Post by Nadica (She/Her) on Aug 18, 2024 2:57:36 GMT
The risk of Long COVID explained. - Published Feb 11, 2022
This is ‘The People's Strategist.’ A newsletter dedicated to Strategy for all things related to the People. Right now, that’s all about making sure you have the information to keep you and your family as safe as possible in these troubling times.
The goal here is to answer folks’ questions about COVID strategy based on risk.
And as protections from COVID are being removed, they were often called “mitigations” or “mandates” but they were protections… Folks have a lot of questions.
The most common questions I’ve seen asked among so many related to COVID is…
What is the risk of becoming a long hauler from an infection?
And what is the risk from multiple infections?
I’m going to cover these two questions in great detail, but first, it will require explaining a few things to make sure we are all on the same page.
If you are opening this article, you came for one of three reasons…
1. Morbid curiosity.
2. You are concerned about the risk to you or your child.
3. You came to diminish the nature of the risk.
The thing is that this affects us all equally, so if you came to troll… This affects you too.
This is my first substack article but I had previously published an article about the risk associated with our situation last October on Medium.
Many, if not all, of my theories or concerns came true.
The Pretext is that SARS-CoV-2 is the virus, and COVID-19 is the disease.
I will refer to it generally as “COVID” but understanding the difference matters.
First, let’s start with what is Long COVID?
Long COVID is not a single ailment. It's a combination of a variety of symptoms that cannot be explained in any other way but from a COVID infection. It can be caused by an acute infection, asymptomatic infection alone, or appear months after the infection.
The WHO also classifies it as “persistence of symptoms beyond 3 months of SARS-CoV-2 infection, lasting for at least 2 months and not explained by any other illness.”
And many folks who get it will never even know they had an infection.
Folks who suffer from any combination of symptoms are known as Long-Haulers.
The disease would be most encompassed by calling it “Long COVID Syndrome.”
It can be defined as damage from infection, persistent virus, or autoimmune attacks.
All of which have entirely different scales of both damage and healing. Symptoms could include just one or all three, each experience is unique and none are trivial.
It’s important to distinguish that the name ‘Long COVID’ is a bit deceptive in that it makes folks think it’s simply the COVID acute infection period stretching out longer but that’s not entirely accurate as it’s not the whole picture.
This is why there has been a conversation about giving it a more official name, but these terms serve to limit who can be included when it needs to be totally inclusive.
Why?
Yes, these symptoms can obviously spring up during infection and never go away but also, they can appear months later as your body tries to heal. So, if you were an asymptomatic case, you could easily fall between the cracks and not get help.
And it’s not just that part that’s confusing…
It is a combination of what can seem like a random assortment of symptoms but some are more common than others and there is some or no correlation between them.
Two people could have similar symptoms for totally different reasons.
This can include but is not limited to neurological, organ, vascular, & reproductive damage. It can be caused by lingering virus and damage from viral syncytia AND what appears to be your body trying to heal from it...
But really, they are all the same thing. Those are the stages of a COVID infection.
When we say COVID is neurological, it means COVID damages our body’s ability to send signals, and as our body is a massive fine-tuned conduit for all the things that make it run… Altering these signal pathways can have very negative outcomes.
But how does COVID do this?
It’s all damage from the creation and activity of ‘viral syncytia.’
Because at their core, both SARS and COVID are “Syncytial Viruses.”
Others are HIV, Herpes, and RSV…
Even MERS did this.
I should point out that all of those listed are known to have similar mechanisms.
This process includes removing your cells from their natural positions.
And that stops your body from sending signals properly.
It can do this all over your body.
It’s important to distinguish that the distinction in the media between “mild” and “severe” is about whether COVID can do this process in your lungs.
Omicron, or BA.1, was considered “mild” because it didn’t do this as well in our lungs.
That was actually the only thing they even checked before declaring it mild.
Even though Omicron was responsible for more deaths than Delta and a third of all pediatric deaths happened in that time, for some reason… This is our defining metric.
