Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

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Yesterday I went swimming at the YMCA pool and I met a man who had COVID 3 times already. As a matter of fact many people have had COVID 3 times. Each time they get it the impact gets smaller and smaller.

Pretty sure I've had it three times, and each one was worse than the last.
The first one left me with Long Covid.

Still dodging it, so is bio-mom.
We’re Novids.
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2023/are-yo ... clues-why/

BU Today: Let’s start with this: why haven’t some people gotten COVID? Luck? Genetics? Cautiousness? Or a combination of these?
Assoumou: It is likely a combination of many factors. Vaccination is the number-one reason I would say.

But it sounds like there is still a lot to learn.

We are building the airplane as we fly it.

jadechronicilly
stardust-maple
May 15
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ranidspace
May 5

reminder that even if the world health organization says covid is over, it isnt.
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ranidspace
May 8

Turns out it was just a bunch of news organizations completely misrepresenting what the WHO said. COVID isn't over. They're shifting from "world health emergency" to long term strategies because major countries failed to even contain it because they were so adamant to send everybody back to work as fast as possible. WHO's announcement that COVID is no longer a global health emergency isnt something to celebrate. It shows that everyone (governments and anti-maskers/vaxxers, mostly) collectively failed to care enough.

Joel Wakefield isn’t just an armchair epidemiologist. His interest in tracking the spread of covid is personal.
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This story also ran on CNN. It can be republished for free.

The 58-year-old lawyer who lives in Phoenix has an immunodeficiency disease that increases his risk of severe outcomes from covid-19 and other infections. He has spent lots of time since 2020 checking state, federal, and private sector covid trackers for data to inform his daily decisions.

“I’m assessing ‘When am I going to see my grandkids? When am I going to let my own kids come into my house?’” he said.

Many Americans have moved on from the pandemic, but for the millions who are immunocompromised or otherwise more vulnerable to covid, reliable data remains important in assessing safety.

“I don’t have that luxury to completely shrug it off,” Wakefield said.

The federal government’s public health emergency that’s been in effect since January 2020 expires May 11. The emergency declaration allowed for sweeping changes in the U.S. health care system, like requiring state and local health departments, hospitals, and commercial labs to regularly share data with federal officials.

But some shared data requirements will come to an end and the federal government will lose access to key metrics as a skeptical Congress seems unlikely to grant agencies additional powers. And private projects, like those from The New York Times and Johns Hopkins University, which made covid data understandable and useful for everyday people, stopped collecting data in March.

Public health legal scholars, data experts, former and current federal officials, and patients at high risk of severe covid outcomes worry the scaling back of data access could make it harder to control covid.

...

Apr 19, 2023 #longcovid #sciencecommunication
As many as 1 in 3 people who catch COVID-19 get #longcovid. People like Dianna Cowern (@physicsgirl) and millions of others are still sick, some of them have been for years. Where's the cure? What's happening? Can we help?

S O U R C E S & M O R E
This episode was a hard one to make. Like a lot of you I saw Simone pop up on the PhysicsGirl channel and was devastated. I've known Dianna for years and always respected and loved her #sciencecommunication. As Simone talked about what was happening, I started researching ME/CFS and COVID long haulers; that research became this video. I emailed Dianna's family and team before making this video to get their consent. I hope you learn something from this and leave with a better understanding of what she, and millions of others, are going through. I know I did.

The COVID-19 pandemic isn't over, and catching COVID isn't the whole story. For millions of people all over the world COVID is just the start of a long, horrible road. In 2019, the first cases of Long Haul COVID appeared. These are COVID patients who seem to have beaten the virus, but never get bette. Instead, they're exhausted, or in pain. They sleep for hours but don't feel rested, and even minor activities like going to the grocery store or checking email can wipe out what little energy they have.

As the COVID pandemic research money dries up, what happens to these people? How do they get care? How do they get better? Where's the cure for Long Covid?

Scientists researching this new illness stumbled upon a similar one called ME/CFS (or CFS/ME depending on where you're from). ME/CFS is a known, but little-understood syndrome that overlaps with many of the symptoms of long haul COVID patients. Are they they same thing?

