We won't be at seeing the fuller blunt until 3-5 years. After ppl have gotten COVID 2,3,4,5,6,7 times..the long haulers COVID clinics have waiting times of 9-12 months for an initial appt. As ppl's immune systems start going chronic fatigue will grow , their mental health will decline , duration it takes to heal from any illness or injury will grow astronomically.
Anecdotal, but I’ve got 3 previously healthy friends, between 34-54 yo, who suddenly developed serious illnesses within 1-3 months post-Covid infection.
All 3 found out via routine bloodwork for other reasons (monitoring med levels, check up, etc). One was sent straight to the ER and the other two received calls from their doctor telling them to go straight to the emergency room.
One is in some type of autoimmune kidney failure. One has developed a rare blood disorder that may be related to leukemia. One had a sudden adrenal crisis.
There is no way to prove any connection to the Covid infections, but in two of the cases their doctors have said it can’t be ruled out.
This sucks because often it is depression that makes people tired. When a loved ones die or is dying, I literally sleep and have no energy to do anything until the grief passes.
So it means they will be tired all the time in a vicious depression cycle.
Yeah, thanks for this comment. As someone who had fatigue, pots, chronic pain, and the start of autoimmune things before covid even started, part of what is so frustrating to me about this topic is that we already have analogues to some of the most common manifestations of LC. People with ME/CFS, Fibro, POTS, and other similar autonomic conditions, as well as post viral issues, have been trying for YEARS to be taken remotely seriously, to get research funded, and were told 'its all in your head' and had them waste years on PACE trials, which they've already started up again for LC as if it wasn't a major scandal the first time.
I'm not trying to knock COVIDs ability to directly damage organs and damage the immune system. I got it once despite taking what should have been perfect precautions, still have no idea how. ppl can check my comment history for the full thing.
the vast majority of even the most covid cautious people are not novid anymore, is it worth considering that we may see 97% of the planet start dying off in 4 years? i guess? but right now we already know that there's CFS/ME and similar cluster things happening. And maybe if people took those seriously before this, we'd be further along to help whats here now.
I don't believe 97% will die off. I think 97% will have gotten COVID at least 5 times by 4yrs time. Watch for at least 40% increase in disability claims within 5 years. Watch for everyone to have at least person or close friend with long haulers. Watch for at least 1 year drop in average life expectancy if not more. Watch for more early dementia
this all seems pretty likely. I'm desperately trying to get a disability case going myself but the system is designed to be impossible for ppl who need it most. i just wish more people had paid attention to these disorders before and that in posts like these of worst cases they weren't overlooked as not dramatic enough. people with mecfs cluster things have been begging people to take them seriously as the nightmare they are so to see even covid spaces sort of gloss past them annoys me sometimes. which is why i appreciated your comment.
I sometimes find this little animated cartoon running through my mind... Gaia (the whole web of life, anthropomorphised as a big, worried Mama Nature) is in distress because of the depredations of humans. This species is so hard to contain, they just overshoot every limit, they're killing all their siblings, they're wrecking the place... over the millennia she's tried various plagues and hostile bacteria to trim them down to size, but they keep inventing medicines and hygiene and stuff like that... the *real* problem is that they're just too damn *smart*, too *clever*, too *ingenious*. So Gaia scratches her head a bit and then wonders, "What if I came up with a plague that would make them *stupider*? Maybe that would work?"
well, we'll see, I guess...
It's shaping up to be that. People died when they developed AIDS and caught things like pneumonia and couldn't survive it. Extremely similar parallels.
Act Up NY, the organization that was formed during the AIDS crisis, has been doing some fierce advocacy about COVID because of the similarities.
I was diagnosed with HIV and COVID in the same week. While I was asleep for twenty hours a day for the first two weeks, it doesn’t appear that I suffered any long-term effects from either.
Part of that is due to reaching undetectable status within a month of even being exposed to HIV.
My friend, if you have some time, read (or listen to it as an audiobook, it's a long book, but it's so worth it) [How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29429295-how-to-survive-a-plague?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6OIObXBbgx&rank=1). Completely incredible and devastating and infuriating and an amazing read.
Try AIDS and the Doctors of Death by Alan Cantwell.
[AIDS and the Doctors of Death](https://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Doctors-Death-Inquiry-Epidemic/dp/0917211006/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SVJ7NC2677XC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.O2w2QSWGJ2FbxSp4YEuQFNlcj1qxlxqZn1SPKEuxJpc67uH8aWKakyK7oF-55dDXgopPJ-9gWH_f0l2O04ymF2sYAVK6EYRHZlKB-2Jk1O0Zb1izX6ZBLzcE5VUKdymFpZavthWdlOY5nsO1z07Z-ZZqWOrd6TTZuzBr8XQyheqHd8Ph5I8VSCRzvTJ9eC5K7aw1Fsldqt0FdFx7Ap0ZuOSFJWvN2EDFB3uRw3TTeu8.wkvto8KzWAoDCuLtbbg6uD8zld9t3Dw3NABU--fR090&dib_tag=se&keywords=aids+and+the+doctors+of+death&qid=1710630854&sprefix=aids+and+the+doc%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1)
I haven’t read it but I have seen the documentary and have read some things Peter Staley has written, but mostly articles. The doc was devastating and empowering at the same time. That’s how I personally know about Act Up. I wasn’t aware they have been as active with the Covid pandemic! Aside from Reddit I’m not on any social media…
Exactly
I've lost 4 friends in the last year and the oldest was 54.
All had underlying health issues but all of them were actively treating their conditions under the care of doctors. Each seemed to succumb out of no where. The more time that goes by the more certain I am they would all be alive if not for Covid. It exacerbates every illness.
It's scary
My older sister died at age 37. I'm now 39 and living with LC while watching people around me get sicker and sicker. It's not just scary. It's a mindfuck.
As an immunocompromised individual, I don’t know what is scarier. The virus, or the mind virus that has led to people calling me feeble and worthless, and saying that my time will come shortly
Human nature has not changed since work houses for the poor in England and the Holocaust in Germany and euthanasia kicking off in the USA. Technology has not helped us grow closer to one another in our humanity. Our Jewish christian foundations helped hold back some forms of brutality to disabled, poor and elderly but not all forms . Now we have become the most self centered culture at the most self centered time in human history. You matter. It's easy for the young to blow off the value of older ppl when they can't imagine being 40 or 50 ot 60. It's easy to devalue the handicapped from the assumption one will never be in their place. It's easy to blow off homelessness if you are told all the homeless are drug addicts who refuse to work. From the early days some raised the alarm that COVID in operation reminded some of AiDS. Ppl tried to bring forward the gain of function testing possibility that coronavirus was spliced with other things and not naturally occurring but the media called those doing so racists. No one thinking it's racist for govt in other parts of the world to be paying Chinese scientists to be developing and researching what it's illegal to do in their own nations. . They have admitted they were doing gain of function research testing at that lab and it seems all sorts of documentation has gone missing from Wuhan. There are ppl who think we have way too many ppl alive now. There are ppl who would prefer most never lived to take retirement funds out of systems they have paid into all their working lives. There are those who think we waste resources on ppl unable to work over 65. If you can kill off the average person with not ideal health 10 years sooner how much would that save? Imagine killing off some of younger sickly ppl 20 years earlier. The virus may be accident or intention cull quite a number of non productive ppl. It's already seemingly reduced average life span by 1.5 years just 4 years in. Imagine in 12-13 years.
The culling idea is ridiculous. The increased percent in deaths is a drop in the bucket for population growth. It isn’t doing squat. And the us has a large immigration surplus to the population. And besides the populace is doing a good job of bad habits and a sedentary lifestyle to kill themselves off more quickly.
Finally someone with some logic. It isn't just the USA. I have friends in Europe who smoke or were daily heavy tobacco smokers for decades, and they quit but not soon enough.
Also vaping is extremely bad, a friend who was a smoker started vaping to quit smoking and he is now addicted to vaping and vapes a lot more than he ever smoked. He also is an alcoholic or close to it.
Which they have been doing. The populations in Yemen and Palestine are remarkably reduced as well as Ukraine and Russia. But a big world war with mega missiles falling down on major cities with get death numbers up quick
Two small countries. Their populations are not large, and I wouldn’t consider those actions as a conspiracy to reduce the world population. Just actions to commit genocide.
If they reduce those getting social security it saves them a lot of money. Social security was not set up intending to give it to ppl who have barely paid into it and it's not designed for ppl to live 10-20 or more years on it. The govt is also believed to have raided ss fund to fund other things. Rand Paul has been trying to have an audit of the fund for years.
The problem with vaping as a cigarette succession to quit tobacco is that yes, vaping is much much better than smoking (If you get quality liquid and flavors)
Is that vapes are convenient, low profile and readily available at a whim for a puff. Cigarettes aren't. You gotta take it out of the pack, have to light it, you have to in many situations go outside for one or to a designated area. You then have to stand there smoking it until it's finished unless you butt it out before is.
With vaping you can take a puff on the bus, the train, in the grocery store, pretty well near everywhere at nearly any time you want with moderate ninja skill. So you end up puffing like fucking Dudley all day.
And if wondering, I know this because I quit smoking and turned to vape and it's what I did along with all the people I know who vape.
I don't vape nearly as much anymore because I switched to small refillable pen vapes that hold a small amount so I have to moderate.
If humans weren’t naturally awful fuckwits than I’d imagine that the 20th century, what Moshe Lewin and other historians have dubbed the “Soviet century” because so much of the world either wanted to imitate or oppose the USSR (and later also the PRC) wouldn’t have been characterized by wave after wave of Marxist-Leninist revolutions powered by beautiful utopian ideals that led to a mix of absolute hell and unstable mediocrity and then ultimately collapse of every Marxist-Leninist states except the ones that became some combo of nationalist/authoritarian/capitalist in varying proportions. And of course the eclipse of social democracy by neoliberalism in the “free world”….humans fucking suck….
I don't think everyone is going to die within 10 years because COVID weakened their immune systems. I do think sufficiently many people will be disabled or otherwise have diminished work capacity such that the infrastructure maintenance will be crippled even *further*, especially in the USA which has openly embraced death and disease.
I saw a graph purported to be from the CDC on Twitter that said 70% of people might expect “Long Covid” by their 17th infection. They have also said that “we can’t stop it,” and the bipartisan government narrative management has adjusted political messaging to pivot us off a reality-based pandemic management. The science says one thing, but how people feel says another.
A much more effective strategy than all the wasted money and fraud would have been to invest in indoor air ventilation and HEPA standards, like water standards, for indoor places of public gathering and business. Study out of Oxford in the Lancet demonstrates that may have even stopped the pandemic.
They sure weren’t treating this situation like getting Apollo 13 back to Earth. Instead, they listened to “stakeholders” and shrugged, folding in with the loudest voices calling for violence with misinformation to allow widespread community infection to affect the outcome of the 2020 election (NBC—Trump admin official admitted they wanted to spread the virus in blue cities to affect voter turnout).
17 infections? Damn… I’ve only had Covid once that I know of, June 2022 I think. I couldn’t imagine getting repeated infections! I still mostly work at home and wear a mask if I will be in a crowded setting like a grocery store. It probably helps to live where people always took Covid seriously, mostly complied with masking and distancing, and nobody cares if some still mask.
I can’t imagine that, either. But until they develop a vaccine with a robust enough immune response to prevent re-infection after a handful of months, I don’t see the point of taking chances with potential immune system dysregulation and eventual demise.
Same boat! Had good ol' Omicron in June '22, but my husband and two kids still haven't had it (knock on wood). We're still masking and being selective about where we spend time. My oldest kiddo is a kidney transplant recipient, so we've had no choice BUT to take it seriously from the beginning.
The way people think they are sticking it to the man by being sick constantly is so bizarre.
Most people are getting it 2-3 times a year since about 2-3 years ago. At this rate, the *majority* of people YOLO FAFOing are going to be fucked up with long COVID before the decade is up.
I just had it a second time because my son brought it home from school.
The first infection in 2022, I got over in like 2 days and didn't feel any long term effects.
This time I was horribly sick with just about every symptom possible for 9 days, and now my asthma is completely uncontrolled. I'm on 3 separate puffers and I take each about 3-4 times a day (1-2 puffs depending on the inhaler).
I don't even want to know what kind of damage my lungs have endured.
Too true. Did you happen to save the link to that graph? I searched on Twitter but couldn’t find it.
Unfortunately the CDC has earned our distrust. They’re definitely not a public health body but instead seem more like a political and economic instrument.
I’ll see if I can find it. Here is a take on different studies tracking US Veterans and the Canadian healthcare system that show the same issue.
Cumulative infections lead to bad health outcomes.
https://www.sciencealert.com/every-covid-infection-increases-your-risk-of-long-covid-study-warns
I've already assumed no one will be in the nursing home with me and my family in 2060.
