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Latest COVID News - Not Good. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-12-14  

I posted a LENGTHY reply on another reclist story and decided that it probably needs to be its own post. I’ll simply paste it all below, but I’m triggered to post this as a standalone item because of SO MANY replies I see where folks are talking about their infection “this time” or making reference to the fact that they have had Covid multiple times. That’s… alarming. So I present below the alarm bells that are not being broadly discussed. Seriously people — the goal should be to NOT catch Covid. Full stop.

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I’m glad somebody is writing about Covid [referring to the story where my reply was posted]. I have been dismayed to see very little discussion of it, especially here, given that I started prepping in January 2020 based on the excellent early coverage here by Mark Sumner.

A few things. Here and in the media, when it comes up at all, the discussion is always around a primary acute infection. That is what the OP is discussing, and make no mistake — it’s important to discuss.

However, that is only half the necessary discussion, and I’m being generous with that proportion. Yes, the Covid vaccines reduce the risk of hospitalization and death from an acute infection. And yes, being vaccinated and UTD on boosters does seem to lower the risk of acute infection complications.

The reality is, though, we are only beginning to see the tip of the iceberg about the long-term effects of a single (let alone repeat) infection. These don’t have to be severe symptomatic infections, either — they can be asymptomatic. We (writ large) keep talking about Covid as a respiratory infection, but it’s not. Covid is a vascular disease that enters the body through respiratory function, because Covid is airborne. Once infected, research is showing that it hangs around in the body for weeks to months after clearing a primary infection — and that’s just what they know now as they are starting to dig in on this data.

Even worse — evidence is increasingly pointing to long-term immune dysregulation as a result of even a single asymptomatic Covid infection.

Long-Term COVID-19 Immune Dysfunction However, a new idea about how COVID can affect immunity has emerged: that even mild infections routinely cause consequential damage to our bodies’ defenses. This degradation was referred to as “immunity theft” by T. Ryan Gregory, an evolutionary biologist, as a counterargument to "immunity debt" being the reason why respiratory infections were more severe than usual this past fall. So while the acute infection may be one reason to not want to keep getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 over and over again, the idea that it can increasingly cause damage to the immune system should be a significant reason. Throughout the pandemic, scientific evidence has mounted that even mild COVID infections may be doing something to our immune systems, as well as our collective immunity.

We have spent years — coming up on four years now — focusing only on the survivability of the acute infection phase. I always refer to 2020 as a “gap year” for other non-Covid infections, at least here in the US. It makes sense — a large proportion of the population stayed home. Masks were largely adopted in congregate indoor settings. All of that. But beginning in 2021 after the rollout (fully) of the initial vaccines, that mitigation stopped and the spread resumed. Yes, the vaccines lowered the risk of hospitalization and death from an acute infection, but the broad return in mid-2021 to “let it rip” as a Covid strategy is a decision we are likely going to greatly regret.

Think about the recent waves of RSV, Strep-A, Mycoplasma, Pneumonia etc. While the research hasn’t caught up to repeat Covid infections as causal yet, the theory that “immunity debt” — the idea that because 2020 was a gap year and now these viruses, bacteria and even fungal infections are making a comeback — has been largely shot down. Caveat: the research on this is woefully behind, so just imagine that “immunity theft” could be a thing and assimilate that information accordingly.

The reality is, the goal should be to NOT catch Covid. This is a novel pandemic virus. We have no idea what the long-term fallout from the “let it rip” strategy is going to be. Long Covid is real, and it’s just one signal that we shouldn’t be messing around with infection at all. A recent study found that long Covid complication continued to affect those with a previous Covid infection 6.6% of the time at 6 months post-acute recovery, 6.5% at 12 months post-acute recovery, and 10.4% of the time at 18 months post-acute recovery. The American Heart Association is warning that a Covid infection may induce new-onset high blood pressure. It increases the risk of new cases of Type 2 diabetes.

And just another note on long Covid — if you really want to see how debilitating it can be, just respectfully join the subReddit for those suffering with long Covid. These people are suffering health-wise, and still they have friends, family and even medical professionals suggesting to them that they have anxiety and aren’t really, actually debilitated by long Covid.

