Even my educated and previously cautious friends have given up and go around maskless despite serious preexisting conditions. I wince every time I get texted a photo of a maskless friend in a crowded restaurant or concert, then hear that someone’s tested positive again. For people who understand what COVID is and take that path, is it fatalism? Is it caving to the pressure of “back to normal”? I don’t know, but I have screwed up lungs already and have managed to avoid COVID infection so far, and I’d like to keep it that way even if I’m doing it alone.
This is my experience 100% and it drives me crazy. I work part time in an elementary school, and three are maybe 5-10 of us--students and kids--who mask at all anymore. The other day, a teacher told me that even when she gets a cold or flu she doesn’t test anymore, and I wanted to jump out the window.
Someone at work just told me everyone in their house (the person, their pregnant wife, and their 18 month old) has been sick continuously for four months. Surprised when I asked if they’ve tested for COVID. Another colleague had their 2 year old sent home from daycare with high fever and flu symptoms - surprised when I asked if they would be testing the kid for COVID, like it never would have occurred to him. When I declined holiday invites citing high wastewater numbers, people were like “oh really?” and went about their plans. These are smart, educated people who can easily access and understand information about the realities of COVID. Instead they’re going to refuse that knowledge, carry on, and years from now wonder why their families have so many mysterious health problems. It’s like a slow motion train wreck I’m going to watch helplessly for the foreseeable future and all I can do is try to keep myself out of the disaster zone.
MOST of friends and family members who are now constantly sick with confirmed COVID cases and other viral and bacterial infections. Just sick, all the time.
When I speak to them, they are not connecting the dots to COVID. When I connect the dots for them, they seem to be unable to process the information or know what they could possibly do to prevent this from continuing to occur.
These are people who were very smart, very intelligent, but quite obviously (I've known many for 15-30 years) and they are - different now. Less articulate. Some know they have Brain Fog, are experiencing "Word Finding," etc. A few that are "just waiting to get fired," as they know it's only a matter of time. They do not know what to do. It's very all or nothing. They know they just can't do what I do, or scoff when I tell them what I would do in their position.
This is especially true for my friends with kids. When I tell them that I wouldn't infect my kid repeatedly with a novel virus that we now know is not only affecting their immune system, but is also a neurological and vascular disease - that I would do whatever I needed to do to make that not happen anymore. Make adjustments. Acknowledge the threat and pivot life accordingly. They just can't make sense of it.
I think the constant COVID and illnesses is affecting their ability to process new information at all. As someone who is severely immunocompromised and was sick every month of my entire life, I can tell you it makes decision making and life in general extremely difficult to navigate. You're very much in survival mode.
We're dealing with a chronically ill and traumatized population. They really do need Public Health to help inform them and do their part by making life livable again. At least, as best as we can with clean air, masking, tracing, etc, etc.
Thanks for this very good ‘reader-friendly’ essay....unfortunately people choose to believe the ‘misinformation’. We are all lemings heading collectively for the cliff. Unless science can find a way to stop this virus and to stop its ‘Long Covid’ impacts I fear the future of humanity. Thanks for this! I wish SARS-CoV-2 was a cold but know it is not...I hate this virus!!
What I have noticed over the past week is that far fewer people are rolling their eyes when viewing the N95 mask fitted to my face. The occasional query is not confrontational but a lament about having to start wearing one again.
My wife is on the staff of our 400 bed local hospital which is filled with COVID patients.
Our governments should be providing respirators with proper fitting instruction at the least. That that does not happen speaks volumes.
The sooner the sad fact that this virus is going to keep mutating and stay present in our lives for the duration, the better off we will be.
Excellent piece, very easy to understand. This is exactly what government doesn’t want us to know. I’m not sure which is worse -- the nearly complete lack of data or the dumbfounded looks we get on a rare day when we go somewhere. Mind boggling!
There also seems to be way too many articles being written on how important it is to have a social life! Honestly, I’d love to do that but not if it’s going to kill me. Which is what these policies seem designed to do.☹️
My first bout with Covid gave me a year of severe gastrointestinal problems. It rendered my GI tract pretty much unable to operate. I had severe acid damage from esophagus to the duodenum. I also ended up with high blood pressure. Did not have that or any stomach issues prior to Covid infection.
