According to this article there are now three large scale studies analyzing covid risk, and they all indicate that your risk of negative health consequences goes up every infection.
While this risk starts (relatively) low for most of us, particularly those vaccinated and in younger people or children, there are concerning signs it may not stay low. If each new invasion of our bodies allows this insidious virus a greater chance to cause damage, such small risks will eventually add up to a big one.
Even if you only experience the symptom of the initial infection mildly.
“Each subsequent COVID infection will increase your risk of developing chronic health issues like diabetes, kidney disease, organ failure and even mental health problems,” physician Rambod Rouhbakhsh warned journalist Sara Berg in an American Medical Association podcast earlier this year.
“This dispels the myth that repeated brushes with the virus are mild and you don’t have to worry about it. It is akin to playing Russian roulette.”
Long COVID is defined as a multisystem disease that have a devastating effect on any organ system, with potentially lifelong consequences. Rates of long COVID among people who have contracted SARS-CoV-2 vary controversially between studies and regions, from about 10 percent to a staggering 50 percent of people who’ve had the virus reported as having long term symptoms.
We are basically ignoring the risks and hoping for a science miracle to save us before things get too bad. Same approach we are taking with global warming. What an interesting time to be alive.
Huh. I wonder how much it trends upwards with every infection. If a person not avoiding it can reasonably be assumed to get it 3-5 times per year how many times do they need to catch it before it can reasonably be assumed that a large proportion of a population becomes disabled? What are things going to look like in 25 years if this continues?
There’s been a lot of quibbling about what long covid is recently, because so many people are having long term health problems following an infection. The WHO says it’s about a 1 in 10 chance every infection. Recently the German health minister stated the risk was 3% per infection. If the German health minister is right, that’s approximately the same chance of rolling snake eyes on a pair of dice. Every infection.
How many infections you get will depend on what variants you are exposed to, how much of it you were exposed to, the timing between exposures, and if you were vaccinated within the last few months. It’s a combination of all those factors and how your body responds to them, which can vary significantly between people. It’s safe to say at least once a year, probably twice a year now that almost nobody is trying to prevent infections, and three times a year if you are unlucky.
So best case you roll the dice once a year. Worst case three times a year.
Basically, everytime covid enters the bloodstream, it’s down to luck as to wether or not our immune system responds before it does a bunch of damage to our body, and by not doing anything to prevent the spread of the virus outside of vaccines and prior immunity, we are selecting for variants of the virus that are best able to evade the immune system. In other words: The only evoluntionary pressure it’s facing is to get around the immune system, and it has billions of hosts a year to train on. I believe we have seen the same mutations that make it easier for it to evade an immune response develop in different variants several times at this point. This situation is unique in modern history, and no one really knows how it will play out.
We are already seeing disability rates go up so much in the US and UK that they are preparing to redefine disability to exclude more and more people, so that’s a bad sign.
I am 100% certain that disability will send me into poverty. Like, if I can’t sell my labour, I’m pretty fucked in this world. It’s why I still mask and take precautions.
Every gunshot wound increases your risk of bleeding to death, study finds
We still mask up… feels bad barely anyone else does. I feel like there’s a faint aura of acknowledgement when i see another masker on the bus or at the store. Solidarity to us lone maskers keeping our spit to ourselves
I feel like there’s a faint aura of acknowledgement
I’ve been vocally telling strangers that I appreciate them when I encounter them wearing masks (correctly, not with their nostrils exposed or some other halfassed nonsense) in public. Someone shouted, “hell yeah, mask up!” at me in a grocery store store a few months ago and it felt nice, so I’ve been trying to emulate that energy and hope it catches on.
I finally got it. After 3 years of avoiding it, working in an office job with very minimal contact with coworkers, masking religiously in public, and tracking my county’s data and adjusting how much I’m socializing based on that data, etc. I honestly don’t know how I got it, I’ve been more cautious this past month and none of my other friends/family had it or were symptomatic. Luckily it’s been ‘mild’ for me, but the first couple days were still pretty hellish. It’s been 3 weeks and luckily all I have left is brain fog which is getting better and should resolve in 90 days according to my pcp (jesus christ that’s a long time). The long covid studies and the permanent brain fog really scares the shit out of me compared to the other stuff since i have a bunch of dementia/alzheimers in the family, but obvs it’s all pretty alarming. Solidarity and love to the folks this has disabled and killed, if this eventually disables me I’m going to [REDACTED] an elected official.
We have east coast family visiting and among them are multiple doctors and libs who believe in climate change that call themselves “progressive”. Whenever I mention any new study on long covid I am made to feel like an annoying shut-in who believes in chem trails. I don’t even get into the details of the study, just the mention of the article title is enough to make these “trust the science” types imply that I’m spending too much time online and blowing things out of proportion. These people are great and smart and accepting in many other ways, but holy fuck. They are fucking DONE trusting the science. I honestly don’t know what it’s going to take, maybe one of them or their kids getting long covid and suffering before they’ll actually shut the fuck up and start “trusting the science” again?? Like I know the media has been normalizing this for years so this is expected but like you’d think people with fucking MDs would be able to see through the media bias, denialism and normalization of this. guess not. it’s literally fine
Oof. The only consistant advice I’ve seen is for people to get as much rest as possible while infected.
The people still concerned about covid get lumped in with the anti-vax wierdos all over social media blaming everything on vaccines. It seems deliberate. The CDC and WHO acknowledge the problem with long covid and all the negative health effects it can cause, but quietly, and most people are left with the impression that covid is a solved problem and anyone still concerned is an anxious nutter.
Agreed, tho I’m definitely an anxious nutter
I’m just shocked that even these highly educated PMC people who work in the field and are generally interested in research are going buck wild maskless this Christmas. I guess one of them just got sick (non-Covid) now while on vacation. In the beginning of Death Panel’s Covid Year Four episode they summed it up pretty well calling it the ‘sociological production of the end of the pandemic’.