Look. I know everyone wants to breathe a sigh of relief and get back to “normal”. What we know about Covid — really know — could fill a small rural library. What we don’t know and have yet to discover would fill the Library of Congress.

Think of it this way: From the time HIV was acknowledged (1981) to the development of the first antiretroviral drugs (1987) took 6-7 years. It wasn’t really until 1997 that antiretroviral treatment against AIDS started truly working and we saw the death rate from HIV infection finally falling. That’s 16 years from the time HIV/AIDS was acknowledged as a threat. Yes, the Reagan administration dragged its feet on HIV, but I would counterargue that the fact that many of you will hear about Covid as an immune dysregulation-causing disease for the first time right here indicates that we also haven’t been realistic and/or forthcoming about Covid and its long-term, ongoing risks either. That this is rarely discussed is both alarming and dangerous. Original point being, we right about at 4 years since Covid hit our shores, and the majority of our collective research has been about surviving an acute infection. But post-acute issues are real, they’re potentially dangerous, and we need to be talking about that as well.

Right now, we are in another surge. It’s predominantly HV.1 & BA.2.86 right now, but they are watching JN.1 rise proportionately in the US. If it follows what’s happened in Europe, we’re in for a rough ride. Even more troubling, the literature is mixed on the efficacy of the XBB 1.5 booster (the one released this fall) against JN.1. It could be effective, it could be effective but not AS effective, or it could be not effective at all due to a serious mutation of the spike proteins that lead to increased transmissibility and higher immune evasiveness. The only real way we can even know what Covid is doing in our communities is via the CDC's Covid wastewater surveillance system, or by checking the more user-friendly biobot.io data tracker, which gives the ability to drill down by county for water treatment facilities that participate. Do note — not all participate, and since the official end to the Covid emergency, this type of surveillance is what we’re down to. Final caveat, most of this data is two weeks in arrears.

We can also try to concatenate Covid hospitalization rate data and the lagging indicator of Covid death rates, both of which are currently increasing. But that data depends on state participation, and many states have stopped reporting, so the data is likely understated.

Bottom line: Get your Covid vaccines and boosters. For those uncomfortable with mRNA vaccines, I’m not going to try to talk you out of it — I’m going to simply tell you that a highly effective traditional attenuated vaccine, Novavax, is broadly available here in the US. But don’t stop there, because frankly, the goal should be to avoid catching Covid in the first place. Wear a well fitting respirator when in congregate indoor settings and at work if you can’t work from home. Improve your air filtration as much as you can when you have to be indoors — I have several HEPA air purifiers at home and a 10x10x10 home-made mini Corsi-Rosenthal box for when I’m away from home. Explore some prophylactic post-exposure treatments like Enovid (there are others — this is just the one I use) to try to reduce the amount of potential virus in the nasal tract. If you do get infection, do what the OP did — demand Paxlovid or the alternative referenced. Paxlovid specifically has been shown to reduce the chance of Long Covid in preliminary studies.

And for the love of whatever you value most, stop pretending like we will ever get back to “normal”. Understand that “let it rip” is a bad and dangerous approach that may create shortened lifespans and mass disability. Internalize that we remain in the nascent state of truly understanding the effects Covid has on the body — short and long-term. We just don’t know yet, but all of the non-acute research around Covid is scary.

Finally, due to choices made up to this point in time, we are behind. Our vaccines are wonderful, and I’m grateful for the boosters, but they are strains behind. We are chasing Covid, and we are far behind. Transmission leads to infection, and infection leads to mutation. We’re going to have to help ourselves here — do our part — to STOP transmitting this shit.

Sorry if this has bummed folks out, but I spend WAY too much time keeping on top of all the things when it comes to Covid and I think that the idea that it’s “over” is as ludicrous as the idea that the election was stolen in 2020. Be safe out there!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/14/2211711/-FFS-Stop-contracting-Covid?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=trending&pm_medium=web

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