Coronavirus **personal experiences** thread

[djmcconn]

Thanks RC! I am an internet compooter idiot. But I sure enjoy virtually hanging out with y’all. David

[hank]

EXCERPT

SARS-CoV-2 enters the brain via nerve cells in the olfactory mucosa, … published in Nature Neuroscience.

For the first time, researchers have been able to produce electron microscope images of intact coronavirus particles inside the olfactory mucosa.

It is now recognized that COVID-19 is not a purely respiratory disease. In addition to affecting the lungs, SARS-CoV-2 can impact the cardiovascular system, the gastrointestinal tract and the central nervous system. More than one in three people with COVID-19 report neurological symptoms such as loss of, or change in, their sense of smell or taste, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and nausea. In some patients, the disease can even result in stroke or other serious conditions.

Until now, researchers had suspected that these manifestations must be caused by the virus entering and infecting specific cells in the brain. But how does SARS-CoV-2 get there?

This isn’t a first, there are many observations of various kinds of particles being transported from the nasal micosa into the brain.

Take a look at some of these: metal particles nasal brain - Google Search

From the first page of results, this is a good summary:

Neurotoxicology. 2012 Aug; 33(4): 838–841.
Published online 2011 Dec 9. doi: 10.1016/j.neuro.2011.12.001
PMCID: PMC3387329
NIHMSID: NIHMS346960
PMID: 22178536
NEUROLOGICAL IMPACTS FROM INHALATION OF POLLUTANTS AND THE NOSE-BRAIN CONNECTION

NEUROLOGICAL IMPACTS FROM INHALATION OF POLLUTANTS AND THE NOSE-BRAIN CONNECTION - PMC

[Lightbringer]

Aw, Hell, it doesn’t have to be as teenytiny as a virus, either.

A big fat amœba like Nægleria fowleri is pretty easy to catch if you go swimming in infested waters, or sometimes even using a netti pot (ecch).

Get tainted water up your nose, the big fat amorphous blobs dig in, float their way into your brainium.

[djmcconn]

YUCK!

[71k5]

FYI

IPAK 2019 Vaxxed/Unvaxxed Study just released.

” IPAK 2019 Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed Study”:https://informedchoicewa.org/education/its-here-the-vaxxed-vs-unvaxxed-study/

[NorthernHarrier]

That so-called study is not credible, and it’s source is a well-known anti-vaccine organization. No further comment, per administrator request.

https://www.chop.edu/centers-programs/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-ingredients/aluminum

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7144200/

[sb56637]

Hi everyone, as mentioned, I definitely don’t want to promote or defend either of the two sides on the vaccine argument, and I’m sure everyone already has their own opinion. But please avoid the subject on this forum.

[Joshk]

It appears what that “IPAK 2019 Vaxxed vs Unvaxxed Study” actually discovered was that parents that skip vaccinations also skip doctors visits.

[hank]

Ew! People !!!

Oral hygiene habits and possible transmission of COVID-19 among cohabitants -...

Background: To find out whether misuse of dental hygiene, in terms of certain dental habits, may facilitate the spread of COVID-19 among cohabiting individuals.

Methods: 302 COVID-19 infected (PCR +) subjects cohabiting with someone else at home were selected for an observational cross-sectional study. An anonymous online questionnaire was developed using Google forms to avoid person-to-person contact. The structured questionnaire consisted of questions covering several areas: sociodemographic data, cross transmission to another person living together, oral hygiene habits during confinement, care and disinfection control behaviours in the dental environment like sharing toothbrush, sharing toothbrush container, sharing toothpaste, placing brush vertically, placing cap with hole for brush, disinfecting brush with bleach, closing toilet lid before flushing.

[hank]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/12/05/943009477/extraordinary-acceleration-takeaways-from-the-pandemic-this-week

EXCERPT

Forget hot spots. “We are way beyond that,” says Siegel. The country is now averaging nearly 180,000 new cases per day. So many places have raging outbreaks that it’s difficult to point to one region that is particularly bad. Rhode Island has now outpaced South Dakota with new cases per capita; New Mexico rivals Wisconsin, which previously had among the worst rates in the country

On the West Coast and in the Northeast, states that had successfully kept the virus in check are under siege. “The coasts are beginning to see the same kind of uptick as the Midwest,” says Dr. William Miller, an epidemiologist at Ohio State University. Cases are growing in every region, with the South leading.

[hank]

This page was cited in the NPR article I linked above.

It explains the little dip and rise seen on the charts around Thanksgiving, which caused VP Pence to tell the CDC things were improving.

https://covidtracking.com/blog/daily-covid-19-data-is-about-to-get-weird [Written around Thanksgiving Day]

EXCERPT
all three metrics will flatten out or drop, probably for several days. This decrease will make it look like things are getting better at the national level. Then, in the week following the holiday, our test, case, and death numbers will spike, which will look like a confirmation that Thanksgiving is causing outbreaks to worsen. But neither of these expected movements in the data will necessarily mean anything about the state of the pandemic itself. Holidays, like weekends, cause testing and reporting to go down and then, a few days later, to “catch up.” So the data we see early next week will reflect not only actual increases in cases, test, and deaths, but also the potentially very large backlog from the holiday.

Further down on that long page, this:

… The actual case increases from Thanksgiving exposures—people who got COVID-19 during the holiday weekend—probably won’t start showing up in the data until the second week of December. Succeeding waves of infections from holiday gatherings will roll in for weeks. From what we’ve seen so far, the virus can spread with remarkable speed, but there are delays at every step in tracing and reporting its spread: It takes time to get tested, time to get and report a result, time to trace close contacts—and to start the process over again with a new circle of exposures.