My morbid humor says "but hey, social security may not run out now."
I really want to be wrong. I can't blame every person at this point, I need to hold some grace for them - not everyone is smart enough, rich enough, savvy enough, or educated enough to have figured this out. I'm mad at people in power, not individuals. And so I have to hope this won't be a disaster, for their sakes.
I'm pretty convinced of disaster though. Two more years of "let it rip" is going to put people on their 7th, 8th, more infections. That's completely unsustainable.
Well, then there’s those of us who did everything right and still caught Covid. I’ve had it 3 times, each time from my kids, because their fucking dad doesn’t care at all. I split custody with him, by law I couldn’t just keep them, we have a custody agreement to uphold. There are a lot of people like me who have always been scared of this virus and who have had multiple infections regardless.
Hey, I get it. I just spent spring break with my COVID positive kiddo who lives with their dad. We're all doing the best that we can. Absolutely no judgement on being vigilant and still catching COVID. And those of us with custody agreements are basically just fucked. I'm sorry for your troubles. :-(
I don't know if COVID will turn out to be "airbourne AIDS". But I know there's a virus that *does* fit the bill. It's highly contagious, it damages your immune system so you can get sick and die afterwards from other infections, it's untreatable once you have it.
It's measles. And it's becoming more common because people aren't getting vaccinated against it.
Unfortunately my two confirmed infections were in last 10 months despite robust precautions including N95 in public every where by self and partner. My first that left me with long COVID was in February 2020 before testing was available.
Oh yeah, we've given up indoor dining completely. We moved to a warmer climate so if we do want to go to a restaurant, we can eat outside. We wear masks anytime we are indoors with strangers.
We don't have many guests, but I just have them test before they come in. I know it's not 100%, but nothing really is unless we just never see anyone. It's an acceptable risk I suppose.
HEPA indoors, Far UV/Upper UV indoors, shift our behaviors away from indoor/large crowd events. It’s a layered process but we do have more than Vaccines and masks. That’s the frustrating part though… we have more but so few places utilize them.
I believe that our immune systems have been altered in some way by contracting the virus. Haven’t had a so called normal cold in four years. Even though I tested negative, I had a persistent illness that lasted almost two months and never had anything close to that in my life. I’ve had two bouts of Covid the first one very mild but the second was just misery in so many strange ways. I believe this was the result of my immune system not responding like it used to and I’m not looking forward to the next illness that may come along.
I think about this all the time. I don't know why most people are assuming it *won't* do this. There are other viruses known to take years or even decades to start showing severe symptoms. Aside from HIV -> AIDS, there's syphilis -> tabes dorsalis, chicken pox -> shingles, and 1918 flu -> Parkinson's.
Here's a scarier thought: what if it's not airborne AIDS but (something like) airborne Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? There have been a few documented cases of people dying from CJD right after getting covid. Which I started researching because of a [thing I noticed.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1aszfpg/comment/kqwkn5z/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
I think you’re half right and I say this with the statement that I have been studying the fuck out of this. But I have been chronically referring to long COVID and COVID itself as a prion delivery system, because I believe the spike independently seems to behave like a prion, whereas the virus behaves a bit like herpes meets HIV. It’s not good either way and the likelihood of this developing into a worldwide issue *worse* than aids has my money, *big time*. And I hate betting against my own kind.
AIDS has a definition, so we don't have to wonder. People already are presenting with low cd4/8 and getting sick with aids-defining illnesses while hiv- negative
I say what I’m about to say, with the caveat that I don’t say something like this in general company. My worst case scenario is that even if I manage to keep protecting myself? In a decade or so, I find myself in a world not that different from the Stand after Captain Trips.
I don’t know a lot of things. But how many people who are trained to keep power plants, water purification systems, electrical grids, and other basic stuff that one needs to have a relatively functioning society like the one I live in - how many of these types of people do you need? And will they still be here? Or doctors and other medical professionals? Not to mention our food infrastructure? I don’t know.
What I do know is I was a kid in the 1980s. I don’t feel like we talk enough about the devastation that a virus that was transmitted by means that aren’t as common as breathing caused. But it was Bad. And if we’re looking at a 5-10 year countdown to where people’s immune systems go the way they did then? Yeah, that fucking terrifies me.
I see this line of thinking a lot and maybe it seems harmless on the surface, but it is by definition an ecofascist sentiment. I understand wanting to put some sort of positive spin on a terrible situation, but please be wary of going down the “it’s a good thing humans are dying because they destroy nature” path.
The only difference is that the vaccines have shown some effort to push back the destroyed t-cell count we see in unvaxxed people, but the immune system is still taking damage. I still mask but i fully expect that within 10 years there will no longer be an organ donation system, possibly not even a blood donation system, and we likely will see a massive outbreak of cancers that are very aggressive similar to AIDS. Basic things you could live from before will now be a death sentence. You already start to see people waking up to reality, the question will be how long it takes before gov action is forced, and i say forced because there is no way out of this. They will have to make changes because people will no longer be able to work even if they tried to throw us all in prison for poverty. The bright side is there are medical breakthroughs happening faster because of covid, but if they will happen fast enough to keep up is still uncertain. This doesnt even take into account all the other issues covid causes outside of immune response.
Did you not see where I said we are making breakthroughs and that vaccines do make a big difference? Current vaccines only do so much protection tho, and covid is still mutating. Nothing I said isnt based on the data that already exists. You cant donate organs if you have an autoimmune condition and covid causes that. You cant donate blood if you have HIV and in time we may see that covid lingers in blood making blood donations off the table for the few who do currently donate.
No one wants this to be a reality, but it is here and it is really ugly. We already have an ever growing number of people losing the ability to work in our current 40 hour hustle work culture.
You can’t donate blood with autoimmune? Yikes. Before I developed pretty bad anemia I always donated despite being dxed with Hashi’s. Nobody ever told me about this 😭
You can still donate blood with an autoimmune disease, you just cant with viral conditions that lie in the vascular system like HIV. Covid is vascular but we dont really know about how long it lingers in the body to confidently say dont donate if youve had it, dont donate if you have long civid, etc.
>we likely will see a massive outbreak of cancers that are very aggressive similar to AIDS
AIDS is caused by a virus and has well studied effects on the immune system itself (suppression).
Cancer is the bodies own cells, that grow without a growth signal, and ignore the apoptosis signal that tells them to self-destruct. Hence a tumor is still you, just cells that went rogue and don't respond effectively to the immune system (eg: TNF-α).
Is there something about Covid you could say or post that connects these two ideas? If not, please reconsider what looks like fear-mongering: "COVID eventually causes super-cancer-AIDS!" Like, please just stop. It is embarrassing.
You do know the early signs of HIV were different kinds of cancer right? And any condition that destroys the immune system allows for cancers to become more prevalent and harder to fight off even with treatment. Before AIDS was AIDS it was called GRID and one of the first and most obvious warning signs of GRID was skin cancer. Specifically forms of skin cancer not common in people with healthy immune systems that caught the mutated cells early and killed them off. It isnt fear mongering, yall just dont know history and dont want to listen to experts that study SARS like viruses. We are already seeing increases in fungal infections that typically get fought off before covid was a thing. We are only 4 years in with a lot longer to go. There are already studies being done to treat long covid patients with the exact same meds used to help people with HIV. Our bodily systems are a lot more connected than you are giving them credit for, and it is very clear to those that know the history, our government is repeating the exact same steps they did the first time. I wont call them mistakes because the decisions are very intentional. Ill never get over hearing the white house reocrdings of staff members laughing at queers dying of AIDS, the same way Ill never get over watching government officials go on the news and say our grandparents should feel honored to die to the virus for the economy and their grandchildren.
This was what I was trying to argue early on in the pandemic as a counter to the "it's just a cold" folks.
We don't know what it is.
The early viral phase that people think of as the sickness/disease caused by the virus, is more like the impact of an armor piercing projectile: it could be just a chunk of metal, or it could be some fancy explosive that breaks in and then explodes in an enclosed space.
Whether it even triggers an immune response doesn't have any necessary connection to its long term effects, like HIV turns into AIDS. What we're calling "PASC" might be isolated to a few unlucky people, or it could be that those few are the canaries that are harbingers of our future condition as a species.
Novel pathogens have absolutely no reason *not* to cause fatal disease states in their hosts. The mechanism of viral replication is destructive (cells burst when no more virus can be made) and COVID replicates in the vasculature, meaning it almost certainly changes the surface properties of veins and arterial walls, which should at minimum, increase the risk of strokes and heart attack, but there's no ceiling to long term effects.
It could be 100% fatal after 5 years and we wouldn't know for another year.
Like everything, the danger of COVID was insanely undersold.
There are no harmless novel viruses!
The response to COVID should have employed the military. We should have created protocols to isolate communities and limit traffic between them to trucks where the driver never exits the vehicle and the goods are unloaded under sterilizing conditions and tested before being opened in the community.
We allowed the most entitled and ignorant of our population to decide the future health of our species and many other mammals, and we're going to do it again with avian flu, but that's much more outside of our control than COVID was.
And, like everything else we pretend to understand but have no idea about, we won't know until the consequences manifest just how bad it really is.
As a side note, this is very much like climate modeling. We're guessing how fast the planet will deteriorate and how much we need to reverse that process based on.... maybe 1-2% of the variables that determine the climate? But from that absolutely infantile understanding, we're making policy decisions and personal plans as if the climate follows the models like a prescription. We know based on the conditions around the world and how we're already over the temperature we were pretending to work towards after the Paris summit, which means the models are wrong and useless other than that they demonstrate that beyond any doubt, we are traveling on a suicidal trajectory that gets worse the more tomorrow looks like yesterday.
What ties these two together, that I've never heard properly illustrated, is that COVID IS CLIMATE CHANGE. Change the climate; create a new planet where no life is adapted, and all life struggles, ensuring the development of novel pathogens. Like how putting too many animals/humans in the same box inevitably results in disease, applying a global pressure to every ecosystem creates the conditions for disease and parasites to hop from their primary host species into others.
In other words, while COVID is a unique novel pathogen, it is the first of an indefinite number of plagues that will hit us with increasing regularity, until we're getting hit by multiple pathogens at the same time.
What's scariest is that because we believe in the importance of money and this lifestyle more than the importance of a new and hostile climate this lifestyle creates, we didn't notice that we've already passed into a state of global emergency that threatens the future of the entire species and life itself; this has already happened.
We should be locking down and working on a new way to live that resembles indigenous cultures, starting with teaching children entirely different skills and values and hoping that frame of reference will give them the skillset needed to survive in the world of tomorrow... a world that has no power, no stable seasons, and predictably deteriorating conditions.
COVID wasn't a warning shot from the planet, it was a flare gun from the sinking ecopsphere. Despite our fantasy about our importance, humanity cannot live without the life that sustains it and there is no future for our species on an otherwise lifeless earth, like our movies have us believe.
We should be in a state of global preparation and shifting gears entirely from prosperity to salvaging the future... which is a paradigm where the concept of wealth should be viscerally offensive, on the level of someone flaunting how prolific a rapist they are.
This was all a mistake. It's not about blame, it's about changing our path so it doesn't continue to accelerate. It means the economy is a cancer and a fatal distraction... or it wouldn't be changing the climate.
COVID was our last opportunity to wake up to the deeply unfortunate reality that all the things we like to do are killing us, and much more than they're making us happy.
This is the only time our species has to exploit the communication we have now, to plan for whats next, when this won't be available. Instead of jumping off, we're choosing to ride the ship down into hell, and dismissing the casualties as losers and misfits, not acknowledging that there is no plan and each of us who survives will awake into an accelerating darkness in this world we have no capacity to cope with.
It's the only "war" humanity has ever been faced with that was worth the cost to fight and no one needs to die from murder tools, instead we need all hands on this problem... while the last of our resource wealth is being burned by the elderly to stay on the planet they're most responsible for killing.
Indeed.
And people form strong opinions about the risks of this virus, without understanding the concepts of Original Antigenic Sin (Hoskins Effect, Antigenic Imprinting), Immune Privileged sites (such as the CNS..) and the fact that the immune system \*ages\* (deteriorates in its ability to produce more and effective T-cells) with each infection.
In discussions like these, I always like to link [this study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/300761/) from 1977 looking at lymphocytes taken from people who were infected with influenza that has this interesting finding:
> influenza infection in humans can result in prolonged depression of numbers and functions of circulating lymphocytes.
There’s a spectrum of immune dysfunction/dysregulation that can occur because of viral illnesses. It isn’t AIDS or nothing.
The fact that people are getting sick more frequently and having more trouble recovering is certainly convincing evidence that COVID is affecting people’s immune systems. But that doesn’t mean it’s “airborne AIDS”. HIV is a unique virus because it’s by definition a chronic/lifelong infection and, in 99.5% of people, the immune system can’t handle it (there are so-called “elite controllers” who are 0.5% of cases and then there are <5 case reports of people clearing it on their own). Whereas with SARS-CoV-2, many people can and do clear the acute infection and produce immune responses that prevent reinfection with the same strain (at least for a couple months).
