1. this is a preprint, so take their results with a massive grain of salt.
2. the sample size for this is quite low. They cite number of cells in the thousands, but when you look at the number of people in the study the sample size is 3 live people undergoing surgery (line 193) and 8 autopsies (line 439).
3. technical replicates in RT-qPCR are not the same as biological replicates (i.e. more people)
4. Single cell RNAseq is trendy, but again, without more biological replicates it's very much in the realm of extrapolation when considering sample size of patients vs the whole human population.
I think we should be more positive about such research (it helps us to further our understanding of COVID-19), there are many other studies that show bad outcomes for those who are obese and this paper suggests a mechanism for the poor outcomes.
This method suggests a possible mechanism for poorer outcomes in the obese, but that does not mean that the mechanism is correct.
The mechanism also involves a way for SARS-CoV-2 to infect lymphocytes in fat tissue that doesn't involve ACE2, which the authors leave completely unexplained, which is whole lot of highly surprising results.
There's also simpler explanations for why the obese are at higher risk, because systemically they're in poorer shape to begin with (metabolic syndrome, etc), and mechanically they have more trouble breathing when they get sick.
The title explanation is so simplistically attractive while the biological mechanism is unexpected and unexplained, which I'd say adds up to requiring a large amount of skepticism, until it gets validated by real experts in the field (not just someone with an MD or PhD on twitter, but someone who is active in exactly this kind of research). It might be an emotionally satisfying result, but it smells like bad science to me.
I agree with your analysis you are correct to put these ideas forward, it does not mean the paper is incorrect. I personally think we should think of this paper as really useful datapoint rather than a set in stone conclusion either way. For me it's really interesting rather than to be dismissed as being completely not probable. Let's see and wait for other research, but I think it's a great theory that needs a lot for it to be fact (as close as we have to one). What is a fact (again, as close as we can get to one...) is that obese people die a lot more readily from COVID and anyone over say 30 BMI (because of fat) should undoubtedly assess the risk of any vaccine as being massively in their favour!
Hard disagree. There's so much junk science that articles need to be treated skeptically, particularly if they have strong headline claims that reinforce some common belief combined with details which are hazy and unexplained.
Being totally open minded is actually not a virtue, you can be so open minded that you'll start to believe any sort of drivel you pour into your head because it sounds persuasive rather than being correct.
I will happily flip my impression of this paper on a dime if someone who is actually qualified to review the actual lab methods and procedures (and if adequate controls were used, etc) pops up to defend it and to explain how cells that don't express ACE2 could possibly be important in COVID-19 pathogenesis, but until then my default setting is to be critical since the paper "smells" bad. It is not a particularly "great" theory, its a very fishy smelling theory.
What are your qualifications for being able to judge this as a "great theory"?
You seem to think that you're free to think very highly of this paper on zero experience because the headline is appealing, while someone critical of the paper needs to be an expert.
Obesity being a risk factor was well known. Why obesity causes more chance of death hadn't been studied well, which I believe is why the paper is appearing here.
Pre-print might lead to it being rejected or outcomes changed or tweaked, and it clearly needs replication in a larger study to see if the findings hold up. But equally I think being healthy and reducing your weight is likely to increase your odds of not becoming severely ill.
Sure, but I didn't think that obesity deaths needed a factor unique to Covid 19 to explain. I'd expect, as a layman, that what causes obese people to die more from Coronavirus is probably the same thing that causes them to die more from everything else that stresses the body. (Whatever that is.)
These things, which are usually things like diabetes, blood sugar problems, high blood pressure, elevated cortisol and so on, do correlate with poorer COVID outcomes.
My understanding is that, even when you control for these factors, outcomes for obese patients are still below what we would expect to see. This means that there is still a contributing factor that we haven't considered yet, and the parent study hypothesizes one possible reason.
> is probably the same thing that causes them to die more from everything else that stresses the body. (Whatever that is.)
There's a good chance that whatever that is, isn't actually a thing, and that people unfairly find fat people repulsive for no reason except that they are fat,
If something is so obvious as to need no explanation, it just might be worth understanding what about it is causal. What can be done given the predisposition to obesity in a time of abundant necessities? It seems your conclusion is to let it go to the joint processes of sin and natural selection, which would tend to call into question your moral certainty.