I personally know at least two people who have come out with their struggles with Long COVID and ME/CFS. I want them to get better. After an incredible, worldwide commitment to finding solutions to COVID people are moving on. Do we really want to leave behind our friends and family? I don't think so.

After about two years of research, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have proposed a list of 12 symptoms that can identify long Covid in a step toward finding treatments for the debilitating condition.

This comes as part of the NIH’s $1.2 billion RECOVER research initiative, which seeks to understand, prevent and treat long Covid—the term for lingering or new symptoms following a Covid-19 infection. The paper was published Thursday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Now that we’re able to identify people with long Covid, we can begin doing more in-depth studies to understand the biological mechanisms at play,” co-author Andrea Foulkes, director of biostatistics at Massachusetts General Hospital, says in a statement.

About one in ten of the study’s participants infected with the omicron variant suffer from long Covid, but the condition remains difficult to research. Long Covid affects every person differently, and many of its 200 or more symptoms, which vary in severity and duration, are connected with several other diseases, too. Doctors have no test to determine if a patient has long Covid—the syndrome has no objective characteristic to measure it. Further, what causes some people to develop the condition remains a mystery.

“If you look up simple questions like, ‘how many people get long Covid,’ the answers are all over the place, because people define it differently,” Leora Horwitz, a physician and co-principal investigator for the RECOVER Clinical Science Core at NYU Langone Health, tells the Washington Post’s Amanda Morris. “To really advance the science, we need a common language.”

To help create this language, researchers examined patient data from 9,764 individuals—8,646 who had been infected with Covid-19 and 1,118 who had not. They found some trends among their participants: Long Covid was more common and severe in unvaccinated people, as well as people who had been reinfected or caught Covid for the first time before the 2021 omicron variant emerged, per the statement.

Finally, the team narrowed down a list of symptoms that tend to set apart those with long Covid: loss of smell or taste, fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, gastrointestinal symptoms, heart palpitations, changes in sexual desire or capacity, thirst, chronic cough, chest pain, abnormal movements and post-exertional malaise, or feeling ill after even minor physical or mental effort.

The researchers assigned a point value to each of these symptoms based on how unique it is to long Covid patients. Loss of taste and smell, for example, which is uncommon in people who haven’t had Covid, was given an eight, while dizziness and fatigue were each assigned one point. Scores of 12 or higher meet the researchers’ definition of long Covid.

But this score is not meant for diagnosing patients, since individuals may have any number of these or other symptoms not included in the list, Horwitz tells Lauran Neergaard of the Associated Press. Rather, it’s meant to be a research tool. Still, some with long Covid feel the tool could leave certain patients out.

“Personally, I think that the list of symptoms is too small, but I understand that you have to start somewhere,” Nitza Rochez, a RECOVER study participant who has had long Covid since March 2020, tells the Post. “At least it’s more than what we’ve had in the last two years.”

Others had harsher criticism for the study. “I think people will be underwhelmed by a ‘landmark’ paper that is describing the presence of symptoms that people have long known are a problem,” Jim Jackson, director of behavioral health at the ICU Recovery Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center who was not involved in the study, says to NBC News’ Erika Edwards.

Jackson and others tell the publication that some of the listed symptoms—namely “brain fog” and abnormal movements”—are not well-defined, which means they are not as useful as they could be.

According to the most recent estimates, more than 65 million people worldwide may be living with some form of long Covid, a startling number that will only continue to increase, given the lack of available treatment options.

One of the scientists leading the race to try to unravel the complexities of long Covid is Akiko Iwasaki, an immunology professor at Yale School of Medicine. Iwasaki has been at the forefront of numerous research breakthroughs throughout the course of the pandemic, from understanding why men were more vulnerable to the Sars-CoV-2 virus, the autoimmunity that made some people unexpectedly susceptible, and why a small minority have experienced heart inflammation in response to the Covid-19 vaccines. Most recently, Iwasaki has been awarded the prestigious Else Kröner Fresenius Prize for Medical Research, worth €2.5m (£2.2m), in part due to her ongoing work on long Covid.