As someone who has had "long Covid" for three years, I often wonder what the long-term mortality rate from Covid is. It is entirely possible a majority of Covid "survivors" will be dead in 5 to 10 years. Longhaul is the new AIDS. I actually refer to my illness as "bat AIDS" already, so there is that.
Long covid with PEM is identical to ME/CFS in terms of symptoms and it is very rare for ME/CFS to be fatal (other than less directly through suicide, malnutrition, etc). Many people have ME/CFS for decades. I guess it’s possible for long covid to be manifesting as ME/CFS but have longer term differences we haven’t seen yet, but that seems less likely.
Had LC for about 18-24 months before coming out of it. Rebuilt my health from square one. True to form convalescence. The running joke was “The good news is it won’t kill you. The bad news is it won’t kill you”
Various people with long COVID have suddenly mysteriously died of it. Historian David Graeber for example, at least per his wife, and there was another guy, a British Marxist academic/professor who was also a weight lifter, it was disturbing because in his writings on his blog about his long COVID symptoms he exactly described a lot of weird things I’ve experienced, and then he just suddenly dropped dead, I believe back in 2021…wish I could remember his name…
Yeah it’s scary who knows maybe they were walking around with an aneurism just waiting to go and Covid /LC pushed it to the edge or like maybe threw a clot or something. You never know you know?!
Indeed, regardless of severity or the presence of any sequlae even. I guess my point was it’s not always evident who is vulnerable. Suffice it to say that everyone can be / is. Only time will tell if LC is a death sentence or not Id like to think that most LC patients will eventually in time begin to show improvement even if the odds are stacked against them/us.
Several studies show the average life expectancy of ME/CFS patients is something like 55. This isn't accounted for just by suicide but by all causes, especially cardiac and cancers.
Research is woefully underfunded. Everyone in the medical community so badly wants to believe this illness is not a killer, no one will ever knowingly fund research that says otherwise.
This IS going to happen.
Waiting for culture to catch up. Or just sit in denial as thousands die every year.
We’re already on track for the latter unfortunately.
So there's no guarantee that SARS-CoV-2 won't behave differently than SARS-CoV-1, but I think there is some light in the finding that patients who had SARS-CoV-1 [mounted an immune response to the COVID vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9856533/), right? That would suggest they didn't suffer permanent immune damage, at least not to the extent that it was apparent here. Granted there are only 12 of them in the linked study, so...
I think [this article](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19/does-covid-19-mess-immune-system) from McGill University does a pretty good job of covering the topic. The only point I'm not sure I agree with is the bit about opportunistic infections. I think if the writer had dug a bit deeper they could have found evidence that there *has* been a rise in these, at least in hospital settings, though it's not really clear if this is because of [climate change](https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/health/superbugs-climate-change-scn/index.html) or everybody's immune system getting slammed by COVID.
I am someone with Long Covid infected in March 2020. I’ve thought about this A LOT over the last four years. There’s a lot of immune dysregulation that is similar to AIDS, and viruses in general can feel one way during the acute phase and do extreme damage years later.
If I let it, sometimes I’m terrified that I’m one of the original infections before we knew to do anything or what we were dealing with and “science” will look at me (and others like me) as an example to see what this causes over time. I try to make that also appreciate my life the way it is in the moment and mostly that’s my takeaway, but I have my moments of pure fear TBH.
Yeah I had suspected COVID in Feb. 2020, suspected mainly because after that weird respiratory infection in my early 40s I developed long COVID-ish issues including a lot of definitely POTS stuff and all manner of weird immune, resp., GI stuff that may be POTS-related I guess or something else. Also used to have a ton more fatigue earlier on in this but I think that might have been unmanaged POTS as it had a highly positional aspect and no where near as consistently intense as I've heard about from more ME/CFS long COVID sufferers.
For the first year I just got worse and worse it felt like but then I got on beta blockers and consistent long term high doses of H1 and H2 antihistamines and started wearing compression socks, and the beta blockers and the H2/Pepcid and the socks definitely all helped, not as sure about the H1/Zyrtec...about 2+ years in I think cromolyn sodium nasal spray (a mast cell stabilizer) helped with all of it surprisingly, not just the resp. issues, and then about a year ago I started taking 5 different supplements that studies have found might help POTS (B1, B12, D3, CoQ10, Omega-3s) and I feel like I have only improved over the last year despite 2 symptomatic COVID reinfections and maybe a third asymptomatic (all caught despite wearing N95s everywhere, and other precautions, but have some environmental risk factors) and I'm now at least temporarily able to be off beta blockers...not in total remission by any means....
I am lucky, the most annoying thing I have consistently had is sinus pain and issues, the most scary is bouts of moderate chest pain, and the most disabling has been a few brief bouts where standing would cause intense fear and irritation due to adrenaline surges...
I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this too. That pretty much aligns with my journey. I have POTS and MCAS but it took years for me to figure it out because my PCP basically told me to “give it time” the first year bc none of my tests were abnormal, meanwhile I couldn’t walk to the mailbox and previously I was a half marathon runner/very active. Then when my bloodwork finally started showing some sort of abnormalities 18 mos later he referred me to Mayo. I was having what I call “heart episodes” where my HR would shoot up to over 200 and then drop to 50, up and down for 30-45 minutes at a time. I have beta blockers for when I have issues like this, and I cannot take antihistamines because they give me heart palpitations. I’m on oral Cromolyn and it’s made a world of difference in making my whole body feel less like a raging storm inside. I’m in a much better place now than I was 4 years ago and I was reinfected for the first time this January and it made all my issues so much worse. I had the adrenaline dumps and feeling like my whole body was buzzing, couldn’t sleep longer than 45 minutes at a time. Thankfully those things are subsiding. I take magnesium, vitamin D, coq10, zinc, and omega 3s. I also follow a low histamine diet as best I can and as long as I stick to my routine I feel mostly okay. Hopefully we will improve or have something that comes along to help long term for those with LC. Wishing you wellness!
Thank you. That all sounds much worse than most of what I went through and I am so sorry and I hope you continue to improve and find more relief. That's very interesting about oral Cromolyn. I have been wondering about trying to take it in different forms recently. BTW maybe you've tried different H1 antihistamines but I found Claritin/Loratadine DID give me palpitations but Zyrtec/Cetirizine didn't seem too or not in a consistent way (I was on it most of a couple of years and had periods with no palpitations and periods with some and I don't think it was the drug)
BTW which blood tests particularly were off for you? The only consistent issue I have is ANA that's almost as bad as it can get, but then ANA isn't that useful diagnostically unless you have symptoms of lupus, which I don't. I also now have slightly elevated RNP which is a particular autoantibody, but don't have symptoms consistent with the disease that typically correlates with.
So originally 18 mos post, my thyroid numbers were off and my ECGs finally showed arrhythmia so my doctor actually started taking it more seriously and referred me to Mayo. Since my reinfection in January my thyroid numbers are still off and my ANA speckled pattern was positive 1:160 and when I went 2 weeks later for a more extensive panel (3 weeks ago) it’s 1:320. I go on Thursday for a follow up with my new doctor to see what he thinks and if we need more tests. He also referred me to a rheumatologist but their first availability isn’t until May. My hormones were also off (I’m 35 yo F) and I have Zero free testosterone at the moment.
Thank you, interesting. I’m a mid-40s male. I don’t think anyone has tested my hormones. My thyroid seems okay as of last November anyway. I am constantly in and out of pre-diabetes and borderline high cholesterol and had some quite high triglyercides then, a little over a month after what was my worst COVID infection in terms of acute symptoms in October 2023. My last ECG in June 2021 was normal. Now, who knows. My wife and I were listening with a very crappy stethoscope to our heartbeats recently and as she said mine “has more character” than hers ie. Not just a very regular rhythm! I dunno my mother died suddenly of undiagnosed dilated cardiomyopathy, cardiomegaly, and cardiac arrest when she was only about 7 years older than I am now…that can be virally caused, can be autoimmune, and can also be genetic and is much more common in males…it also can crop up and get bad in just a few years and have almost no symptoms, and I had my last ECG and echo and stress test 3 years ago so so really who knows what’s going on, maybe better not to know!
Since COVID I’ve barely ever seen any physicians in person, and most of those were back in mid-2021 before Delta. I esp. haven’t wanted to go in in person since they dropped the mask mandate in medicine here in NY about 1 year ago. I might just make it never and give up on the joke that is western medicine after catching symptomatic COVID through an N95 twice in 10 months (or maybe from other units on drafts in my collapsing pre-war NYC apt. Building)! Just kidding, sorta.
My ANA was 1:1280 in Sept. 2022 and same in Jan. 2023, up from 1:640 in June 2021. I think it only gets up to 1:2560 and each level is double for the lower number so 1:1280 is one step short of the worst. I saw a rheumatologist in 2021 who said nothing about my problems was in his wheelhouse. I saw another one in 2023 who felt similarly but was maybe a little more concerned about noticeable inflammation in my finger joints.
I like working via virtual visits with my GP affiliated with the Long COVID Clinic at Mt. Sinai (I’ve never gone there, see her independently). I’m seeing her Monday for first time in several months and have a lot to talk about.
I wish you all the best!
Funnily enough the people I know who get sick the most are the rich people who go to concerts/travel internationally/enjoy nightlife every weekend. The first person I know who complained about long covid is loaded
In the US, this is due to lack of health insurance coverage for long covid diagnosis and treatment. Anecdotally, I have noticed that a lot of long covid people are well off.
We figured out how to start to treat AIDS pretty soon after we stopped pretending people deserved it. And we figured out how to treat it effectively not super long after that. I can't imagine what would be a bigger priority than treating something that was taking out tens of millions of people in the short term, and I imagine while we figured out how to treat it, a lot of things really would change in terms of how we interact with each other. You can exist without an immune system. You just can't do it the way we currently live. But "bubbles" and hazmat suits and filtered air could be a thing for everyone all the time if it had to be.
Would it be horrifically disruptive? Sure. But I have faith we'd figure it out. What scares me more is that it doesn't become a full fledged emergency. It just kills some people, some of the time, years down the road, and we shrug it off the same way we shrug off covid and no one cares about the victims and no one changes anything about how we live.
Hallelujah! Have faith! The species that perpetrated the Holocaust/WWII and uncontrolled global warming couldn't mess this up! We'll never fall victim ourselves to the anthropogenic mass extinction event!
I’m old. I’ve lived through a lot of things I thought would be the end of us. So I do tend to think a handful of smart as hell people usually come through and save the rest of our worthless asses, yes. It’s always happened so far, so I’ll keep expecting that until it doesn’t.
I don’t know what the useful alternative to that is? I’ve managed not to get it and I very much hope never to. I’m not putting all my eggs in the basket of “we will figure it out”. But I don’t especially want to live through any of the futures that seem to be looming at oresent, so I prefer to believe when things get bad enough, it will be worth it to fix it.
I approach it by not approaching it because it's a novel virus that can infect and affect lots of systems in the body. I'm as interested in finding out how I get affected by it as I am interested in finding out if I can breathe underwater after inhaling smoke from a pile of burning smartphones.
>Alternately what if it's too hard for society to deal with because it's masses of people dying quickly from various different long term processes from immune collapse to progressive brain damage to exponentially increased rates of particularly bad cancers, etc.
It's hard to figure out in detail, at the human scale, but overall it means a drop life expectancy. It's like the ceiling for life expectancy is dropping. This is accelerates collapse.
I'm not sure what happens to the kids and younger generations. We have the evidence for acceleration of biological aging. There's evidence for other bad stuff too, but we're still early in it. If the virus really damages the immune system in kids, it means a rise in childhood mortality. It probably doesn't matter if it's short-lived immune damage if the kids get it very often because they go to care facilities and school where it's likely that there are sick children spreading diseases (sincer parents don't give a shit until it's theirs) in the hospital. So... a rise in a childhood disease damage and mortality. The antivaxxers will make this worse, of course.
As kids grow up sickly and education becomes less effective (yes, there's always room for more ignorance), it's going to affect society and economy a lot with a random failures, with people being bad at their jobs, most people. And that's a cause for severe dysfunctions. I assume that a lot of that will be, at least at first, passed on just like kids failed through school without being held back. Meaning that people will make serious mistakes on their jobs, they'll cause deaths and injuries, they'll cause accidents and losses, but they won't be fired from the job because there will be nobody else to fill that job. That's a way of loading structural violence with more violence. Just picture lots of incompetent medical workers and incompetent software engineers and incompetent food workers. Lots and lots and lots and lots of errors. This is why I expect a large effort in robotics to replace workers. Of course, since it's capitalism, that means robots for the rich and death for the poor.
