The thing I hate about this disease is how differently it affects people. I had it in the Fall and had no idea I had it...had a runny nose I thought was allergies...I remember feeling kinda tired one day. Had no idea I was exposing my wife to it, who doesn't do well with it despite being healthy otherwise. She had breathing problems from it that lasted months after the very first time she had it in June 2020. Her doctor called it covid pneumonia. She told me this time she knew she had it before she even tested because of the way it felt in her chest. I had no idea I was bringing that to her again, and it sucks. She recovered and all is well, but it scares me every time she gets it.
I'm not sure what she took the last time. The first time she got it was so early (June 2020) that we weren't sure what to do with it.
I would definitely recommend taking Paxlovid if someone is at risk. It really helps (tastes like ****, but it helps - I tried it).
https://viraldine.com/?gclid=CjwKCA...1WxWPXBKbb0QeG7UOZ0mAiiB8l1l5IHhoCDpIQAvD_BwE I’ve been using this spray for a few years now. I rarely get any colds or flus. Last year on a trip to a conference in Miami, I came down with something, something , maybe Covid maybe not, I did not get tested, just felt bad for a couple days on the weekend and I was back and ready to go again on Monday. Never been vaccinated and always take good care of myself by sleeping well, eating well, exercising and taking good supplements so I know my immune is damn strong. Maybe this spray can help you guys. Happy New Year!
Covid is crazy inflammatory, it makes your immune system go haywire, a result that continues well past the infection period. most of disease pathology in my opinion is related to inflammation, cancer, and increasingly accepted now too…heart disease
I think the problem is the fed had no business dictating public health policy. It should have been medical officers around the country having worked during that time it was ****ing chaotic and most people just stopped listening to the cdc.
The height of Covid was a pretty crazy time, but I recall state and local health departments still dictated policies. The feds had power to shut the border down, hand out FEMA money to states and vaccine requirements for federal employees You can argue that the state and local departments got info and recommendations from the feds that lead to policies you didn't agree with, but that's really hindsight quarterbacking imo for a real time pandemic. Anyway, just trying to clarify how the separation of duties work.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to look back and see what mistakes were made so moving forward we have some type of roadmap, but in the moment while it was developing, it was hard to know what was right or wrong.......at the beginning masks were not thought to be effective and then that changed so you rolled with the punches, I hated the dam mask but I did it to be cautious. I dont buy into the narrative that Fauci or any of the others were "corrupt", were they wrong on occasion, absolutely but they were all in uncharted territory. In this political atmosphere, folks like Rob S always want to "blame" someone and obviously they had to be corrupt to fit his narrow-minded narrative, it doesn't have to be true, you just keep parroting the lie with no basis of truth.
I mentioned this is the Hangout Covid thread - my father in law got Covid in early October 2023 and he passed away from Covid pneumonia in mid November 2023 after a long hospital stay, where his condition got progressively worse. I'm thankful to everybody that gave condolences and support in that thread. I shared that story since it was on point and to let folks know that Covid is still out there and still has potential to be life threatening. Since this is the D&D, I will go a little further as far as my opinions on what happened and Covid generally: 1) The vaccine was a great effort, but it failed. My father in law was vaxed and boosted. I never bought into how the vax was being sold as a jab that would prevent infection and stop the spread of infection. I did believe, however, that it was at minimum a preemptive therapeutic that would prevent severe cases, but that also does not seem to be the case either. 2) General masking does not work. I do believe that a PROPERLY WORN N95 mask works, but it is unrealistic that people could go about day to day living wearing that kind of mask. 3) Researchers and doctors still have not figured out why a case can be severe with some people, and minor in others. My father in law and his wife were infected at the same time, she recovered in three days, he died. He had no preexisting conditions or comorbidities, he was still young. 4) We just have to live with Covid, and you have to hope it doesn't get you severely if you get it. Maybe in the future a better vaccine will come around. We have been spoiled as humans for a long time that we did not have much to fear for getting random deadly infections, but we do right now. 5) China did this and I am pissed they have not been held accountable. At minimum they negligently infected the earth with this thing, at worst they unleashed this thing on purpose.