Are we getting closer to understanding some of the causes of long Covid?
Long Covid is a blanket term that likely describes multiple diseases with different causes. We still don’t have the answers, but there are some hypotheses that are becoming more likely and others less likely. There’s more evidence now showing either viral proteins or viral RNA in various tissues, months after infection. The hypothesis that long Covid symptoms could be caused by the reactivation of latent viruses such as Epstein-Barr virus is also gaining momentum. The other idea is that changes can occur due to the inflammation from an acute Sars-CoV-2 infection, both at the site of infection, and in distal organs such as the brain. We have a paper that we published last year which demonstrates that even a mild Sars-CoV-2 respiratory infection can result in long term changes in the brain

More than 200 symptoms have now been associated with long Covid, affecting almost every organ system in the human body. Many are also experienced by chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) sufferers. What similarities have been found in the biology of these two illnesses?
One you’ve probably heard of is microclots, which appear to be happening in a large fraction of people from long Covid and potentially ME/CFS. These are tiny little clots in the blood that may be impairing oxygen exchange and other important functions of the circulation. The way blood oxygen is being utilised by tissues also appears to be impaired, which could be due to microclots as well as mitochondrial dysfunction.

I always have in the back of my mind – how can these insights from long Covid help people with ME/CFS and other post-acute phases of infections, like post Lyme disease? I’m so excited about receiving this new award because it shows that long Covid and ME/CFS are diseases of global significance. It’s validation and acknowledgment for people who have been suffering for decades with ME/CFS, a disease that has been mostly ignored and completely understudied given the amount of suffering it has caused.

What new treatment avenues are being explored for long Covid?
We are starting a clinical trial where 50 patients will be treated with the antiviral drug Paxlovid and 50 will be given a placebo. This is to probe whether persistent virus infection may be causing long Covid in a subset of people. We’re not giving them the conventional five-day course, but a 15-day course of treatment, to see if that can eliminate the source of the problem, which is the remnants of replicating virus.

Earlier this month, the World Health Organization downgraded Covid-19 from the status of “emergency of international concern”, while the Biden administration has officially declared an end to the Covid-19 public health emergency. What is your perspective on this – could the pandemic still have some twists to come?
I understand why the emergency declaration had to be ended, because of the economic impact and other things. But at the same time, we are not done with Covid, not even close. The virus is here to stay with us and that’s why we do need to think about future booster vaccines that match with the circulating variants, as well as the potential of new variants that further evade our existing immunity.

I get that people want to move on from the pandemic, but the virus is still out there, people are getting infected, and there’s the possibility of developing long Covid. I’m still wearing masks and following preventive practices as much as possible.

Pretty sure I've had it three times, and each one was worse than the last.
The first one left me with Long Covid.

I have had ME/CFS for just shy of 20 years now and my Dad was the US Navy's first medical retirement with it around 1985. I used to think he was "one of" the first. He was the first.
That ME/CFS crap can absolutely screw the total friggin hell out of your life.
It Is Evil.

But I think the point you are tying to make is the similarities between ME/CFS and perhaps one of the variants of Long COVID.

More than 200 symptoms have now been associated with long Covid, affecting almost every organ system in the human body. Many are also experienced by chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) sufferers. What similarities have been found in the biology of these two illnesses?
One you’ve probably heard of is microclots, which appear to be happening in a large fraction of people from long Covid and potentially ME/CFS. These are tiny little clots in the blood that may be impairing oxygen exchange and other important functions of the circulation. The way blood oxygen is being utilised by tissues also appears to be impaired, which could be due to microclots as well as mitochondrial dysfunction.

I always have in the back of my mind – how can these insights from long Covid help people with ME/CFS and other post-acute phases of infections, like post Lyme disease? I’m so excited about receiving this new award because it shows that long Covid and ME/CFS are diseases of global significance. It’s validation and acknowledgment for people who have been suffering for decades with ME/CFS, a disease that has been mostly ignored and completely understudied given the amount of suffering it has caused.

I do not see a connection between ME/CFS and COVID.

Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) is a highly disabling, severe condition that has been largely overlooked and even questioned as an illness by medicine and researchers for decades. But now, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as many as one in eight infected people, according to Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, Sterling Professor of Immunobiology, are developing “long COVID,” in which symptoms persist for weeks, months, or years post-infection and some are developing symptoms indistinguishable from ME/CFS. As an increasing number of people become debilitated by the post-viral syndrome, researchers such as Iwasaki and Harlan Krumholz, MD, Harold H. Hines, Jr. Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) are striving to uncover the mysteries behind the unrelenting fatigue and numerous other symptoms that seem to linger after COVID infection. They hope to provide answers to not only COVID “long haulers,” but also patients suffering from other poorly understood chronic conditions, including ME/CFS, that have been left unresolved for too long.

