I was wearing earbuds so I just ignored him completely and eventually he shut up, but this is why I continue to mask, because these people are crazy.

Unvaccinated of course.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3060668

> This is a really good like State of the Covid letter, of where we're at right now. It ain't great, obviously. This guy is an epidemiologist with a background in hospital infection control and emergency management.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/15861618

> (USA) > > >Some lawmakers across the country are working to sidestep vaccine mandates, not just for COVID-19, but also for measles, polio and meningitis. Public health experts worry the renewed opposition to childhood immunizations will reverse state gains in vaccination rates. Meanwhile, cases of some diseases, including measles, have increased across the country. > > >>We’re against the government telling us what to do with our own bodies. > >– Louisiana Republican state Rep. Kathy Edmonston > > >“Conservatives have really moved towards that medical freedom position of where people need to be really educated about whatever vaccine that they are taking,” said Tennessee state Sen. Bo Watson, who sponsored his state’s legislation. > > > Picture unrelated to article: > > !

I'm in hospital for a surgery. Staffs don't wear masks. Many of them cough. In the recovery room there is free unlimited access for visitors and you're of course with other patients. Another patient here has three visitors. No masks. No distance. No barriers.

I am trying to discharge myself because I'm legitimately worried I'll catch something from someone else (if I haven't already).

Hospitals don't care about COVID. Why would anyone be surprised about the general population when the most medical institution there is doesn't?

I'm slowly realising that I probably have some mild #LongCovid

Since having covid (now had it twice since 2022): iron deficiencies, breathing problems, constant asthma, and now a sudden allergy to some foods apparently.

My partner and I have been careful throughout the pandemic but clearly not careful enough at times (twice each) since "opening up".

And though it could be far far worse, I feel pretty violated right now TBH.

@coronavirus @longcovid

From https://drsforchoice.org/ > BREAKING NEWS > >Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice is pleased to announce a significant win for transparency! United States District Court Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk has issued a thoughtful, insightful, and incredible 30-page decision that orders the CDC to release the 7.8 million free text fields from the Covid-19 v-safe program to the public! > > The CDC must release hundreds of thousands of these entries each month and all the entries must be released on or before January 15, 2025! CDC had argued that it never had to turn over the entries to the public because it was too burdensome to redact the entries. The Court vehemently disagreed and granted expedited processing, recognizing that “Predictably, the American public now seeks access to COVID-related papers to ensure that relevant government policies were — and still are — supported and justified by the available data.” > > The first production of at least 390,000 free text entries is required to be produced by February 15, 2024 and all data received will be posted on this site for the public’s use. The full decision is available here.

___ Court ruling: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/texas/txndce/2:2023cv00102/378122/40/0.pdf

Excerpts:

> MEMORANDUM ORDER AND OPINION > > .. The Motion is GRANTED .. > > INTRODUCTION > > .. > > V-safe collected two types of data from millions of Americans: (1) check-the-box options and (2) free-text responses. > > Plaintiff seeks production of approximately 7.8 million freetext responses pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). > > .. > > C. Plaintiff’s FOIA Request > >While “Trust the Science” became something of a national slogan, 19 the American public’s trust in science and scientists are at an all-time low.20 It is with this background that Plaintiff aims to further the ideals pledged by the Biden-Harris administration: to “Promote trust, transparency, common purpose, and accountability in our government”21 by making available for public access — and particularly for independent scientific and medical research — all of the relevant health data collected through the V-safe program. As the check-the-box data has already been released, it is the free-text response data Plaintiff seeks. > > ...

Reposting here in case anyone missed the c/worldnews posting two days ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs#COVID-19 (emphasis mine) >In spring 2020, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, appointed Sachs as chair of its COVID-19 Commission, whose goals were to provide recommendations for public health policy and improve the practice of medicine. Sachs set up a number of task forces, including one on the origins of the virus.

The race for next generation vaccines is steadily heating up now. And this month, we’ve passed a major milestone: The first data suggesting that an already-authorized nextgen vaccine could outperform the BNT/Pfizer vaccine – with its manufacturers ramping up production facilities for potentially wide distribution in the next year or so.

"This is what surrendering to the pandemic means around the edges of the statistics, where people live. It’s not just the broad strokes and the sudden deaths. It’s land mines lying silent beneath the surface of a loved one’s heart or brain or immune system, waiting to be stepped on in a biologically wrong footed moment. It’s whittling away at the already blurry space between functional and disabled [..]"

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/9825270

> Not the link in the post to the article: http://carlbergstrom.com/publications/pdfs/2023PNAS.pdf

Stories like this are why I donate my CPU/GPU time to SiDock/Rosetta/Folding@home. We all can make a difference, even if our contributions are small.

🚨 Reminder for folks in the USA

Today, November 14, is Long Covid Moonshot Day

Please call your member of congress today and ask them to support increased research funding for Long Covid.

Instructions for how to call are here: https://longcovidmoonshot.com/

If you can't call you can send email.

Article:

Now we know how COVID attacks your heart Even patients with mild COVID symptoms could face a higher risk of developing heart disease and stroke

By Sanjay Mishra

Nov 07, 2023 04:08 PM5 min. readView original Scientists have noticed that COVID-19 can trigger serious cardiovascular problems, especially among older people who have a buildup of fatty material in their blood vessels. But now a new study has revealed why and shown that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, directly infects the arteries of the heart.