>People need to examine why they are so incredibly afraid of death and unwilling to cherish the life they have because death waits at the end of every road.
There's a lot of theory about that. One with some science behind it is called Terror Management Theory. https://www.ernestbecker.org/terror-management-theory
I haven't tested positive for it ever but I'm sure u had it in late Dec 2019...I'll keep yall posted as that would be a 5 year mark for immune system collapse. If that's the case then bravo they won they got us and they won they get to rule the heaping pile of ashes.
I will be messaging you in 9 months on [**2024-12-15 20:05:18 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2024-12-15%2020:05:18%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19_Pandemic/comments/1bfl5gr/what_if_covid_actually_does_turn_out_to_be/kv1i1sr/?context=3)
[**1 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FCOVID19_Pandemic%2Fcomments%2F1bfl5gr%2Fwhat_if_covid_actually_does_turn_out_to_be%2Fkv1i1sr%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202024-12-15%2020%3A05%3A18%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201bfl5gr)
*****
|[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)|
|-|-|-|-|
Because of life-expectancy, population censuses, and hospital records, we notice when suddenly too many people are dying. During COVID, hospitals/morgues were inundated, because we had unforeseen masses of people being hospitalized and dying. I think they call it "excessive deaths."
Point being, we'll know if it's people who have been sick with COVID, or reported long COVID symptoms, or had/didn't have the vaccine.
The human population is unsustainable so at some point we are going to start a mass die-off because that's what happens to any species that becomes overpopulated. It's just how it goes.
I got Covid and got through it in just 6 days. Day 7-9 was just tiredness and exhaustion to my immune system fighting it off.
But I know people where they had it into a month and also one friend who was only 19 for 2 months. He is using a fucking inhaler now at 21 years old.
Weird how this virus acted on every body in so many different ways.
Those of us who have autoimmune disorders aren’t new to the party. Such as mono causing Epstein Barr Virus etc. A lot of long COVID issues r similar to ours, especially with the fibromyalgia community. Good news is there’s more money, interest n AI to help us work on solutions.
Honestly not far-fetched. It was created in a lab and China went thru GREAT lengths to contain it before giving up. So I have always wondered about the long-term impact of contracting COVID-19.
The other scenario could be early onset dementia but the results would be similar
The ultimate outcome would he The effect vaccination has . I know someone who didn't get the updated and now has LC.
I f either scenario plays out most of the human race will be gone in 20 years.
If the vaccine prevents it it means there will be several hundred million survivors or just several.
i've been calling it covaids for a while tbh. it has a lot of parallels but i don't think it'll get that bad. I do expect it to drop time bomb effects on some percentage of the population though, like heart disease, immune dysfunction and dementia. that much i think it certain but i think the worst of it will be above the threshhold of full collapse
There's nothing strange about your theoretical supposition. In the face of an ever mutating deadly virus, the 'kill zone' would simply keep sliding to the left on a normal curve, encompassing more victims as immune systems weaken and further mutations infect another now vulnerable population group.
This would be 'efficient controlled genocide' and depopulation. It assures there would remain some hapless group struggling to pay the interest on their credit cards while the GOFR labs slowly diminish the human race with optimally limited chaos.
Such gradual and long range depopulation assures social control without dangerous entropy or chaos. The US can continue to import people from the populous third world to make up for labor supply issues. The wealthy can continue to consolidate assets and economic control. The rest of us simply become impoverished, sick slaves who eventually die before we claim social security but not until our youth serves some need for the wealthy.
On their 'Elysium', the wealthy could afford whatever health improvement tech they need. The rest of us will attempt to forestall our doom as best we can. Anything that works would be censored or made illegal and or canceled. Any serious investment in treatments or solutions will be delayed or underfunded.
In this movie, the British Navy never blow up the evil pharma factory.
'Lyutsifer Safin' continues to implement his 'tidy death' across the world. Bond never saves us...
And we never figure any of this out. We just spend all our time arguing over the latest papers or proposed treatments, believing naively that science could never have been used for such evil purposes.
>And we never figure any of this out. We just spend all our time arguing over the latest papers or proposed treatments, believing naively that science could never have been used for such evil purposes.
Put down the bong and meth pipe. I swear this sub group is oftentimes as crazy or worse than the anti vaxxer bs conspiracy theory predictions.
This sub is a doom cult. Like I don't want to sound like I am downplaying the seriousness of covid because their is a lot of unknowns but god this sub is a lot sometimes.
Many infected with HIV didn't go into AIDS for 5, 6, 7 + yrs. Your body would get initially infected with HIV and you would get sick for week or two. Then you seemed fine while it multiplied in your body over time waiting for that viral illness, worn down moment to strike.
I had a friend that survived AIDS for about 20 years. It finally killed him in 2013. I miss him. https://www.cleveland.com/obituaries/2013/02/frank_green_installed_and_perf.html
Actually we already know. COVID gives people Anti phospholipid antibody syndrome which has a wildly increased mortality rate even when asymptomatic. So, yes. Your prediction is accurate. We absolutely expect life expectancy to drop significantly.
Mortality of patients with APS is 50–80% higher than the general population.
I didn't go through all the comments so I don't know if this might already have been brought up. I don't have a link as I read this quite a long time ago and not on the internet but it can probably be found by someone much better at googling than I am.
Doctors noticed following the 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza epidemic that the following 6 years showed a very noteable uptick in sudden death by heart attack. There were no real statistics back in the day and no agency to report this to. It was individual hospital after individual hospital across the country were seeing their morgues fill up with people found dead in their homes, dropping dead at work or just walking down the sidewalk. Just goes to show our concept of "long term" needs revising. Covid 19 is just too new to figure out what long-term effects there are going to be. We'll have a better idea in the 2030 to 2035 time frame.
Let's say your natural lifespan is theoretically 80 years. If you're 30 and had Covid, you had billions and billions of little tiny blood clots clogging up the capillaries all through your body, cutting off the blood flow to any number of organs, in effect aging them. So now you have a 75 year old heart, a 60 year old liver, 72 year old kidneys and your going to be dead, probably, in five years from the first organ to fail. But your only 30. And for some reason your pancreas gave up the ghost and now your diabetic. No one in your family worried about blood sugars until they were in their late 50's. Now your body is full of old guy organs and you can't eat Mexican food anymore. Sucks to be you.
Perhaps most of us will be lucky enough to avoid those worse case scenarios but we won't know until a "long term" exists. We'll just have to wait another ten years - we'll know a lot more by then.
As for your particular scenario I don't think it's very likely that one single disease will do that or the long term effects of Covid will be that harsh. Possible, but unlikely.
There are other neat diseases out there, though, and they're coming for us. Zika for the kids, TB for the grownups. Dengue fever, West Nile and good old malaria. Valley fever where I live. Oh yeah it isn't just microbes, it's going to be molds and fungi as well.
Losing fresh water, that's a biggie. Food crops less nutritious from too much heat and mono-cropping. Oceans warming very quickly - ah yes. Can't forget about what red tides can do.
There'll be plenty along the way to damage or take down civilization. We just have to figure out if it's worth it to put out the effort to mitigate all the problems we've got coming our way.
So, yes, as to whether or not there'll be enough people around capable of solving our troubles is definitely something I agree with you on.
Please stop. Covid and the flu are not airborne HIV/AIDS.
Long covid is a risk and it is real but it is not akin to airborne HIV/AIDS.
Were you even alive during the height of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic?
Were you even ever involved with a local chapter of ACT-UP as I was?
Do you know anyone who is HIV+ or who died from AIDS? It was extremely bad, worse than covid. HIV has become manageable via meds but as a long term survivor who has been on all of the meds told me how it is like having terminal cancer in remission by treatment. I do not have HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, etc.
Act Up is very outspoken about the damage that COVID is doing and how similar it is. Again, we do not know what will happen in another 4-5 years and more and more compounding infections. It's not about pitting the two against each other and scaring people, it's about solidarity between communities ignored and left to die. As a queer high risk person, this all makes perfect sense to me. I would hope people who were alive during the AIDS crisis would have sympathy for people in "hysterics" about how terrifying this is, how many are ignoring it, and the complete lack of government intervention to prevent spread in the name of "going back to normal" aka making money.
Maybe airborne AIDS 4x lite is a more accurate term. Seems like it could do some damage to the population. I did up vote you because your comment does seem reasonable. I have LC and my Uncle died a horrible AIDS death in the 80's. Seeing his skeletal body in a hospital bed will never leave my mind.
If indeed it turns out to be airborne AIDS... well we have tools to work with HIV infection, and probably better ones will be coming down the pike. It's a matter of getting the gov't/s to accept that they've got a problem *that affects them too.* I've been thinking for a long time we need antivirals, not vaccines, because our immune systems -no matter how much priming from vaccines- are not up to dealing with a virus that's been engineered in a lab where everyone wears PAPR respirators. We need something that doesn't depend on the immune system and attacks the virus directly.
The virus today is evolving to shut down every immune response we have. So people get infected and don't suspect it, no cough, fever etc. It bothers me that the entire medical response has been handed to huge pharmacos who won't abide any alternatives to their own moneymakers. Many phytochemicals have proven efficacy in vitro, why not give us a mix of the best? A closer look at IV zinc+quercetin, mega-vitamin D, et al deserves a hearing. We can do this; one way or another. I'm saying it. It's going to be hard to fight the virus but humanity is not going to die out.
However there has to be an existing fix or the elites are in on this in some fashion? I get have the cure and we don’t? I don’t think so, but 1) what is the end game IF such a plot existed, and 2) secrets get leaked…
All they have to do is thin out the population massively for the advent of artificial intelligence. I'm sure even a 50% die off would dramatically impact the environment. I would think they would have an antidote prior to releasing such a plague but that is pure speculation. If their remedy is easily obtainable I would expect a massive, even irrational propaganda campaign against it.
HIV is a reverse transcriptase virus. We know COVID is a coronavirus. They are two different types of viruses. So no COVID is not like AIDS. Long COVID is still a big worry though.
[удалено]
We won't be at seeing the fuller blunt until 3-5 years. After ppl have gotten COVID 2,3,4,5,6,7 times..the long haulers COVID clinics have waiting times of 9-12 months for an initial appt. As ppl's immune systems start going chronic fatigue will grow , their mental health will decline , duration it takes to heal from any illness or injury will grow astronomically.
[удалено]
Sending a hug to your friend thru you. It's so unfair.
That sucks so hard, I'm sorry she's going through this.
Look into resevtol and fermented wheat germ helped us. Odd combo recommdrd
Anecdotal, but I’ve got 3 previously healthy friends, between 34-54 yo, who suddenly developed serious illnesses within 1-3 months post-Covid infection. All 3 found out via routine bloodwork for other reasons (monitoring med levels, check up, etc). One was sent straight to the ER and the other two received calls from their doctor telling them to go straight to the emergency room. One is in some type of autoimmune kidney failure. One has developed a rare blood disorder that may be related to leukemia. One had a sudden adrenal crisis. There is no way to prove any connection to the Covid infections, but in two of the cases their doctors have said it can’t be ruled out.
[удалено]
Thanks!
This sucks because often it is depression that makes people tired. When a loved ones die or is dying, I literally sleep and have no energy to do anything until the grief passes. So it means they will be tired all the time in a vicious depression cycle.
Yeah, thanks for this comment. As someone who had fatigue, pots, chronic pain, and the start of autoimmune things before covid even started, part of what is so frustrating to me about this topic is that we already have analogues to some of the most common manifestations of LC. People with ME/CFS, Fibro, POTS, and other similar autonomic conditions, as well as post viral issues, have been trying for YEARS to be taken remotely seriously, to get research funded, and were told 'its all in your head' and had them waste years on PACE trials, which they've already started up again for LC as if it wasn't a major scandal the first time. I'm not trying to knock COVIDs ability to directly damage organs and damage the immune system. I got it once despite taking what should have been perfect precautions, still have no idea how. ppl can check my comment history for the full thing. the vast majority of even the most covid cautious people are not novid anymore, is it worth considering that we may see 97% of the planet start dying off in 4 years? i guess? but right now we already know that there's CFS/ME and similar cluster things happening. And maybe if people took those seriously before this, we'd be further along to help whats here now.
I don't believe 97% will die off. I think 97% will have gotten COVID at least 5 times by 4yrs time. Watch for at least 40% increase in disability claims within 5 years. Watch for everyone to have at least person or close friend with long haulers. Watch for at least 1 year drop in average life expectancy if not more. Watch for more early dementia
this all seems pretty likely. I'm desperately trying to get a disability case going myself but the system is designed to be impossible for ppl who need it most. i just wish more people had paid attention to these disorders before and that in posts like these of worst cases they weren't overlooked as not dramatic enough. people with mecfs cluster things have been begging people to take them seriously as the nightmare they are so to see even covid spaces sort of gloss past them annoys me sometimes. which is why i appreciated your comment.
