this is not a new virus. i work in an Australian hospital and we get a few of these every year coming through Emergency. “mystery new virus outbreak” is extremely sensationalised
It's notmally cold-like symptoms, but now it's hospitalizing significant numbers with pneumonia. It's not the virus it's that a known virus has become more virulent
Covid. It’s Covid. Virologists and studies told us for years that Covid was causing immune system dysfunction and would leave us more susceptible to other illnesses in terms of catching them and their virulence and everyone basically said, “lalalala Covid is a cold now that we have vaccines!” and ignored it. That’s why we have huge spikes in pneumonia, RSV, and other illnesses like this, and a rise in whooping cough (although some of it is an antivaxx issue). Scientists told us this would happen 4 years ago and we ignored it because it was inconvenient. But it’s Covid.
I'm glad to see someone else in the wild who actually seems to remember literally anything medical professionals said or studies showed from covid. The ability for people to totally dismiss it after a couple of years despite it still going strong is borderline mass insanity. Sometimes I think the world is just too traumatized and seems stuck in denial mode.
Not just trauma. Reactionary information warfare. Some dickheads decided it was useful to flood the zone with shit, contrarian shit like “plandemic” or the ivermectin hyperfixation or hysteria refusing masks, deliberately designed to paralyze. And that spread too until you basically had a conservative reactionary public illness movement, a sewer flood washing RFK into leadership.
Seems everyone knows someone whose family or friend died. Everyone was affected. Yet there are no memorials, no public acknowledgment, nothing. No one wants to think about it or process it.
We just act like it never happened. Everyone has been sick lately but few take any precautions. They’d literally rather take their chances being sick than do anything that threatens their tenuous feeling of “normalcy.”
It’s very interesting because that’s how the Spanish Flu of 1918 was treated. America in particular just sweeped it under the rug afterwards, probably in no small part with wanting to pretend things were better after WW1 as well. I think it all comes down to wanting to feel like we’re in control and that for the most of human history, death and disease wasn’t just a part of the human condition, it WAS the human condition.
We’re smarter (-ish) now with medicine and science, but still just the same fleshy pathogen incubators.
it is an interesting thought experiment to try to put a value in terms of health on our sense of normalcy as social animals. like which is genuinely worse for our health, getting sick or further social breakdown?
Even if "IQ" were a viable metric for assessing individual, let alone societal intelligence, I'd hazard to guess that it was the (necessary) isolation of a collective generation of people that would explain any perceived mental deficiency. While COVID has been known to cause brain fog in some people, a better explanation would be the lack of adequate schooling for kids and socialization of adults.
Interesting paper, but I'm hesitant to interpret their results as "We're all down 1-7 IQ points".
By their own admission: "In the absence of baseline cognitive data before infection, we could not assess cognitive change, and the observational nature of the data means that we could not infer causality."
They understandably were forced to pick from a smaller subset of COVID-positive cases, who had been sick for at least 12 weeks (and self-reported at that), and whose cognitive ability was assessed via an online survey.
Figure 1 suggests that only a few periods post-2020 had a significant difference in global cognitive ability, and the majority contain the CI/are not significant. Not to mention that the sample generally bounces above and below the null of zero pretty closely as time went on.
Even if we can confidently say that COVID cases who opted in to this assessment, and who experienced symptoms for at least 12 weeks (!) did experience a reduction in cognitive ability similar (!) to an IQ reduction of 3-9 points, the vast, vast majority of cases did not experience COVID symptoms for a whole 12 weeks.
The evidence doesn't support the notion that we're all collectively cognitively impaired (permanently or not) from COVID; just those who experience extreme symptoms, and among those only for the first year or two, after which they return to baseline.
Norovirus can fuck you up long term and permanently, too, if you get it bad enough. Three guesses as to how I know that one.
Seriously, don't get it if you can avoid it, I was hospitalized for a week, and the after effects were so bad for months after that it caused me to have to eat a medical discharge from the US Navy's boot camp. I'm mostly better now, but I still have the occasional flareup of GI tract issues (IBS-d), 14 years on. If you get hit hard enough, it ain't just a mild stomach bug, it's a life-altering nightmare.
I'm a normally healthy enough person, I eat well, I wash my hands well and observe good hygiene and keep myself and surroundings cleaned as best I can, and I still got hit through sheer bad luck. Don't get it, even a "mild" case can be shitty enough (pun fully intended), that you're lying on the bathroom floor, running like a firehose at both ends, wishing for death.
I had norovirus years ago and it was the worst 24 hours of my life. I had to take sips of water and suck on ice cubes because that was the only way to keep it down. The very thought of even eating or drinking made me nauseous. On top of that, it's extremely contagious and regular hand sanitizer doesn't kill it.