EDIT: Another post today titled "Causal Information Affects Decisions" seems relevant here:
I don't care about the moral aspect, I just thought it was established that obesity causes the body to be less able to handle ~any kind of stress. Is that actually incorrect?
Like, my confusion is that I didn't think we needed to go look for a new mechanism unique to Covid here.
Yes but the point is your point is added onto buy the possibility (likliyhood given the study) that being fat has a particular mechanism for it being worse than all the other co-morbidities we're talking about. That's what the paper is studying!
> Um. Is high hazard and death ratio for obese people something that needed explaining?
Some people might argue that convincing people to not get fat is much lower hanging fruit than transforming every democracy into an authoritarian apartheid state for effects that are well below any statistical significance threshold.
Agreed. But apparently we're on the wrong side of the narrative. The simple fact is, we don't have leadership able to tell consumers that they've done too good job (to the point of ruining their own health), that the (over) consumption economy has failed them. This is why (in the USA) we hear very little about areas not overrun (e.g., many African countries).
I am by no means a Covid denier, but the bottom line is: Covid is more of a symptom (of broader health and healthcare issues) than it is a Black Plague-esque disease. Since the majoriry rules, and illness has been normalized there will be few in power willing to speak truth.
Even with that lens, Covid is not universally successsful. It's very much opportunistic. For example, leave the nursing homes - even after being well aware of the data from Italy - and plenty of innoscent ppl die. Blaming Covid for incompotence of leadership is silly. Or, we had a pandemic ~10 yrs ago, yet zero discussion of "Where's the mask stockpile?" and "Where's the PPE stockpile?"
Then, of course, there's how well Covid does against (often) preventable conditions.
We're on the same page. Context matters. Now let's human-up and table the details about Covid. Let's stop hiding behind fearmongering aggregated data, and abuse of the use of percentages and other intentionally manipulative tactics. Finally, let's not forget to ask why? Why the thumb on the scale approach?
Don't see how ships to trade is a red herring. First Google result for "Black Death rats ships":
> The Black Death was also carried by rats on merchant ships through the trade routes of Europe. It struck Europe in 1347, when 12 ships docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Subsequently called “death ships”, those on board were either dead or sick
Parent is using an example of a case where we know trade by ships helped cause the plague to spread, so is similar to how obese people have worse covid outcomes. No one is really going to go on a platform and attack trade by ships, though, just like in modern times no one is allowed to discriminate against the obese.
The point is, the infection rates, etc. are not comparable. Taken in aggragate and on a long enough time line just about anything can look dangerous. Sans, evidently, preventable diseases. Then we sweep those aside, even before Covid.
Again, all that's being suggested is more transparency and honesty, and less hyperbole and statistical fueled manipulation. That is all.
Please don't be snarky. It's rude and it also makes it more difficult for others to follow your train of thought. I'm not part of the original thread and I don't understand what argument you're making here.
Okay. So what's the actual argument? All I can pull out of it is insults and sarcasm toward the GGGP, along with an assumption about what GGGP would do in a different scenario.
What is GGP's actual argument for why GGGP is wrong?
Since GP refers to ubiquitous systemic issues, not xenophobia, not technological ventures, "ships to trade" seems to be a red herring. Also worth noting: "congratulations" reads more than a bit disingenuously.
It's an interesting take but you are only partly correct, because only some of these problems are self-inflicted, so to say. There are only as many ways you can influence your blood pressure levels for example. At some point no matter what you do - you run an hour a day, eat veggies mainly, eat zero salt (which is not recommended btw) - and still have higher blood pressure than your older colleague with BMI above average. So you can't just claim COVID-19 is punishing the people who don't take care of themselves.
The impact of salt on blood pressure is based on concentration (osmolality), not quantity. Consuming excess fructose can also cause hypertension due to the biochemical mechanisms in humans and other primates that cause higher uric acid production.
I agree 100%, and should have said so in my OP, there are some who have conditions that are difficult to treat. However, there are a significant number that are legitimately preventable. Rare is rhe case where a doctor's prescription is "consume more sugar." The science, which we're all in favor of, is pretty clear on this.