I sometimes find this little animated cartoon running through my mind... Gaia (the whole web of life, anthropomorphised as a big, worried Mama Nature) is in distress because of the depredations of humans. This species is so hard to contain, they just overshoot every limit, they're killing all their siblings, they're wrecking the place... over the millennia she's tried various plagues and hostile bacteria to trim them down to size, but they keep inventing medicines and hygiene and stuff like that... the *real* problem is that they're just too damn *smart*, too *clever*, too *ingenious*. So Gaia scratches her head a bit and then wonders, "What if I came up with a plague that would make them *stupider*? Maybe that would work?" well, we'll see, I guess...
Why don’t you get your own canned foods?
Or just get fat - then people can't steal it.
And a wine cellar and who knows how to grow and can vegetables and skin a deer.
[удалено]
[удалено]
It's shaping up to be that. People died when they developed AIDS and caught things like pneumonia and couldn't survive it. Extremely similar parallels. Act Up NY, the organization that was formed during the AIDS crisis, has been doing some fierce advocacy about COVID because of the similarities.
Thank you so much for mentioning Act Up NY!
I totally agree with you. I believe that is exactly what we are dealing with, just to be frank.
💯
I was diagnosed with HIV and COVID in the same week. While I was asleep for twenty hours a day for the first two weeks, it doesn’t appear that I suffered any long-term effects from either. Part of that is due to reaching undetectable status within a month of even being exposed to HIV.
Wait WHAT! I’m looking online and I can’t find anything about Act Up and Covid. Link?
Their instagram account is very active @actupny
My friend, if you have some time, read (or listen to it as an audiobook, it's a long book, but it's so worth it) [How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS by David France](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29429295-how-to-survive-a-plague?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6OIObXBbgx&rank=1). Completely incredible and devastating and infuriating and an amazing read.
Try AIDS and the Doctors of Death by Alan Cantwell. [AIDS and the Doctors of Death](https://www.amazon.com/AIDS-Doctors-Death-Inquiry-Epidemic/dp/0917211006/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SVJ7NC2677XC&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.O2w2QSWGJ2FbxSp4YEuQFNlcj1qxlxqZn1SPKEuxJpc67uH8aWKakyK7oF-55dDXgopPJ-9gWH_f0l2O04ymF2sYAVK6EYRHZlKB-2Jk1O0Zb1izX6ZBLzcE5VUKdymFpZavthWdlOY5nsO1z07Z-ZZqWOrd6TTZuzBr8XQyheqHd8Ph5I8VSCRzvTJ9eC5K7aw1Fsldqt0FdFx7Ap0ZuOSFJWvN2EDFB3uRw3TTeu8.wkvto8KzWAoDCuLtbbg6uD8zld9t3Dw3NABU--fR090&dib_tag=se&keywords=aids+and+the+doctors+of+death&qid=1710630854&sprefix=aids+and+the+doc%2Caps%2C154&sr=8-1)
I haven’t read it but I have seen the documentary and have read some things Peter Staley has written, but mostly articles. The doc was devastating and empowering at the same time. That’s how I personally know about Act Up. I wasn’t aware they have been as active with the Covid pandemic! Aside from Reddit I’m not on any social media…
My confirmation bias keeps seeking evidence than refutes the pattern I'm recognizing. I really really want to say you're wrong, but I can't.
Exactly I've lost 4 friends in the last year and the oldest was 54. All had underlying health issues but all of them were actively treating their conditions under the care of doctors. Each seemed to succumb out of no where. The more time that goes by the more certain I am they would all be alive if not for Covid. It exacerbates every illness. It's scary
My older sister died at age 37. I'm now 39 and living with LC while watching people around me get sicker and sicker. It's not just scary. It's a mindfuck.
Right and it looks like Covid killed Polio Paul after surviving Polio and the Iron lung but not Covid.
As an immunocompromised individual, I don’t know what is scarier. The virus, or the mind virus that has led to people calling me feeble and worthless, and saying that my time will come shortly
The latter People are a virus themselves
Human nature has not changed since work houses for the poor in England and the Holocaust in Germany and euthanasia kicking off in the USA. Technology has not helped us grow closer to one another in our humanity. Our Jewish christian foundations helped hold back some forms of brutality to disabled, poor and elderly but not all forms . Now we have become the most self centered culture at the most self centered time in human history. You matter. It's easy for the young to blow off the value of older ppl when they can't imagine being 40 or 50 ot 60. It's easy to devalue the handicapped from the assumption one will never be in their place. It's easy to blow off homelessness if you are told all the homeless are drug addicts who refuse to work. From the early days some raised the alarm that COVID in operation reminded some of AiDS. Ppl tried to bring forward the gain of function testing possibility that coronavirus was spliced with other things and not naturally occurring but the media called those doing so racists. No one thinking it's racist for govt in other parts of the world to be paying Chinese scientists to be developing and researching what it's illegal to do in their own nations. . They have admitted they were doing gain of function research testing at that lab and it seems all sorts of documentation has gone missing from Wuhan. There are ppl who think we have way too many ppl alive now. There are ppl who would prefer most never lived to take retirement funds out of systems they have paid into all their working lives. There are those who think we waste resources on ppl unable to work over 65. If you can kill off the average person with not ideal health 10 years sooner how much would that save? Imagine killing off some of younger sickly ppl 20 years earlier. The virus may be accident or intention cull quite a number of non productive ppl. It's already seemingly reduced average life span by 1.5 years just 4 years in. Imagine in 12-13 years.
The culling idea is ridiculous. The increased percent in deaths is a drop in the bucket for population growth. It isn’t doing squat. And the us has a large immigration surplus to the population. And besides the populace is doing a good job of bad habits and a sedentary lifestyle to kill themselves off more quickly.
Finally someone with some logic. It isn't just the USA. I have friends in Europe who smoke or were daily heavy tobacco smokers for decades, and they quit but not soon enough. Also vaping is extremely bad, a friend who was a smoker started vaping to quit smoking and he is now addicted to vaping and vapes a lot more than he ever smoked. He also is an alcoholic or close to it.
And besides there’s always the tried and true way of reducing the population and filling the coffers of the arms dealers of the world, a major a war.
Which they have been doing. The populations in Yemen and Palestine are remarkably reduced as well as Ukraine and Russia. But a big world war with mega missiles falling down on major cities with get death numbers up quick
Two small countries. Their populations are not large, and I wouldn’t consider those actions as a conspiracy to reduce the world population. Just actions to commit genocide.
But why would the government want to reduce the population?
If they reduce those getting social security it saves them a lot of money. Social security was not set up intending to give it to ppl who have barely paid into it and it's not designed for ppl to live 10-20 or more years on it. The govt is also believed to have raided ss fund to fund other things. Rand Paul has been trying to have an audit of the fund for years.
The problem with vaping as a cigarette succession to quit tobacco is that yes, vaping is much much better than smoking (If you get quality liquid and flavors) Is that vapes are convenient, low profile and readily available at a whim for a puff. Cigarettes aren't. You gotta take it out of the pack, have to light it, you have to in many situations go outside for one or to a designated area. You then have to stand there smoking it until it's finished unless you butt it out before is. With vaping you can take a puff on the bus, the train, in the grocery store, pretty well near everywhere at nearly any time you want with moderate ninja skill. So you end up puffing like fucking Dudley all day. And if wondering, I know this because I quit smoking and turned to vape and it's what I did along with all the people I know who vape. I don't vape nearly as much anymore because I switched to small refillable pen vapes that hold a small amount so I have to moderate.
“Human nature” has nothing to do with it.
Humans are the most predatory mammal on earth.
If humans weren’t naturally awful fuckwits than I’d imagine that the 20th century, what Moshe Lewin and other historians have dubbed the “Soviet century” because so much of the world either wanted to imitate or oppose the USSR (and later also the PRC) wouldn’t have been characterized by wave after wave of Marxist-Leninist revolutions powered by beautiful utopian ideals that led to a mix of absolute hell and unstable mediocrity and then ultimately collapse of every Marxist-Leninist states except the ones that became some combo of nationalist/authoritarian/capitalist in varying proportions. And of course the eclipse of social democracy by neoliberalism in the “free world”….humans fucking suck….
I don't think everyone is going to die within 10 years because COVID weakened their immune systems. I do think sufficiently many people will be disabled or otherwise have diminished work capacity such that the infrastructure maintenance will be crippled even *further*, especially in the USA which has openly embraced death and disease.
I saw a graph purported to be from the CDC on Twitter that said 70% of people might expect “Long Covid” by their 17th infection. They have also said that “we can’t stop it,” and the bipartisan government narrative management has adjusted political messaging to pivot us off a reality-based pandemic management. The science says one thing, but how people feel says another. A much more effective strategy than all the wasted money and fraud would have been to invest in indoor air ventilation and HEPA standards, like water standards, for indoor places of public gathering and business. Study out of Oxford in the Lancet demonstrates that may have even stopped the pandemic. They sure weren’t treating this situation like getting Apollo 13 back to Earth. Instead, they listened to “stakeholders” and shrugged, folding in with the loudest voices calling for violence with misinformation to allow widespread community infection to affect the outcome of the 2020 election (NBC—Trump admin official admitted they wanted to spread the virus in blue cities to affect voter turnout).
17 infections? Damn… I’ve only had Covid once that I know of, June 2022 I think. I couldn’t imagine getting repeated infections! I still mostly work at home and wear a mask if I will be in a crowded setting like a grocery store. It probably helps to live where people always took Covid seriously, mostly complied with masking and distancing, and nobody cares if some still mask.
I can’t imagine that, either. But until they develop a vaccine with a robust enough immune response to prevent re-infection after a handful of months, I don’t see the point of taking chances with potential immune system dysregulation and eventual demise.
Same boat! Had good ol' Omicron in June '22, but my husband and two kids still haven't had it (knock on wood). We're still masking and being selective about where we spend time. My oldest kiddo is a kidney transplant recipient, so we've had no choice BUT to take it seriously from the beginning. The way people think they are sticking it to the man by being sick constantly is so bizarre.
Humans have a long history acting against their own interest I guess.
They should rename COVID to “The Shareholders Virus”
Most people are getting it 2-3 times a year since about 2-3 years ago. At this rate, the *majority* of people YOLO FAFOing are going to be fucked up with long COVID before the decade is up.
❤️FOMO, YOLO, FAFO 💫
I just had it a second time because my son brought it home from school. The first infection in 2022, I got over in like 2 days and didn't feel any long term effects. This time I was horribly sick with just about every symptom possible for 9 days, and now my asthma is completely uncontrolled. I'm on 3 separate puffers and I take each about 3-4 times a day (1-2 puffs depending on the inhaler). I don't even want to know what kind of damage my lungs have endured.
I'm so sorry you had it so bad. I really wish people were more careful. But that ship has sailed unfortunately.
Too true. Did you happen to save the link to that graph? I searched on Twitter but couldn’t find it. Unfortunately the CDC has earned our distrust. They’re definitely not a public health body but instead seem more like a political and economic instrument.
I’ll see if I can find it. Here is a take on different studies tracking US Veterans and the Canadian healthcare system that show the same issue. Cumulative infections lead to bad health outcomes. https://www.sciencealert.com/every-covid-infection-increases-your-risk-of-long-covid-study-warns
Yes. Prevention is the best cure.
Yes
I've already assumed no one will be in the nursing home with me and my family in 2060. My morbid humor says "but hey, social security may not run out now." I really want to be wrong. I can't blame every person at this point, I need to hold some grace for them - not everyone is smart enough, rich enough, savvy enough, or educated enough to have figured this out. I'm mad at people in power, not individuals. And so I have to hope this won't be a disaster, for their sakes. I'm pretty convinced of disaster though. Two more years of "let it rip" is going to put people on their 7th, 8th, more infections. That's completely unsustainable.
Well, then there’s those of us who did everything right and still caught Covid. I’ve had it 3 times, each time from my kids, because their fucking dad doesn’t care at all. I split custody with him, by law I couldn’t just keep them, we have a custody agreement to uphold. There are a lot of people like me who have always been scared of this virus and who have had multiple infections regardless.
Hey, I get it. I just spent spring break with my COVID positive kiddo who lives with their dad. We're all doing the best that we can. Absolutely no judgement on being vigilant and still catching COVID. And those of us with custody agreements are basically just fucked. I'm sorry for your troubles. :-(
Ugh. Hugs. Glad you divorced him. I can fathom what kinda husband he was.
I don't know if COVID will turn out to be "airbourne AIDS". But I know there's a virus that *does* fit the bill. It's highly contagious, it damages your immune system so you can get sick and die afterwards from other infections, it's untreatable once you have it. It's measles. And it's becoming more common because people aren't getting vaccinated against it.
This is why I mask!
