Getting over covid now. Midwest US Dr I spoke to said he does not see many covid cases anymore and the ones he does see are very mild. Just getting over it now and I didn’t even feel sick like 2021 2022. Not to say there aren’t severe cases but I’m mildly immune compromised and faired fine. Fever for 1 day and with fluids it broke. Rest was stuffy nose and sore throat.
It is no longer the acute symptoms one needs to worry about. This virus is like HIV/AIDS and will stay in your system long after you are “over it”.
Source?
This is from 2 years ago, but was being discussed as early as 2020.
To be clear, McComsey isn’t suggesting that the viruses themselves are similar. Coronaviruses are not retroviruses like HIV, nor are they sexually transmitted like HIV. But it’s the way they make the people they infect sick that caught her attention. It hides in the body and continues to wreak havoc in the various organ system by driving inflammation and disrupting the immune response.
“HIV patients don’t die from the virus itself. They die from immune activation – from the high levels of inflammation that causes cancer, heart disease, liver and kidney disease,” she said.
“The only reason we cannot cure HIV is because the virus hides where the HIV drugs can’t go in. So it continues to fuel this high inflammation. That’s why somebody like me who has been studying HIV for the last 20 years found that COVID is extremely similar to HIV. It’s a virus that produces a lot of inflammation. We see a lot of conditions that are known to stem from inflammation, and now we have some evidence that it persists in different organs.” McComsey is referring to various published research papers that suggest the SARS-Cov-2 may linger in various organ tissues long after nasal swabs and blood tests come back negative.
If you wanted a more “academic” perspective, this is a study on “Long COVID” from this year.
We used ‘omic” assays and serology to deeply characterize the global and SARS-CoV-2-specific immunity in the blood of individuals with clear LC and non-LC clinical trajectories, 8 months postinfection. We found that LC individuals exhibited systemic inflammation and immune dysregulation.
This tells us that Long COVID manifests as persistent symptoms far after an acute COVID infection and appears to be, in reality, a continued infection by COVID that doesn’t go away, instead hanging out in various organs and constantly challenging your immune system – despite vaccination. Hopefully I don’t need another source to tell you why this is a bad thing.
Well shit. Is that just for long COVID? Do the majority of infections clear completely? Also isn’t part of the problem with AIDS that it will lay dormant inside of you for years after initial infection without any symptoms. Same with, like, TB. Is there any evidence that that happens with COVID?
Do the majority of infections clear completely?
The numbers are still unclear. Keep in mind that HIV/AIDS, TB et al have had a much longer time around to be studied. The researcher I quoted above mentioned studying HIV for 20 years. COVID is only approaching the end of year 5. In spite of its recency, we do still have a wealth of data to tell us how threatening it is, anyway. Being re-infected several times per year is certainly not tipping the odds in anyone’s favor, either.
The safest thing to do is also, thankfully, the simplest: wearing a well-fitting, N95-grade respirator whenever one is away from their home. These types of respirators are, regardless of anything you may have heard, extremely effective at protecting you and others from infecting one another, even one-way.
