Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank

Don't lose hope. I got in October, similar effects, and I've been recovering a lot of my smell and taste, veery slowly and in "bursts".

Nowadays I'm almost fully ok, the only smells I haven't recovered are body odor (which I can smell, it's just really different) and feces and trash, which for some reason smell in a very particular sweet way, kinda like rotten meat.

That last one, for some reason, seems to be really common, since several friends that also lost smell have had the same exact change.

My cousin (20s) lost his sense of taste and hasn't recovered it months later. Son (teen) lost his for a week then recovered it. Reports however that he has pernanently lost his sense of thurst. Ymmv.

I heard on a cooking podcast (probably this episode of cooking issues[1]) that smell training has helped some people with anosmia. I have no idea if it helps with loss of smell related to covid. Have any of you tried it?

Here's an example (no affiliation, just the ones with the best SEO, I am not a doctor): https://abscent.org/learn-us/smell-training

[1] https://heritageradionetwork.org/episode/live-datta-lab-feat...

Did getting vaccinated change anything ? I've heard that vaccinations helped people with long COVID.

Hope you recover fully.

Edit: since someone asked for citations, here is a CNN link

https://us.cnn.com/2021/04/03/health/long-haulers-vaccine-we...

I follow the "This week in virology" podcast and they have discussed this extensively as well. Dr Daniel Griffin, cited in the CNN article is a weekly contributor on this podcast, and has mentioned the effect in question multiple times.

My social media manager had the exact same reaction. She says it’s getting better very slowly - she can still only stomach eating rice and bread, though. Everything else makes her throw up immediately.

How old are you? Were you completely healthy before?

The vaccines did not skip any safety tests, they just compressed the schedule because millions of people were dying of a preventable disease.

At this point hundreds of millions of people have taken the various vaccines. There clearly are no major short or medium term effects (other than the reported, rare side effects).

Also you can literally read all the documents provided to the FDA concerning the efficacy and safety of the vaccines. There isn't a giant conspiracy, all the original studies and data are in the open.

You're right in a way but I think these people are still a tad wrong. It's not that everyone deny there can be side effects, on pregnancy or otherwise. It's that if nobody does the sacrifice, and everybody has his little thing he wants to protect (you want to get pregnant, I want to keep on working, my wife wants to be there for our kid, our parents have diabetes, etc etc) then nobody gets the vaccine.

Get it, whatever it cost you, because it's your duty.

I haven't found it exceedingly hard to find data supportive or critical of vaccination despite the fact that the pro-vaxxers feel morally entitled and even obligated to censor the planet. Where there isn't censorship there is forced editorialization or often both. Such things aren't unusual though and I predicted it before it happened based on the known correlation between disease outbreaks and authoritarianism. Mind that you have to know how to FIND uncensored communities of anti-vax cranks who will gladly shove the most plausible theories they can devise in your face.

The fact that the lab leak hypothesis stopped being a heterodoxy despite long being censored by big social media networks by non-medical professionals pretending that by citing politifact they were proxy medical professionals was shrugged off and censorship didn't even pause. Negative feedback has no effect on the strategy even when it reveals a stunning lack of expertise on the part of the censors. We even saw papers like WaPo just quietly retroactively correcting headlines and continuing to dish out Pinocchio ratings.

I don't find the data to convince me of the anti-vax argument at all, save for potential arguments that there might be an angle to freeride at least short term off other people mitigating covid through vaccination and non-vaccination measures.

> data is worrisome

I'd love to learn more about this but run into the walls your described about everyone dismissing your worries. Where is this data?

> The other study that concerns me shows that the vaccine’s lipid nanoparticles— which carry the RNA instructions for the spike protein — move beyond the deltoid muscle they’re injected into and accumulate in other tissues, and seem to accumulate in ovarian tissue preferentially.

This is really nasty, I'm inhaling litres of it per year while vaping.

They looked at longitudinal data from people before and after COVID. Most of these people had the flu before, none had COVID because it didn't exist in humans then. There is no way to run the exact same study (UK biobank) on people who got the flu.

> And did they do the same study against people who got the flu and other diseases?

Does this matter?

I think this depends a lot on the time scales you are looking at. COVID isn’t going to go anywhere once the pandemic is declared over. The chance of you getting it at some point is very high.

In many countries, the number of people getting the vaccine has plateaued, and at a fairly low level. Combine that with loosening policies, lower precautions, and more transmissible variants (like the Delta variant), and I think a lot of unvaccinated people may be at higher risk of catching it then they expect.

Once the pandemic phase is over, it'll be yet another endemic disease, meaning that as time goes anyone's chance of getting it tends towards 100%.

Study suggests the "90% who are fine" may not all be fine.

If many people do what you are doing, some percentage can get the virus and allow it to mutate further, reducing the vaccine efficiency, putting others to risk.

Prisoner's dilemma at play.

meta edit: I don't like your post becoming completely gray and therefore up-voted you. It's a view that many people hold and it needs to be answered not by screaming "down-vote the selfish!" but rather with good arguments.

Your very high probability rides on the virus dying down. Which will happen after enough people get vaccinated to bring Reff < 1. Which with the original variant required 50% of the population and probably only adults counted. With the newest variant, that threshold grows to about 80% and probably needs to involve children. The longer we wait, the higher the chance it will never die down.

I’m not sure which child to respond to, so responding here.

I’m pretty well aligned with this and I’m not sure why it’s getting the downvotes.

COVID has never been communicated to me as something serious for my age group. Maybe I’m misinformed, but I’ve never feared getting COVID. I was _terrified_ of needing hospital care _during a hockey stick_.