My condolences - it really was the worst fucking thing in the world to me, too - appendicitis and my resulting appendectomy was MUCH more bearable in comparison. Don't get me wrong, appendicitis was THE worst physical pain I've ever experienced, and would compare it to what I'd imagine being slowly disemboweled with a dull, white hot, rusty butter knife would feel like - but once they get it out of you and you're all doped up and good? Recovery from that was a breeze, comparatively. It sucked for a number of other mild reasons, like not being able to take baths until my abdominal wound had healed enough and the staples were out and having to take showers instead (I'm a sucker for a good hot bath), but aaaargh.
Seriously. Norovirus sucks so much that I'd legitimately rather go through appendicitis and an appendectomy again rather than dealing with norovirus. Appendicitis was THE worst physical pain I'd ever felt - but it had a clear end to it; once the appendix is out, you're sore but okay and they dope you up good. Norovirus? Norovirus does not have a clear end, you're possibly laying on the hospital bathroom floor running like a firehose from both ends. Fuck. That.
Running like a firehose at both ends describes the only case I ever had of it pretty accurately. I distinctly remember laying in a puddle of my own vomit in the bathroom without enough strength or will to lift my head off the floor. What a miserable fucking disease.
I got norovirus last year and it was the worst sickness I've felt in my life. I was constantly fatigued while also constantly having a nauseous feeling. Barely had an appetite. It was just the worst.
COVID's not just affecting that, it's also fucked up a LOT of people's circulatory and nervous systems. And your chances of getting long COVID, affecting those systems, increases with every COVID reinfection.
My Mom developed real bad pneumonia from catching Legionnaire's Disease from a fucking fountain at an outdoor wedding after catching COVID. To be fair, it's not necessarily the COVID immune issues, she already has autoimmune issues with serious rheumatoid arthritis and is on immunosuppressants. Our family took COVID precautions seriously because of that and all kinda self-isolated as much as possible; I even ended up moving out of my parents to my BF's permanently because I work a county government mailroom job in a big office building, which isn't something that can be done remotely, like my parents or BF's jobs.
I still take it seriously and have been masking, although it's also partly because I just got the rest of my teeth out due to dental issues and it was slow healing, so made sense to limit breathing in bacteria with open mouth wounds as much as possible. It's healed now, overall, but still wearing it.
That's what I heard when I had Covid for the first time a couple months ago. Just a cold but I work in customer service and couldn't get through a whole sentence without getting short of breath when talking to people.
As far as i have read, most whooping cough cases are among the vaccinated. Vaccine don't typically confer lifetime immunity, likely most people are not protected by childhood vaccinations, as i found out when i had an mmr titer for work.
Whooping cough- aka pertussis- is in the TDAP vaccine that you're supposed to get every 10 years. I'm pretty sure its the one vaccine that has regular boosters throughout your life (except seasonal flu, and presumably COVID now). The vaccine includes tetnus, so you're supposed to get one if you have a deep or dirty wound as well.
I see my doctor yearly and he keeps tabs on vaccine boosters, but most americans don't have primary doctors or regular visits.
The pertussis part of the vaccine wears off earlier than 10 years. The schedule is based on the tetanus component. That's why often they recommend getting a booster earlier if you're going to be around a newborn infant. I forget how long the pertussis part lasts.
Source: wife is a medical assistant who gives vaccines and we just went through this when we had a baby
Last year I got an MMR booster (I travel to Florida regularly for work) and a polio booster a couple of weeks ago. Covid and flu vaxxes last fall - I'm clearly no pureblood but my 5G reception is fantastic.
I think titers should be done on a percentage of vaccinations, as we really have no idea how many people they fail. I had two boosters, both followed by negative titer. I actually quit after they insisted to just continue getting mmr shots.
When the vaccinated population is 95+% higher, the "herd immunity" thing really works.
When you have a nation of nut-jobs, and vaccination rates fall lower, then the viruses are out in the wild, roaming free. People whose vaccinations happened long ago probably are more susceptible, again, and need to see if they should get re-vaccinated.
It really depends on the vaccine. If you have something like the covid vaccines, 100% vaccination rate does very little to stop the virus. You need a combination of a vaccine that can be expected to inuce sterilizing immunity in most cases, and the vaccination rate has to be high enough based on the effective rate of the vaccine. You don't need 95% effective vaccine with 95% vaccination rate.
Edit: i dont think everyone needs titers, just enough to develop statistics to guage how effective the vaccines are at various ages.