And let’s not forget that Omicron can still make syncytia just fine in other places.
Plus, the next oncoming dominant variant, BA.2, creates syncytia in the lungs again.
There is a handy chart toward the end to help with visualized comparison.
There is even a second variant called BA2.2 that is destroying Hong Kong and since originally writing this close to a dozen new variants have shown their ugly head.
The further we let this go unchecked, the worse it will get.
BA.2 is believed to be 1.4x as infectious as its predecessor and it’s important to say that we’ve seen this demonstrated. Expect each variant to continue on this track.
But it’s SOOOO important to say…
ALL the COVID variants have been doing this damage all over our entire body.
This is the problem with thinking of it as a Respiratory Virus alone. It creates this image that the damage is limited to your lungs, but the damage is in your entire body.
That’s one of the reasons why Long-Hauler symptoms can seem so chaotic.
A study was done in 2020, it estimated that there were more viral particles during peak infection than cells in your body. It was actually thought to be 10 to 1.
That’s between 1 and 100 billion viral particles, and this was in the early stages.
Being infected with a virus is best comparable to a house infested with termites.
Because of this… You have to understand that COVID is all over your body.
Consequently, it’s much better to think of COVID as a Vascular Disease caused by SARS-CoV2 that triggers a complex series of auto-immune attacks, extracellular dysfunction, cellular apoptosis, and death; and there is no pill for any of that.
While the truth is closer to a “Respiratory transmitted virus that causes disease, dysfunction, and death to every type of cell in your body.” But that’s a bit much.
It breaks down like this…
Your body has four types of tissue; epithelial, connective, nervous, and muscular.
COVID can cause dysfunction or cell death, or apoptosis, in any type of cell group.
It can even create an AIDS-like syndrome where your T cells stop functioning.
(More on this in a future update.)
But most folks don’t have a great conceptualization of what “Everything” means…
So, we will use Vascular Disease for visualization… Everything your blood touches.
The actual damage though happens in two parts…
One part is during acute infection, which you can see above.
That chart demonstrates that it takes about five hours for COVID to start forming syncytia and invade your body.
So, that’s your window for action post-exposure…
Though I don’t suggest playing that game.
Omicron has likely sped up this process.
To give you an even better idea of why I don’t suggest you gamble it is because this is COVID in your Olfactory Nerve…
Which is, for practical purposes, PART of your brain.
COVID doesn’t always act in a biologically linear way as we think of it, the study these photos are from explains that COVID gets in your brain directly via the Olfactory but it skips the bulb and instead enters the larger part of your brain.
Before that “SARS-CoV-2 can enter the nervous system by crossing the neural–mucosal interface in olfactory mucosa, exploiting the close vicinity of olfactory mucosal, endothelial and nervous tissue, including delicate olfactory and sensory nerve endings.”
Folks need to understand how little ground it has to cover to get into your brain.
Basically, once it’s in your Olfactory… That’s your brain.
There is no Blood-Brain Barrier to protect you when COVID is riding in your cells.
And the only protection is the mucosae, a tiny thin layer of skin that is LOADED with access points and even Omicron has no problem exploiting this entrance.
It is literally a mucus membrane. They aren’t notoriously durable against pathogens.
Anyone who says “we don’t know if COVID damages brain cells directly” is wrong.
Considering how Airborne transmission works, we are extremely vulnerable.
It’s kind of shocking that we’ve been so blasé about air quality this entire time.
When we finally do what is necessary to stop COVID, we will kill a few viruses.
But here is why I’ll be wearing a mask even after we exterminate COVID.
The real important thing is that no matter if the particles are dispersed close to you or far away they reach a constant point where they linger in the air for hours.
You can even pick up the virus if an infected person had been in an enclosed space with poor ventilation hours after them like a shared bathroom in that example.
Or if ventilation is shared…
There are even examples of vertically attached bathrooms spreading COVID when you flush the toilet. It’s known as “fecal aerosol transmission.”
