28th November 2022
Post with 18 notes
Shibboleths
- “Covid is airborne!” - that the virus is spread through exhaled aerosols, not airborne moisture droplets or surface-tainting “fomites”. A point they were genuinely more right on than authorities early on that still has some application – that only N95-type masks or respirators reliably stop transmission, not fabric or paper surgical masks. However, largely an ingroup signal at this point, they seem to believe that authorities not pointedly declaring it apropos of nothing causes or constitutes failure.
- Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes: a DIY air filter made of box fans and furnace filters, because above. They love these things and are always frustrated that schools and public places won’t welcome wild-eyed maniacs trying to set up their own homemade science fair projects everywhere.
- CO2 testing: they carry around little CO2 monitors and are always tutting about how high the readings they get are, less in their own right than because it’s a clear sign of a poorly ventilated space where exhalations are not being cleared. Once again, makes them look like maniacs.
- “SARS-CoV-2”: they kind of performatively always call Covid this, even using more characters of a tweet. I dunno if the intention was to differentiate the syndrome from the virus, or if putting it in the SARS lineage was supposed to draw on residual associations there, but by now it mostly seems like flaunting yourself as savvy.
Something there but iffy
- That danger and damage increases with multiple infections. It is true that Danger(Case1 + Case2) > Danger(Case1), which means that Case2 (and subsequents) has some nonzero risk, but they often act like Danger(Case1) < Danger(Case2), which I don’t see as well established at all.
Pretty convinced
- The danger of Covid now lies largely not in the initial “acute” respiratory infection, but in the chance of later “long Covid” progression to other organ systems, that may render the sufferer vulnerable to later mortality. Damaged heart muscles lead to later heart attacks; blood vessels to strokes & aneurysm; immune systems to later infection (as seems to be making this winter an atrocious pediatric respiratory infection season, or made Jair Bolsonaro an infection piñata). I myself can attest to later blood pressure swings that cause fainting. That this explains much of the increase in “all-cause mortality” above and beyond that attributed to Covid itself since the beginning of the pandemic.
Not convinced
- Immunity from prior infections or immunization does not durably reduce the severity of future ones. This is out of keeping with the experience of other coronaviruses already in regular human circulation and mutating into new variants, which after caught repeatedly throughout life become trivial. My own experience has my current infection (somewhere from my 4th to 6th, producing symptom “echoes” of the “long” portions of 1 and 2) as the worst since 2, but 2 was much less harsh than 1 and 3-current was nothing. I suspect this might be a stronger case against the background of a generally decreasing trend of severity. Also it might be the case that immunity wanes so subsequent cases are easier if they occur before it wears off (and leaves new immunity of its own), in which case attempts to stop any particular case with masking, isolation, or air treatment might make population-level health worse by lengthening average time between infections past acquired immunity duration.
- “Schools should have been reworking their ventilation systems for anti-viral effect!” My father was the solicitor for our school district, in which capacity one of the things he worked with was contracting. At one point the district upgraded ventilation systems in maybe a third of their secondary schools at once. From scoping through passing a bond, soliciting and evaluating bids to work completion (when the construction market was slack enough for contractors to hire labor and buy materials cheap) was 8 years. In a small subset of schools, that already had ductwork at all, in a rich school district where the bond passed on the first try. To attempt this for every school building in the US – let alone other public places – would likely exceed the national HVAC construction capacity for decades. The only precedent I can think of, the drive to rework hospital ventilation systems against Legionnaires, affected far fewer buildings and institutions that were then fairly flush with income streams atop the healthcare economy, still required extensive federal subsidy, and was ongoing decades later.
Tagged: long covidcovidcoronavirus2022it's social media