And most recently my 81 year old mom was in the hospital for a blood infection. Zero hospital staff wore masks of any kind. My mom caught Covid in the hospital but none of the staff even noticed. Part of why she felt so bad was she had Covid! She got diagnosed because I got sick and tested positive. My 85 year old dad also caught it from her. The timeline shows she got it at the hospital and my dad and I got it from her. She is now housebound due to pulmonary edema and edema in her legs. She has fluid around the heart as well. She had heart issues beforehand so it’s amazing this hasn’t killed her. It may yet do so. She had been fully active before that hospital stay.
“Another implication, according to a neuroscientist studying covid, is ‘a generation of babies being born with long covid.’ ” this is terrifying, and I’m glad I’m old. I’m afraid of what the world is going to look like when everyone has brain damage.
Currently, there are people, even on Substack, attempting to pin excess deaths on cytotoxins remaining in the mRNA vaccines from a very complicated manufacturing process. Seems the Ace2 receptor link is missing in their narratives because they jump straight to blaming cytotoxins as the excess death cause with mounds and heaps of “scientific data” while alleging a “coverup” by the manufacturers. Thanks again for your narrative.
Not only is Covid not the common cold, I think Covid has been teaching us that the common cold could be way worse than we realized. In the early 90s my best friend from college came down with such a knock-down/drag-out "cold" that it sent him to the ER a couple times during the course of the three week acute infection. In the ensuing three decades my friend has suffered from what we used to call "chronic fatigue syndrome," but is now called long Covid. His condition tidily checks all the now-familiar hallmark molecular boxes - mast cell activation, autoantibodies, periodic EBV reactivation, etc. I've been urging him to post a 'stack about the strategies he's developed for surviving the condition. It has been a heroic struggle.
The point being: my friend's early 90s infection was most likely a seasonal coronavirus. NL43, maybe. Or the OC43 coronavirus that's believed to have caused the disastrous Russian flu of 1895. Casually dismissing the common cold as uniformly harmless condition we shouldn't bother fighting has been a horrifying century-long mistake. Vaccines! Now!
This makes many things make so much more sense! However, I'm puzzled because I thought there were well-known long-term non-respiratory effects of some respiratory diseases. For example, I have heard (apparently it is up for debate?) that Spanish Flu later caused sleeping sickness and then (even later) Parkinson's.
I have also seen research that says that getting a flu shot cuts your risk of a major cardiac event (e.g. heart attack, stroke, heart failure) in the next year by 50%.
Great article. I'm curious how vaccines affect the ability for the virus to change its envelope code? Are we past the point of reaching R_0<1? Does a sustained low vaccine rate increase the likelihood of a virus evolving to bypass or neuter vaccines?
BTW, protip: Vit D, Vit C, and Zinc will not protect you from a Neurological and Vascular Disease.
The vaccines adverse effects, even severe ones like Myocarditis (1629 ppl out of 192+ Million ppl vaccinated) are insignificant when compared to the absolute horror show of an actual COVID infection. Just, FYI.
Also, wearing a properly fitted respirator absolutely protects the wearer and those around them from infection.
* There's a TON of articles that can be found on sites like the CDC, Yale Med, John's Hopkins, etc that describe the efficacy of properly worn fit-tested N95 respirators. All you needed to do was a quick little Google search ;-)
Absolutely false. Vitamin D is fundamentally involved in immune response to viruses including C0VlD-l9 (see video link below) and is also fundamentally involved in modulating immune response to be robust, while at the same time mitigating against excessive immune response (for example it helps prevent cytokine storms).
Based on that opening wild inaccuracy on your part, I think it is safe to say that you are not pursuing proper basic independent study and research.
The CDC, Yale Med and Johns Hopkins all have deep conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry and are therefore not credible sources that can be simply taken at face value. You need to show actual links to truly independent, peer reviewed research (some of which can be found at Yale and Johns Hopkins, but again each paper must be scrutinized on its own merits).
(Perhaps if you knew how to properly spell Johns Hopkins -with no apostrophe- and you actually cited links -instead of shooting off vague unsubstantiated pronouncements about studies- your assertions would be more credible.)