It's not logical that we (in the USA) continue to side step a serious discussion about the value of prevention (and how that relates to the level of unhealthines we are on average.)
> I think we should be more positive about such research (it helps us to further our understanding of COVID-19)
Listing important limitations of a study is not being negative. It is contributing to understanding the paper. The comment you are replying to is the most substantive comment in the thread.
One does not need to encourage authors with compliments, nor does one need to balance criticism with praise.
Look, even peer reviewed papers are not supposed to be treated as any kind of unquestionable truth, especially in medical sciences. It is unfortunately very common to have papers with repeatability issues or even outright wrong. Peer review just means that experienced scientists read a paper and concluded that nothing they saw was outright wrong.
Neither are published papers in peer reviewed journals, we need to always treat everything with healthy skepticism. That obesity and bad covid outcomes happen is beyond any doubt, the interesting part for me in this paper is that they try to explain the mechanism for obesity itself being a problem, rather than say diabetes or atherosclerosis.
I guess my whole point was if they're trying to explain a mechanism, their sample size doesn't generalize to the population; even limiting it to the obese population. If anything they've shown, in their small cohort, that the hypothesis is worth further study.
Having spent a lot of time in academia before moving into biotech, I think this is a pilot study and they're fishing for more research funding. The way those funding mechanisms work, I tend to view manuscripts like this with a critical eye.
It's disappointing that public health agencies haven't put much emphasis on telling people to reduce body fat. While the vaccines are fairly effective at preventing deaths, breakthrough infections are quite common and getting down to a healthy body fat level further reduces risk.
Public health already emphasizes reducing body fat to a significant degree for numerous other health reasons. Simply telling people to do so has proven fairly ineffective.
I think, in the context of possibly dying of Covid-19, it could be effective though. If the messaging was there that you could greatly reduce your risk by loosing weight, at least the group of people who were both obese and seriously frightened of Covid could be engaged to make positive changes. That would save lives.
Even with the onset of diabetes/serious complications from the disease, it’s still often not enough.
Losing weight is very difficult for people to sustain. There are individual success stories but those don’t outweigh the fact that, statistically, people just isn’t lose weight and keep it off sustainably.
Next week and losing fat can't be in the same sentence.
1 kg of fat is roughly 7500
Cal. Healthy deficit is 500 Cal a day, which means losing 2 kg of fat per month. 50 kg overweight means two years of suffering.
People are motivated to lose fat already. There are immediate social and psychological costs aplenty to carrying it and immediate benefits to presenting as trim/fit.
Obesity is not a motivation problem.
I would believe that covid has provided all sorts of opportunities for changes in habit, though, which might help.
If COVID has proven anything, it's that political messaging is far better than all other types of messaging combined.
Either way, telling people to change their lifestyles falls on deaf ears as a group. People know, for example, that being obese in your 50s and 60s puts you at a great deal of risk, yet most people who are obese at the beginning of their 50s are still obese at the end of their 60s, provided that they are still alive.
You know why politicians don't state these obvious facts? Because they don't want to lose votes.
Most fat people probably don't like hearing wealthy skinny politicians with personal chefs and trainers telling them to lose weight. Doesn't score well with the focus group I guess.
How many orders of magnitude? Can you quantify that for us? While I recommend that everyone eligible protect themselves by getting vaccinated, I don't think the current data supports the strength of your claim. Exaggerations and hyperbole aren't helpful.
> Simply telling people to do so has proven fairly ineffective.
We've already normalized instituting authoritarian measures over this pandemic. Given the Rubicon we've already crossed, there's absolutely no moral reason we shouldn't be firing everyone who doesn't reduce their BMI below threshold X by Y date and confining them to their homes.
But obese people don't live in vacuum, they are much more likely to take away the hospital beds from others in this pandemic. Also the world has socialised medicare (par America) so the costs have relevant effect on every citizen for anti vaxxers and obese.
If the obese and overweight remain fully vaccinated w/ boosters, it's unlikely they'll end up in the hospital taking away hospital beds. The unvaccinated in general are the biggest issue.
they can tell until the cows come home but it's very hard to actually do it cause most causes are environmental and lifestyle related that can't easily be changed - can't all of a sudden start walking to work if you live in a car dependent area and that's true for most of the USA.