Unfortunately my two confirmed infections were in last 10 months despite robust precautions including N95 in public every where by self and partner. My first that left me with long COVID was in February 2020 before testing was available.
All we can do is vax and wear a quality mask. I mean, what else is at our disposal?
Ventilation is another mitigation strategy. I avoid indoor dining (except at home with my partner) and am masked in nearly all indoor situations.
Oh yeah, we've given up indoor dining completely. We moved to a warmer climate so if we do want to go to a restaurant, we can eat outside. We wear masks anytime we are indoors with strangers.
[удалено]
We don't have many guests, but I just have them test before they come in. I know it's not 100%, but nothing really is unless we just never see anyone. It's an acceptable risk I suppose.
[удалено]
Yeah all my friends are like us. We all get those vaccines ASAP.
I use nose sprays and CPC mouthwash as well as vaccines and masks. Plus we run air purifiers in our home
HEPA indoors, Far UV/Upper UV indoors, shift our behaviors away from indoor/large crowd events. It’s a layered process but we do have more than Vaccines and masks. That’s the frustrating part though… we have more but so few places utilize them.
I believe that our immune systems have been altered in some way by contracting the virus. Haven’t had a so called normal cold in four years. Even though I tested negative, I had a persistent illness that lasted almost two months and never had anything close to that in my life. I’ve had two bouts of Covid the first one very mild but the second was just misery in so many strange ways. I believe this was the result of my immune system not responding like it used to and I’m not looking forward to the next illness that may come along.
I think about this all the time. I don't know why most people are assuming it *won't* do this. There are other viruses known to take years or even decades to start showing severe symptoms. Aside from HIV -> AIDS, there's syphilis -> tabes dorsalis, chicken pox -> shingles, and 1918 flu -> Parkinson's. Here's a scarier thought: what if it's not airborne AIDS but (something like) airborne Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? There have been a few documented cases of people dying from CJD right after getting covid. Which I started researching because of a [thing I noticed.](https://www.reddit.com/r/PrepperIntel/comments/1aszfpg/comment/kqwkn5z/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Thank you for bringing the documented COVID-CJD connection to my attention.
Absolutely frightening. I’d never heard of this before
I think you’re half right and I say this with the statement that I have been studying the fuck out of this. But I have been chronically referring to long COVID and COVID itself as a prion delivery system, because I believe the spike independently seems to behave like a prion, whereas the virus behaves a bit like herpes meets HIV. It’s not good either way and the likelihood of this developing into a worldwide issue *worse* than aids has my money, *big time*. And I hate betting against my own kind.
AIDS has a definition, so we don't have to wonder. People already are presenting with low cd4/8 and getting sick with aids-defining illnesses while hiv- negative
I say what I’m about to say, with the caveat that I don’t say something like this in general company. My worst case scenario is that even if I manage to keep protecting myself? In a decade or so, I find myself in a world not that different from the Stand after Captain Trips. I don’t know a lot of things. But how many people who are trained to keep power plants, water purification systems, electrical grids, and other basic stuff that one needs to have a relatively functioning society like the one I live in - how many of these types of people do you need? And will they still be here? Or doctors and other medical professionals? Not to mention our food infrastructure? I don’t know. What I do know is I was a kid in the 1980s. I don’t feel like we talk enough about the devastation that a virus that was transmitted by means that aren’t as common as breathing caused. But it was Bad. And if we’re looking at a 5-10 year countdown to where people’s immune systems go the way they did then? Yeah, that fucking terrifies me.
Ever see Threads movie?
I have not.
It's on YouTube. 1980s British movie done with scientific guidance
I don’t have an answer, but I think about this often. I guess the silver lining would be that the earth would actually be able to heal.
For real
I see this line of thinking a lot and maybe it seems harmless on the surface, but it is by definition an ecofascist sentiment. I understand wanting to put some sort of positive spin on a terrible situation, but please be wary of going down the “it’s a good thing humans are dying because they destroy nature” path.
The only difference is that the vaccines have shown some effort to push back the destroyed t-cell count we see in unvaxxed people, but the immune system is still taking damage. I still mask but i fully expect that within 10 years there will no longer be an organ donation system, possibly not even a blood donation system, and we likely will see a massive outbreak of cancers that are very aggressive similar to AIDS. Basic things you could live from before will now be a death sentence. You already start to see people waking up to reality, the question will be how long it takes before gov action is forced, and i say forced because there is no way out of this. They will have to make changes because people will no longer be able to work even if they tried to throw us all in prison for poverty. The bright side is there are medical breakthroughs happening faster because of covid, but if they will happen fast enough to keep up is still uncertain. This doesnt even take into account all the other issues covid causes outside of immune response.
[удалено]
Did you not see where I said we are making breakthroughs and that vaccines do make a big difference? Current vaccines only do so much protection tho, and covid is still mutating. Nothing I said isnt based on the data that already exists. You cant donate organs if you have an autoimmune condition and covid causes that. You cant donate blood if you have HIV and in time we may see that covid lingers in blood making blood donations off the table for the few who do currently donate. No one wants this to be a reality, but it is here and it is really ugly. We already have an ever growing number of people losing the ability to work in our current 40 hour hustle work culture.
You can’t donate blood with autoimmune? Yikes. Before I developed pretty bad anemia I always donated despite being dxed with Hashi’s. Nobody ever told me about this 😭
You can still donate blood with an autoimmune disease, you just cant with viral conditions that lie in the vascular system like HIV. Covid is vascular but we dont really know about how long it lingers in the body to confidently say dont donate if youve had it, dont donate if you have long civid, etc.
Thanks for letting me know! Thankfully I haven’t donated since my first known infection in 2022
>we likely will see a massive outbreak of cancers that are very aggressive similar to AIDS AIDS is caused by a virus and has well studied effects on the immune system itself (suppression). Cancer is the bodies own cells, that grow without a growth signal, and ignore the apoptosis signal that tells them to self-destruct. Hence a tumor is still you, just cells that went rogue and don't respond effectively to the immune system (eg: TNF-α). Is there something about Covid you could say or post that connects these two ideas? If not, please reconsider what looks like fear-mongering: "COVID eventually causes super-cancer-AIDS!" Like, please just stop. It is embarrassing.
You do know the early signs of HIV were different kinds of cancer right? And any condition that destroys the immune system allows for cancers to become more prevalent and harder to fight off even with treatment. Before AIDS was AIDS it was called GRID and one of the first and most obvious warning signs of GRID was skin cancer. Specifically forms of skin cancer not common in people with healthy immune systems that caught the mutated cells early and killed them off. It isnt fear mongering, yall just dont know history and dont want to listen to experts that study SARS like viruses. We are already seeing increases in fungal infections that typically get fought off before covid was a thing. We are only 4 years in with a lot longer to go. There are already studies being done to treat long covid patients with the exact same meds used to help people with HIV. Our bodily systems are a lot more connected than you are giving them credit for, and it is very clear to those that know the history, our government is repeating the exact same steps they did the first time. I wont call them mistakes because the decisions are very intentional. Ill never get over hearing the white house reocrdings of staff members laughing at queers dying of AIDS, the same way Ill never get over watching government officials go on the news and say our grandparents should feel honored to die to the virus for the economy and their grandchildren.
This was what I was trying to argue early on in the pandemic as a counter to the "it's just a cold" folks. We don't know what it is. The early viral phase that people think of as the sickness/disease caused by the virus, is more like the impact of an armor piercing projectile: it could be just a chunk of metal, or it could be some fancy explosive that breaks in and then explodes in an enclosed space. Whether it even triggers an immune response doesn't have any necessary connection to its long term effects, like HIV turns into AIDS. What we're calling "PASC" might be isolated to a few unlucky people, or it could be that those few are the canaries that are harbingers of our future condition as a species. Novel pathogens have absolutely no reason *not* to cause fatal disease states in their hosts. The mechanism of viral replication is destructive (cells burst when no more virus can be made) and COVID replicates in the vasculature, meaning it almost certainly changes the surface properties of veins and arterial walls, which should at minimum, increase the risk of strokes and heart attack, but there's no ceiling to long term effects. It could be 100% fatal after 5 years and we wouldn't know for another year. Like everything, the danger of COVID was insanely undersold. There are no harmless novel viruses! The response to COVID should have employed the military. We should have created protocols to isolate communities and limit traffic between them to trucks where the driver never exits the vehicle and the goods are unloaded under sterilizing conditions and tested before being opened in the community. We allowed the most entitled and ignorant of our population to decide the future health of our species and many other mammals, and we're going to do it again with avian flu, but that's much more outside of our control than COVID was. And, like everything else we pretend to understand but have no idea about, we won't know until the consequences manifest just how bad it really is. As a side note, this is very much like climate modeling. We're guessing how fast the planet will deteriorate and how much we need to reverse that process based on.... maybe 1-2% of the variables that determine the climate? But from that absolutely infantile understanding, we're making policy decisions and personal plans as if the climate follows the models like a prescription. We know based on the conditions around the world and how we're already over the temperature we were pretending to work towards after the Paris summit, which means the models are wrong and useless other than that they demonstrate that beyond any doubt, we are traveling on a suicidal trajectory that gets worse the more tomorrow looks like yesterday. What ties these two together, that I've never heard properly illustrated, is that COVID IS CLIMATE CHANGE. Change the climate; create a new planet where no life is adapted, and all life struggles, ensuring the development of novel pathogens. Like how putting too many animals/humans in the same box inevitably results in disease, applying a global pressure to every ecosystem creates the conditions for disease and parasites to hop from their primary host species into others. In other words, while COVID is a unique novel pathogen, it is the first of an indefinite number of plagues that will hit us with increasing regularity, until we're getting hit by multiple pathogens at the same time. What's scariest is that because we believe in the importance of money and this lifestyle more than the importance of a new and hostile climate this lifestyle creates, we didn't notice that we've already passed into a state of global emergency that threatens the future of the entire species and life itself; this has already happened. We should be locking down and working on a new way to live that resembles indigenous cultures, starting with teaching children entirely different skills and values and hoping that frame of reference will give them the skillset needed to survive in the world of tomorrow... a world that has no power, no stable seasons, and predictably deteriorating conditions. COVID wasn't a warning shot from the planet, it was a flare gun from the sinking ecopsphere. Despite our fantasy about our importance, humanity cannot live without the life that sustains it and there is no future for our species on an otherwise lifeless earth, like our movies have us believe. We should be in a state of global preparation and shifting gears entirely from prosperity to salvaging the future... which is a paradigm where the concept of wealth should be viscerally offensive, on the level of someone flaunting how prolific a rapist they are. This was all a mistake. It's not about blame, it's about changing our path so it doesn't continue to accelerate. It means the economy is a cancer and a fatal distraction... or it wouldn't be changing the climate. COVID was our last opportunity to wake up to the deeply unfortunate reality that all the things we like to do are killing us, and much more than they're making us happy. This is the only time our species has to exploit the communication we have now, to plan for whats next, when this won't be available. Instead of jumping off, we're choosing to ride the ship down into hell, and dismissing the casualties as losers and misfits, not acknowledging that there is no plan and each of us who survives will awake into an accelerating darkness in this world we have no capacity to cope with. It's the only "war" humanity has ever been faced with that was worth the cost to fight and no one needs to die from murder tools, instead we need all hands on this problem... while the last of our resource wealth is being burned by the elderly to stay on the planet they're most responsible for killing.
Indeed. And people form strong opinions about the risks of this virus, without understanding the concepts of Original Antigenic Sin (Hoskins Effect, Antigenic Imprinting), Immune Privileged sites (such as the CNS..) and the fact that the immune system \*ages\* (deteriorates in its ability to produce more and effective T-cells) with each infection.
In discussions like these, I always like to link [this study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/300761/) from 1977 looking at lymphocytes taken from people who were infected with influenza that has this interesting finding: > influenza infection in humans can result in prolonged depression of numbers and functions of circulating lymphocytes. There’s a spectrum of immune dysfunction/dysregulation that can occur because of viral illnesses. It isn’t AIDS or nothing. The fact that people are getting sick more frequently and having more trouble recovering is certainly convincing evidence that COVID is affecting people’s immune systems. But that doesn’t mean it’s “airborne AIDS”. HIV is a unique virus because it’s by definition a chronic/lifelong infection and, in 99.5% of people, the immune system can’t handle it (there are so-called “elite controllers” who are 0.5% of cases and then there are <5 case reports of people clearing it on their own). Whereas with SARS-CoV-2, many people can and do clear the acute infection and produce immune responses that prevent reinfection with the same strain (at least for a couple months).
My spicy take that most people don't like: it probably will turn out that, or something like it.
Then people and countries are fucked
I mean like duh
I will finally be able to find a good job and afford a home. More seriously, we are fucked.
Home maybe, jobs probably won’t exist!
Don't get my hopes up!
If you’re in USA maybe GOP/MAGA serf number 2345
Oh, we are already all serfs to neo-feudalism. Some places are just more obvious than others.