COVID was communicated to me as a hospital killer. I was terrified I’d have a bad time and not get the care I needed or, worse, steal care from someone else in a zero-sum game. And it wasn’t just COVID during that window. If we “hockey sticked” and exceeded hospital capacity, any care I needed (heart problems, broken bones, different virus, etc.) would all be wrapped up in the same zero-sum game.

I quarantined for months, then socially distanced, and now I’m pretty much back to life as normal. What changed for me: my perceived risk of my local hospitals getting knocked over by COVID is now close to zero. In my eyes we’ve weathered the storm.

Am I missing something?

Most of the arguments against accepting an mRNA shot read as “too new, do not want” to me. What are the specific long-term side effects that one should be aware of when accepting an mRNA shot?

> until more is known about long term effects

I'm curious about this line of reasoning. We've been testing mRNA treatments for other diseases for about 25 years now. The approach was abandoned for gene therapy because the effects weren't long lasting. We have follow up data on people who participated in those studies, and to my knowledge there aren't any documented negative long term effects. We know what the vaccine encodes, a spike protein, which is produced for a few weeks and the the mRNA wears out and is cleaned up by the cells. The proteins also don't persist in the body for very long. The other ingredients in the vaccine aren't anything special.

History also demonstrated that negative vaccine reactions typically happen quickly, and not years down the line.

With all of that in mind, why would one be concerned with long term effects? Is there something I'm missing? Is the position one of maximalist caution? If so, are you applying that to other areas of your life?

There's even greater herd immunity for measles and co., yet there are outbreaks among unvaccinated people all the time. Perhaps those odds are not that small. COVID-19 is probably never going to go away.

And you worry about the long term side effects for the vaccine's one protein, but only focus on the treatment (and not the side effects) for the virus that has 29 of them and tries its best to multiply itself. Do you see how this line of reasoning doesn't seem to compute?

There ultimate treatment has arrived in the form of prevention. The urgency to develop covid specific therapeutics has dissipated for the same reason "your chance of getting it is lower."

Though even that is highly dependent on where you live, who you interact with, if you travel, etc. Lots of vaccine skeptics tend to share views and group, which makes conditions ripe for mini-outbreaks.

"Other people got the vaccine so I don't have to" is logic that looks sound on the surface but I think recent skepticism has shown that enough people all playing this card has the potential for disaster/devestation that is easily avoided.

Anyhow, you should talk your physician about this stuff, who is an authority who can give you information and help diffuse worried in a meaningful way.

> At this point, the odds of getting COVID are small.

That's because the herd around you has been vaccinated. So you are OK with others getting vaccinated for your benefit but wouldn't do your part to benefit the herd. Awesome!

Maybe your post is parody. Can't really tell.

> Vaccines introduce a foreign substance 100% of the time into your body

So does the virus. And all of our data shows the virus is much, much worse.

Appreciate the candor. Agree odds are low now of getting it.

When you’re healthy you get the vaccine for others, not yourself.

Studies so far show no difference in baby outcomes.

mRNA is short-lived, metabolized, etc. That's exactly how Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work.

> Once the instructions (mRNA) are inside the immune cells, the cells use them to make the protein piece. After the protein piece is made, the cell breaks down the instructions and gets rid of them. [0]

You seem to be arguing against the principle of vaccination in general.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...

> Rather than injecting yourself with mRNA which will create long-term antibodies in your organism which will be reactivated any time something like COVID19 appears again in the nature,

That's... supposed to be bad?

What other viral diseases are easily treatable by medication as opposed to vaccination? Are there any?

"I am not anti-vax" is always the first lie we hear from every anti-vax idiot. Now that the general anti-vax position has been so thoroughly debunked everyone knows to avoid someone who is obviously displaying this particular mental illness, so they have learned to be much more circumspect about their claims and how to position their anti-vax arguments. It will usually start with a bit of sea lioning and concern trolling before they move into arguments that tend to end with 'just saying...'

You should not make your decisions based on social media AT ALL.

if you have questions, talk to a physician.

The video you linked is removed.for violating guidelines, which I'm guessing means it had a conspiratorial slant. Discussion does not have to include unsupported or crackpot claims to be "inclusive".

Totally anecdotal, but my wife who was very ill with both covid and then long covid, only lost her smell for a day before it returned.

Another friend who had very few symptoms still has no sense of smell 9 months later - her smell can come and go, and she will also now 'miss-smell' smelling nice things as horrible and horrible as nice.

The article is “published” on a preprint server and carries a suitable warning at the top. It’s preliminary, unverified and not reviewed. The target audience is other researchers, not the general public. It’s useful to publish preliminary results based on low sample sizes, it can guide future research. Basically a “hey, we found something we consider interesting, it may be worth having a better look at this.” It’s very dangerous to read too much into this, though - hence the warning at the top.

I thought this also - but as it turns out - you can make conclusions with really small sample sizes in medicine.

For example (this has nothing to do with the paper), if the average rate of some condition - some rare brain tumor - is 1 in 50M - and you take 200 COVID-19 patients and 4 of them have it - and they have several of these tumors - you can have high CI & Power with a low sample size.

When you're doing conversion rate optimization - it's usually just "did this person make a purchase?" And usually, your base rate is not less than 1/1000... But in medicine, there are ways to measure the severity of the symptoms and a lot of things are quite rare.

They had over 700 people total, 50% control and 50% infected; which they break down earlier in the same paragraph. The 15 people are those who are hospitalized and the abstract literally says the results from that small group aren’t significant.