Wake me up when you find a US government with the guts to mandate cuts in the amount of high fructose corn syrup allowed in staple foods, put a tax on sugary drinks etc...
until then telling people to lose weight is a waste of time.
It's both sad and hilarious that the CDC is still recommending frequently disinfecting your doorknobs. As if that's going to make a difference in the pandemic.
Meanwhile we have very strong evidence from multiple controlled clinical studies that hypovitaminosis D is a critical risk factor.
in california at least, we did exactly the wrong thing in this regard: we closed down all gyms for over a year, and even shut down outdoor recreational facilities, to the point that outdoor basketball rims, soccer goals, and tennis nets were removed, outdoor gym equipment chained, and outdoor trails were closed. it was beyond idiotic.
Is washing hands and sanitizing touch points (like doorknobs) ever not effective at preventing disease? Hand Washing seems to be one of the few things doctors have never wavered on since the beginning of germ theory.
It's not effective in cases where the disease is neutralized by the environment before you would wash your hands anyways. A lot of diseases can't survive outside the body for long; I think this is more true of viruses than bacteria, but I could be wrong.
E.g. HIV doesn't last long outside the body. By the time blood dries, almost all of the HIV is neutralized.
I think the research has said COVID is similar, and can really only live on a surface for minutes.
Hand washing is great for preventing disease generally. It's less effective against some diseases, but it also has virtually no downsides, so it's still a sane thing to do.
I don't think I'd classify any of those studies as "very strong evidence". Lots of studies in many different environments(some uncontrollable) measuring different things at different dosages. It doesn't exactly result in finding any particular conclusion, certainly not "Vitamin D supplementation effectively prevents, reduces harm or cures COVID".
I didn't say you said that, but looking at study summaries that state things like "high-dose cholecalciferol supplementation led to SARS-CoV-2 RNA negative status" is why I mentioned "cure".
At the bottom of the page you linked, you'll find a link for "People at Increased Risk"(also found via "Specific Groups of People" link on sidebar), you'll then click on "Medical Conditions"[1], which mentions a list of medical conditions that increase risk, including obesity. Obesity section links you to the CDC's "Healthy Weight, Nutrition, and Physical Activity" page[2], which discusses exactly what you mention.
This is an interesting paper because it shows how fat cell tissue worsens outcomes for Covid. We’ve known for awhile that obesity increases the risk of mortality, however, this gives a clue (the inflammatory response and fat cells amplify the virus) as to why that’s the case.
This strikes me as odd. Females tend to have more body fat than males, on average, yet females seem to fare better after Covid-19 infections. So either the adipose inflammation improves disease outcome (unlikely?), or the effect of this inflammation is neglible and other factors are more important? I only gave the paper a cursory glance, but it doesn't seem to address this issue.
Leaving aside all of the possible confounders for the difference in severity of Covid-19 infection in men and women, it's not the case that women on average have more body fat than men. So for a "healthy" man and a "healthy" woman, the woman would tend to have more fatty tissue, but more men are overweight. UK figures show that 40% of men are overweight, compared to 31% of women. In the US, 74% of men are overweight, compared to 67% of women.
The categories of overweight and obese are based on BMI, which is not relative proportion of body fat. On average, of a man and woman who both have a BMI of 30, the woman will have a higher proportion of body fat.
I think both these claims can be true at the same time, can’t they?
To make a toy example just to make the reasoning clear: if men’s BMI was distributed as 50% = 20, 50% = 35, and women’s BMI was distributed as 95% = 20, 5% = 35, the average body fat of all men would be higher than the average body fat of all women, even though the average body fat of women BMI=X would be higher than of men BMI=X for all X.
also, women tend to be smaller, so even with higher percentages, the total amount of fat can be roughly similar to men.
but it seems the real issue with fat is how much visceral fat there is vs. the total amount anyway. obese folks all tend to have much more visceral fat than relatively fit individuals. visceral fat interferes more with the workings of organs and the signaling mechanisms (hormones, neural pathways, lymph/blood compositions, etc.) that keep a body healthy.