“The pandemic has opened the world’s eye to the fact that many chronic illnesses have been largely ignored, dismissed, and ridiculed,” says Iwasaki. “Long COVID has taught the world that these diseases are real, there is a biological basis for them, and we need to study them.”
ME/CFS Is a Debilitating but Overlooked Condition

ME/CFS has an unfortunate name, says Beth Pollack, a research scientist at MIT specializing in chronic diseases including long COVID and ME/CFS, and a scientific collaborator with Iwasaki. It defines the illness by just one of its many symptoms. “There are misconceptions about what fatigue looks like in ME/CFS,” she says. “It’s not the fatigue that someone who is completely healthy might feel if they were just tired. It’s a very different, complex, and much more severe picture in ME/CFS.”

ME/CFS is a “neuroimmune, neuroinflammatory illness that affects numerous organ systems throughout the body, involving dysfunction of the vascular, autonomic, neurological, mitochondrial, metabolic, connective tissue, endocrine, and immune systems,” says Pollack. In addition to its core symptoms, including severe fatigue that is not relieved after sleep, worsening of symptoms post-physical or mental activity, brain fog, and dizziness, patients may also experience aches and pains, difficulty being upright, digestive issues, night sweats, muscle weakness, flu-like symptoms, shortness of breath, and irregular heartbeat. These symptoms existed long before the virus that causes COVID. ME/CFS can have many triggers, including viral and bacterial infections. Some patients develop ME/CFS gradually over months or years. For many others, the symptoms begin much more rapidly.

A hallmark symptom of ME/CFS and now long COVID is post exertional malaise (PEM), which entails an oftentimes severe exacerbation of symptoms after cognitive or physical exertion, which can be delayed. For years, people with ME/CFS were incorrectly advised to do Graded Exercise Therapy (GET), which is no longer recommended. “It can be very harmful to make people with ME/CFS exercise, especially going beyond their energy windows,” says Pollack. “They are physiologically exercise-intolerant and have key dysfunctions in cellular energy production as well as multi-factorial reductions in cardiovascular and cerebral blood flow.” Research using CPET testing and recent molecular research have illuminated possible biomarkers for PEM in ME/CFS.

Mady Hornig, a Columbia Mailman School psychiatrist renowned for her research on ME/CFS, joined Walter J. Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), for a late June panel discussion on post-acute COVID. The panel was part of WNYC Radio’s 2021 Health Convening, hosted by Nsikan Akpan, health and science editor at New York Public Radio.

Individuals with PASC/Long COVID rarely continue to test positive for an active infection (at least by standard tests) but continue to experience a constellation of symptoms, from fatigue to trouble with cognition and chest and abdominal pain. While the condition is most common in those with severe COVID, it is also seen in 19 percent of those with asymptomatic infections, according to an analysis by FAIR Health, although studies vary widely. But how the virus triggers these symptoms and why it happens in some people not others is so far unknown.

“We’re really dealing with a mystery right now,” said Koroshetz. Yet the similarities of Long COVID to ME/CFS are striking, starting with a significant overlap in the symptoms, notably fatigue, unrefreshing sleep or “post-exertional malaise”—a general sense of being unwell after even minor physical or cognitive exertion affecting a majority of those with long COVID, along with high rates of problems with memory and attention (“brain fog”). Pain is another feature in common. And the onset of both Long COVID and up to 75 percent of ME/CFS cases can be traced to a viral infection. Indeed, one might easily ask: could Long COVID and ME/CFS be one and the same?

This is a critical question. If it was man-made, then there is a high probability that the world will experience another plague with billions of deaths.

The Fourth Seal: Death
7 And when He opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come!”
8 And I looked, and behold, a pale horse, and the one sitting on it, the name of him was Death, and Hades was following with him; and authority was given to them over the fourth of the earth, to kill with sword, and with famine, and with plague, and by the beasts of the earth.