I had spent months chewing on the various dangers and risks of each step I could take, and had not at all considered the dangers and risks of staying put.
I can see now that I was, in fact, making several mistakes. Principal among them was that I considered no change at all to be a viable option. It wasn’t, and not only because the present circumstances were untenable, but also because they were not static.
The second, related, error was that I assumed that all the risk was in moving, that by definition staying put was the prudent option.
On June 6th, 2022, Politico published: “How many Covid deaths are acceptable? Some Biden officials tried to guess.”
From the piece:
Biden officials in recent months privately discussed how many daily Covid-19 deaths it would take to declare the virus tamed, three people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.
The discussions, which took place across the administration, and have not been previously disclosed, involved a scenario in which 200 or fewer Americans die per day…
Our opinion is that this reflects a broader issue: that, by this point, the Biden administration have clearly absorbed a central lesson, which is that as long as they attempt to make a good show of things––pretending everything is ok––the levels of illness, death, debility, and disability from covid that the US public will apparently just absorb without rioting is shockingly high.
Importantly though, one of the individuals cited says that the number of deaths floated, 200 a day, would be “aspirational.” And that individual was right: even with our now-restrained data reporting infrastructure, we’ve never gotten down to that level. In fact, the lowest we’ve gotten to for any significant stretch of time is still an average of 300 deaths a day, or over 110,000 deaths a year.
And in the UK:
Now that we’re getting to the end of the year, it’s worth looking at the toll of the ‘mild & acceptable’ illness that COVID is hailed as by many. Here’s a thread of measurable toll in the UK in 2022 since omicron – considered the ‘mild’ variant of COVID spread. 🧵
In fact not only have hospitalisations been high, the ONS data shows that almost at no point during the year did infection rates dip below 1 in 70. So extremely high infection rates, even between peaks – with impacts obviously seen in long COVID, and work/school absences.
A mild or even an asymptomatic case of COVID can cause reservoirs of some viruses you’ve previously battled to reactivate, potentially leading to symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome—a condition that resembles long COVID, according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.
T cells are a body’s key line of defence against infection. COVID infections can cause them to prematurely age, harm organs and become exhausted, warns Dr. Anthony Leonardi.
An estimated 7.3% (95% CI: 6.1-8.5%) of all respondents reported long COVID, corresponding to approximately 18,828,696 adults…We observed a high burden of long COVID, substantial variability in prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 and risk factors unique from SARS-CoV-2 risk…
Covid-19 was a major contributor to the decline in life expectancy, which is now nearly two and a half years shorter than it was at the start of the pandemic. After a drop of 1.8 years in 2020, another cut of 0.6 years last year brought US life expectancy down to 76.4 years in 2021.
[L]ife expectancy typically only changes by 0.1 or 0.2 years.
Researchers are hunting through waste water for heavily mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants that could be the next Omicron.
Just in time for the boosters no one is taking anyway 🤪
Impressive sleuthing work from this team, supported by the good folks in Public Works. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to narrow your search to 30 people but not be able to figure out which is sick. Modern shades of Typhoid Mary with 40% not willing to be tested to see if they are carriers.
Updating information regarding convergent variants BA.2.3.20, BN.1, BA.2.10.4, BN.2.1, BA.4.6.1, BQ.1, BQ.1.1. In short, BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 are the most antibody-evasive convergent variants tested, far exceeding BA.5 and approaching SARS-CoV-1 level. (1/4) https://t.co/BzknQBSF5e
I’ve had “pine mouth” where all food tasted revolting for two weeks after eating pine nuts, and I threw away homemade pie because I thought it had gone bad, and a few years later something else where I was convinced anything with vinegar in it was bad for a week — turns out a lot of stuff has vinegar, like mayonnaise. Both of those instances really sucked, and I can’t imagine them lasting six months.
215 individuals were included in an exploratory, cross-sectional study to perform multi-dimensional immune phenotyping in conjunction with machine learning methods to identify key immunological features distinguishing Long COVID…Integration of immune phenotyping data into unbiased machine learning models identified significant distinguishing features critical in accurate classification of Long COVID, with decreased levels of cortisol being the most significant individual predictor.
Findings broken down by one of the study’s authors:
Studied “adults at least four months after recovering from mild COVID-19”
“In approximately one-quarter of mild-COVID-19 individuals, we detected a specific visuoconstructive deficit, which was associated with changes in molecular and structural brain imaging, and correlated with upregulation of peripheral immune markers. Our findings provide evidence of neuroinflammatory burden causing cognitive deficit…”
COVID a leading cause of death for young adults too:
Lol this looks bad. Yeah not published yet but do you want to bet an indeterminate time of disability on it being completely flawed? Combine this with our societal efforts to reduce transmission that influence how many times a year you’re likely to get COVID, and with our current schedule that’s not a whole lot of years…
The risk of heart and circulation problems, such as irregular heartbeats and blood clots on the lungs, was nearly six times higher in Covid patients than uninfected people of the same age and sex, and 80% higher for diabetes, during the month after infection, researchers found.