> The age-adjusted prevalence of severe obesity among U.S. adults was 9.2% in 2017–2018. Women had a higher prevalence of severe obesity (11.5%) than men (6.9%). The prevalence was highest among adults aged 40–59 (11.5%), followed by adults aged 20–39 (9.1%) and adults aged 60 and over (5.8%).
long covid has very similar demographics to chronic fatigue syndrome.
issues like these are very politicized, but it's likely that most of long covid is a combination of people who are having post-illness long-term sequelae and then also people with CFS-like symptoms, perhaps exacerbated by negative media coverage around covid and long covid.
Can you explain how negative media coverage is relevant here? How can a real illness that people are suffering from be affected at all by negative media coverage? Are you saying that it's something that people are imagining because they are being influenced by media reports?
And what do you mean by "politicized"? Where has long covid been politicized? I haven't seen anything like that.
> real illness that people are suffering from be affected at all by negative media coverage
Real illnesses that people are suffering from can be psychosomatic or affected by mental status. There is a ton of stigma around suggestions like these, hence the subtext of your comment that a "real illness" is independent from mental state.
> And what do you mean by "politicized"? Where has long covid been politicized? I haven't seen anything like that.
If you are a researcher and your research suggests that many cases of long covid or CFS have a psychological component or are psychosomatically driven, you will get death threats as well as condemned by advocacy organizations. [0] That is what I mean by politicized.
The underlying root of the issue is stigma around any sort of illness that has a psychological component.
Is there any evidence that it is psychosomatic? My understanding is that CFS (and long covid which indeed appears to be similar) affects a wide range of people, most often after some kind of viral infection that is very much physical in nature. And furthermore that the most successful treatment programs tend to focus on careful regulating exercise and diet which again seems to be largely physical.
Just because the underlying biological mechanism isn't understood doesn't mean that there isn't one. To me CFS seems like a case of a disease neglected by medical science because it's dismissed as being psychosomatic.
A study of ~25,000 persons found stronger statistical correlations between the belief in having been infected and long COVID symptoms, than between serology tests of prior infections and long COVID symptoms. Except for the persistent loss-of-taste symptom, which does not correlate with belief in prior infection and only correlates with serology test results. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34747982/
The layman interpretation of this is that long COVID is possibly a mental health issue associated with the belief in having had a prior infection, except for the loss-of-taste symptom which is very specific to COVID (vs, say, persistent fatigue). Not to say "it's not real", but maybe "it's not always viral in origin".
Yep. This would line up exactly with what I've said: a post-viral sequelae (with unique post-viral effects for covid) superimposed on a CFS-like disease population that is more driven by psychological factors, both being referred to by the label "long covid."
It’s really easy to discard that study. Someone who thinks they had COVID-19 and didn’t even bother getting tested is likely to have had a more severe case. Maybe it wasn’t even a case of COVID-19 but a severe viral infection nonetheless. Meanwhile serology positives would show up even after mild infection.
A serology test is just proof of prior infection. It says nothing about the severity and would even count asymptomatic cases. So the study is comparing apples and oranges.
1. Antibody positives are more likely the more severe the case of covid
2. Your point was that people with more severe covid would
> thinks they had COVID-19 and didn’t even bother getting tested
The problem with that theory is that the serology testing in this study was conducted on everybody so whether or not people chose to get tested when they had covid was irrelevant. The fact that perceived infection correlates higher with these symptoms means that these symptoms are more related to someone's self perception of infection than any physical change.
CFS is far from neglected and there have been a number of studies attempting to show a physical cause. We've had a number of false positives that have later been debunked.
> the most successful treatment programs tend to focus on careful regulating exercise and diet which again seems to be largely physical.
This is coming from the PACE study, I'm assuming. PACE is largely viewed as suggesting that CFS has a substantial psychological component. There is a bunch of other literature on this as well.
Exercise and diet changes are usually successful treatments for psychosomatic-like illnesses, so I disagree that this treatment means that it is a physical disease.
Many of the original researchers who provided evidence that the disease is non-physical in nature have since left the field after extensive death threats and harassment. [0]
> Reuters contacted a dozen professors, doctors and researchers with experience of analysing or testing potential treatments for chronic fatigue syndrome. All said they had been the target of online harassment because activists objected to their findings. Only two had definite plans to continue researching treatments.
