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
@DroidEngineer @grammargirl @clubantietam
Tufekci's one of the biggest COVID minimizers on planet earth. I wouldn't listen to her on anything. Period.
All you have to do is open the actual paper that's been linked here and look at figure 5, as has been pointed out to you, and you'll see quite clearly that all of the data points match perfectly. Just in the paper it's a bar graph and here it's been put into a different form for easier viewing for a non-scientific audience. It's not a "made up graph" in any way other than it's not the graph that was in the paper.
It's not something that's up for debate and too much time's been wasted on this discussion already, frankly.
Now, if you want to discuss what the data itself was discussing and what the limitations were, I think that's a valid discussion, but you'd have to read the paper before we could have that discussion.
EDITED TO ADD - I'm going to pull this back, because I can(yay Mastodon) and say I'm not trying to be aggressive about it, as that did sound when I re-read it, but Tufekci's not a reliable source and I do actually know that not everyone keeps up with the latest COVID news, but this articles been discussed ad nauseam for 4 months now. I generally believe anyone still casting doubt on the overall info to be a bad faith actor, but I'm going to pull back and assume you're not.
What it *does* discuss is exactly what most people would think it discusses, and rather than explain it myself, here's what the paper states quite clearly:
"In this study of 5,819,264 people, including 443,588 people with a first infection, 40,947 people who had reinfection and 5,334,729 noninfected controls, we showed that compared to people with no reinfection, people who had reinfection exhibited increased risks of all-cause mortality, hospitalization and several prespecified outcomes.
...
Compared to noninfected controls, assessment of the cumulative risks of repeat infection showed that the risk and burden of all-cause mortality and the prespecified health outcomes increased in a graded fashion according to the number of infections (that is, risks were lowest in people with one infection, increased in people with two infections and were highest in people with three or more infections). Altogether, the findings show that reinfection further increases risks of all-cause mortality and adverse health outcomes in both the acute and postacute phases of reinfection. The findings highlight the clinical consequences of reinfection and emphasize the importance of preventing reinfection by SARS-CoV-2."
IMO Tufekci simply creates a straw man argument that sicker people will get COVID more often because they have more issues, rather than looking at the fact that millions upon millions of people are on their 3rd infection(at least) already and no matter how you slice it those people have worse health outcomes.
The limitation here is the same as all of the studies done by this group, in that they pull most of their data from the VA so it skews heavily male(although females tend to have worse COVID outcomes) and older. Take it for what you will.
Long COVID linked to lower brain oxygen levels, cognitive problems and psychiatric symptoms
@trendless @novid Super interesting paper, particularly with the reduced oxygen uptake in the brain.
I know it's linked in the write-up you linked, but just to make it more clear here's the paper itself. Thanks for sharing this one!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666354623000091?via%3Dihub
For what it's worth Berberine appears to help as well, probably for the same reasons.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36183284/
I've never had a problem reading anything on Medscape before, but it appears to be behind a registration now, unfortunately.
This is the type of warnings that we need, unfortunately.
Thank you to people like Dr Leonardi(@fitterhappierAJ) for warning those of us who would listen 3 years ago that exactly this would be the outcome.
I've been warning about this:
https://qoto.org/@BE/109823967281876128
The only reason wearing a mask has been allowed in many places, my hometown included, is because of the federal emergency declaration. When it's over you no longer have that protection.
But it's the clown car that they signed up for and they're thrilled with it. At least the ones that I know are loving every minute of it. They've got some "gotcha" moment every day that they're bragging about. January 6th videos "finally seeing the light of day" and banning "the biowarfare vaccine" and "keeping the kids safe from groomer librarians" etc.
As much as you and I think it's absurd, they're getting what they voted for, loving it and can't wait to vote for more of it in 2024.
Awesome! We were planning to begin tapping maples on our property for the first time this year, but we didn't quite get set up in time. Next year's the year. Good luck with your collection!
I've wondered this, too. At first I just thought they just put out plenty of different propaganda pieces and everyone latched onto one, or more, and in essence there was something for everyone. But it seems like that would be less efficient than making up a single story and sticking to it. You might be right on the reasoning there.
I can confirm, in real life, pointing this out does, in fact, have zero effect. It's bizarre.
@DroidEngineer @grammargirl @clubantietam
If you're listening to Tufekci you've already lost the battle. Sorry.
I've tried, completely unsuccessfully, to explain why I'm not keeping up with all of the ins and outs of that story. Thank you for explaining it better than I did.
The only difference from how it's always been is the scale of the problem, but the long COVID heath care options are terrifying. In response to another article yesterday I looked up the closest long COVID clinic to where I live to see what they do. They give you 4 one hour tele-visits with a psychologist, teach you how to log your symptoms, teach you about nutrition and how to use heat and ice to manage your pain. That's apparently it.
