All those people who refused to take COVID seriously have a lot of blood on their hands.
Shout out to Physics Girl Dianna. Who is still bedridden.
STILL? I haven't checked in months. That's crazy.
yeah her YouTube channel still posts updates from time to time. shoutout to her husband too. they got married and almost immediately became patient/caretaker. it's probably exhausting for both but they're both resilient, hopefully they'll get out of it and live a stress free happy life. sure deserve it after going through this.
She has shown small improvements, but it's excruciatingly slow.
They don't remember. On account of their brain injury.
No, not everyone who got long covid didn't take it seriously. But the people who were super spreaders or spread misinformation are certainly to blame.
They don't give a shit, unfortunately.
But fortunately a lot of them don't care about such things as the quantity of blood on their hands, so news like this won't worsen their lives or self-image.
They got their Applebees. Does’t matter.
Ooo interesting. The parallels with CFS are fascinating.
I wasn't even aware of that. chronic fatigue syndrome was actually real.
I thought I was just like side- depression.
is there anything known about CFS?
what causes it or how long it lasts or anything?
I know nothing about it except for like a comedy sketch from the 2000s at some point.
Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.
Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @Neurologist@mander.xyz is specialised in it.
Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).
As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.
Couldn’t have said it better. And yes, science journalism often is basically repeating and dumbing down what a study says, but in science, and especially in medicine, a lot of studies tend to be wrong, make false assumptions, or overstate their findings, while journalists tend to take them for their word. There’s a reason you hear of a new cancer treatment in the news every other week but few actually make it past FDA approval.
wow, thank you so much for the detailed answer, I'm fascinated chronic fatigue syndrome turned out to be a neuroimmune disorder.
is ME genetic or do you just get unlucky as far as we know so far?
We don’t really know. But theres a giant GWAS (Genome Wide Association Study) called Decode ME with I think upwards of 25’000 pariticpants which is coming out in the next year. So we’ll know a whole lot more then. Hopefully it might lead to treatments.
Seems like it generally just gets triggered by a viral infection, but obviously it's hard to find conclusive evidence for that as people get viral infections all the time and usually recover fine. In a way COVID was a useful 'experiment' where we got a lot of cases of people getting long COVID right after a confirmed infection (because everyone was getting tested, which you typically wouldn't do for your average viral infection).
Yeah. Atleast 50% report an onset right after a viral infection. And it’s not impossible to assume the other 50% were caused by viral infections too but the patient didn’t make the connection. Obviously we don’t really know yet.
CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.
It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.
That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.
Hey I’m a researcher who works on ME (in the past called CFS).
ME/CFS is currently classified as a disease/biological illness according to the CDC.
ME is a disease state in itself. We don’t know much about it, but it can’t be explained by other diagnoses, as the defining factor, neuro-immune abnormalities including immune activation showing up post exertion is unique to it. You’re completely right that we don’t yet have a reliable biomarker. We have a test that differentiates from healthy controls, but it was discontinued for ethical reasons because conducting the test leads to a sometimes permanent worsening of the illness.
In the past it’s been mixed up and jumbled a lot, but the picture is getting clearer.
There have been a few case reports of degenerative forms of the illness. But in general it takes a more classical relapsing remitting pattern. Although even in less bad stages some patients are severely functionally disabled, even bedridden and tubefed. It has a really wide range of severities with the least severely affected able to work part time and walk and travel, while the most severe might not even be able to communicate.
What’s CFS?
Chronic fatigue syndrome.
It's another one like long covid where so much of the medical community thinks it's all in people's heads and not real, but unlike long covid it's less prevalent and thus studied less. We still don't know what it is.
There's even some hopes that figuring out long covid might lead to new ways to look into what cfs really is.
I wish people cared about dealing with covid still. Once corporate America got that sign off not to care there was no going back.
Seriously. I spent 2 days in the hospital last week with bilateral pulmonary embolisms after having COVID the middle of last month. I was NOT otherwise at risk for clots. A terrible surprise that I'll no doubt be recovering from for some time. I'm on a blood thinner for 6 months.
great.
remember when all the politicians and people who control things got covid?
What a totally normal and cool planet this is.
