my kids to be infected by something that we'd rather not be.
I'm not apathetic, although I guess I've gotten to the point where people who are knowingly on their 4th infection and are choosing to keep going, while cheering others on to do the same, can just live with whatever the consequences may be on their own.
I used to lobby schools, businesses and hospitals about protections, but they don't care anymore, so I think there's not really anything to be done other than look out for yourself. It's a particularly weird point in the pandemic, I guess. Just watching it all happen from as great of a distance as I can manage.
In Florida high schools when the kids can't keep up in class they're often placed in virtual school to get their credits. On the surface it's the right decision because they can work independently, they have access to teachers virtually, and they can work entirely at their own pace. If they need a year to finish a semester, that's fine. The problem is then they're really just forgotten about by the part of society they were in. Their classmates and in school teachers don't see them anymore. Out of sight, out of mind.
Anyway, my wife works on science classes with a lot of these kids and what they're often going through is devastating. Not just from a health standpoint, but with their families and friends who don't believe they're unhealthy. She gets a pretty significant number of kids just breaking down and crying these days. She deals with parents calling saying "My kid was doing great at school but then they got sick and now they're just lazy. I can't get them to get up and do anything." Because, you know, long COVID doesn't exist as far as they're concerned.
Just trying my best not to be part of it, unless I'm a control sample.
Interestingly, the day before Stanford announced that, Manchester announced a different mechanism. The Stanford result seems to be getting a lot more press in the US.
The Mandolorian
@philip_cardella@historians.social
My 9yo keeps going "Is that Sabine?" to every Mandolorian they run into.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9497911/
"The co-infection can primarily result from the immune dysregulation found in individuals diagnosed with COVID-19. Recent studies regarding COVID 19-associated immune dysfunction identify lymphopenia and immunosuppression due to leukocyte apoptosis and T-cell exhaustion, paving the pathway for secondary or concurrent bacterial, fungal, and viral infections."
""Bacterial infections are one of the most significant complications of respiratory viral infections such as COVID-19 and Influenza A. Despite the use of antibiotics, 25 percent of patients co-infected with SARS-CoV-2 and bacteria, die as a result."
Yikes
@mielcarz @Jennifer_Pinkley@zirk.us @DrPsyBuffy
Yes, the guy who starts with "airborne AIDS" bows out when called a minimizer. You really should have sat this one out from the get go.
@mielcarz @Jennifer_Pinkley@zirk.us @DrPsyBuffy
I accept that perhaps you weren't pointing at me, but, no one...not one single person...in this thread said "airborne AIDS" but you. So you *are* minimizing by trying to make other people's positions seem more extreme than they may be, which sounds an awful lot like a straw man to me.
So then I see that you linked an article in a second post. One that I've actually read(it may surprise you to find out that I've actually read thousands of COVID articles and papers and I've come to my conclusions across thousands of hours of reading and thinking) and....now I just have to dig into this.
In the spectrum of articles on COVID from "This is the extinction of mankind" on the left to "This is absolutely nothing" on the right it's just right of center. Since we've already beaten "airborne AIDS" to death I'm going to ignore the whole first half of it and move onto the "A Subset of Patients" section.
I think the conclusion is probably a bit optimistic, but, let's take it exactly as it says. it says that a conservative estimate of 10% of people will get long COVID. Long COVID being a set of outcomes that are currently under one umbrella. Underneath that umbrella, a set of those conditions are immune related.
As your linked article states:
"As long COVID comes into clearer focus, it appears to be an umbrella term for different conditions, caused by a persistence of the virus in the body in some, the development of antibodies that start attacking healthy tissue in others, and tiny blood clots in yet others due to viral persistence or autoantibodies. The immune system thus seemingly shares the blame for some long COVID cases."
The article links to Dr Topol's long COVID paper which has *an entire section* on immune dysregulation, autoantibodies, reactivated viruses, viral persistence, etc.
Let's link that with another generally accepted concept in that reinfection can also cause long COVID. Not having long COVID after one infection does not mean you won't after the second, third, etc.
So, the article which you are putting out there to back the idea that our immune systems are generally safe is one that implies that within a never-ending reinfection society increasing numbers of people are going to....have immune problems?
I'm sorry, but I think if this were the 80's you'd be saying that HIV is just a flu-like virus.
This is *just* the immune system. We haven't even touched on any of the other dangers.
The bottom line is *no one* knows what the long term implications are here and people who are out there selling "it's fine" have either forgotten the precautionary principle or have some ulterior motive. When you linked to that Ryan Cooper article you outed yourself as a minimizer. Sorry.
@mielcarz @Jennifer_Pinkley@zirk.us @DrPsyBuffy
Interestingly, I went through what I wrote a couple of times and I never said "airborne AIDS" and so I have to assume you're either:
Not talking to me
or
Have to set up a straw man
Since I don't know you, I'll assume the former and not the latter.