Here's the breakdown on Vitamin D, C0VlD-l9, Flu, etc..
Not you sending me a f**king YOUTUBE video by John Campbell - LMFAO.
The man has a "Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton, and a Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."
He is well known quack. lol.
Thank you for letting all of us here know you are following a conspiracy theorist and not any notable immunologists, virologists, public health professions, etc.
Well done.
You'll take his info at face value but not credible researchers, institutions, etc.
Lol, "I get my medical advice from a rando NURSE on youtube."
Note: I didn't say *all* respirators are ineffective (I did not actually use the word 'respirators' at all.) Nice attempt to raise a strawman.
If expensive high tech respirators (which most people would not pay for, nor wear on a bus ride) would help protect the vulnerable, they would make sense for those people. I'm talking about basic masks and *simple* respirators (eg. N95, just a glorified mask) which have been shown to be essentially useless for airborne viruses.
NEWS REPORT "Approximately Zero: Masks make no difference in reducing the spread of Covid, according to an extensive new review by Cochrane - the gold standard for evaluating health interventions." (cites multiple studies)
So now you are deleting replies with evidence that you are clearly wrong? What a joke. The Cochrane review was not discredited, the review authors stated that a summary of the review that they published may have misled people. Anyone in doubt about what the actual Cochrane study says can simply read it for themselves and see its clear evidence that masks have not been shown to be effective.
It's just incredibly boring to have to post decent sources to discredit your shit ones over and over again. Don't bother replying. I'll delete it. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119266119
Even my educated and previously cautious friends have given up and go around maskless despite serious preexisting conditions. I wince every time I get texted a photo of a maskless friend in a crowded restaurant or concert, then hear that someone’s tested positive again. For people who understand what COVID is and take that path, is it fatalism? Is it caving to the pressure of “back to normal”? I don’t know, but I have screwed up lungs already and have managed to avoid COVID infection so far, and I’d like to keep it that way even if I’m doing it alone.
This is my experience 100% and it drives me crazy. I work part time in an elementary school, and three are maybe 5-10 of us--students and kids--who mask at all anymore. The other day, a teacher told me that even when she gets a cold or flu she doesn’t test anymore, and I wanted to jump out the window.
Someone at work just told me everyone in their house (the person, their pregnant wife, and their 18 month old) has been sick continuously for four months. Surprised when I asked if they’ve tested for COVID. Another colleague had their 2 year old sent home from daycare with high fever and flu symptoms - surprised when I asked if they would be testing the kid for COVID, like it never would have occurred to him. When I declined holiday invites citing high wastewater numbers, people were like “oh really?” and went about their plans. These are smart, educated people who can easily access and understand information about the realities of COVID. Instead they’re going to refuse that knowledge, carry on, and years from now wonder why their families have so many mysterious health problems. It’s like a slow motion train wreck I’m going to watch helplessly for the foreseeable future and all I can do is try to keep myself out of the disaster zone.
I have experienced this as well.
MOST of friends and family members who are now constantly sick with confirmed COVID cases and other viral and bacterial infections. Just sick, all the time.
When I speak to them, they are not connecting the dots to COVID. When I connect the dots for them, they seem to be unable to process the information or know what they could possibly do to prevent this from continuing to occur.
These are people who were very smart, very intelligent, but quite obviously (I've known many for 15-30 years) and they are - different now. Less articulate. Some know they have Brain Fog, are experiencing "Word Finding," etc. A few that are "just waiting to get fired," as they know it's only a matter of time. They do not know what to do. It's very all or nothing. They know they just can't do what I do, or scoff when I tell them what I would do in their position.
This is especially true for my friends with kids. When I tell them that I wouldn't infect my kid repeatedly with a novel virus that we now know is not only affecting their immune system, but is also a neurological and vascular disease - that I would do whatever I needed to do to make that not happen anymore. Make adjustments. Acknowledge the threat and pivot life accordingly. They just can't make sense of it.
I think the constant COVID and illnesses is affecting their ability to process new information at all. As someone who is severely immunocompromised and was sick every month of my entire life, I can tell you it makes decision making and life in general extremely difficult to navigate. You're very much in survival mode.
