Unmasking the Real Villain

The Tour de France is now mandating masks after several riders got Covid and had to leave the race. 

But so many other reports of people getting physically sick still attribute illness to bizarre causes:

People love to feel safe and secure, so it's comforting to think we just need to stave off loneliness to avoid having a stroke in our 20s or 30s. But it's causing harm to refuse to acknowledge that COVID is a vascular disease causing microclots in the bloodstream and definitely affecting rates of heart attack and stroke. 

Professor Danny Altmann gives an excellent interview here, explaining the seriousness of SARS-CoV-2:

He explains that we still don't have answers to know for sure how to slow down the damage much less anything close to a cure. We're particularly bad at working with viruses. 

Covid leads to organ damage. There's a UK Biobank that has tracked normal healthy people for 15 years to provide correlate so we can see clearly the brain changes from Covid. From the video: 

"If you have SARS-Cov-2, even mild SARS-CoV-2, it changes your brain. It changes the way your brain MRI looks, and it makes you more stupid! Sorry to say it so bluntly. That's why I mask everywhere." 

After acute symptoms, the virus doesn't get fully cleared. This is the Persistent Viral Reservoir Theory. There's a lot of evidence for this including post mortem studied that find it everywhere hiding in tissues. It's in our feces, so wastewater surveillance is a very useful tool (that Ontario is getting rid of this month). And it's got massive overlap with ME/CFS, long thought to be a psychological problem. Despite all this evidence, some doctors are still gaslighting patients with ME/CFS and now Long Covid too, insisting they should just get out of bed! 

Even without Long Covid, just mild or asymptomatic Covid can our increase risk of diabetes, heart attack, myocardial infarction, stroke, and more. We saw a huge wave of Parkinson's disease after Spanish flu, so viruses could be causing more than we currently understand, like many more cancers. It can reactivate latent viruses in the body that set up house in a person and never leave, leading to Epstein Barr and multiple sclerosis. He worked with John Patcai at the University of Toronto, who had treated SARS-1 patients, and he said SARS-2 patients are almost identical. But, when he did twenty years follow-ups on his SARS-1 patients, he found,

"None of my patients ever got their lives back, none ever got their jobs back. Even those who tried to switch to lighter jobs or part-time jobs found those hard as well!"  The outlook over the next 20 years looks very serious."

So, I don't know about you, but I'm going to keep wearing a mask to protect myself from this!! And I'm feeling less alone now that Y'all Masking went viral. Even Eminem and Kid Cudi put out these lyrics:

"Bunch of halfwits up in office.
Half of us walking around like a zombie apocalypse.
Other half are just pilss off and don't want to wear a mask and they're just scoffin'.
And that's how you end up catchin' the shit off 'em.
I just used the same basket as you shoppin',
Now I'm in a fuckin' casket from you coughin'." 

Maybe we're realize what's happening and what needs to be done on a grand scale!! Some days, it actually feels possible.

This is a good graphic to understand the use of CO2 monitors - but remember CO2 is a proxy for the virus. The more CO2 in a room, the more you're breathing other people's lung backwash, and the more likely you are to pick up a virus if just one person is an asymptomatic carrier, or even if someone's coughing up a lung but on the other side of the room. It crosses a room in minutes and hangs in the air for hours. But N95s work to dramatically reduce the risk of transmission.

We are currently living through TWO of the five most massive pandemics. We just might want to actually do things to protect ourselves and others.