TheModerateTankie

They tested people to check for evidence of asymptomatic infection and found that people who had two doses of the nasal vaccine showed no signs of infection after three months.

CONCLUSION. A 2-dose intranasal vaccination regimen using NB2155 was safe, was well tolerated, and could dramatically induce broad-spectrum spike-specific sIgA in the nasal passage. Preliminary data suggested that the intranasal vaccination may establish an effective mucosal immune barrier against infection and warranted further clinical studies.

https://insight.jci.org/articles/view/180784

"At least 86.2% participants who completed 2 [nasal vaccine] doses maintained uninfected status, likely without even asymptomatic infection, for at least 3 months.

https://xcancel.com/EricTopol/status/1838937705977110991#m

Seems like we are getting closer to better vaccines being approved.

This is a pretty succinct overview of what your options are if you live with people who had their empathy circuits fried by the pandemic and can't be bothered to care about disease transmission anymore.

Aside from masking: Setting up air filters is probably the lowest effort for biggest return on safety.

All these tips will help against actual regular colds and flus, too, since we are coming up on that time of year.

Also a reminder that it's never healthy to be infected by virus.

It's 2024, and we get to relearn the same thing we've learned every year since the pandemic started: Covid causes brain damage!

Be aware that in most news articles about covid and brain damage, like this one, the authors usually measure the cognitive impacts in terms of IQ points, which is a bad way to measure it but it's what most people understand, I guess.

How Covid Harms the Brain

The effects of a SARS-CoV-2 infection on the brain are the focus of intense research and remain only partially understood. Studies suggest that during acute infection, the virus may damage nerves, particularly in the olfactory bulb — which houses the nerves that transmit smell impulses to the brain — leading to problems that can persist for years. In some cases, the virus may infect the brain through this pathway, altering the organ’s structure and resulting in impaired cognition and fatigue.

Persistent viral remnants or the initial infection itself may trigger neuroinflammation and disrupt the immune system, causing antibodies and T cells to mistakenly attack healthy brain cells, damage blood vessels, and harm the blood-brain barrier. Additional research points to blood clots that may drive immune activation, restricting the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the brain, and altered levels of key hormones cortisol and dopamine that may be linked to changes in gut health.

New vaccines are available, and I just got mine, but If you don't have insurance it will be expensive because our bloodthirsty capitalist oligarchs hate you. A lot of countries are just relying on constant covid infections to build up "herd immunity" which doesn't work with the common cold or flu, and those are far less infectious and don't mutate as quickly.

I guess the CDC updated their page.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncird/whats-new/covid-19-can-surge-throughout-the-year.html

Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer, driven by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations. You can protect yourself from serious illness by staying up to date with vaccinations, getting treated if you have medical conditions that make you more likely to get very sick from COVID-19, and using other strategies outlined in CDC's respiratory virus guidance.

If only we had a way to slow down or stop the spread of disease.

Someday, far onto the future, scientists will figure it out!

Around the world, a post-Covid reality is beginning to sink in: Everyone, everywhere, really is sick a lot more often.

At least 13 communicable diseases, from the common cold to measles and tuberculosis, are surging past their pre-pandemic levels in many regions, and often by significant margins, according to analysis by Bloomberg News and London-based disease forecasting firm Airfinity Ltd.

The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.

The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.

We can explain it, covid takes a toll on our immune system, and we are constantly exposed to it and can catch it multiple times a year. No one in public office wants to acknowledge it because that would mean putting money and effort into infection control.

Feb 2022 is when they started transitioning from pcr's for everyone to home tests.

May 2023 is when they declared an "end to the public emergency" and ended the emergency and stopped requiring hospitals to test people.

This year they stopped requiring hospitals to report much of anything.

I guess this is just how it's going to be from now on, and we'll have to figure out what damage it's doing by analyzing excess death rates

BTW many parts of the US (Hawaii and SF, and my little town apparently) and world are experiencing a pretty sizeable covid surge at the moment. Most likely from the FLiRT variant, and there is also a different variant coming up called kp.3, so that's fun.

Although heart failure mortality rates fell between 1999 and 2012, the proportion of people dying from the condition in the US has increased in recent years, according to a study published in JAMA Cardiology. By 2021, the heart failure mortality rate was higher than in 1999, signaling that earlier improvements have been “entirely undone” over the past 10 years, the researchers wrote. The findings were based on death certificate data collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

**The accelerated increase in heart failure mortality rates during 2020 and 2021 suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic might have contributed to current trends. **Changes in how heart failure is diagnosed and coded as well as improved survival for patients with conditions such as ischemic heart disease, which predispose them to heart failure, might also have contributed to the uptick in heart failure mortality rates, the researchers wrote.

It's just a super infectious and rapidly mutating virus that can cause heart disease, nbd.

BTW, Rates of covid are increasing rapidly in many parts of the world, including my town. It was low for about two months, and now wastewater levels are spiking again.

The latest edition of the World Health Statistics released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth (HALE).

The pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years. Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012).

The 2024 report also highlights how the effects have been felt unequally across the world. The WHO regions for the Americas and South-East Asia were hit hardest, with life expectancy dropping by approximately 3 years and healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years between 2019 and 2021. In contrast, the Western Pacific Region was minimally affected during the first two years of the pandemic, with losses of less than 0.1 years in life expectancy and 0.2 years in healthy life expectancy.

Short answer: Yes, covid increases your risk of cancer, but it's not a huge risk.

Longer answer: Covid, like HPV, messes with our cells ability to make the p53 gene, which among other things, helps our bodies destroy cancerous cells.

In mild infections low p53 levels lasted 16-24 weeks before returning to normal.

In severe infections low p53 levels lasted past 24 weeks and may not return to normal.

It took a long time to measure the impact of the HPV vaccine, and it will take a long time to meaure the impact of covid and vaccines.

The video compares it to the risk of getting HPV and the Epstien-Barr virus. However I don't think either of those viruses mutate the way covid does, or have the potential to reinfect you with a different variant every several months the way covid does. Also, all three viruses have shown the ability to persist in people's bodies, which increases the risk of cancers and other long term health effects.

Found this gem posted by the technology connections guy.

In a nutshell, we showed that over-the-counter cheap generic antibiotic neomycin can be repurposed in nasal formulation to prevent & treat infection, block transmission, and reduce disease burden against a wide array of viruses. Since this is a host-directed strategy and virus-agnostic, it holds promise as a prophylactic strategy against any viral threat.

The advice in the screencapped thread was to apply a little with a q-tip to the inside of the nostrils.

There is no info on any dangers of doing this very often, but if you can't avoid a high-risk environment it's worth trying.

Here's a thread about the study. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1782535781338222960.html

here's the study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5918160/