Watching how poorly some professional athletes perform during long Covid recovery makes me highly doubt CFS as the root cause. Also, people have reported long-term loss of smell which also isn’t a typical post-illness or CFS thing.
as i've said, long-term sequelae certainly exist - and they are different for covid probably.
i also have had long-term loss of smell and modification of taste after getting a breakthrough delta case.
that said, demographically (as well as by diversity of symptoms reported), it does appear that there is also a "CFS-like" disease population being super-imposed on top of those that are experiencing long-term sequelae. much of the conversation around long covid is also being funded by ME/CFS lobbying/patient advocacy groups [0].
i think there are two distinct phenomena, and the fact that women are over-represented as long covid patients may be due to the CFS-like phenomena rather than the sequelae one.
Is this part of some weird political debate or something? The only thing I got out of that article is that one needs to count both the vaccinated and the recovered towards immunity levels, which is very much not controversial.
So, in March people should have said the opinion was reasonable and made corresponding policy decisions.
Include any facts that support a belief and omit all others.
Anyway, I’m simply saying the track record of the Journal leans more in one direction, and is frequently wrong.
Furthermore, no one ever follows up to correct all those incorrect opinions
Perhaps the steady diet of “coronavirus is no big deal” and “climate change “ opinions has skewed my opinion but to me the wsj seems to have an agenda.
Look, I don't really love the WSJ - but "what went wrong" is the exact same thing that went wrong with the government's story around vaccination.
If we would have reached herd immunity at 70-80% vaccinated (which is what was being said) then the argument was we would reach it sooner due to antibodies.
Given that delta evolved and rendered both of those stories bunk, I think it is silly to solely blame the WSJ for being wrong at predicting the future here.
From my point of view, the scientific consensus how covid spreads was pretty good from the start, and has only gotten better. With more information, the picture is more detailed, not fundamentally different.
What a completely unrelated piece by Bjørn Lomborg has to do with covid is not easy to understand. Hopefully no one is surprised if Lomborg has a simplified view of any given environmental problem. He is a business school professor after all and pretty well known for these things.
If you look at the chart of covid cases from March 2021, it is true that herd immunity was, in fact, near. Cases dropped to nearly zero shortly thereafter. Until the delta strain, of course, but the WSJ can hardly be expected to predict the future.
i'm not citing the opinion piece as a general endorsement of the wall street journal, or even this article. merely citing it because it condenses the evidence showing that CFS patient advocacy groups are heavily funding many of the prominent long covid organizations.
Any viral infection can cause some medium term effects. But most of the people with so called long-covid didn’t even test positive. They are just really convinced that they got it some time ago and that now they have long covid and the doctors are gaslighting them
I know people with long covid and people with CFS, and while there may be some overlapping symptoms that are common, they are decidedly different in most people.
As I've said, "long covid" is an overloaded term right now.
I'm also not going to be drawing conclusions from "I know some people X" and "other people Y." Hopefully the scientists studying this don't do that either.
> Enough research out there that disproves the ‘it’s all in your head’ theory.
That is definitely not even close to the consensus opinion of the field. there have been a number of attempts to try to show viruses as causing cfs, they have been discredited, whereas the pace study has not. [0]
post-aids patient advocacy, in clinical practice it has become incredibly unwise and unpopular to say that something is psychological in nature. even researchers who don't do anything in the clinic will still get death threats for suggesting otherwise.
Pace has been debunked. The idea that is has become unpopular to say something is psychological in nature couldn’t be more wrong. Talk to CFS patients before you make statements like that. There is not a single CFS patient who hasn’t been accused of making it all up. Not. A. Single. One.
Whenever a doctor doesn’t know the answer, it’s always psychological. It’s the easy way out.
People like you piss me off to no end so I’m gonna stop replying.
you clearly have massive internal stigma against people with psychologically-based illness. this is not the same as "making it all up."
this is exactly what i mean when i say this stuff is politicized.
i disagree fundamentally with the epistemic theory of "trust people to know what is causing their illness, not doctors or researchers."
e: for evidence of what this particular strain of "patient advocacy" looks like, just peruse through this person's previous comments (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29398210), such as:
Post viral fatigue syndrome has been known for decades, although the exact mechanism of action remains unclear. There's nothing special about COVID-19 in that regard.