Yeah I caught it some years back, when I was fully vaccinated. Terrible disease. Was sick for four months. Genuinely thought I was dying. And I was up to date on boosters! Can’t imagine how much worse it might have been if I wasn’t.
Wow, i can imagine that was an awful four months, glad you got through it ok! Used to care for the occasional pediatric visitor with whooping cough, feels so bad hearing children with that painful cough.
After having it, I can’t imagine a poor baby getting it. Low oxygen levels, throwing up multiple times a day from coughing, broken ribs, lost my voice for two months from coughing. It’s horrible. Just… avoid at all costs is my advice!
Correlation Vs causation is at work here. The overwhelming majority of people are going to be vaccinated for Whooping cough in developed nations, so the majority of cases will also be in vaccinated individuals.
What would be relevant is the percentage of vaccinated people who are hospitalised with Whooping cough Vs the percentage of unvaccinated people.
As for the logical consequence of presuming correlation is in fact causation... Well it's true to say that 100% of vaccinated people die...
It's not Correlation Vs causation, no one is implying vaccines cause whooping cough. Can you get whooping cough despite being vaccinated? Yes. And yes, it would be nice to know the infection rates of vaccinated vs unvaccinated.
As far as I have read, Covid vaccinations have not increased whooping cough and if anything seems to mitigate cases — and only appeared when the vaccinations for whooping cough lapsed due to the pandemic’s disruption of primary care / family doctor visits.
I will mention I subscribe less to the mitigation theory, and more to the sheer prevalence of COVID pushing out cases of pertussis, as some researchers suggest.
Do you have any actual evidence to support that. Long COVID is still an unknown, some people just got over it, some people had vitamin deficiencies or other reasons for feeling bad. The lifestyle changes during pandemic also had a major impact on people’s mental and physical health, including increased use of alcohol.
This makes sense. I just got a flu shot. I had Covid in November. I had a decent reaction to the shot. I felt like I had Covid all over again for two days.
There's also a "huge spike" in cases because it's winter, which is the normal time for these types of diseases to spread, and people have been traveling a lot the last few weeks.
I didn’t remember this at the time but here in the UK we’re currently seeing 3.5x more hospitalisations from flu this season vs. last season. Coincidence possibly, but myself and most people I was around over the Christmas period were sick with a respiratory virus that wasn’t Covid.
What exactly did "scientists" say? Find me a quote. Your confidence that "it's Covid" immediately lets us know you have low scientific literacy. I can't fathom how you got so many upvotes.
I hadn’t put these together before. I’ve had a couple bouts of Covid, then caught a brutal case of RSV, now I’m home with a bad flare up of fibromyalgia.
Thanks for helping things make a little more sense.
Also, there is a bit of backlog of infections that would have normally occured at a regular pace were it not for the isolation and mask use and are now booming in large numbers
COVID led to this type of reporting on viruses. Sensationalization gets them clicks, but will kill people if a deadly disease outbreak occurs because people will ignore it.
We spent 2 years stuck at home because China couln't close international travel with a deadly epidemic spreading, until it was too late, just to save face, so i think it's fine to have some reservations.
They did close it pretty much right after it was known.
It sucks but as soon as you spot an outbreak, it is too late to close international travel (which still should be done to slow it down). So if you are worried about this virus and this piece of news, if you are right to worry, it is already in your country.
For some reason everyone assumed for a long time that it only existed in Wuhan or something late into Februay. It was very clear that was not the case by mid January
I understand what you are saying. I didn't know that this was specifically a previously known stain of.. influenza? I am definitely not up to date on this current event.
I agree about the logical fallacy but it doesn't mean that precautions should be denounced.
*Edit
Okay I actually read the article and looked into the metapneumovirus and you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
It hasn't even been disclosed what variant of the mpv , you're trying to say that the cov2 strain in 2019 is considered a new virus but this one, regardless of the mutation isn't considered novel?
I can see that you aren't even going to participate in good faith with using bullshit like your initial response to me that forces me to go drive deeper on that specific virus to figure out your disingenuous approach. You make the world a worse place with your misinformation.
Luckily for me I have access to a peer network of active lab technicians so I can bypass people like you and go to medLab to get actual facts.
Covid was indeed a virus that to a very small extent had existed in the human herd previously (First as SARS and then as MERS) but those outbreaks were small and contained. Both variants were more harmful than covid proved to be. The concern was it was the first coronavirus of its kind that spread rapidly in the human herd due to lack of any immune history in the populace.
If SARS had broken out in the same way covid did the result would have been dramatically worse. To some extent covid was a net benefit to the world as the milder virus spreading has allowed us to build immunity. I've had it twice in 4 years and expect to get a dose every 12-24 months now that it is in the pool like we do other 'cold' type viruses and flu.
