Anyone with a chronic health issue has to become an expert on their chronic health issue because regular doctors can be dismissive of chronic heatlh problems, so I thought these two threads should be shared with anyone who has long covid.

Here's a thread by Ryan Hasner, who tracks covid variants, about the evidence for viral persistance being the cause of a lot of Long Covid cases.: bsky or xcancel

TLDR; His conclusion is that due to the types of antibodies they are seeing covid is likley peristing in deep lung tissue or places in the body with a similar structure to deep lung tissue. He thinks the idea that it's viral protien fragments to be unlikely due to the traits exhibited in the antibody response and for how long these antibodies are being produced in people with long covid.

Also:

I don't know if this is replicable, but here is a twitter thread by a user who recovered from long covid and how they treated themselves by concluding that viral persistance was the cause: https://xcancel.com/sun_in_winter12/status/1962944555826676006#m

In particular she recommends Glutathione and CoQ10, some dietary changes, and anti-virals.

Glutathione, CoQ10, alpha lipoic acid can all help with this.

Glutathione in particular has been shown to have multiple antiviral properties.

It's often depleted in chronic infections such as HIV, and supplementing it can help restore immune function.

She hasn't detailed everything yet, but some of her process and dietary changes that helped are detailed in the thread and on this page: https://longcovidbegone.substack.com/p/a-positive-update-how-i-stopped-needing

Also Also

Here is a new study showing people who were vaccine only had better immune responses to new covid variants than people who had "hybrid immunity": https://xcancel.com/brownecfm/status/1961839511496806594#m

"The unexpected finding that vaccination-only participants showed superior cross-neutralization compared to individuals with hybrid immunity challenges conventional assumptions about hybrid immunity advantages'."

This is something fitterhappieraj predicted in 2020: "cov2 is built by nature to distort memory formation. vaccines dont have those machines. i believe we will see the first time a vaccination regimen yield superior immunity than a nonseroconverting natural viral course. the first person to write this up gets an honorary MD"

Would you be surprised to learn that this article doesn't mention any health effects of getting covid, a virus that can cause brain damage?

Sussman and Frankel are not alone in their anxiety. Eli is one of more than 3.6 million children born in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic who are walking into elementary schools across the country this fall. They're children who came into a world full of masked adults dousing themselves in hand sanitizer. Many spent the first year of their lives either in isolation in lockdowns or with only a handful of trusted people in their bubbles. And the long-term impact on these "COVID kindergartners" remains unclear.

Maybe we should ban hand sanitizer?

A 2023 study published in Epic Research found that children who turned 2 between October and December 2021 were about 32% more likely to have a speech delay diagnosis than those who turned 2 in 2018. That rate increased dramatically, up to nearly 88%, for children who turned 2 between January and March 2023. Overall, the speech delay diagnoses increased from an average of 9% of children in 2018 to nearly 17% in the first quarter of 2023.

Did people mask at home around their babies? How many strangers do infants normally interact with for significant periods of time? Wierd how having more time with their parents due to brief lockdowns wasn't a good thing.

School attendance and preschool enrollment levels have also suffered since the pandemic. The U.S. Department of Education's most recent study on attendance found that the rate of chronic absenteeism — which is when students miss 10% or more of school — averaged 28% across the country during the 2022-2023 school year.

Would you be surprised to learn they don't mention several years of record rates of other diseases like RSV, Strep, and Flu in relation to these statistics?

Anyway, it's certainly not the disease that causes brain damage and memory problems, or how it takes a toll on our immune system, it was our reaction to the virus that was the real problem becuase it disrupted our routines.

Here's another news article that's probably not related to the brain damaging virus we are letting infect everyone: Memory problems increase among Nordic children. The article entertains the theory that cell towers and microwaves are to blame, but I'm pretty sure the problem is hand sanitizer.

spoiler

This is a good article

“Immunity debt,” a theory to explain the global surge in non-covid infections since pandemic restrictions were lifted, is increasingly being challenged by emerging evidence. Nick Tsergas reports

Mycoplasma pneumoniae is a bacterial infection not known to cause widespread hospital admissions. “I can count on my two hands the number of times I’d ever seen mycoplasma pneumoniae before 2023,” says Samira Jeimy, clinical immunologist at the University of Western Ontario. “All of a sudden I feel like everybody has it.”

Over the past three years similar reports have circulated of rising bacterial infections, flare-ups of old viruses becoming more common, and children landing in hospital with diseases not usually seen in young, healthy people. One explanation offered by public health leaders has been “immunity debt”—the idea that precautions taken in the covid pandemic suppressed routine exposures to circulating pathogens, leaving people more vulnerable to them when restrictions were lifted.

The theory landed in the public consciousness at the right moment. A simple idea that sounded like science, it soothed a public seeking answers just as the world was returning to a semblance of normality. And it served a policy function, allowing governments to focus on economic recovery.

But its explanatory power has faded as the number of non-covid infections has kept rising each year. A 2024 analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that invasive group A strep infections saw their most dramatic year-on-year increase from 2021 to 2022, well after most precautions had been lifted in the US. Rates have been abnormally high since then, raising questions about what might be behind the trend.

This is a pretty good article, it's basically researchers explaining that they are seeing immune system effects after covid and then then Ashish Jha going "No, that doesn't happen. shut up. It only happens to a small percentage of people."

If you've been lax about masking, now is a good time to pick it back up. Especially in busy public places.

There are two different variants that might be at play, the one that started in Asia/Australia is more contagious due to better ACE2 binding, which seems bad.

But the new strategy our country and most people I know are going with is "just catch it, spread it to as many people as possible, and get it over with so you can go back to brunch" so good luck to everyone.

Florida is seeing the largest increases in transmission of any state right now. Almost 3x higher than any time in the past 9 months.

Other southern and west coast states are rising too but not as quickly. Everywhere else is staying low+flat.

It is difficult to pin down exactly how common long COVID really is among those aged under 18 as "prevalence varies between studies due to different clinical definitions, follow-up period and survey methods used," Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Yale School of Medicine, told Newsweek.

However, she added that "the most robust studies" collectively suggest the number of children who get infected with COVID and then develop long COVID "is higher than the prevalence of asthma in children in the U.S."

Also discussing the study, Dr. Lauren Grossman, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, told Newsweek: "The number of children under 18 with asthma ranges from 4.9 million to 6 million depending on the source so it's not an incorrect statement to say that there are more or at least the same number of children with asthma as there are with long COVID."

Many children are also going "unrecognized and unsupported," Dr. Rachel Gross, a professor in the department of pediatrics at NYU Langone Health, told Newsweek

And now we have the CDC vaccine panel replaced with grifters across the board.

Don't be surprised if we follow other countries in the rukes basrd international community and start encouraging medically assisted suicide. Probably to be expected seeing how rabidly capitalists invested in AI on the promise that a bunch of jobs would be made obsolete.

Any teachers here? Would 10-20% of your class having long term trouble with memory or focusing be disruptive to the learning process? With really young children, how could you even tell something changed for the worse after a viral infection?

Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10% to 20% of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost 6 million US children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children.

Don't worry, AI can do the work for them.

Any teachers here? Would 10-20% of your class having long term trouble with memory or focusing be disruptive to the learning process? With really young children, how could you even tell something changed for the worse after a viral infection?

Long COVID is common, affecting up to 10% to 20% of children with a history of COVID-19. With almost 6 million US children potentially affected, this is higher than the number of children with asthma, the most common chronic health problem in children.

Don't worry, AI can do the work for them.

It's kinda cool how covid fucked and continues to fuck everything up and we are not dealing with it at all. I think it was a bad idea to infect everyone in the world with a virus that damages every major organ in our bodies, but trying to mitigate the damage is annoying and expensive so

Along with a baffling rise in post-pandemic mortality rates that has insurers stymied, the number of Americans claiming disabilities has skyrocketed since 2020, adding another puzzling factor that could impact corporate bottom lines.

After rising slowly and steadily since the turn of the century and hovering between 25 million and 27 million, the number of disabled among the U.S. population rose nearly 35 percent in the last four years, to an all-time high of 38,844,000 at the end of November, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Reasons behind the stunning increase vary, but many seem connected to the COVID-19 pandemic. A sizable number of COVID-19 survivors claim long-term health issues, the so-called Long COVID, which includes symptoms like chronic fatigue, respiratory problems, and neurological impairments. The CDC estimates that 15 million Americans may have Long COVID symptoms as of 2024, with some experiencing debilitating conditions.

The CDC and World Health Organization have recognized Long COVID as a contributing factor to rising disability rates. Moreover, the COVID-19 virus has shown to worsen pre-existing chronic conditions, like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disorders, also leading to increased disability rates.

Mental health disorders also surge

Along with those ailments is the surging levels of anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders, from pandemic-related isolation, loss of loved ones, financial hardships, and economic uncertainties. Many mental health conditions are classified as disabilities under U.S. law when they significantly impair daily functioning.

https://infinityknives666.bandcamp.com/album/a-city-drowned-in-gods-black-tears

After getting a new laptop with win 11 installed, and having to run all the tweaks to make it less obnoxious and disable all the annoyances, I started getting adds pop up in the corner after an update and decided enough was enough. I was forced to pay for that shit and it's serving me ads? Fuck off.

