Letter from America re the Virus. By David Archibald.
Our correspondent in Missouri writes:
“We have to get it through the numties’ thick heads that it isn’t “just a head cold.” We know a lot of people now from the spring and summer waves that had very mild cases (symptoms of very low grade fever under 100F and maybe a headache for just one day) who have permanent organ damage. Never hospitalized, never had pneumonia, no difficulty breathing but now have heart damage, lung damage, retinal damage, kidney damage, etc. One dude is having significant neurological issues right now. He had it in July/August and still isn’t right. Not at deaths door was he either before or after … but he can’t work now.
“There’s a reason China did not go herd with this. If it only killed the old and weak they’d have been seeding it from planes…
“The issue with “going herd” is that the antibodies you generate with the first instance of contracting the virus won’t be effective the next time it comes around. Your antibodies may last for years for the first viral variant you got. The virus will be different enough the next time that they won’t recognize it.
“The only long term way out of this (unless we want 70 yr old Caucasians to be unicorn type myths) is to stop giving the virus more hosts to make new and better versions of itself. Or you/I/we will ‘expire’ about the time we lose our usefulness to the state as taxpaying wage earners. …
“This is a roulette virus. You never know if it’s the one for you. And even after you’ve recovered, even if you had a mild case, it’s like you’ve been robbed. There’s the stuff you immediately see is missing (the TV, the A/V equipment, the computer/laptop/tablet — feeling like crap, running fever, missing a few days of work, being quarantined for a couple of weeks). And the stuff you find months later isn’t there anymore when you open a drawer to look for the inlaid penknife your grandfather gave you for graduation and it’s gone too (heart damage you discover when your feet begin to swell in late afternoon/early evening, lung damage you find at a routine exam for something else, retinal damage you discover when you get in your car to drive to work that first day and realize you can’t read the road signs).
“The weirdest thing. I’ve talked to lots of people about this, including some in NYC who know people who were infected nearly a year ago. … Nearly everyone that had more than a ‘sniffle’ type case (but not hospitalized ones) — i.e. the ones who ran fever a day or two or so — are wraiths now. I’m talking emaciated post covid (some months). With no appetite. Even when their taste/smell senses returned. They aren’t just 1970’s jogger type skinny, they’re anorexic level skinny now. You can tell these people if you haven’t seen them in a while and when you ask them, sure enough, they had covid. It’s creepy.” …
Surviving a Covid infection is one thing. It appears that maintaining your pre-infection quality of life will require reversing the viral load as rapidly as possible.
Long covid, it’s called. There’s a lot more to its harm than just death rates.
As experience builds up, we know now that either we really do not want to get this, or we have an effective treatment on hand.