The study also found that the virus can survive and grow inside the cells that form plaque—the buildup of fat-filled cells that narrow and stiffen the arteries leading to atherosclerosis. If the plaque breaks, it can block blood flow and cause a heart attack or a stroke. The SARS-CoV-2 infection makes the situation worse by inflaming the plaque and increasing the chance that it breaks free.

This can explain long-term cardiovascular effects seen in some, if not all, COVID-19 patients.

SARS-CoV-2 virus has already been found to infect many organs outside the respiratory system. But until now it hadn't been shown to attack the arteries.

"No one was really looking if there was a direct effect of the virus on the arterial wall," says Chiara Giannarelli, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Health, in New York, who led the study. Giannarelli noted that her team detected viral RNA—the genetic material in the virus—in the coronary arteries. “You would not expect to see [this] several months after recovering from COVID.”

Mounting evidence now shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not only a respiratory virus, but it can also affect the heart and many other organ systems, says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. Al-Aly's research has shown that the risk of developing heart and cardiovascular diseases, including heart failure, stroke, irregular heart rhythms, cardiac arrest, and blood clots increases two to five times within a year of COVID-19, even when the person wasn't hospitalized.

"This important study links, for the first time, directly the SARS-CoV-2 virus with atherosclerotic plaque inflammation," says Charalambos Antoniades, chair of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.

Virus triggers the inflammation in plaque

A recent study of more than 800,000 people led by Fabio Angeli, a cardiologist at University of Insubria in Varese, Italy, has shown that COVID-19 patients develop high blood pressure twice as often as others. More worrying is that the risk of cardiac diseases can also rise for patients who suffered only mild COVID symptoms.

"I saw a patient who now has a defibrillator, and she didn't even have a severe [COVID] illness," says Bernard Gersh, a cardiologist at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota.

Wondering whether the cardiovascular damage during COVID was due to the virus directly attacking the blood vessels, the NYU team analyzed autopsied tissue from the coronary arteries and plaque of older people who had died from COVID-19. They found the virus was present in the arteries regardless of whether the fatty plaques were big or small.

"The original finding in this study is that the virus was convincingly found in the plaque in the coronary artery," says Juan Carlos Kaski, a cardiovascular specialist at St George's, University of London, who was not involved in the study.

The NYU team found that in the arteries, the virus predominantly colonized the white blood cells called macrophages. Macrophages are immune cells that are mobilized to fight off an infection, but these same cells also absorb excess fats—including cholesterol from blood. When microphages load too much fat, they change into foam cells, which can increase plaque formation.

To confirm that the virus was indeed infecting and growing in the cells of the blood vessels, scientists obtained arterial and plaque cells—including macrophages and foam cells—from healthy volunteers. Then they grew these cells in the lab in petri dishes and infected them with SARS-CoV-2.

Giannarelli found that although virus infected macrophages at a higher rate than other arterial cells, it did not replicate in them to form new infectious particles. But when the macrophages had become loaded with cholesterol and transformed into foam cells, the virus could grow, replicate, and survive longer.

"We found that the virus tended to persist longer in foam cells," says Giannarelli. That suggests that foam cells might act as a reservoir of SARS-CoV-2. Since more fatty buildup would mean a greater number of foam cells, plaque can increase the persistence of the virus or the severity of COVID-19.

Scientists found that when macrophages and foam cells were infected with SARS-CoV-2 they released a surge of small proteins known as cytokines, which signal the immune system to mount a response against a bacterial or viral infection. In arteries, however, cytokines boost inflammation and formation of even more plaque.

"We saw that there was a degree of inflammation [caused] by the virus that could aggravate atherosclerosis and cardiovascular events," says Giannarelli.

These findings also confirm previous reports that measuring inflammation in the blood vessel wall can diagnose the extent of long-term cardiovascular complications after COVID-19, says Antoniades.

"What this study has found is that plaque rupture can be accelerated and magnified by the presence of the virus," says Kaski.

Understanding heart diseases after COVID

While this new research clearly shows that SARS-CoV-2 can infect, grow, and persist in the macrophages of plaques and arterial cells, more studies are needed to fully understand the many ways COVID-19 can alter cardiac health.

"The NYU study identifies one potential mechanism, especially the viral reservoir, to explain the possible effects" says Gersh. "But It's not going to be the only mechanism."

This study only analyzed 27 samples from eight elderly deceased patients, all of whom already had coronary artery disease and were infected with the original strains of virus. So, the results of this study do not necessarily apply to younger people without coronary artery disease; or to new variants of the virus, which cause somewhat milder disease, says Angeli.

"We do not know if this will happen in people who have been vaccinated," says Kaski. "There are lots of unknowns."

It is also not clear whether and to what extent the high inflammatory reaction observed in the arteries of patients within six months after the infection, as shown in the new study, will last long-enough to trigger new plaque formation. "New studies are needed to show the time-course of the resolution of vascular inflammation after the infection," says Antoniades.

COVID patients should watch for any new incidence of shortness of breath with exertion, chest discomfort, usually with exertion, palpitations, loss of consciousness; and talk to their physician about possible heart disease.

Thank you to Reddit user u/spacelambhat for providing article content. https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/17qher4/comment/k8c8ila/