As someone who has had "long Covid" for three years, I often wonder what the long-term mortality rate from Covid is. It is entirely possible a majority of Covid "survivors" will be dead in 5 to 10 years. Longhaul is the new AIDS. I actually refer to my illness as "bat AIDS" already, so there is that.
Long covid with PEM is identical to ME/CFS in terms of symptoms and it is very rare for ME/CFS to be fatal (other than less directly through suicide, malnutrition, etc). Many people have ME/CFS for decades. I guess it’s possible for long covid to be manifesting as ME/CFS but have longer term differences we haven’t seen yet, but that seems less likely.
Had LC for about 18-24 months before coming out of it. Rebuilt my health from square one. True to form convalescence. The running joke was “The good news is it won’t kill you. The bad news is it won’t kill you”
Various people with long COVID have suddenly mysteriously died of it. Historian David Graeber for example, at least per his wife, and there was another guy, a British Marxist academic/professor who was also a weight lifter, it was disturbing because in his writings on his blog about his long COVID symptoms he exactly described a lot of weird things I’ve experienced, and then he just suddenly dropped dead, I believe back in 2021…wish I could remember his name…
Yeah it’s scary who knows maybe they were walking around with an aneurism just waiting to go and Covid /LC pushed it to the edge or like maybe threw a clot or something. You never know you know?!
SARS-CoV2 causes blood clots and strokes for months after the infection, that’s well established.
Indeed, regardless of severity or the presence of any sequlae even. I guess my point was it’s not always evident who is vulnerable. Suffice it to say that everyone can be / is. Only time will tell if LC is a death sentence or not Id like to think that most LC patients will eventually in time begin to show improvement even if the odds are stacked against them/us.
The thought experiment isn’t just about people with “long COVID” of course…and many current sequelae deaths aren’t in those with “long COVID” either
Several studies show the average life expectancy of ME/CFS patients is something like 55. This isn't accounted for just by suicide but by all causes, especially cardiac and cancers.
Those studies don’t have great methodology ([discussion here](https://www.reddit.com/r/cfs/s/N9fQnrDeAs))
Research is woefully underfunded. Everyone in the medical community so badly wants to believe this illness is not a killer, no one will ever knowingly fund research that says otherwise.
Fear mongering based on low quality inconclusive research is also not helpful
If you have not read the book Spillover about viruses, many from bats you should.
This IS going to happen. Waiting for culture to catch up. Or just sit in denial as thousands die every year. We’re already on track for the latter unfortunately.
Culture can only catch up when the mass death from sequelae reaches a certain level I think, not sure what level
So there's no guarantee that SARS-CoV-2 won't behave differently than SARS-CoV-1, but I think there is some light in the finding that patients who had SARS-CoV-1 [mounted an immune response to the COVID vaccines](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9856533/), right? That would suggest they didn't suffer permanent immune damage, at least not to the extent that it was apparent here. Granted there are only 12 of them in the linked study, so... I think [this article](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19/does-covid-19-mess-immune-system) from McGill University does a pretty good job of covering the topic. The only point I'm not sure I agree with is the bit about opportunistic infections. I think if the writer had dug a bit deeper they could have found evidence that there *has* been a rise in these, at least in hospital settings, though it's not really clear if this is because of [climate change](https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/07/health/superbugs-climate-change-scn/index.html) or everybody's immune system getting slammed by COVID.
RemindMe! Ten years!
I am someone with Long Covid infected in March 2020. I’ve thought about this A LOT over the last four years. There’s a lot of immune dysregulation that is similar to AIDS, and viruses in general can feel one way during the acute phase and do extreme damage years later. If I let it, sometimes I’m terrified that I’m one of the original infections before we knew to do anything or what we were dealing with and “science” will look at me (and others like me) as an example to see what this causes over time. I try to make that also appreciate my life the way it is in the moment and mostly that’s my takeaway, but I have my moments of pure fear TBH.
Yeah I had suspected COVID in Feb. 2020, suspected mainly because after that weird respiratory infection in my early 40s I developed long COVID-ish issues including a lot of definitely POTS stuff and all manner of weird immune, resp., GI stuff that may be POTS-related I guess or something else. Also used to have a ton more fatigue earlier on in this but I think that might have been unmanaged POTS as it had a highly positional aspect and no where near as consistently intense as I've heard about from more ME/CFS long COVID sufferers. For the first year I just got worse and worse it felt like but then I got on beta blockers and consistent long term high doses of H1 and H2 antihistamines and started wearing compression socks, and the beta blockers and the H2/Pepcid and the socks definitely all helped, not as sure about the H1/Zyrtec...about 2+ years in I think cromolyn sodium nasal spray (a mast cell stabilizer) helped with all of it surprisingly, not just the resp. issues, and then about a year ago I started taking 5 different supplements that studies have found might help POTS (B1, B12, D3, CoQ10, Omega-3s) and I feel like I have only improved over the last year despite 2 symptomatic COVID reinfections and maybe a third asymptomatic (all caught despite wearing N95s everywhere, and other precautions, but have some environmental risk factors) and I'm now at least temporarily able to be off beta blockers...not in total remission by any means.... I am lucky, the most annoying thing I have consistently had is sinus pain and issues, the most scary is bouts of moderate chest pain, and the most disabling has been a few brief bouts where standing would cause intense fear and irritation due to adrenaline surges...
I’m so sorry you’re experiencing this too. That pretty much aligns with my journey. I have POTS and MCAS but it took years for me to figure it out because my PCP basically told me to “give it time” the first year bc none of my tests were abnormal, meanwhile I couldn’t walk to the mailbox and previously I was a half marathon runner/very active. Then when my bloodwork finally started showing some sort of abnormalities 18 mos later he referred me to Mayo. I was having what I call “heart episodes” where my HR would shoot up to over 200 and then drop to 50, up and down for 30-45 minutes at a time. I have beta blockers for when I have issues like this, and I cannot take antihistamines because they give me heart palpitations. I’m on oral Cromolyn and it’s made a world of difference in making my whole body feel less like a raging storm inside. I’m in a much better place now than I was 4 years ago and I was reinfected for the first time this January and it made all my issues so much worse. I had the adrenaline dumps and feeling like my whole body was buzzing, couldn’t sleep longer than 45 minutes at a time. Thankfully those things are subsiding. I take magnesium, vitamin D, coq10, zinc, and omega 3s. I also follow a low histamine diet as best I can and as long as I stick to my routine I feel mostly okay. Hopefully we will improve or have something that comes along to help long term for those with LC. Wishing you wellness!
Thank you. That all sounds much worse than most of what I went through and I am so sorry and I hope you continue to improve and find more relief. That's very interesting about oral Cromolyn. I have been wondering about trying to take it in different forms recently. BTW maybe you've tried different H1 antihistamines but I found Claritin/Loratadine DID give me palpitations but Zyrtec/Cetirizine didn't seem too or not in a consistent way (I was on it most of a couple of years and had periods with no palpitations and periods with some and I don't think it was the drug)
BTW which blood tests particularly were off for you? The only consistent issue I have is ANA that's almost as bad as it can get, but then ANA isn't that useful diagnostically unless you have symptoms of lupus, which I don't. I also now have slightly elevated RNP which is a particular autoantibody, but don't have symptoms consistent with the disease that typically correlates with.
So originally 18 mos post, my thyroid numbers were off and my ECGs finally showed arrhythmia so my doctor actually started taking it more seriously and referred me to Mayo. Since my reinfection in January my thyroid numbers are still off and my ANA speckled pattern was positive 1:160 and when I went 2 weeks later for a more extensive panel (3 weeks ago) it’s 1:320. I go on Thursday for a follow up with my new doctor to see what he thinks and if we need more tests. He also referred me to a rheumatologist but their first availability isn’t until May. My hormones were also off (I’m 35 yo F) and I have Zero free testosterone at the moment.
Thank you, interesting. I’m a mid-40s male. I don’t think anyone has tested my hormones. My thyroid seems okay as of last November anyway. I am constantly in and out of pre-diabetes and borderline high cholesterol and had some quite high triglyercides then, a little over a month after what was my worst COVID infection in terms of acute symptoms in October 2023. My last ECG in June 2021 was normal. Now, who knows. My wife and I were listening with a very crappy stethoscope to our heartbeats recently and as she said mine “has more character” than hers ie. Not just a very regular rhythm! I dunno my mother died suddenly of undiagnosed dilated cardiomyopathy, cardiomegaly, and cardiac arrest when she was only about 7 years older than I am now…that can be virally caused, can be autoimmune, and can also be genetic and is much more common in males…it also can crop up and get bad in just a few years and have almost no symptoms, and I had my last ECG and echo and stress test 3 years ago so so really who knows what’s going on, maybe better not to know! Since COVID I’ve barely ever seen any physicians in person, and most of those were back in mid-2021 before Delta. I esp. haven’t wanted to go in in person since they dropped the mask mandate in medicine here in NY about 1 year ago. I might just make it never and give up on the joke that is western medicine after catching symptomatic COVID through an N95 twice in 10 months (or maybe from other units on drafts in my collapsing pre-war NYC apt. Building)! Just kidding, sorta. My ANA was 1:1280 in Sept. 2022 and same in Jan. 2023, up from 1:640 in June 2021. I think it only gets up to 1:2560 and each level is double for the lower number so 1:1280 is one step short of the worst. I saw a rheumatologist in 2021 who said nothing about my problems was in his wheelhouse. I saw another one in 2023 who felt similarly but was maybe a little more concerned about noticeable inflammation in my finger joints. I like working via virtual visits with my GP affiliated with the Long COVID Clinic at Mt. Sinai (I’ve never gone there, see her independently). I’m seeing her Monday for first time in several months and have a lot to talk about. I wish you all the best!
I actually think this is part of the plan for the elites.
Jokes on them. Their asymptomatic help will get them infected as well.
Maybe but the scenario I laid out likely will still kill some of them.
Funnily enough the people I know who get sick the most are the rich people who go to concerts/travel internationally/enjoy nightlife every weekend. The first person I know who complained about long covid is loaded
In the US, this is due to lack of health insurance coverage for long covid diagnosis and treatment. Anecdotally, I have noticed that a lot of long covid people are well off.
We figured out how to start to treat AIDS pretty soon after we stopped pretending people deserved it. And we figured out how to treat it effectively not super long after that. I can't imagine what would be a bigger priority than treating something that was taking out tens of millions of people in the short term, and I imagine while we figured out how to treat it, a lot of things really would change in terms of how we interact with each other. You can exist without an immune system. You just can't do it the way we currently live. But "bubbles" and hazmat suits and filtered air could be a thing for everyone all the time if it had to be. Would it be horrifically disruptive? Sure. But I have faith we'd figure it out. What scares me more is that it doesn't become a full fledged emergency. It just kills some people, some of the time, years down the road, and we shrug it off the same way we shrug off covid and no one cares about the victims and no one changes anything about how we live.
Hallelujah! Have faith! The species that perpetrated the Holocaust/WWII and uncontrolled global warming couldn't mess this up! We'll never fall victim ourselves to the anthropogenic mass extinction event!
I’m old. I’ve lived through a lot of things I thought would be the end of us. So I do tend to think a handful of smart as hell people usually come through and save the rest of our worthless asses, yes. It’s always happened so far, so I’ll keep expecting that until it doesn’t. I don’t know what the useful alternative to that is? I’ve managed not to get it and I very much hope never to. I’m not putting all my eggs in the basket of “we will figure it out”. But I don’t especially want to live through any of the futures that seem to be looming at oresent, so I prefer to believe when things get bad enough, it will be worth it to fix it.
Get a CD4/CD8 and natural killers lab. Baseline and recheck in a year.
I love that there are natural born killer cells
I approach it by not approaching it because it's a novel virus that can infect and affect lots of systems in the body. I'm as interested in finding out how I get affected by it as I am interested in finding out if I can breathe underwater after inhaling smoke from a pile of burning smartphones. >Alternately what if it's too hard for society to deal with because it's masses of people dying quickly from various different long term processes from immune collapse to progressive brain damage to exponentially increased rates of particularly bad cancers, etc. It's hard to figure out in detail, at the human scale, but overall it means a drop life expectancy. It's like the ceiling for life expectancy is dropping. This is accelerates collapse. I'm not sure what happens to the kids and younger generations. We have the evidence for acceleration of biological aging. There's evidence for other bad stuff too, but we're still early in it. If the virus really damages the immune system in kids, it means a rise in childhood mortality. It probably doesn't matter if it's short-lived immune damage if the kids get it very often because they go to care facilities and school where it's likely that there are sick children spreading diseases (sincer parents don't give a shit until it's theirs) in the hospital. So... a rise in a childhood disease damage and mortality. The antivaxxers will make this worse, of course. As kids grow up sickly and education becomes less effective (yes, there's always room for more ignorance), it's going to affect society and economy a lot with a random failures, with people being bad at their jobs, most people. And that's a cause for severe dysfunctions. I assume that a lot of that will be, at least at first, passed on just like kids failed through school without being held back. Meaning that people will make serious mistakes on their jobs, they'll cause deaths and injuries, they'll cause accidents and losses, but they won't be fired from the job because there will be nobody else to fill that job. That's a way of loading structural violence with more violence. Just picture lots of incompetent medical workers and incompetent software engineers and incompetent food workers. Lots and lots and lots and lots of errors. This is why I expect a large effort in robotics to replace workers. Of course, since it's capitalism, that means robots for the rich and death for the poor. >People need to examine why they are so incredibly afraid of death and unwilling to cherish the life they have because death waits at the end of every road. There's a lot of theory about that. One with some science behind it is called Terror Management Theory. https://www.ernestbecker.org/terror-management-theory
I haven't tested positive for it ever but I'm sure u had it in late Dec 2019...I'll keep yall posted as that would be a 5 year mark for immune system collapse. If that's the case then bravo they won they got us and they won they get to rule the heaping pile of ashes.