Here’s how it works… Western Style plumbing might avoid this.
The annoying fact is that … any HEPA air filter will catch COVID because it is currently one of the larger viruses, so even minimal effort will go VERY far.
And there are multiple examples of Schools and Gyms staying COVID-free by focusing strictly on Air Filtration. So, this isn’t impossible.
If you want to get really serious, it looks something like this…
If that’s too much, build one of these… They are already popular and well tested.
The can be done relatively inexpensively and last for a significant amount of time.
And just so everyone can quickly understand the difference between ventilation, filtration, disinfection, and doing nothing…
But what are we going through all this effort for?
See those dots? Those are micro aerosols and droplets containing COVID.
Here is a model of what those delicious micro aerosol droplets look like…
Even if that didn’t have COVID in it… That’s quite literally ‘Lung Juice.’
It’s important to note that a recent study showed us that a single virion, a viral particle, the purple cell in the photo, was enough to begin an infection.
That study went on to say…
This was the first controlled and studied infection to date. I want to point out I have very mixed feelings about the ethical nature of this study. But the data is clear…
Regardless of the severity of symptoms, asymptomatic or not, the risk of infection is the same if an infected person won’t wear a mask… And not just any mask.
There has been some debate on the validity of masks when a virus is so infectious.
Though infectiousness doesn’t alter the physics, just increases this risk.
But just in case, here is an article with 49 studies showing masks work.
But for some people that won’t be enough, so I am going to explain it.
This is a photograph of COVID occupying a cell where it will do what is known as “parasite” the cell and seize control of its mechanisms.
COVID and all Viruses are classified as ‘Obligate Intracellular Parasites.’
Because they cannot reproduce or replicate outside of a host cell.
Why anyone would willingly make themselves a host to something like this is beyond me, while Urgency for Normal is acting like our bodies are a COVID BnB.
Once folks understand this better there will be a greater push to clean indoor air.
Now, if you notice that picture shows that a COVID virion is approximately 100 nanometers. But if you understand Micro Aerosols, I propose the name Microsols, but it doesn’t matter… then you know that COVID “rides” in lung fluid as shown in the picture just above this one… Those lung fluids are approximately three times larger.
That means a liquid micro aerosol is approximately 300+ nanometers.
300 nanometers is .3 micrometers or microns.
An N-95 will handle anything above .3 microns.
The micro aerosol COVID rides in are slightly larger than that.
So, an N-95 or a Chinese-made Kn-95 is the MINIMUM protection to stop COVID.
But the Chinese made can be unreliable if it’s from a random source.
Having learned this from personal experience.
Now, it’s critical to point out that ANY disruption of that fluid aerosol will significantly disrupt COVID because it creates the necessary environment.
COVID is VERY fragile but if you ignore this risk… And refuse to mask.
You will get infected.
Once COVID is in, and it will get in, it specifically uses something called sustentacular cells. This can get so bad, they hypothesize the loss of smell and taste is because the actual supportive cells are so damaged they can’t send signals anymore.
These cells are found in a few places in our bodies. Besides the nose, they are found in the testes and ovaries. This is probably why we are seeing a lot of damage to COVID patient’s testes… and it’s really bad. It even causes erectile dysfunction.
The additional viral reservoir might actually contain the virus and could be why folks without testes are more likely to have worse long sequelae like ME/CFS, but I digress.
Here is one more look at the differences between COVID infected testes and a control.
Control is on the left, but for the infected… “Asterisks denote high deposition of glycoproteins in the basement membrane and surrounding blood vessels.”
I’m still unclear, and maybe someone can explain this in the comments, why so many men are in such a rush to have their testes look like the picture on the right?
The truth is that all the folks who think that COVID isn’t a big deal…
Are going to end up with a “little deal” if you get my drift.
There is no amount of toughness or manliness that will protect from this.
The only guaranteed protection from this damage is wearing a properly fitting mask.