We don't know that viruses and bacteria are always the trigger for CFS. That's a reasonable hypothesis but remains unproven. There could be other root causes for some cases.
Totally. Media coverage is why I suddenly started falling asleep during my work day and why my sense of smell and taste are still screwed up a year later. I can't taste oranges, cannot stand the smell or taste of tap water, and my office smells like an ash tray because CNN and MSNBC, and not because there's actually an issue. One of the very best ways to be insulting on this sort of an issue is to tell people that what they're experiencing is a fabrication of a media conspiracy that doesn't exist.
1. Maybe actually read my comment, where I acknowledge that post-covid sequelae are absolutely a thing. I myself experienced long-term sense of smell screwups.
2. Psychological components of an illness are still an illness, and I'm not suggesting that long covid is a "fabrication." You need to get over your internalized stigma, psychological effects can be incredibly powerful.
People experiencing CFS get similarly outraged when people suggest there is a psychological component to the disease. This is due to stigma. Indeed, if anything, CFS is good evidence of the strong impact that even a (probably) psychologically derived illness can have on one's physical well-being.
3. Even saying that something is at least partially driven by the media does not mean it is not a "serious" problem. Media coverage of high profile suicides leads to a measurable increase in the number of suicides in the general population. Those people killing themselves is not a "fabrication" and is in fact a really serious problem. i would be surprised if we hadn't seen something like cfs for covid emerge given the level of scary (to be clear, not irrationally scary, justifiably scary) media coverage around covid.
> This is due to stigma. Indeed, if anything, CFS is good evidence of the strong impact that even a (probably) psychologically derived illness can have on one's physical well-being.
AFAIK there is no strong consensus that (even covid-unrelated) CFS is probably psychosomatic in constrast to, say, immunologic.
It's hard to get a "strong consensus" on a negative. I think the general belief is that the weight of evidence is towards most of these cases being psychosomatically driven, as well as some poorly understood post-viral sequelae.
Perhaps it doesn't matter that much at all, the treatment for either is the same. Indeed, if you tell people with CFS that they instead have post-viral sequelae, their outcomes are significantly better.
Basically, the current status is no mechanism has been identified to cause CFS, there is a huge diversity of symptoms and demographics of who gets CFS, and there is substantial circumstantial evidence suggesting large psychological components (differences in effectiveness based on what you call the disease, larger correlation between self-reported illness vs. serological results, etc.) that all come together to form a broader whole. PACE is largely accepted in the medical research community, it has only been "debunked" in the blogosphere and news articles.
I'm going to issue 2 ignorant assumptions of mine and a "could it be" hypothesis, but assuming 1) That not a lot of Africans are obese and 2) Covid has so far not hit Africa that bad; Could it be that their lack of fat tissue is the reason?
Yeah, this is the Internet and I could do research to confirm or deny 1) and 2), but hey I'm just here because I'm distracting myself from work right now.
I don't think that's accurate. Eye-balling this[0], northern African and South African women are more obese than most European and US countries, and although men seem less obese, when you look at it overall, over 50-60% of adult South Africans and northern Africans are overweight or obese, compated to 75% of Americans. Obviously cherry-picking a bit here and ignoring western and most of sub-Saharan Africa, but I don't think "not a lot of Africans are obese" stands up as an assumption.
There are several factors, higher Vitamin D levels because of time spent outdoors, median age of the population, co-morbidities including diabetes, levels and availability of testing and gathering data etc. etc.
It's a clue but not necessarily true. Being fat is also highly correlated with cardiovascular issues, and hypertension is apparently the worst comorbidity with covid.
I think a mostly vegan diet would probably be the best you can do as an individual to protect yourself from severe covid (aside from vaccination).
> I think a mostly vegan diet would probably be the best you can do as an individual to protect yourself from severe covid
I know two vegans, who don't know each other as it happens, and both of them have what I'd call a shitty diet.
Sure, everything they eat is vegan but have you seen the contents of some vegan products? There are many things packed full of "filler". Especially stuff that comes in a box (although that's true of regular processed food too)
It's not like vegans just eat a steaming pile of broccoli each meal.
I'd say a diet that makes you healthier would be more appropriate: for some, that would be a high-animal-fat diet, others might be something else and so on.
