I am appreciative that lefties (broadly, with obvious exceptions) tend to see COVID safety as an important civil justice issue, and part of disability rights more broadly.
It's nice not to be entirely alone on this stuff.
@noyes @SuperTwaddle I'm not really sure there are any leftists setting policy in Canada/US/UK.
I'm not sure about Canada or the UK, but in the United States, the Democratic Party, which purports to be a left of center affair, campaigned on heavy mitigation... then they threw the gates open and let Omicron rip.
In Spain and Portugal not a single party that I'm aware of, anywhere on the political compass is arguing for mitigation. None. In these countries there are several left-wing parties with representation. In Portugal, there's even an old-school communist party, in name and ideology, with representation. Both countries have left wing governments, lead by nominally socialist, but actually social democrat prime ministers.
Finland has a social democrat PM leading a center left coalition. No party with parliamentary representation is arguing for mitigation either.
Only the Finnish Pirate Party actually wants to do something about it. You can place it left of center, but it's essentially a civil libertarian party. And unfortunately it has no representation in parliament.
So, hear it from someone who votes moderate left in countries currently led by left of center parties with plenty of left wing options. Lefties are not interested. They have their heads stuck in the sand just like everybody else.
@carlos @SuperTwaddle @noyes This was meant more as a cultural comment than being about actual policy and politicians.
Got it. You'll find a culture of caring for others beyond your immediate circle more on the left than on the right, specially for people who are different.o
But somehow, it's not working here. I don't see left wing ordinary people interested in mitigation either.
I don't think Left Wing Politicians understand the threat. Leadership pulled some sleight of hand in terms of long term morbidity, which is expected to be quite serious based upon past performance w/SARS and MERS, even for those that are not disabled.
American Right Wing think tanks are adjusting policy as if they expect unskilled laborers to lose utility in early adulthood. That's a safe bet for someone exposed by middle school.
Most people left or right seem to be in denial. I reckon people on the left will have even more to be sorry about - especially those not rich - as this continues. I'm not optimistic about public health care and disability support staying viable without substancial downgrades with the additional load caused by repeated widespread infection.
1)They think that authority figures would repeatedly warn them if the danger was that bad. Unfortunately, Western leadership was unable to handle the crisis due to over-reliance on financially interested entities that misrepresented the both the interval of infection and the capacity of interventions necessary to manage that infection. SARS-CoV-2 infection is not transient, it is chronic, and we lack the background knowledge necessary to eliminate the infection.
Given frequent reinfection in the absence of mitigations, chronic infection doesn't even have to be common for the impact to be tremendous, just by sheer accumulation of damage and repeatedly rolling the dice.
But I've noticed you've been stressing chronic infection as a common occurrence, beyond immunocompromised people.
Do you have pointers to published work on this, or your insights collected somewhere?
@carlos @SuperTwaddle @noyes @steven
We have autopsy data of people who supposedly "cleared" their COVID infection showing it is still in their bodies, just not necessarily where it started. We also have studies showing it moving to pretty much every part of your body.
So let me kind of turn that question on its head. Do we have any evidence of most people fully clearing SARS-CoV-2 from their bodies?
It's early, so perhaps we will but I'm not aware of a study showing most people without COVID anywhere in their body. I think it's much more likely that no one's actually clearing it fully.
What we do know for sure is that it's found in parts of your body where it's theoretically "hiding" from your immune system for at least months after an infection. With an average re-infection period of every 8 months I feel like it's pretty clear people aren't clearing it from their body before adding more, on average.
No need to flip the question around. I get that it is extremely hard to have any certainty about the negative (no persistent infection in most people) for a novel virus, We may need to wait decades to really know even if that's the case. And to find out everything even a single infection can do over a lifetime.
And as you said, it is also clear that the impact of an infection easily outlasts the time until the next one, without precautions.
This is all more than good enough reason to avoid infection, including the 1st if you still can.