If it makes you feel any better, those demographics were already suffering from lead gas exposure.
I'm still afraid of long-c. I insisted that we wore masks in airports and on flights when we took a trip last month. We live life in a normal fashion everywhere else (because we're vaxxed and boosted), but I wasn't willing to risk that environment.
Why just planes? Surely this would apply to all public transport.
If they're US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they've ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it's likely the only one available to them.
Signed, -An American
I was going to say "almost every American takes a school bus at one point in their life" then I looked it up and was disgusted to find that recently more children are driven to school than take the bus.
It's absolutely ridiculous how many people drive their kids to school. The traffic reduction during fall break last week was astounding.
It's absolutely ridiculous how hard the school systems make it to get on a bus route.
You basically have to stay at the same residence and at the same school for their entire education. Even just moving within the district and they use it as an excuse to "put you on a wait list".
Add in the shortage of drivers (who wants that job) and any excuse they can use to change boundaries or cut a route.
It's like the fucking DMV on steroids.
Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.
And you're in very close proximity for a very long time. I don't know how HVAC works on an aircraft but I assume there's a large amount of recirculation.
I was on buses and trains this morning. They weren't nearly as crowded, the trips were a lot shorter, the air moved around at every stop, and like you said, they're all pretty local, so low risk of someone importing weird diseases. At least on the subways, you should still wear a mask if only because of the air quality. There's a lot of brake dust floating around.
Do masks help the wearer? Last time I heard it didn't. Probably wrong.
Either way, good for you...even if it only helps others that's a good reason!
N-95 masks are protective, and to a certain (most likely lesser degree), KN-95 masks are also protective.
As someone with long COVID, I can vouch the debilitating mental effects. I was teaching math to 4th through 8th grade students when I got it. I can remember standing in a classroom talking about a lesson and just having my mind go blank in mid sentence. I couldn't function. Not knowing what I was talking about or even where I was. Thankfully the students where very understanding and someone would finish my point I was making. I still suffer from it yet today, nearly 2 years later.
I have respiratory issues despite every CT scan showing nothing more than a couple of small pneumonia scars form long ago. I should be able to breathe just fine with no reduction of lung capacity. It stems from a lack coordination with my diaphragm - It runs backwards when I exert myself causing shortness of breath. Another sign of probable brain injury. And despite using a therapy tool to try and fix the issue, at best it just helps a little.
The upshot is I have pretty much stopped doing a lot of things I used to do because of the difficulties breathing and I spend a lot more time away from people due to an unreasonable fear of COVID.
It has caused me to retire earlier than I wanted to. And my life has greatly changed - and not for the better either.
Sorry you're going through all of that. There obviously aren't any long term studies on it yet, but hopefully things will improve more and more over time.
According to my Pulmonolgist - Nope. Her observations of all her patients over the years is that if you don't get over it in about a year, you don't get better. And she has been seeing more COVID patients than her "normal" patients for several years now. Long term care is going to be a real problem for society going forward.
Using high-resolution scanners, researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford have shown microscopic, structural abnormalities in the brainstems of those recovering from COVID-19.
Signs of brain inflammation were present up to 18 months after first contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
[..]
In living brains of those with long COVID, however, conventional MRI studies have shown no structural abnormalities in the brainstem.
Do these people not proof-read their own articles?
Normal hospital-type MRI scanners can't see inside the brain with the kind of chemical and physical detail we need. But with 7T (7 Tesla) scanners, we can now measure these details
Not the best article, but I think what they are trying to say over multiple paragraphs is that new higher resolution MRI machines can see the damage that normal lower resolution MRI can't see
what type of abnormalities are they seeing specifically?
FTA: Signs of ongoing inflammation in the brainstem, something that is seen in people with traumatic brain injury and people with chronic fatigue syndrome.
oh, interesting.
so this new study is saying they can see on a small enough scale to find that scientifically consistent and significant inflammation in the brainstem directly linked to covid?
The abnormalities are only visible with a 7T scanner, and not conventional MRIs.
Diana from YT Physics Girl has long COVID. Her very loving husband takes care of her. We all wish them the best and any kind of recovery.
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
rule #1: be kind
<--- rules currently under construction, see current pinned post.
2024-11-11