Read the rest at the link. This is very extensive. It took me 6 minutes to get here just copy/pasting.
This is ‘The People's Strategist.’ A newsletter dedicated to Strategy for all things related to the People. Right now, that’s all about making sure you have the information to keep you and your family as safe as possible in these troubling times.
The goal here is to answer folks’ questions about COVID strategy based on risk.
And as protections from COVID are being removed, they were often called “mitigations” or “mandates” but they were protections… Folks have a lot of questions.
The most common questions I’ve seen asked among so many related to COVID is…
What is the risk of becoming a long hauler from an infection?
And what is the risk from multiple infections?
I’m going to cover these two questions in great detail, but first, it will require explaining a few things to make sure we are all on the same page.
If you are opening this article, you came for one of three reasons…
1. Morbid curiosity.
2. You are concerned about the risk to you or your child.
3. You came to diminish the nature of the risk.
The thing is that this affects us all equally, so if you came to troll… This affects you too.
This is my first substack article but I had previously published an article about the risk associated with our situation last October on Medium.
Many, if not all, of my theories or concerns came true.
The Pretext is that SARS-CoV-2 is the virus, and COVID-19 is the disease.
I will refer to it generally as “COVID” but understanding the difference matters.
First, let’s start with what is Long COVID?
Long COVID is not a single ailment. It's a combination of a variety of symptoms that cannot be explained in any other way but from a COVID infection. It can be caused by an acute infection, asymptomatic infection alone, or appear months after the infection.
The WHO also classifies it as “persistence of symptoms beyond 3 months of SARS-CoV-2 infection, lasting for at least 2 months and not explained by any other illness.”
And many folks who get it will never even know they had an infection.
Folks who suffer from any combination of symptoms are known as Long-Haulers.
The disease would be most encompassed by calling it “Long COVID Syndrome.”
It can be defined as damage from infection, persistent virus, or autoimmune attacks.
All of which have entirely different scales of both damage and healing. Symptoms could include just one or all three, each experience is unique and none are trivial.
It’s important to distinguish that the name ‘Long COVID’ is a bit deceptive in that it makes folks think it’s simply the COVID acute infection period stretching out longer but that’s not entirely accurate as it’s not the whole picture.
This is why there has been a conversation about giving it a more official name, but these terms serve to limit who can be included when it needs to be totally inclusive.
Why?
Yes, these symptoms can obviously spring up during infection and never go away but also, they can appear months later as your body tries to heal. So, if you were an asymptomatic case, you could easily fall between the cracks and not get help.
And it’s not just that part that’s confusing…
It is a combination of what can seem like a random assortment of symptoms but some are more common than others and there is some or no correlation between them.
Two people could have similar symptoms for totally different reasons.
This can include but is not limited to neurological, organ, vascular, & reproductive damage. It can be caused by lingering virus and damage from viral syncytia AND what appears to be your body trying to heal from it...
But really, they are all the same thing. Those are the stages of a COVID infection.
When we say COVID is neurological, it means COVID damages our body’s ability to send signals, and as our body is a massive fine-tuned conduit for all the things that make it run… Altering these signal pathways can have very negative outcomes.
But how does COVID do this?
It’s all damage from the creation and activity of ‘viral syncytia.’
Because at their core, both SARS and COVID are “Syncytial Viruses.”
Others are HIV, Herpes, and RSV…
Even MERS did this.
I should point out that all of those listed are known to have similar mechanisms.
This process includes removing your cells from their natural positions.
And that stops your body from sending signals properly.
It can do this all over your body.
It’s important to distinguish that the distinction in the media between “mild” and “severe” is about whether COVID can do this process in your lungs.
Omicron, or BA.1, was considered “mild” because it didn’t do this as well in our lungs.
That was actually the only thing they even checked before declaring it mild.
Even though Omicron was responsible for more deaths than Delta and a third of all pediatric deaths happened in that time, for some reason… This is our defining metric.
And let’s not forget that Omicron can still make syncytia just fine in other places.