Consider the now infamous Millinocket, Maine wedding superspreading event this summer: The day after the wedding, the “index case” wedding guest developed COVID-19 symptoms, according to reporting from the Los Angeles Times and a CDC report—though this person wouldn’t receive the results of their PCR test until six days after the wedding. Three days later, a worker at a long-term-care facility who hadn’t attended the wedding, but whose child had, began showing symptoms. The test for the LTC worker didn’t come back until 11 days after the wedding, by which time they had worked multiple days in the facility while ill. …

[bushmaster]

So……we got that to look forward to……

[hank]

December 4 coronavirus news

Mask use can reduce the number of new Covid-19 infections by close to 50%, study finds

From CNN’s Shelby Lin Erdman

Mandatory mask usage in parts of Germany last spring helped significantly reduce the number of new Covid-19 infections, a team of German researchers reported in a new analysis.

The team used public data on coronavirus cases to compare regions with and without mandatory mask policies last April.

“Depending on the region we consider, we find that face masks reduced the number of newly registered severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 infections between 15% and 75% over a period of 20 days after their mandatory introduction,” researchers wrote. “Assessing the credibility of the various estimates, we conclude that face masks reduce the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 47%.”

The study, which was published Thursday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also found that certain age groups benefited more from mask usage.

The researchers looked at data from mask use in Jena, a city in central Germany, after a mandatory mask policy took effect between April 1-10.

[hank]

https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=154&instance_id=24693&nl=coronavirus-briefing&productCode=CB&regi_id=108526780&segment_id=46030&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F4993a9f9-f373-5ecb-bf03-7b48d1388b87&user_id=574d2e49281da9e6f81a867042569e39

[71k5]

FYI

Tested Positive?? Be Sure to Ask This Question!

Excerpt:

“The lockdowns are based on surging “cases” which are based on positive PCR test results.”

“When it comes to COVID, the presence of viral particles picked up by the PCR technique does not and has not been quantitatively linked to an active “symptomatic” infection. It simply cannot be so, because infection threshold as a result of viral load is different for each patient. It turns out, if you “cycle” over around 25 times, the false positivity of COVID infection starts getting very high.”

[hank]

Korean Study: Indoor SARS-CoV-2 Transmission from 21 Feet Away in Just 5 Minutes

a small study from Korea that has big implications on how we think about transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Scientists traced two cases back to a restaurant and discovered that transmission had occurred over quite a long distance in a very short period of time.

If you just want the results: one person (Case B) infected two other people (case A and C) from a distance away of 6.5 meters (~21 feet) and 4.8m (~15 feet). Case B and case A overlapped for just five minutes at quite a distance away. These people were well beyond the current 6 feet / 2 meter guidelines of CDC and much further than the current 3 feet / one meter distance advocated by the WHO. And they still transmitted the virus.

As Tufekci goes on to explain, the way they figured this out was quite clever: they contact traced, used CCTV footage from the restaurant, recreated the airflow in the space, and verified the transmission chain with genome sequencing.

[Lightbringer]

And that’s what we call an airtight analysis…

[NorthernHarrier]

@71k5

FYI

Tested Positive?? Be Sure to Ask This Question!

Excerpt:

“The lockdowns are based on surging “cases” which are based on positive PCR test results.”

“When it comes to COVID, the presence of viral particles picked up by the PCR technique does not and has not been quantitatively linked to an active “symptomatic” infection. It simply cannot be so, because infection threshold as a result of viral load is different for each patient. It turns out, if you “cycle” over around 25 times, the false positivity of COVID infection starts getting very high.”

Why that’s not true

[Rexlion]

It’s really hilarious when people start telling a law school graduate what the law says and doesn’t say. Especially when the law is not applicable to the point being made, that universities have long tended to be bastions of free speech. No one claimed (the straw man argument) that colleges have a legal obligation to be that way. But they have almost always tended to be that way and have even trumpeted their free speech practices as an ideal; but when the things the students recently were saying didn’t fit the P.C. viewpoint, Johns Hopkins U. showed some hypocrisy.

On another note, today I read a good article in Imprimis by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya M.D., Prof. of Medicine at Stanford.
A Sensible and Compassionate Anti-COVID Strategy
An brief excerpt:

I should say something in conclusion about the idea of herd immunity, which some people mischaracterize as a strategy of letting people die. First, herd immunity is not a strategy—it is a biological fact that applies to most infectious diseases. Even when we come up with a vaccine, we will be relying on herd immunity as an end-point for this epidemic. The vaccine will help, but herd immunity is what will bring it to an end. And second, our strategy is not to let people die, but to protect the vulnerable. We know the people who are vulnerable, and we know the people who are not vulnerable. To continue to act as if we do not know these things makes no sense.

[Rexlion]

@NorthernHarrier

@71k5

FYI

Tested Positive?? Be Sure to Ask This Question!

Excerpt:

“The lockdowns are based on surging “cases” which are based on positive PCR test results.”

“When it comes to COVID, the presence of viral particles picked up by the PCR technique does not and has not been quantitatively linked to an active “symptomatic” infection. It simply cannot be so, because infection threshold as a result of viral load is different for each patient. It turns out, if you “cycle” over around 25 times, the false positivity of COVID infection starts getting very high.”

Why that’s not true

That link was an interesting read. Glad you posted it.