Atlantic is the coronapanic gift that keeps on giving. The laptop class migrates from chronic Lyme to Long COVID highlights our summer gift from this magazine. “Medium COVID Could Be the Most Dangerous COVID” (October 11, by Dr. Karen) is our fall gift.
I am still afraid of catching COVID. As a young, healthy, bivalently boosted physician, I no longer worry that I’ll end up strapped to a ventilator, but it does seem plausible that even a mild case of the disease could shorten my life, or leave me with chronic fatigue, breathing trouble, and brain fog.
Rather, [the ravages of COVID] emerge during the middle phase of post-infection, a stretch that lasts for about 12 weeks after you get sick. This period of time is so menacing, in fact, that it really ought to have its own, familiar name: medium COVID.
Dr. Karen has plenty of company in the halls of medicine:
Yet many have inferred that COVID’s dangers have no end. “What’s particularly alarming is that these are really life-long conditions,” Ziyad Al-Aly, the lead researcher on the veterans studies, told the Financial Times in August. A Cleveland Clinic cardiologist has suggested that catching SARS-CoV-2 might even become a greater contributor to cardiovascular disease than being a chronic smoker or having obesity.
The last point shows how great Science is. Consider a 300 lb. human who has spent the last 2.5 years Following the Science by staying home and snacking, thus avoiding catching SARS-CoV-2. Compare to Novak Djokovic, who has been infected with the deadly virus at least once. A layperson might imagine that Djokovic is healthier than the couch whale, but Science tells us that the 300 lb. Playstation hero is the better insurance bet. (The Biden Administration agrees, which is why the plague-ridden unvaccinated Djokovic is still banned from entering the United States.)
COVID is so deadly that people are dying before they can be dragged to the hospital:
By the end of the Omicron surge last winter, one in four Americans—about 84 million people—had been newly infected with the coronavirus. This was on top of 103 million pre-Omicron infections. Yet six months after the surge ended, the number of adult emergency-room visits, outpatient appointments, and hospital admissions across the country were all slightly lower than they were at the same time in 2021, according to an industry report released last month. In fact, emergency-room visits and hospital admissions in 2021 and 2022 were lower than they’d been before the pandemic.
Keep wearing your cloth mask inside the world’s most packed art museums:
The pervasiveness of medium COVID does nothing to negate the reality of long COVID—a calamitous condition that can shatter people’s lives. Many long-haulers experience unremitting symptoms, and their cases can evolve into complex chronic syndromes like ME/CFS or dysautonomia. As a result, they may require specialized medical care, permanent work accommodations, and ongoing financial support. Recognizing the small chance of such tragic outcomes could well be enough to make some people try to avoid infection or reinfection with SARS-CoV-2 at all costs.
Long COVID is real and we should expect an expansion of deficit spending to feed the author’s industry, plus tons of money shoveled out to those who spend years at home with Netflix and Xbox. “At all costs” means go to the theme park, get into a packed airliner for a vacation rather than drive, go to the grocery store in person rather than having a Latinx essential worker deliver, etc., while wearing the simple cloth or surgical masks that Dr. Fauci suggested in the spring of 2020. Here’s someone avoiding COVID on October 10, 2022 at the Louvre (fortunately, the ventilation system got a big upgrade during the reign of Emperor Napoleon III):
And here’s a simple mask blocking SARS-CoV-2 in what turned out to be the least crowded room within the Versailles chateau:
Is this satire? I’m struggling to tell. If so, hilarious. If not, even funnier. You should be both ashamed of yourself and embarrassed to post this if it’s not satire. The vaccines do very little and the risk>benefit for the majority of people who didn’t even need one in the first place. The vaccines have been publicly torn apart over the last few days. Cloth mask wearing does absolutely nothing to prevent infection (as per the CDC). That 300lb couch whale you mention is exactly the reason that the USA has struggled to cope with covid. If people actually took better care of themselves by not eating processed garbage and moving their asses, they would be metabolically healthier and able to brush aside a virus which, for the most part (bar the 3% vulnerable) has little to no effect on the majority of people. Nice try with the fear mongering. You’ve had your day. “Medium Covid” LOL.
At times, I wasn’t certain this virus was all that virulent, except for older individuals and/or individuals with BMI above 24. But I know now a number of healthy, normal-weight individuals in their 30s, 40s and 50s who contracted COVID, either post-holiday gatherings in late Dec 2021/early 2022, or this past summer (one was a manager at a restaurant) when COVID rates rose, who’ve had to spend several weeks recovering from the worst flu of their lives. They had no desire to be bedridden for weeks on end, so I don’t think it was a minor ailment. They sought medical treatment when their coughing was interfering with their breathing, and received that new anti-viral in most cases. In the absence of certainty about the efficacy of the boosters, I chose to get a booster in November 2021 because I had just been called to jury duty a few weeks later. And then I got my second booster a few days ago, the bivalent Pfizer, since it’s been tweaked for the most common variants around, and I am about to travel for the first time since March & April 2022 when COVID wasn’t raging (at least, not enough to inspire me to get a second booster). With your argument about folks taking care of themselves, that’s a narrative Bill Maher has been pushing since 2020. Problem is that Maher buys his fresh raspberries at the Santa Monica farmers’ market for $6 a half-pint, but the average middle income American with several dependent children cannot afford to eat the fresh, organic, WFM regime. And many Americans in the service or manufacturing sectors work draining, sedentary jobs before returning home to deal with said children — which doesn’t always make hitting the gym or running 5 miles before work all that realistic. I agree that better diet & more exercise would help reduce medical care costs (20% of GDP and yet our health outcomes are inferior to much of Eastern Europe, for instance) and would have reduced number of COVID fatalities. But I am not sure that a solution is at hand in the near-term anyway.
The lion kingdom has 6/8 COVID, 4/4 COVID, & waltz COVID. You do not want to get the cha cha COVID. Can’t believe there’s only 1 photo of the hall of mirrors.
Meanwhile, study finds twice daily nasal wash w saline reduced covid hospitalization by 8x: https://www.scidev.net/asia-pacific/news/simple-nasal-wash-reduces-covid-19-severity/
The only epidemic we have is epidemic of B.S. Short, medium, and long.
The amazing thing about Versailles is that it was all constructed by hand. There were no power tools, it pre-dates even steam engines.
That is pretty mind-blowing to contemplate. Lately, seeing the methodical destruction of Ukraine’s electric grid by the Russians, I am wondering whether they will manage to function — to include the civilians who are supplying their army with food, etc.. Versailles and the Giza pyramids should reassure me???
What you are seeing is vaccine injuries being blamed on Covid.
The woke will forever blame all their problems and all the world’s problems on two things: COVID and Trump.
Even if we use every single tree to print fake money to eradicate COVID and even if we sentence Trump to prison for life to silence him, the wokes will not be satisfied because the shadows of COVID and Trump will still room Mother Earth.