@KN3RDS @nancylwayne @hoelessromantic
Yeah, I refuse to believe that these people can't figure it out.
As of the beginning of 2022 there were an estimated 1.6 million full-time workers "missing" from the workforce due long COVID (https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-long-covid-worsening-the-labor-shortage/). I'm going to bet that hasn't gotten significantly better in the last year.
Excess deaths are at ~1.3 million in the US since 2020 at this point (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm#dashboard).
There's 3 million of the 3.4 million "missing" already and we don't even have great long COVID numbers for the past year that I've seen. None of this is all that hard to figure out and they're welcome to pay me to figure it out for them if they'd like :)
I'll finish my thought on that this way.
You say:
"Most climate deniers are basically good people that have been duped by the propaganda of oil apologists, deniosaurs, and hard-core climate deniers."
and I'd change it to
"Many climate deniers are basically good people that have been duped, while most have taken an active role by choosing to believe the propaganda of oil apologists, deniosaurs, and hard-core climate deniers because it makes their day to day lives easier."
OK, so in your mind, in an ideal world situation, there's no misinformation and everyone is informed of objective truth only?
I just think that's a fantasy world that'll never exist, so, you have to deal with the people who actually exist in your life who are misinformed and decide which are in that state intentionally and which are in that state by accident.
I'll preface this with the fact that I've tried to ignore most of the lab vs natural discussion about COVID. I just find it to be a distraction to the situation we find ourselves in with COVID and I suspect that's largely the point.
That said, I worked at a certain national lab for a pretty long time. One thing to realize about the culture is that things change, often fairly dramatically, lab to lab in each Presidential transition. There's often fairly hardened battle lines of "My lab gets more funding when Democrats are in power and your lab gets more funding when Republicans are in power." Politics is often a mine field in these labs. It's not hard at all to imagine someone wanting to prop up a political narrative in the DOE infrastructure because their livelihood basically depends on one party being in power.
"Today's NPR story on [insert important story] was pretty bad."
Repeat as your headline indefinitely. They've fallen so far from being a legitimate news source.
Sure. So, where do we draw the line?
"You're a good person, but, you're super busy in life and don't take in any news, so climate change doesn't exist in your life."
"You're a good person, but, you believe being educated means watching the local news 3 times a week, so every now and then you think about recycling."
"You're a good person, but, you watch nothing but Tucker Carlson as your only news source, so you think that climate change is a hoax."(probably...I've never actually seen that show)
"You're a good person, but, you read everything out there about climate change and decided that that 0.1% of scientific literature that denies human caused climate change must be correct, so you choose to do nothing about it."
Honestly, I struggle with deciding where the line is with people in my own life. At some point in the spectrum you've clearly moved from "good person who doesn't know better" to "this seems hard, I don't want to deal with it, so it's easier for me to pretend it's not real."
@GeraldKutney I tend to make the same argument from time to time, so I'm not disagreeing with you.
But....
At what point are people responsible for their own education?
As we see with COVID, and there's a lot of parallels, there's a fine line between ignorance and willful ignorance that allows you to, cognitively, escape doing anything that inconveniences you.
Really interesting research. While this isn't, exactly, what they were looking at, I've been noticing what I'll call increased aggression in people I've known for decades beginning weeks after their first or second COVID infections.
This article touches on something that made me think about the topic:
"In the simultaneous group, gray matter atrophy was seen in the left cingulum (86 voxels) and the inferior frontal lobe (91 voxels). The asymptomatic group had no gray atrophy.
The simultaneous group presented a widespread, bilateral pattern of hyperconnectivity involving all 12 networks; the asymptomatic group showed hyperconnectivity involving only five networks."
Meanwhile, a 2008 paper titled "Neurobiology of Aggression and Violence" says this:
"The other critical abnormality implicated in impulsive aggression and violence is hyperactivity of the limbic system, including structures such as the amygdala, in response to negative or provocative stimuli, particularly anger provoking stimuli."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176893/
My wife's the one with the neuroscience degree, so I should probably run it by her before I make any connections about science I'm definitely not an expert in, but, I was already mid-research into this subject when I saw your post so I thought I'd share.
EDITED TO ADD:
I did a poor job of explaining that there's often a link between hyperconnectivity and hyperactivity in a wide range of brain abnormalities such as ADHD, Alzheimer's and paranoia(which often goes along with aggressiveness). Paranoia is specifically linked to the limbic system.
https://elifesciences.org/articles/36011
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/1756814
Moved full time to my other account @BE soon as this instance is still having issues.
Joined Nov 2022
