TheModerateTankie

I guess the CDC updated their page.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/covid-19-can-surge-throughout-the-year.html

Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer, driven by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations. You can protect yourself from serious illness by staying up to date with vaccinations, getting treated if you have medical conditions that make you more likely to get very sick from COVID-19, and using other strategies outlined in CDC's respiratory virus guidance.

If only we had a way to slow down or stop the spread of disease.

Someday, far onto the future, scientists will figure it out!

Around the world, a post-Covid reality is beginning to sink in: Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often.

At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins, according to analysis by Bloomberg News and London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd.

The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.

The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.

We can explain it, covid takes a toll on our immune system, and we are constantly exposed to it and can catch it multiple times a year. No one in public office wants to acknowledge it because that would mean putting money and effort into infection control.

Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.

May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.

This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.

I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates

BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.

Although heart failure mortality rates fell between 1999 and 2012, the proportion of people dying from the condition in the US has increased in recent years, according to a study published in JAMA Cardiology. By 2021, the heart failure mortality rate was higher than in 1999, signaling that earlier improvements have been “entirely undone” over the past 10 years, the researchers wrote. The findings were based on death certificate data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

**The accelerated increase in heart failure mortality rates during 2020 and 2021 suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic might have contributed to current trends. **Changes in how heart failure is diagnosed and coded as well as improved survival for patients with conditions such as ischemic heart disease, which predispose them to heart failure, might also have contributed to the uptick in heart failure mortality rates, the researchers wrote.

It's just a super infectious and rapidly mutating virus that can cause heart disease, nbd.

BTW, Rates of covid are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, including my town. It was low for about two months, and now wastewater levels are spiking again.

The latest edition of the World Health Statistics released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth (HALE).

The pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years. Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012).

The 2024 report also highlights how the effects have been felt unequally across the world. The WHO regions for the Americas and South-East Asia were hit hardest, with life expectancy dropping by approximately 3 years and healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years between 2019 and 2021. In contrast, the Western Pacific Region was minimally affected during the first two years of the pandemic, with losses of less than 0.1 years in life expectancy and 0.2 years in healthy life expectancy.

Short answer: Yes, covid increases your risk of cancer, but it's not a huge risk.

Longer answer: Covid, like HPV, messes with our cells ability to make the p53 gene, which among other things, helps our bodies destroy cancerous cells.

In mild infections low p53 levels lasted 16-24 weeks before returning to normal.

In severe infections low p53 levels lasted past 24 weeks and may not return to normal.

It took a long time to measure the impact of the HPV vaccine, and it will take a long time to meaure the impact of covid and vaccines.

The video compares it to the risk of getting HPV and the Epstien-Barr virus. However I don't think either of those viruses mutate the way covid does, or have the potential to reinfect you with a different variant every several months the way covid does. Also, all three viruses have shown the ability to persist in people's bodies, which increases the risk of cancers and other long term health effects.

Found this gem posted by the technology connections guy.

In a nutshell, we showed that over-the-counter cheap generic antibiotic neomycin can be repurposed in nasal formulation to prevent & treat infection, block transmission, and reduce disease burden against a wide array of viruses. Since this is a host-directed strategy and virus-agnostic, it holds promise as a prophylactic strategy against any viral threat.

The advice in the screencapped thread was to apply a little with a q-tip to the inside of the nostrils.

There is no info on any dangers of doing this very often, but if you can't avoid a high-risk environment it's worth trying.

Here's a thread about the study. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1782535781338222960.html

here's the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918160/

Research published today in Lancet Infectious Disease and supported by PolyBio Research Foundation provides the strongest evidence yet that the COVID virus can persist for months or years after infection. The findings, published by a UC San Francisco/Harvard Medical School team, found that proteins created by the virus were still present for up to 14 months in a quarter of people tested. This demonstrates SARS-CoV-2 viral persistence as an urgent area of research underlying a breadth of chronic disease after COVID.

“The fact that every new SARS-CoV-2 infection has the potential to become chronic is perhaps the single most concerning aspect of this virus” says Dr. Amy Proal, President of PolyBio. “We have compelling data that viral persistence is much more common than recognized which could have major health implications.”

However, with an estimated 18 million adults and 5.8 million children suffering from Long COVID, government investment is also needed. SARS-CoV-2 has even been found in the lymph nodes of children months after COVID, suggesting persistent infection can begin early in life.

long suspected and showed up in research before, but here's more proof this is a thing.

Nearly all people in the study were not vaccinated, and generally the sicker they were the more likely they had viral persistance.

Independently, advocates, researchers, and clinicians also reported seeing an increase in the number of people who have developed long COVID after a second or third infection.

John Baratta, MD, who runs the COVID Recovery Clinic at the University of North Carolina, said the increase is related to a higher rate of acute cases in the fall and winter of 2023.

In January, the percentage of North Carolinians reporting ever having had long COVD jumped from 12.5% to 20.2% in January and fell to 16.8% in February.

At the same time, many cases are either undetected or unreported by people who tested positive for COVID-19 at home or are not aware they have had it.

Hannah Davis, a member of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, also linked the increase in long COVID to the wave of new infections at the end of 2023 and the start of 2024.

"It's absolutely real," she said via email. "There have been many new cases in the past few months, and we see those new folks in our communities as well."

After there was a lull in cases last spring/summer, a lot of covid minimizers claimed long covid isn't a big deal anymore because there were less new cases. Immunity wall or whatever. Turns out cases start increasing again when there is a major covid wave. No one could have forseen...

The best we can say is that some people who get long covid will feel better within a year, and all current data points to covid having cumulative risk. Everytime you get covid, your risk of long term symptoms goes up.

Four years late. They knew it was airborne at the start and it took them four years to release this info. They could have prioritized upgrading indoor air in busy public places, but nah, better to just throw money at millionaires and hope something sticks. They opened up schools which were unsafe (rich schools had air filtration installed so the important people were protected) and they did it specifically to spread the disease after the vaccines were available, chasing the "herd immunity" fantasy. Maybe that's not working out as well as they thought it would?

The guidance emphasizes the importance of bringing in fresh outdoor air and ensuring that air conditioning and heating systems are operating properly, preferably with filters rated MERV-13 or higher. It also describes other steps that can be added, including air circulation, proper exhaust venting, air cleaners, and ultraviolet air treatment.

So HEPA filters, far-uvc, CR-Boxes are all a good idea. Small anecdote, but I have a couple CR-Boxes I set up and ran them when someone in my house was sick, and it never spread to me. A very rare occurance pre-pandemic.

Some co-workers and I have been advocating for proper air filtration for years now, and have basically been treated like kooks because the CDC has dragged their feet on this. Maybe now they'll listen to us?