Kraken wrote: Fri Jun 10, 2022 10:03 pm
Everyone in her house has had covid at least twice and it's no big deal.
Funny you should mention that - interesting piece on the COVID
event horizon from a few days ago:
If we manage it the way that we manage it now, then most people will get infected with it at least a couple of times a year,” virologist at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego, Kristian Andersen, says in the New York Times. Doctors are now “seeing kids with [their] 3rd infection in [a] 4 month period. The shortest time between reinfection recorded by the CDC was 23 days.
All of which begs the question: how many SARS-CoV-2 infections can an organism sustain? People don’t get the flu 2 or 3 times a year, and if they did that would probably *also* be bad. But getting a thing that kills your T cells seems not infinitely scalable, right?
....
COVID degrades your immune system for the next time you encounter the virus, and also makes you more susceptible to infections overall. (Population-level immune dysfunction may go a ways to explaining the emergence of the sudden new characters in our viral cinematic universe — Monkeypox, Pediatric Hepatitis, et al.) COVID also increases your risk of developing diabetes by 59%, which is then a contributing risk factor for severe COVID, including death.
....
Imagine your DNA strands as intertwined shoelaces. At the end of each lace is a plastic tip that keeps the strand from coming undone. Telomeres are these caps at the end of each DNA strand that protect the chromosomes.
We start out our lives with long telomeres, but as our cells replicate the telomeres progressively get shorter. Like tree-rings, telomere lengths can be used as biological markers of age in every cell. Last year, a study looking at the telomeres of people who had been infected with COVID found that infection can make the aging process happen much faster. According to the findings, “COVID-19 survivors exhibited a significant acceleration of their biological age, occurring mainly in the younger individuals.” Just because you’re supposed to “learn to live with it” doesn’t mean it will be for long.
So where does that leave us?
While we don’t yet know what number of SARS CoV-2 assaults an organism can tolerate, we do know what level of COVID deaths the Biden administration thinks the American public will tolerate. According to Politico reporter Rachael Levy, “Biden officials in recent months privately discussed how many daily Covid-19 deaths it would take to declare the virus tamed. One person involved in the conversations said, ‘500 a day is a lot. You still have 9/11 numbers in a week… People generally felt like 100 [a day] or less, or maybe 200, would be OK.’ The U.S. has never sustained that level of deaths.”
...
Each surge, of course, washes fresh new waves of disabled and significantly sicker people ashore. COVID’s mass disabling is not so much an event — which implies a start and end time — as an era. As Diana Berrent, Founder of Survivor Corps, a grassroots COVID advocacy group says, “This is going to change the fabric of our society, and we need to prepare ourselves for it. There is no part of our society that is not going to be touched by Long COVID.”
In closing:
As we continue the denihilist status quo of doing whatever this nothing we’ve been doing is, we now live in a state of collective grief. Whether through the loss of those we love, the health we used to take for granted, or the idea of any solidarity or accountability in the face of mass crisis. “The collective trauma of the past several years has slowly begun to erode our resilience and our hope,” Melissa Flint, PsyD, associate professor of clinical psychology at Midwestern University Glendale who specializes in thanatology (the study of death, dying and bereavement) and traumatic loss, tells CNBC. “Our brains have not practiced what it takes to cope with these enormous losses, one after another, after another. The cumulative effect of this has yet to be seen.”
, now it's just part a familial conversation. "So and so got COVID again last week."