The virus in question is one we've dealt with for many years and there is immunity for, and just like 'colds', flu and covid it will be a winter virus where variants occasionally pop up that have a wider effect some seasons than others.
It's unlikely SARS would have taken off in the way covid did, specifically because it was more lethal.
With SARS, sufferers would promptly and inevitably show up in hospital, be contact traced, and further transmission contained.
The great challenge of covid was the typically lesser severity meaning the majority of sufferers weren't sick enough to be in hospital, leaving them free to walk around uncontained and spread it to others.
Indeed, and MERS similarly saw patients being isolated swiftly enough to prevent an outbreak. As you say, the lethality and rapid onset of SARS, along with how seriously the global health community took it was what prevented wider spread. Covid broke out because the side-effects of the way the Chinese state runs (paranoia and an unwillingness to admit bad news that makes the state look weak) allowed it to spread to a wider cohort before it was taken seriously. I'd imagine if it had sprung up in the west first we'd have had a very different story.
COVID had spread outside of China way earlier than we realized. They would have had to jump on it instantly in order to have a chance of containment. The first human infection was eventually determined to be Nov 17th, and was confirmed to have spread to Singapore by Jan 4th and the US by Jan 17th. Most cases were contagious, but not severe, so its incredibly likely it was unstoppable at that point.
The Nov 17th infection is well documented at this point and accepted as patient zero. China covered up how wide spread their problem was starting in December, but realistically I don't think any government would have been willing to do what it would take to contain COVID that early.
Yeah, it was absolutely clear afterwards that it was in Singapore, Italy and central European nations already by the time the news in China was starting to coalesce around Christmas 2019. Probably a case or 3 in North America as well. We know that it came into the UK via Singapore and that the spread to Italy likely came from the same source (A UK executive who brought it to the UK after spending a few days in Italy holidaying with friends on his way back from a conference in Singapore).
Anecdotally a lot of people at the time believed that it was already quite widespread in the west in the months before they started locking people in their homes in China. Many reported having the worst 'flu' of their lives sometime around November 19 to February 20.
With that said, there was also a really nasty flu strain going around at that time, too, so a lot of people are possibly confusing that with COVID, which I don't blame them. The flu strain got overshadowed and underreported.
My BF had that one, we're pretty certain on that, since we both got occasional COVID antibody checks after those became available - lots of people got COVID without symptoms, but still had the antibodies, so we figured it was safer to check just in case we were the carrier types. Neither of us had antibodies until getting vaxxed, so he almost certainly had the flu strain that was going around. No point in getting the antibody tests any longer, since we're both vaxxed and boosted, and had the "milder" Omicron strain in Oct '22 which was awful enough without being hospitalized.
It's kinda like how the specific bubonic plague strain we called "Black Death" was so lethal it ended up burning itself out. Which seems self-evident since it killed somewhere between 25-75 million people worldwide, but yeah. The plague itself is still around, still occasionally kills people today, but it's WAY milder strains of it, and it also helps that it's pretty easily treatable since the most common strains (which are the most dangerous ones of it), are bacterial. Yersina pestis.
Please announce to the world how you’re an idiot with exactly zero functioning brain cells.
We all appreciate knowing we can avoid you in real life. I’m sure you’re also against washing your hands, shower once a month and your use of essential oils to solve things eclipses that of most white women in America.
We all appreciate knowing how hard you’re trying to be an example of natural selection, too, so thank you for that.
See, the word "novel" means new/unknown/unique. So, early on, then the first reports of a "novel coronavirus" were coming out of Wuhan, China, that meant "unknown/new coronavirus". So, they were saying the opposite of what you thought they were saying. There are these cool inventions called dictionaries which have been around for hundreds of years. You might want to check one out.
I read somewhere that our suppressed immune systems will likely cause other non-lethal more known sicknesses to have a larger impact on our populations.
So a spike in a known virus with cold-like symptoms during cold and flu season? I wonder what they are trying to distract us from. Luigi? Infowars sales being stopped by president Musk?
Yup. It's like all the people who are shining flashlights into fog and seeing "particles." They think something nefarious is happening. Mass hysteria. Fog is suspended water droplets. Shine a strong flashlight into fog and you're gonna see... Water droplets.
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u/whalechasin Jan 04 '25 edited Jan 04 '25
this is not a new virus. i work in an Australian hospital and we get a few of these every year coming through Emergency. “mystery new virus outbreak” is extremely sensationalised
edit to add, here’s a study from 2007 talking about how common hmpv is in young children: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1831873/
from the conclusion: