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.”

The new study provides the most compelling data yet to suggest that excess mortality rates from chronic illnesses and other natural causes were actually driven by COVID-19 infections.

For the study, Stokes, Paglino, and colleagues utilized novel statistical methods to analyze monthly data on natural-cause deaths and reported COVID-19 deaths for 3,127 counties over the first 30 months of the pandemic, from March 2020 to August 2022. They estimated that 1.2 million excess natural-cause deaths occurred in US counties during this time period, and found that roughly 163,000 of these deaths did not have COVID-19 listed at all on the death certificates.

Now if we could get an estimate of how much chronic illness covid is causing...

It's probably not even bird flu, yet.

Remember to get your flu shots every year, and a reminder that sine common diseases like covid can take a toll on your immune system and harm your ability fight off other diseases, especially in the few months after infection.

That might be why you've been hearing a lot of "why am I sick all the time" in the past couple years.

It's probably not even bird flu, yet.

Remember to get your flu shots every year, and a reminder that sine common diseases like covid can take a toll on your immune system and harm your ability fight off other diseases, especially in the few months after infection.

That might be why you've been hearing a lot of "why am I sick all the time" in the past couple years.

This isn't news to anyone who's followed the science since 2020...

A new study has found that COVID-19, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, is linked to accelerated plaque buildup in the coronary arteries, increasing the risk of heart-related complications. The findings were published today (February 4) in Radiology, the journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

“COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2, is initially characterized by acute lung injury and respiratory failure,” explained the study’s senior author, Junbo Ge, M.D., professor and director of the Cardiology Department at Zhongshan Hospital, Fudan University in Shanghai, China. “However, emerging evidence indicates COVID-19 also involves an extreme inflammatory response that can affect the cardiovascular system.”

“Inflammation following COVID-19 can lead to ongoing plaque growth, particularly in high-risk, noncalcified plaques.” Dr. Ge said. “Patients with SARS-CoV-2 infection are at increased risk for myocardial infarction, acute coronary syndrome, and stroke for up to a year.”

He added that these effects persist during the aftermath of COVID-19, regardless of comorbidities such as age, hypertension, and diabetes.

Seems kind of bad for a disease everyone is exposed to multiple times a year.

Higher levels of long COVID were found in lower-income households.

One child aged 17 or under was randomly selected from each sample household within the survey, and parents responded to questions about whether their child had previous COVID-19 illness, if the child had symptoms lasting three months or longer and if the child still had those symptoms at the time of interview.

Results of the analysis, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, showed approximately 1.01 million children, or 1.4%, are believed to have ever experienced long COVID as of 2023 and about 293,000, or 0.4%, were experiencing the condition when the survey was being conducted.

This is similar to the 1.3%, or about 1 million, of children ever estimated to have had long COVID as of 2022, according to the authors.

Among children currently experiencing long COVID at the time of interview, 80% reported to have some level of activity limitation compared with before they had COVID-19.

"The large proportion of children experiencing [long COVID] with any activity limitation highlights the need to examine the severity of activity limitation, functional outcomes, and days lost from school," the authors wrote.

The authors said there may be an under-reporting of long COVID in younger children due to difficulty with the verbalization of their symptoms.

After 30 years of relentless growth and capitalism, a new trend has emerged in China. The search for a simpler, calmer life is leading some Chinese people to seek a life abroad. The trend is so popular that it’s gained its own internet buzzword: the “run philosophy."

This video popped up in my feed andabout 2 and a half minutes in they start talking to a former policeman turned artist name Ye Fu. His story is that after Tiananmen Square he renounced his job, and then was sent to prison after being framed by a friend. After he was released he left the country and eventually settled in Thailand and runs a place for Chinese people fleeing China, basically wealthy chinese liberals.

He claims that before Tiananmen square people were full of hope, and that now people are miserable and desperate, etc. Says everyone is miserable and the economy is about to collapse. The usual.

So I looked him up and his name is Zheng Shiping, and his pen name is Ye Fu.

His grandpa was a direct male-line descendant of chieftain (土司), his grandfather, Liu Jilu, who had graduated from Huangpu Military Academy, was a general and Chiang Kai-shek's bodyguard. After 1949, Yefu's parents stayed in Mainland China. They were cast as rightists, and suffered political persecution. Yefu's grandfather was brought to be persecuted. His grandfather and two aunts committed suicide due to such tough and hopeless life conditions.

His wiki page also links to conversation with Xiong Zhaozheng, the friend who betrayed him, and seems to indicate they were involved with an "overseas democracy" group (coughCIAfrontcough) that was under surveillence at the time of June 4th.

(auto translated by google)I’m sorry, Brother Yefu, no matter what you are like, I have always regarded you as my most chivalrous friend and brother. I’m sorry, I’m not as strong as you, I confessed everything after three days in prison. I apologize for the suffering you have endured, etc.

You have many doubts about that case, and I have many doubts too, the reasons for which I cannot explain to you now. I will explain the truth when I am old and buried in the earth.

People from the Overseas Chinese Alliance did come, but I never admitted it to the police, so they had to release me in the end. I don’t know why you were sentenced. I did go to Guangzhou to contact them a few times, and once at the airport, Liu Fudao [a leader of the Hubei Writers Association and a famous writer] and his men forcibly took me back. The police later showed me photos of my meeting with you and everyone else, indicating that all my actions were under surveillance.

https://chinadigitaltimes-net.translate.goog/chinese/99602.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

And I found another interview that seems to confirm their involvment with an oversees "pro-democracy" group.

03:29 Chai: The thing that he [Ye Fu] cannot wrap his head around is that he went to Guangzhou on your behalf to send a document that you told him an overseas democracy activist would pick up. Later, when the procuratorate brought forth the charges, your name wasn’t mentioned, nor was the name of the overseas democracy activist—even though [the procuratorate] had all the documents. This perplexed him. I’m sure you can understand his feelings, right? Why weren’t you charged with a crime while he was sent to prison?


https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2024/09/accused-tiananmen-informants-silence-reveals-enduring-public-secrecy-around-1989/

Does the state department act as publicists for these people, so whenever a journalist wants an interview they are funneled towards people like Ye Fu?