Plus, the next oncoming dominant variant, BA.2, creates syncytia in the lungs again.
There is a handy chart toward the end to help with visualized comparison.
There is even a second variant called BA2.2 that is destroying Hong Kong and since originally writing this close to a dozen new variants have shown their ugly head.
The further we let this go unchecked, the worse it will get.
BA.2 is believed to be 1.4x as infectious as its predecessor and it’s important to say that we’ve seen this demonstrated. Expect each variant to continue on this track.
But it’s SOOOO important to say…
ALL the COVID variants have been doing this damage all over our entire body.
This is the problem with thinking of it as a Respiratory Virus alone. It creates this image that the damage is limited to your lungs, but the damage is in your entire body.
That’s one of the reasons why Long-Hauler symptoms can seem so chaotic.
A study was done in 2020, it estimated that there were more viral particles during peak infection than cells in your body. It was actually thought to be 10 to 1.
That’s between 1 and 100 billion viral particles, and this was in the early stages.
Being infected with a virus is best comparable to a house infested with termites.
Because of this… You have to understand that COVID is all over your body.
Consequently, it’s much better to think of COVID as a Vascular Disease caused by SARS-CoV2 that triggers a complex series of auto-immune attacks, extracellular dysfunction, cellular apoptosis, and death; and there is no pill for any of that.
While the truth is closer to a “Respiratory transmitted virus that causes disease, dysfunction, and death to every type of cell in your body.” But that’s a bit much.
It breaks down like this…
Your body has four types of tissue; epithelial, connective, nervous, and muscular.
COVID can cause dysfunction or cell death, or apoptosis, in any type of cell group.
It can even create an AIDS-like syndrome where your T cells stop functioning.
(More on this in a future update.)
But most folks don’t have a great conceptualization of what “Everything” means…
So, we will use Vascular Disease for visualization… Everything your blood touches.
The actual damage though happens in two parts…
One part is during acute infection, which you can see above.
That chart demonstrates that it takes about five hours for COVID to start forming syncytia and invade your body.
So, that’s your window for action post-exposure…
Though I don’t suggest playing that game.
Omicron has likely sped up this process.
To give you an even better idea of why I don’t suggest you gamble it is because this is COVID in your Olfactory Nerve…
Which is, for practical purposes, PART of your brain.
COVID doesn’t always act in a biologically linear way as we think of it, the study these photos are from explains that COVID gets in your brain directly via the Olfactory but it skips the bulb and instead enters the larger part of your brain.
Before that “SARS-CoV-2 can enter the nervous system by crossing the neural–mucosal interface in olfactory mucosa, exploiting the close vicinity of olfactory mucosal, endothelial and nervous tissue, including delicate olfactory and sensory nerve endings.”
Folks need to understand how little ground it has to cover to get into your brain.
Basically, once it’s in your Olfactory… That’s your brain.
There is no Blood-Brain Barrier to protect you when COVID is riding in your cells.
And the only protection is the mucosae, a tiny thin layer of skin that is LOADED with access points and even Omicron has no problem exploiting this entrance.
It is literally a mucus membrane. They aren’t notoriously durable against pathogens.
Anyone who says “we don’t know if COVID damages brain cells directly” is wrong.
Considering how Airborne transmission works, we are extremely vulnerable.
It’s kind of shocking that we’ve been so blasé about air quality this entire time.
When we finally do what is necessary to stop COVID, we will kill a few viruses.
But here is why I’ll be wearing a mask even after we exterminate COVID.
The real important thing is that no matter if the particles are dispersed close to you or far away they reach a constant point where they linger in the air for hours.
You can even pick up the virus if an infected person had been in an enclosed space with poor ventilation hours after them like a shared bathroom in that example.
Or if ventilation is shared…
There are even examples of vertically attached bathrooms spreading COVID when you flush the toilet. It’s known as “fecal aerosol transmission.”
Here’s how it works… Western Style plumbing might avoid this.