We're dealing with a chronically ill and traumatized population. They really do need Public Health to help inform them and do their part by making life livable again. At least, as best as we can with clean air, masking, tracing, etc, etc.
Thanks for this very good ‘reader-friendly’ essay....unfortunately people choose to believe the ‘misinformation’. We are all lemings heading collectively for the cliff. Unless science can find a way to stop this virus and to stop its ‘Long Covid’ impacts I fear the future of humanity. Thanks for this! I wish SARS-CoV-2 was a cold but know it is not...I hate this virus!!
What I have noticed over the past week is that far fewer people are rolling their eyes when viewing the N95 mask fitted to my face. The occasional query is not confrontational but a lament about having to start wearing one again.
My wife is on the staff of our 400 bed local hospital which is filled with COVID patients.
Our governments should be providing respirators with proper fitting instruction at the least. That that does not happen speaks volumes.
The sooner the sad fact that this virus is going to keep mutating and stay present in our lives for the duration, the better off we will be.
Precaution is mandatory, not optional.
Excellent piece, very easy to understand. This is exactly what government doesn’t want us to know. I’m not sure which is worse -- the nearly complete lack of data or the dumbfounded looks we get on a rare day when we go somewhere. Mind boggling!
There also seems to be way too many articles being written on how important it is to have a social life! Honestly, I’d love to do that but not if it’s going to kill me. Which is what these policies seem designed to do.☹️
My first bout with Covid gave me a year of severe gastrointestinal problems. It rendered my GI tract pretty much unable to operate. I had severe acid damage from esophagus to the duodenum. I also ended up with high blood pressure. Did not have that or any stomach issues prior to Covid infection.
And most recently my 81 year old mom was in the hospital for a blood infection. Zero hospital staff wore masks of any kind. My mom caught Covid in the hospital but none of the staff even noticed. Part of why she felt so bad was she had Covid! She got diagnosed because I got sick and tested positive. My 85 year old dad also caught it from her. The timeline shows she got it at the hospital and my dad and I got it from her. She is now housebound due to pulmonary edema and edema in her legs. She has fluid around the heart as well. She had heart issues beforehand so it’s amazing this hasn’t killed her. It may yet do so. She had been fully active before that hospital stay.
So no, Covid is not a cold.
So sorry Beth, it's unacceptable
“Another implication, according to a neuroscientist studying covid, is ‘a generation of babies being born with long covid.’ ” this is terrifying, and I’m glad I’m old. I’m afraid of what the world is going to look like when everyone has brain damage.
Wow! Thanks.
Currently, there are people, even on Substack, attempting to pin excess deaths on cytotoxins remaining in the mRNA vaccines from a very complicated manufacturing process. Seems the Ace2 receptor link is missing in their narratives because they jump straight to blaming cytotoxins as the excess death cause with mounds and heaps of “scientific data” while alleging a “coverup” by the manufacturers. Thanks again for your narrative.
Not only is Covid not the common cold, I think Covid has been teaching us that the common cold could be way worse than we realized. In the early 90s my best friend from college came down with such a knock-down/drag-out "cold" that it sent him to the ER a couple times during the course of the three week acute infection. In the ensuing three decades my friend has suffered from what we used to call "chronic fatigue syndrome," but is now called long Covid. His condition tidily checks all the now-familiar hallmark molecular boxes - mast cell activation, autoantibodies, periodic EBV reactivation, etc. I've been urging him to post a 'stack about the strategies he's developed for surviving the condition. It has been a heroic struggle.
The point being: my friend's early 90s infection was most likely a seasonal coronavirus. NL43, maybe. Or the OC43 coronavirus that's believed to have caused the disastrous Russian flu of 1895. Casually dismissing the common cold as uniformly harmless condition we shouldn't bother fighting has been a horrifying century-long mistake. Vaccines! Now!
I said all of this in May 2020 and everyone laughed lol
let's just go extinct already.
:head-exploding-emoji:
This makes many things make so much more sense! However, I'm puzzled because I thought there were well-known long-term non-respiratory effects of some respiratory diseases. For example, I have heard (apparently it is up for debate?) that Spanish Flu later caused sleeping sickness and then (even later) Parkinson's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4684089/
I have also seen research that says that getting a flu shot cuts your risk of a major cardiac event (e.g. heart attack, stroke, heart failure) in the next year by 50%.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/1758749
Finally, this paper says that HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1 use sialic acid as their entry receptors, and sialic acid apparently is on ALL cells:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7653219/
Can you please educate me?
Went to the CDC homepage and was surprised to see that covid is NOT listed as an 'airborne' spreading disease but rather as a 'direct contact'
Great article. I'm curious how vaccines affect the ability for the virus to change its envelope code? Are we past the point of reaching R_0<1? Does a sustained low vaccine rate increase the likelihood of a virus evolving to bypass or neuter vaccines?
BTW, protip: Vit D, Vit C, and Zinc will not protect you from a Neurological and Vascular Disease.
The vaccines adverse effects, even severe ones like Myocarditis (1629 ppl out of 192+ Million ppl vaccinated) are insignificant when compared to the absolute horror show of an actual COVID infection. Just, FYI.
Also, wearing a properly fitted respirator absolutely protects the wearer and those around them from infection.
* There's a TON of articles that can be found on sites like the CDC, Yale Med, John's Hopkins, etc that describe the efficacy of properly worn fit-tested N95 respirators. All you needed to do was a quick little Google search ;-)
Good luck.
Absolutely false. Vitamin D is fundamentally involved in immune response to viruses including C0VlD-l9 (see video link below) and is also fundamentally involved in modulating immune response to be robust, while at the same time mitigating against excessive immune response (for example it helps prevent cytokine storms).
Based on that opening wild inaccuracy on your part, I think it is safe to say that you are not pursuing proper basic independent study and research.
The CDC, Yale Med and Johns Hopkins all have deep conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry and are therefore not credible sources that can be simply taken at face value. You need to show actual links to truly independent, peer reviewed research (some of which can be found at Yale and Johns Hopkins, but again each paper must be scrutinized on its own merits).
(Perhaps if you knew how to properly spell Johns Hopkins -with no apostrophe- and you actually cited links -instead of shooting off vague unsubstantiated pronouncements about studies- your assertions would be more credible.)
Here's the breakdown on Vitamin D, C0VlD-l9, Flu, etc..
"Vitamin D, now conclusive" - 14 min (2023)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5sc7G4s4CY
Not you sending me a f**king YOUTUBE video by John Campbell - LMFAO.
The man has a "Ph.D. in nursing from the University of Bolton, and a Ph.D. for his work on developing methods of teaching via digital media such as online videos."
He is well known quack. lol.
Thank you for letting all of us here know you are following a conspiracy theorist and not any notable immunologists, virologists, public health professions, etc.
Well done.
You'll take his info at face value but not credible researchers, institutions, etc.
Lol, "I get my medical advice from a rando NURSE on youtube."
Also, please show the peer reviewed articles that you say indicate that masks and respirators are ineffective.
Thanks.
Note: I didn't say *all* respirators are ineffective (I did not actually use the word 'respirators' at all.) Nice attempt to raise a strawman.
If expensive high tech respirators (which most people would not pay for, nor wear on a bus ride) would help protect the vulnerable, they would make sense for those people. I'm talking about basic masks and *simple* respirators (eg. N95, just a glorified mask) which have been shown to be essentially useless for airborne viruses.
NEWS REPORT "Approximately Zero: Masks make no difference in reducing the spread of Covid, according to an extensive new review by Cochrane - the gold standard for evaluating health interventions." (cites multiple studies)
https://www.city-journal.org/article/approximately-zero
STUDY "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses"
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
The Cochrane review has been discredited. The publishers issued an apology for the flawed conclusions https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/how-the-cochrane-review-went-wrong-report-questioning-covid-masks-blows-up-prompts-apology/article_80b67196-5872-5b1a-a208-b0a525f8de5b.html
So now you are deleting replies with evidence that you are clearly wrong? What a joke. The Cochrane review was not discredited, the review authors stated that a summary of the review that they published may have misled people. Anyone in doubt about what the actual Cochrane study says can simply read it for themselves and see its clear evidence that masks have not been shown to be effective.
Here's the direct link to the study:
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full
It's just incredibly boring to have to post decent sources to discredit your shit ones over and over again. Don't bother replying. I'll delete it. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2119266119