My problem is that, even though we think like that, most people don't.
So, if there are smoking guns that don't focus on previously immunocompromised people, or people who died with the acute infection I'd really like to know about them.
It may help me convince some people.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05542-y
This study is more than enough for me (specially considering P36 and P42) , but most people will read "died with covid" and "in some patients", and right away paint themselves a picture where it can't happen to them.
@carlos @SuperTwaddle @noyes @steven
There's been quite a bit of research into viral persistence in people with long COVID. Is that the smoking gun? There's, for obvious reason, quite a bit less research into "Person who gets COVID and seems fine two weeks later." You, generally, neither have autopsy evidence available nor do those people generally keep coming in for repeated testing.
Just a sampling:
https://www.bmj.com/content/377/bmj.o1555
https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1379777/v2
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.06.14.22276401v1.full.pdf
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/could-coronavirus-persist-safe-havens-body
https://reports.mountsinai.org/article/gi2022-_6_evolution-of-antibody-immunity-in-the-bowel
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2022.939989/full
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9057012/
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.07.22278520v1.full
@carlos @SuperTwaddle @noyes @steven
You never clear EBV, for example, and it can cause all sorts of issues. It certainly wouldn't be the first virus to hide in places in your body where the immune system has a harder time reaching, so I don't think it's a strong claim at all, personally.
Yes, that has been established for many viruses but not for many others. I will not be terribly surprised if it is also established for SARS-COV-2 but it still needs to be shown.
Has it been established for SARS-CoV-1 or for any other coronavirus?
Discussion begins at minute 32. The information flows better if your view the latter 28 minutes before the first 32.
@noyes @carlos @SuperTwaddle @BE As a not sciency person, how does this concept relate to what we know about cumulative harms caused by repeated reinfections?
Is there another virus that stays in the body forever, but also that gets worse every time it's reintroduced to your body?
Watched it now. Thanks again, this was very informative.
Well, it concerns the autopsy study.
The presenter is very open about the limitations resulting from the composition of the population studied, when asked right away (1st question) about generalising to other populations.
It's also clear that he is very suspicious that they might be found to generalise if further studies are done, based on what they saw with a very small but suggestive number of cases. And based on finding the virus "in plain sight" in a number of tissues, over an extended period of time, without injury or inflammation. That suspicion is something that didn't come across to me when I first read the paper. And it's an important cue.
I do hope that those studies are performed. Now that almost everybody, along with their dog, cat, hamster and cockroach has been infected at least once, if nobody really clears the virus, you will find it in just about everyone in let's say, a balanced cohort of victims of traffic accidents. The hard part might be finding people who have not been reinfected for long enough to rule out that they would eventually clear it.
Generally speaking, after about 5 weeks of any infection, the immune system gives up on trying to eradicate stubborn pathogens and de-escalates the immune response with a collection of protective compromises, most conspicuously the establishment of autoimmunity. A good example of such an autoimmune signal can be found here, ubiquitously expressed in all subjects, w/sex specific differences.
https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-021-03184-8
@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
Also, persistence of infection is well documented in FCoV/FIP, but the evasion mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 & Omicron are unique, distinct from all other known CoVs, including SARS and MERS, though there are undoubtedly similarities.
Thanks for the links.
Yes, there's now little doubt that persistent infection plays a role in Long Covid.
The odds of experiencing LC (not to mention increased risk of all sorts of other bad outcomes) are much much too high to justify the chill attitude to infection that is prevalent. Particularly considering frequent reinfection. And it looks like it can last arbitrarily long. And relapses on reinfection are common. It is a life ruiner for many people.
There are so many ways in which SARS-CoV-2 could ruin my life that, personally, knowing that I would have a good chance of fully clearing it would not really change my personal risk calculus much. And I don't know that.
Still, "never cleared" is a strong claim to make. If it's true I want to know, and to understand. So I think it's fair to ask for evidence and reasoning. If I can grasp it I will for sure boost it.