(Although causation is not necessarily the case:)
While Covid can cause direct damage to organs and the circulatory system, Rezel-Potts stresses that many factors could explain the findings. For example, the Covid patients in the study were more likely to be overweight and had more underlying health problems than the uninfected control group, predisposing them to the further conditions.
“When BA.2.12.1 became predominant, vaccine effectiveness with two doses was 24% against COVID-19 -associated hospitalizations and increased to 52%-69% after a third/booster dose.”
“We’re probably only picking up one in seven or one in eight infections. So when we say there’s 30,000 infections a day, it’s probably closer to a quarter of a million infections a day,”
Our results show that social distancing alone without masking is associated with a very high risk of infection, especially in situations where infectious is speaking. High infection risks are also expected when only the susceptible wears a face mask, even with social distancing.
“[Katelyn Jetelina, epidemiologist who studies COVID risks at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston,] considers community risk high when there are more than 50 weekly cases per 100,000 residents… Others suggest a slightly higher risk threshold of 10 daily (or 70 weekly) cases per 100,000 residents.*” — How to Judge COVID Risks and When to Wear a Mask by Devabhaktuni Srikrishna (
COVID impacts
More evidence that COVID causes cognitive impairment:
People point out limitations of this 👇paper on cognitive decline in patients with severe Covid. Small sample, lack of control group etc. True. No single paper is definitive. That's why I referred to 'more evidence'. Lets look at some of the other papers out recently. https://t.co/EdCB7tBei0
Huh fancy that, politicians took the message they wanted — that Omicron was NBD — and ran with it, but it was a lie that caused much suffering and death. Yet most people still believe this because it was hammered home in the news and by politicians so much. The power of lies.
Long COVID
Long COVID may be more common than what was thought earlier:
(paper referenced in tweet above) Global Prevalence of Post COVID-19 Condition or Long COVID: A Meta-Analysis and Systematic Review — Chen et al, Journal of Infectious Disease, April 2022: “50 studies were included, and 41 were meta-analyzed. Global estimated pooled prevalence of post COVID-19 condition was 0.43 (95% CI: 0.39,0.46). Hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients have estimates of 0.54 (95% CI: 0.44,0.63) and 0.34 (95% CI: 0.25,0.46), respectively.” Fatigue and memory problems most prevalent.
Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome (PACS) in Adults by Public Health Ontario, April 2022: “The literature identified that approximately 50% of patients with COVID-19 may experience PACS [Long COVID].”
Long COVID among hospitalized patients – more than half of those participating in the study still had at least one symptom two years later:
The proportion of COVID-19 survivors with at least one sequelae symptom decreased significantly from 777 (68%) of 1149 at 6 months to 650 (55%) of 1190 at 2 years (p<0·0001), with fatigue or muscle weakness always being the most frequent.
Survivors with long COVID symptoms at 2 years had lower HRQoL, worse exercise capacity, more mental health abnormality, and increased health-care use after discharge than survivors without long COVID symptoms. COVID-19 survivors still had more prevalent symptoms and more problems in pain or discomfort, as well as anxiety or depression, at 2 years than did controls.
“This is damning. 1 in 12 triple vaxxed infections develop into long COVID. The vax lowers your chance of long COVID, but critically, it doesn’t eliminate it. That’s an incredibly important point for your quality of life. Source: UK’s @ONSONS self-report data May 6 2022“
“The broad rejection of masking as a solidaristic act, and the turn of the United States’ Covid response towards individualistic frames of personal responsibility, is ultimately a rejection of the right to “social life” for all those who are well within their rights to refuse to consent to needless and repeated Covid infections.”
“When I say “social life,” I don’t just mean the right to socialize, though that is certainly also part of it. I am instead speaking in terms of what sociologist John Marshall called “social rights,” as in economic participation which predicates the inclusion of an individual in society.”
Structural violence = “social arrangements that put individuals and populations in harm’s way.” (Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, via Gregg Gonsalves)
“Those whose lives are rarely touched by structural violence are uniquely prone to recommend resignation as a response to it.”
Biggest risk now from covid if vaccinated is long covid, either extended symptoms or other poor health outcomes like blood clots, brain shrinkage, heart problems
A direct approach to limit airborne viral transmissions is to inactivate them within a short time of their production. Germicidal ultraviolet light… is effective in this context but… can be a health hazard to skin and eyes. By contrast, far-UVC light efficiently kills pathogens potentially without harm to exposed human tissues.
Only two established room‐based technologies are available to supplement mechanical ventilation: portable room air cleaners and upper room germicidal UV air disinfection… SARS‐CoV‐2 is highly susceptible to GUV, an 80‐year‐old technology that has been shown to safely, quietly, effectively and economically produce the equivalent of 10 to 20 or more air changes per hour under real life conditions.