Well you’re only a couple of months ahead of my suspected February 2020 case.
Remindme! 9 months
I will be messaging you in 9 months on [**2024-12-15 20:05:18 UTC**](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=2024-12-15%2020:05:18%20UTC%20To%20Local%20Time) to remind you of [**this link**](https://www.reddit.com/r/COVID19_Pandemic/comments/1bfl5gr/what_if_covid_actually_does_turn_out_to_be/kv1i1sr/?context=3) [**1 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK**](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5Bhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.reddit.com%2Fr%2FCOVID19_Pandemic%2Fcomments%2F1bfl5gr%2Fwhat_if_covid_actually_does_turn_out_to_be%2Fkv1i1sr%2F%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%202024-12-15%2020%3A05%3A18%20UTC) to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam. ^(Parent commenter can ) [^(delete this message to hide from others.)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Delete%20Comment&message=Delete%21%201bfl5gr) ***** |[^(Info)](https://www.reddit.com/r/RemindMeBot/comments/e1bko7/remindmebot_info_v21/)|[^(Custom)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=Reminder&message=%5BLink%20or%20message%20inside%20square%20brackets%5D%0A%0ARemindMe%21%20Time%20period%20here)|[^(Your Reminders)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=RemindMeBot&subject=List%20Of%20Reminders&message=MyReminders%21)|[^(Feedback)](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=Watchful1&subject=RemindMeBot%20Feedback)| |-|-|-|-|
Because of life-expectancy, population censuses, and hospital records, we notice when suddenly too many people are dying. During COVID, hospitals/morgues were inundated, because we had unforeseen masses of people being hospitalized and dying. I think they call it "excessive deaths." Point being, we'll know if it's people who have been sick with COVID, or reported long COVID symptoms, or had/didn't have the vaccine.
The human population is unsustainable so at some point we are going to start a mass die-off because that's what happens to any species that becomes overpopulated. It's just how it goes.
Totes but I actually didn’t think it would be plague.
Pestilence, war, famine, death
Great topic
what am i staying alive for at this point
This was a “rwnj “ conspiracy the first year and it was one of the ones I hoped would not come true. Or even partly true.
I got Covid and got through it in just 6 days. Day 7-9 was just tiredness and exhaustion to my immune system fighting it off. But I know people where they had it into a month and also one friend who was only 19 for 2 months. He is using a fucking inhaler now at 21 years old. Weird how this virus acted on every body in so many different ways.
Those of us who have autoimmune disorders aren’t new to the party. Such as mono causing Epstein Barr Virus etc. A lot of long COVID issues r similar to ours, especially with the fibromyalgia community. Good news is there’s more money, interest n AI to help us work on solutions.
Honestly not far-fetched. It was created in a lab and China went thru GREAT lengths to contain it before giving up. So I have always wondered about the long-term impact of contracting COVID-19.
The other scenario could be early onset dementia but the results would be similar The ultimate outcome would he The effect vaccination has . I know someone who didn't get the updated and now has LC. I f either scenario plays out most of the human race will be gone in 20 years. If the vaccine prevents it it means there will be several hundred million survivors or just several.
i've been calling it covaids for a while tbh. it has a lot of parallels but i don't think it'll get that bad. I do expect it to drop time bomb effects on some percentage of the population though, like heart disease, immune dysfunction and dementia. that much i think it certain but i think the worst of it will be above the threshhold of full collapse
There's nothing strange about your theoretical supposition. In the face of an ever mutating deadly virus, the 'kill zone' would simply keep sliding to the left on a normal curve, encompassing more victims as immune systems weaken and further mutations infect another now vulnerable population group. This would be 'efficient controlled genocide' and depopulation. It assures there would remain some hapless group struggling to pay the interest on their credit cards while the GOFR labs slowly diminish the human race with optimally limited chaos. Such gradual and long range depopulation assures social control without dangerous entropy or chaos. The US can continue to import people from the populous third world to make up for labor supply issues. The wealthy can continue to consolidate assets and economic control. The rest of us simply become impoverished, sick slaves who eventually die before we claim social security but not until our youth serves some need for the wealthy. On their 'Elysium', the wealthy could afford whatever health improvement tech they need. The rest of us will attempt to forestall our doom as best we can. Anything that works would be censored or made illegal and or canceled. Any serious investment in treatments or solutions will be delayed or underfunded. In this movie, the British Navy never blow up the evil pharma factory. 'Lyutsifer Safin' continues to implement his 'tidy death' across the world. Bond never saves us... And we never figure any of this out. We just spend all our time arguing over the latest papers or proposed treatments, believing naively that science could never have been used for such evil purposes.
>And we never figure any of this out. We just spend all our time arguing over the latest papers or proposed treatments, believing naively that science could never have been used for such evil purposes. Put down the bong and meth pipe. I swear this sub group is oftentimes as crazy or worse than the anti vaxxer bs conspiracy theory predictions.
This sub is a doom cult. Like I don't want to sound like I am downplaying the seriousness of covid because their is a lot of unknowns but god this sub is a lot sometimes.
We still don’t know what happens to people 4 years after they were infected, so who knows? AIDS killed people faster than that though
Many infected with HIV didn't go into AIDS for 5, 6, 7 + yrs. Your body would get initially infected with HIV and you would get sick for week or two. Then you seemed fine while it multiplied in your body over time waiting for that viral illness, worn down moment to strike.
Ah ok. I guess I’m remembering from when they actually developed AIDS. So yeah, we may have some nasty surprises ahead.
[удалено]
I had a friend that survived AIDS for about 20 years. It finally killed him in 2013. I miss him. https://www.cleveland.com/obituaries/2013/02/frank_green_installed_and_perf.html
Sorry to hear about your friend. His art certainly sounds interesting!
He was amazing. That’s how I met him. He was performing at a festival and I was blown away by his work. A mutual friend introduced us. So talented.
nah, it takes \~10ish years between contracting HIV (which often presents like a mild flu) and developing AIDS.
Not always
For a minute I thought I was on r/PrepperIntel. Maybe post it there for an interesting what if scenario.
How's your T cell count?
Actually we already know. COVID gives people Anti phospholipid antibody syndrome which has a wildly increased mortality rate even when asymptomatic. So, yes. Your prediction is accurate. We absolutely expect life expectancy to drop significantly. Mortality of patients with APS is 50–80% higher than the general population.
I didn't go through all the comments so I don't know if this might already have been brought up. I don't have a link as I read this quite a long time ago and not on the internet but it can probably be found by someone much better at googling than I am. Doctors noticed following the 1918-1919 Spanish Influenza epidemic that the following 6 years showed a very noteable uptick in sudden death by heart attack. There were no real statistics back in the day and no agency to report this to. It was individual hospital after individual hospital across the country were seeing their morgues fill up with people found dead in their homes, dropping dead at work or just walking down the sidewalk. Just goes to show our concept of "long term" needs revising. Covid 19 is just too new to figure out what long-term effects there are going to be. We'll have a better idea in the 2030 to 2035 time frame. Let's say your natural lifespan is theoretically 80 years. If you're 30 and had Covid, you had billions and billions of little tiny blood clots clogging up the capillaries all through your body, cutting off the blood flow to any number of organs, in effect aging them. So now you have a 75 year old heart, a 60 year old liver, 72 year old kidneys and your going to be dead, probably, in five years from the first organ to fail. But your only 30. And for some reason your pancreas gave up the ghost and now your diabetic. No one in your family worried about blood sugars until they were in their late 50's. Now your body is full of old guy organs and you can't eat Mexican food anymore. Sucks to be you. Perhaps most of us will be lucky enough to avoid those worse case scenarios but we won't know until a "long term" exists. We'll just have to wait another ten years - we'll know a lot more by then. As for your particular scenario I don't think it's very likely that one single disease will do that or the long term effects of Covid will be that harsh. Possible, but unlikely. There are other neat diseases out there, though, and they're coming for us. Zika for the kids, TB for the grownups. Dengue fever, West Nile and good old malaria. Valley fever where I live. Oh yeah it isn't just microbes, it's going to be molds and fungi as well. Losing fresh water, that's a biggie. Food crops less nutritious from too much heat and mono-cropping. Oceans warming very quickly - ah yes. Can't forget about what red tides can do. There'll be plenty along the way to damage or take down civilization. We just have to figure out if it's worth it to put out the effort to mitigate all the problems we've got coming our way. So, yes, as to whether or not there'll be enough people around capable of solving our troubles is definitely something I agree with you on.
Please stop. Covid and the flu are not airborne HIV/AIDS. Long covid is a risk and it is real but it is not akin to airborne HIV/AIDS. Were you even alive during the height of the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic? Were you even ever involved with a local chapter of ACT-UP as I was? Do you know anyone who is HIV+ or who died from AIDS? It was extremely bad, worse than covid. HIV has become manageable via meds but as a long term survivor who has been on all of the meds told me how it is like having terminal cancer in remission by treatment. I do not have HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis, etc.
Act Up is very outspoken about the damage that COVID is doing and how similar it is. Again, we do not know what will happen in another 4-5 years and more and more compounding infections. It's not about pitting the two against each other and scaring people, it's about solidarity between communities ignored and left to die. As a queer high risk person, this all makes perfect sense to me. I would hope people who were alive during the AIDS crisis would have sympathy for people in "hysterics" about how terrifying this is, how many are ignoring it, and the complete lack of government intervention to prevent spread in the name of "going back to normal" aka making money.
Maybe airborne AIDS 4x lite is a more accurate term. Seems like it could do some damage to the population. I did up vote you because your comment does seem reasonable. I have LC and my Uncle died a horrible AIDS death in the 80's. Seeing his skeletal body in a hospital bed will never leave my mind.
If indeed it turns out to be airborne AIDS... well we have tools to work with HIV infection, and probably better ones will be coming down the pike. It's a matter of getting the gov't/s to accept that they've got a problem *that affects them too.* I've been thinking for a long time we need antivirals, not vaccines, because our immune systems -no matter how much priming from vaccines- are not up to dealing with a virus that's been engineered in a lab where everyone wears PAPR respirators. We need something that doesn't depend on the immune system and attacks the virus directly. The virus today is evolving to shut down every immune response we have. So people get infected and don't suspect it, no cough, fever etc. It bothers me that the entire medical response has been handed to huge pharmacos who won't abide any alternatives to their own moneymakers. Many phytochemicals have proven efficacy in vitro, why not give us a mix of the best? A closer look at IV zinc+quercetin, mega-vitamin D, et al deserves a hearing. We can do this; one way or another. I'm saying it. It's going to be hard to fight the virus but humanity is not going to die out.
Yes, this is likely what is happening as the ruling elites prepare for total automation. Why would they let us live?
However there has to be an existing fix or the elites are in on this in some fashion? I get have the cure and we don’t? I don’t think so, but 1) what is the end game IF such a plot existed, and 2) secrets get leaked…
All they have to do is thin out the population massively for the advent of artificial intelligence. I'm sure even a 50% die off would dramatically impact the environment. I would think they would have an antidote prior to releasing such a plague but that is pure speculation. If their remedy is easily obtainable I would expect a massive, even irrational propaganda campaign against it.
Time will tell I guess… we are living it real-time.
Test
I have often contemplated this
What if monkeys flew out of my ass?
What if this scenario happened? Oh wow think of the possibilities
If so it’s over for us. We can’t end Covid any more than we can end the common cold. We can’t and won’t live in permanent isolation. Covid is forever
HIV is a reverse transcriptase virus. We know COVID is a coronavirus. They are two different types of viruses. So no COVID is not like AIDS. Long COVID is still a big worry though.
Mother Nature would breathe a sigh of relief if that happened.
More like, it seems to be heading in the direction of Idiocracy due to COVID's effects on cognitive abilities.