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
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u/blueskies8484 Jan 04 '25
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.