Edit: I get your point: eating healthier is key but to say vegan is probably the wrong way of putting it.
> It's not like vegans just eat a steaming pile of broccoli each meal.
It depends on you know. Until recently (the last couple of years), vegans did tend to have very healthy whole-food diets, for the simple reason that processed foods were rarely vegan. That is different now, but I can see why people associate such a diet with veganism.
This is huge. This shows that obesity drives severe COVID outcomes and mortality. We need to tackle the obesity epidemic to help fight COVID. Less driving. More walkable cities. More density. Less highways. We also need to lower food consumption to reduce climate change and greenhouse gases. Over consumption and food waste is one of the primary drivers of climate change.
True, BUT: Get your booster. "Three doses against omicron are almost equivalent to the two doses effectiveness we had against the ... original variant," Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said Wednesday
When do we start to question these companies more critically? They have a huge financial conflict of interest, ranging in the billions of dollars per year, to push their drugs. Instead, they seem to be treated as pure and altruistic actors, while in other contexts such as their pricing of insulin, people recognize them as bad actors.
COVID is NOT a respiratory disease. It's a vascular disease.
That includes yellow bone marrow (which is adipose), red bone marrow (hence both the autoimmune/cytokine storm and immune deficiency/ADE effects), arteries and veins (hence blood clots, myocardia, stroke effects) and white fat (adipose, hence obesity as a pre-existing condition strongly associated with death from both virus and vaccine).
You only need to read the medical reports for people who die (including VAERS deaths) to see the obvious connections.
It was apparent from the start that the pandemic kills fat old men. I control only one of those parameters. I spent the time I saved not commuting on a bike. Many benefits. Could still do better. And, yes, vaxxed and boosted.
It could be more related to smoking in older people?
> Generally, men tend to use all tobacco products at higher rates than women. In 2015, 16.7 percent of adult males and 13.6 percent of adult females smoked cigarettes.
Interestingly in Finland at least women have been reporting considerably higher amount (around 70%) of side-effects from the vaccine. Haven't looked at other countries though.
Never. The only proper response is to force healthy, thin, young people who've already recovered from Covid to get vaccinated. And continue to get tested for Covid before traveling.
I agree, it's dangerous to shrug off the link that the vaccine doesn't have any risk associated with it,but then there's also from the same article you linked earlier:
> That compares with another study from Israel which found that in adults over 18, getting Covid-19 increases risk of myocarditis by 18 times – a far bigger increase in risk than from the vaccine.
That was the public health/pharma messaging from a few weeks ago. The link is getting too obvious to ignore so that's shifted to "Well it happens but it isn't a big deal" recently.
What do you even mean? National vaccination regulations reflect the myocarditis/pericarditis risk since half a year already. E.g. Germany doesn't vaccinate under 30s with Moderna etc.
How did OP become so confident in the assertion that it does not cause heart issues? The US media has been claiming the myocarditis risk was some sort of antivax conspiracy theory, that is when they covered it at all.
Not sure which "media" you got this from, myocarditis cases were first reported in young athletes with Covid, then army personnel that was vaccinated, if I remember correctly.
The absolute risk is very small though, a lot smaller than e.g. driving a car.
The headline is: "No, the COVID-19 vaccine does not cause myocarditis", the content does not line up with the assertion the headline makes and sort of weasel words it's way to "well it does but less then Covid", but most people just read the headline. I think media like this is what confused people to think: "the COVID-19 vaccine does not cause myocarditis".
I've heard similar assertions on shows like The View and Good Morning America, but I don't have clips.
You are still much better of with the vaccine than with covid.
While mRNA vaccines increase the risk by a factor of 3.2, covid increases the risk by a factor of 18.3. But there are many other averse things that may happen during an infection with sars-cov-2
I'm confused what your point is. The link between myocarditis and COVID vaccines is well-known and has been for a long time.
And, per scientific literature, it's a rare side-effect with little long-term implications. This is neither recent nor a shift in messaging, and implying such is dishonest.
I vouched for the parent comment. You can argue that the comment is just an ad hominem but I see value in being warned of links to the writings of crackpots.
"Vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are running well above normal.
I don’t know how to explain this other than vaccine-caused mortality."