It is fair to say that there are things that were not clear at some point, but then dissenting opinions should not have been stifled in the West as if we were in totalitarian China. Can't have it both ways - force people to lose their jobs if they "don't comply", but say "oh well, how could we know, we were all just learning".
My alcohol tolerance has dropped over the past couple of years. I stopped drinking altogether in May because even one drink would cause me a fairly immediate sick feeling in my stomach that would last into the next day. I tested it again just the other day with one glass of wine. The sickness wasn't as bad as it was in May, but the intolerance is definitely still there. Now, this is probably the result of getting older, and that's what I've been assuming. This was a slide toward intolerance over 1-2 years. But, at the beginning of the pandemic, I was fine. It's possible that it's a long covid symptom. Other people have suspected the link. I did catch covid, though I can't remember if my troubles started before then. Btw, did I mention that going sober against your will really sucks?
Planners were freaking out from a collapse of hospital resources and health professionals burning out. America got hit pretty hard with deaths compared to other countries. You're closer to that sector, were those fears of the hospital system unfounded?
there has been a definite change in my ability to process alcohol. I've attributed this to age, but the change does coincide with the pandemic. I'm not necessarily drinking less, just feeling worse.
Almost entirely, yes. I understand being very cautious in that very first wave, after the pictures from Bergamo, etc. But after that, mostly, the fears of overburdened hospital systems were blown out of proportion, and partly self-caused because the determining factor for that claim was availability of ventilators, when it later turned out that hooking people up to ventilators actually killed them. At least as far as I know, for instance in the NHS in England, hospitals are "at capacity" almost every year during flu waves, which is of course problematic, but not that different from what was actually the case with Covid.
Similar here, but I think it's mostly age, and "being out of practice". I sometimes think of George Bush Jr. and how he (almost?) entirely stopped drinking at a certain age. Might have been less ideological and more realizing that it just "doesn't feel good" anymore.
This was a joint project between the United States and China. It's a line of research that was outlawed here because it was too dangerous, so they moved the development to China with U.S. brainpower. They also wanted to do it in China because it was cheaper to use lower security labs and Chinese labor. It was not released on purpose, but that does not dismiss the absolute negligence on the part of U.S. and Chinese researchers and administrators. We should have never allowed this technology transfer and research to be done in China. This just came out recently. https://nypost.com/2023/12/19/news/...-scientists-safety-concerns-over-chinese-lab/ Drafts and notes regarding a grant proposal called Project DEFUSE, coauthored by American researchers and scientists from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, were published by US Right to Know Monday through a Freedom of Information Act request. The proposal, which was ultimately rejected and denied funding by the US’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), was submitted by the now-controversial EcoHealth Alliance and sought to test engineering bat coronaviruses in a way that would make them more easily transmissible to humans. ... The researchers proposed introducing “appropriate human-specific cleavage sites” to the spike proteins of SARS-related viruses in the lab. “The BSL-2 nature of work on SARSr-CoVs makes our system highly cost-effective relative to other bat-virus systems ( e.g. Ebola, Marburg, Hendra, Nipah), which require BSL-4 level facilities for cell culture. The proposal was later edited and BSL-2 was changed to BSL-3, noting that the lower level of biosafety standards would “likely freak out” US scientists. “In the US, these recombinant SARS-CoV are studied under BSL3, not BSL2, especially important for those that are able to bind and replicate in primary human cells,” Baric commented on the original document. “In china (sic), might be growin these virus [sic] under bsl2. US reseachers [sic] will likely freak out.” There was a Nobel laureate that when he saw the furin cleavage site in SARS-Cov-2 called it a smoking gun. He got blasted in the media and walked it back. Well now we have documents that show the blueprint of how Covid was created. These documents are the smoking gun of the smoking gun. It's obvious Covid was a lab creation at this point. And for those still clinging to natural origin - where is the intermediate species jump? It was found in MERS in 9 months and SARS-1 in 3 months. It's been 4 years and nothing. There is still zero evidence for natural origin.