I love that you wrote this and I really wish it weren't where we are, but you did a wonderful job of summing it up. You wrote:
"Lack of Covid Precautions creates a space where Covid can easily spread. This infects more people and puts their lives in danger. This action is rooted in denial of Covid's very real danger, and that denial complicity with eugenicist policies. That's a very hard truth for folks to swallow, and I get that, but if folks cannot grapple with that truth, then how can we ever build a better world? "
This is where I see so much of the problem, because people don't *want* a continuing pandemic, so they'll automatically gravitate towards those who tell them that there's not a problem. For every person telling people "HEY PEOPLE, THERE'S A PROBLEM HERE!" there's someone out there using some pseudoscientific BS to tell them it's fine. The problem lies in that people will largely listen to the one they want to believe.
@Jennifer_Pinkley@zirk.us @DrPsyBuffy @mielcarz
I hate to do this, because you're obviously well meaning, but as I was reading that article alarm bells started going off. Simple google searches will disprove a lot of it.
For example, when I got to this part I wondered if I'd missed something:
"There are a couple of papers that alleged T cell infection from SARS-CoV-2, but they are highly implausible from a theoretical standpoint and some ended up retracted. Those “papers are honestly ridiculous, that’s what they are,” said Bertoletti. "
Unfortunately for us all, he does link to a single article that was retracted, but, there's others that are not.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-022-00919-x
Or, this statement at the beginning:
"Most importantly, as time has passed, the rate of hospitalization and death from COVID has plummeted..."
In fact, the hospitalization rate is still pretty consistent if you think about it another way. While the last couple of peaks weren't as high as the three highest peaks, the rate as of the last peak(all of two months ago) would have been in the middle of the three highest peaks.
Perhaps more importantly if the idea that COVID hospitalizations had "plummeted" were true, then we'd be seeing the lowest rates, correct? Unfortunately, we're not. The rate was lower in June of 2021 and April of 2022.
https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions
It's important to note that it's even worse than that, because we're not comparing apples to apples. Early on all hospitalizations in which someone tested positive were generally counted, whereas now being hospitalized "with" COVID and "for" COVID are often counted separately.
Not to mention the elephant in the room....we've killed off a lot of the most vulnerable people so the rates, pretty much by definition, have to go down as more and more people are killed.
Anyway, this does a pretty good job, I assume, because I quit reading after I realized that article has a lot of misinformation in it:
https://pandemicindex.substack.com/p/psa-do-not-take-medical-advice-from
@another_katt@mastodon.social @Billius27@mstdn.ca
https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npptl/topics/respirators/disp_part/respsource3approval.html
"Most valid NIOSH-approved N95 respirators will have two headband straps, not ear loops. However, a few NIOSH-approved models are approved with ear loops because the loops are secured behind the head with a non-removable fastener."
That's fair. Re-reading what I wrote I want to make clear I wasn't saying "Someone's lying!"
I'm a big proponent of "There's a lot of different things going on" whenever someone is waiting for the single treatment that will solve all of the COVID problems. I meant it more like "Lots going on here."
Re-reading I can also see that I misspelled mechanisms. Oof.
Back to back days that two separate institutions claim to have figured this out, but with what appear to be different meechanisms.
@Gjallarhornet@mastodon.nu
I debated whether this is worthy of comment or not and I thank you @Gjallarhornet@mastodon.nu for sharing it...but I guess this is part of the problem with AI generated articles. I may be arguing semantics, but...
It's not a "breakthrough" in COVID research, per se. All the researchers from Manchester are saying is that they linked the monocytes to fatigue, thus the title of the actual paper:
"Severe fatigue as symptom of long COVID is characterized by increased expression of inflammatory genes in monocytes, increased serum pro-inflammatory cytokines, and increased CD8+ T-lymphocytes: A putative dysregulation of the immune-brain axis, the coagulation process, and auto-inflammation to explain the diversity of long COVID symptoms"
Monocytes as a focus of COVID research and possible therapeutics has a lot of articles going back a couple of years now. Here's just a few:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41385-021-00482-8
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8471575/
It's a good step forward and hopefully it does help develop treatments.
@carlos @SuperTwaddle @noyes @steven
OK, let's dig into that.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro1560
Establishes from 2006 that "elevated interleukin-10 (IL-10) production causes the immunosuppression that allows viruses to persist unchecked by the immune system."
What happens in COVID? Uh oh.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2021.677008/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7605819/
Now let's go back to 2005, SARS-CoV-1, in vitro.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15788125/
"Conclusions: SARS-CoV can establish a persistent infection in vitro."
At this point I'd throw in Dr Leonardi's paper from 2021 for "a perspective on some of the long-term risks of mutational escape, viral persistence, reinfection, immune dysregulation and neurological and multi-system complications."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8536991/
1990's:
"Human corona viruses (HCV) have been associated mainly with infections of the respi-ratory tract. Accumulating evidence from in vitro and in vivo observations is consistent with the neurotropism of these viruses in humans."
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4615-5331-1_75
1970's:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02121320
https://pmj.bmj.com/content/postgradmedj/54/635/581.full.pdf
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