The annoying fact is that … any HEPA air filter will catch COVID because it is currently one of the larger viruses, so even minimal effort will go VERY far.
And there are multiple examples of Schools and Gyms staying COVID-free by focusing strictly on Air Filtration. So, this isn’t impossible.
If you want to get really serious, it looks something like this…
If that’s too much, build one of these… They are already popular and well tested.
The can be done relatively inexpensively and last for a significant amount of time.
And just so everyone can quickly understand the difference between ventilation, filtration, disinfection, and doing nothing…
But what are we going through all this effort for?
See those dots? Those are micro aerosols and droplets containing COVID.
Here is a model of what those delicious micro aerosol droplets look like…
Even if that didn’t have COVID in it… That’s quite literally ‘Lung Juice.’
It’s important to note that a recent study showed us that a single virion, a viral particle, the purple cell in the photo, was enough to begin an infection.
That study went on to say…
This was the first controlled and studied infection to date. I want to point out I have very mixed feelings about the ethical nature of this study. But the data is clear…
Regardless of the severity of symptoms, asymptomatic or not, the risk of infection is the same if an infected person won’t wear a mask… And not just any mask.
There has been some debate on the validity of masks when a virus is so infectious.
Though infectiousness doesn’t alter the physics, just increases this risk.
But just in case, here is an article with 49 studies showing masks work.
But for some people that won’t be enough, so I am going to explain it.
This is a photograph of COVID occupying a cell where it will do what is known as “parasite” the cell and seize control of its mechanisms.
COVID and all Viruses are classified as ‘Obligate Intracellular Parasites.’
Because they cannot reproduce or replicate outside of a host cell.
Why anyone would willingly make themselves a host to something like this is beyond me, while Urgency for Normal is acting like our bodies are a COVID BnB.
Once folks understand this better there will be a greater push to clean indoor air.
Now, if you notice that picture shows that a COVID virion is approximately 100 nanometers. But if you understand Micro Aerosols, I propose the name Microsols, but it doesn’t matter… then you know that COVID “rides” in lung fluid as shown in the picture just above this one… Those lung fluids are approximately three times larger.
That means a liquid micro aerosol is approximately 300+ nanometers.
300 nanometers is .3 micrometers or microns.
An N-95 will handle anything above .3 microns.
The micro aerosol COVID rides in are slightly larger than that.
So, an N-95 or a Chinese-made Kn-95 is the MINIMUM protection to stop COVID.
But the Chinese made can be unreliable if it’s from a random source.
Having learned this from personal experience.
Now, it’s critical to point out that ANY disruption of that fluid aerosol will significantly disrupt COVID because it creates the necessary environment.
COVID is VERY fragile but if you ignore this risk… And refuse to mask.
You will get infected.
Once COVID is in, and it will get in, it specifically uses something called sustentacular cells. This can get so bad, they hypothesize the loss of smell and taste is because the actual supportive cells are so damaged they can’t send signals anymore.
These cells are found in a few places in our bodies. Besides the nose, they are found in the testes and ovaries. This is probably why we are seeing a lot of damage to COVID patient’s testes… and it’s really bad. It even causes erectile dysfunction.
The additional viral reservoir might actually contain the virus and could be why folks without testes are more likely to have worse long sequelae like ME/CFS, but I digress.
Here is one more look at the differences between COVID infected testes and a control.
Control is on the left, but for the infected… “Asterisks denote high deposition of glycoproteins in the basement membrane and surrounding blood vessels.”
I’m still unclear, and maybe someone can explain this in the comments, why so many men are in such a rush to have their testes look like the picture on the right?
The truth is that all the folks who think that COVID isn’t a big deal…
Are going to end up with a “little deal” if you get my drift.
There is no amount of toughness or manliness that will protect from this.
The only guaranteed protection from this damage is wearing a properly fitting mask.
Read the rest at the link. This is very extensive. It took me 6 minutes to get here just copy/pasting.