So I just installed Bluefin and it's been absolutely awesome. The things they have set up by default are pretty wonderful. Gnome is up with useful extentions to start with so I didn't have to bother tweaking it to my liking. There is also a KDE based version called Aurora, and the famous gaming spin called Bazzite has both KDE and Gnome versions. There is even a command that lets you easily switch between all the different ublue flavors.

It's an immutible distro, so it has a base you can't easily change, but it relies on flatpaks, appimages, homebrew, podman/docker, and distrobox for all the user apps you want, all set up to work by default. The gnome software center is populated by flatpaks, for example. Almost all of the sensible default apps are flatpaks that you can easily uninstall if you don't want them. And it keeps all of this up-to-date in the background, it checks weekly, and you just restart when convenient to upgrade. The last successful linux distro I installed and stuck with was debian with flatpaks, so I could have a stable base with more up-to-date apps, so it's a paradigm I like.

There is no traditional package manager unless you install one via distrobox, but flatpak and homebrew cover almost everything most people could want, really.

Want to install jellyfin media server or the ARR stack? Just open up podman-desktop and look for a docker images and then follow a set up guide. Want some command line bling? They have a custom command that installs a bunch of useful terminal apps from homebrew. The bluefin team basically listens to the userbase and then adds whatever they ask for by default if they can get it working, which includes a lot of peripheral support. The results are fantastic.

Previously I was messing around with NixOS, and I like how that works, but I quickly ran out of time to set up my own computer and kind of lost steam messing with it. The ublue distros offer similar functionality: you can create your own custom setup and make it wasy to clone, but you don't have to bother with that to get a usable experience. It's usable by default.

It doesn't support dual booting, because they are a small team and don't want to have to do tech support whenver windows screws up the boot manager, so if you want to install it and don't want to wipe your windows install you'll need a install on a seperate drive (an external drive works) and switch between installs when you boot up. It's a little more annoying, but it's a cleaner way to do things.

I've never had a linux install be this trouble free and sensibly set up by default. I'm very impressed and would recommend to anyone thinking of switching.

This is so good.

Emel Mathlouthi (Arabic: آمال المثلوثي) (born 11 January 1982), also known professionally as Emel,[1] is a Tunisian-American singer-songwriter, musician, arranger and producer. She rose to fame with her protest song "Kelmti Horra" ("My Word is Free"), which became an anthem for the Tunisian revolution and the Arab Spring.

Anyone who says covid doesn't effect the immune system is a liar. All viruses take a toll on the immune system to some degree, and we can measure it after covid and it can be quite severe. Similar things happen after a flu. For a while after you will be more prone to opportunistic infections, like from bacteria and fungus and other viruses. Except most people only get the flu every several years, while covid can infect you several times a year due to being a coronavirus, being airborne and incredibly contagious, and mutating so quickly due to infecting so many hosts. Of course it's making us sicker.

What they mean is "it's not HIV", but it's also been shown, like other viruses, to persist in parts of people's bodies, and while it's not the same, long covid is effecting a lot of people in a similar way across the world. The pro-infection people are betting that covid was only dangerous because it was new to humanity, when signs are there that's it's still plenty dangerous even after previous exposure and vaccines.

“Dawn Bowdish, Canada Research Chair in Aging & Immunity at McMaster University, says they see immune changes following COVID infections in her lab. But she cautions against singling COVID out as uniquely disruptive.

“In our own work do we see that ‘COVID changes your immune system?’ Yes. But so does absolutely every other thing you’ve ever been exposed to,” she said. “Infections are never good for you.”

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“Virtually every viral respiratory infection has this period where the immune responses needed to deal with the virus leave you compromised to bacterial infections,” she added.

Samira Jeimy, program director of Clinical Immunology and Allergy at Western University, says COVID’s disruptive effects on the immune system are probably driving recent illness surges.

“Other viruses cause immune dysregulation,” Jeimy said. “I don’t know why we’re in such denial that COVID can do it as well.”

“There’s still a pervasive belief that all of this is because of an ‘immunity [debt],’ which is hard to believe,” she said..

Raywat Deonandan, a University of Ottawa epidemiologist, said he is also “quite open” to the immunity theft hypothesis.

“We’re seeing rises in respiratory infections of all kinds,” he said. “And there’s probably something behind that.”