EU scientists reveal long-term brain damage caused by Covid

“we sought to reproduce the findings in two animal models of SARS-CoV-2 infection. In hamsters infected with SARS-CoV-2, the length of string vessels increased on day 4 after infection […]. Interestingly, _the_increase_was_transient_ and normalized at later time points. A similar finding was observed in K18-hACE2 mice”

⇒ patients who are seriously ill have brain damage. If you subsequently die, you won’t recover.

I read this more a (possibly tiny, possibly large; I can’t tell) contribution to the discussion on whether COVID enters the brain than about long-term damage.

On a side note, since we now know the Wuhan lab did do gain of function research after all, which we were first lied to about, there is a very real possibility this virus was engineered. So we should be comparing it to weaponized flu strains as well. Stuff like this, also founded by the NIH, interestingly enough: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevensalzberg/2019/03/04/scien...

A mere 2 years before this outbreak the NIH lifted their ban on these sort of experiments, btw: https://www.businessinsider.com/nih-lifts-ban-on-flu-mers-sa...

And Corona viruses have been with us for ages.

The short answer is yes, mainly with viral infection. Note though that sometimes it might be symptoms, not the infection itself, that causes damages. But in the case of some viral infections, like the HxNx or SARS-CoV-2, but also varicella, it's the immune response that is too strong and attack the body.

In a way, I'm glad that Corona lifted the awareness about post-infection issues. The common knowledge usually was "you're sick for a week and then you're fine".

I don't have ME/CFS, but my body started to react weird to some harmless common cold infections. My blood pressure drops and remains low, sometimes for weeks. Makes me feel dizzy, makes working out almost impossible.

Also, I had some stomach bug several years ago with some side effects lasting for 2 months. Most people don't believe that a "harmless" infection can cause side effects for weeks (and neither did I), but it's a thing.

Contrast this to something like rabies, which always affects the nervous system (and always kills you and there is no cure, but vaccination shortly after a bite can avert that outcome).

When star athletes have an injury that's more macroscopic we do expect it to heal but often the athlete can't or doesn't want to return because its higher risk for future damage and it's likely they won't be able to perform at their prior state. With less 'physical' injuries we expect a difference for some reason. Maybe the law of large numbers comes into play and we assume all the diseases and their damage is fully removed and replaced at cellular levels when we often have no idea if that's really occurring at full scale.

Overall, I think this is fine. Medicine doesn't promise full, better than new, recovery so to speak always (at least not from good practitioners). What it does often promise instead is a hope and empirical data of improvement and documented side effects with a lot of probabilities for risk and uncertainty quantification. What I think isn't fine is this notion that recovery is always 'complete.' Its likely, as you point out, we're only observing these sorts of smaller effects with COVID due to the widespread infliction it caused over the population and amount of resources humanity has thrown at it to study it in great detail. I suspect there are many other diseases with negligible fractions of resources for study that have similar unknown consequences.

When the active virus invades, the whole body turns into its spike (and others) proteins factory. So, this should be lining up much stronger with the concerns outlined in such reasoning.

If anything objectively "rushed" in this case is, it's the rapid spread of the virus. I find it quite remarkable that the vaccines could be developed while the initial worldwide spread was still in progress.

Jokes aside, the study seems more like a Coronavirus can cause long term damage to parts of brain. Vaccinated people would likely end up with less likelyhood of this happening (by a big factor) compared to unvaccinated.

Nevertheless this does not seem to be a big deal that you should worry about.

This seems to be related to the severe cases of the infection. However it's not certain in milder cases, that is it may still be the case. Also the neural damage may be reversible (observed for hamsters).

Obviously, the key here is to survive it first.

Vaccination, when effective, is supposed to reduce the chance of a severe case of the infection.

This study focused on the brain, but it's well known that the same sort of damage occurs in other parts of the body.

And stop worrying about the unvaccinated transmitting to the vaccinated. The risk to the vaccinated is sufficiently low that it should not be a dominating concern any way. Also, vaccination doesn't stop COVID transmission enough to create herd immunity even at near 100% coverage, so we have to resign to COVID being endemic, especially given how rapidly a single strand RNA virus mutates.

The caveat is we could potentially eliminate COVID, influenza and a host of other viral infections, if we take the reigns off the pharmaceutical industry, by eliminating FDA approval requirements for vaccines. Machine learning has made enormous paradigm shifting breakthroughs in other fields, like natural language processing and protein folding, and could very well do the same for drug discovery and testing. Drug development could potentially keep up with the viral mutation rate if it could subsist solely on faster processes, and jettison the slower FDA mandated ones.

It will almost certainly become one of the regular shots everyone gets as a kid if it ends up proving safe to do so.

Also I totally get your point, but a comparative study is still much more valuable than a set of anecdotes, even if N=2.

A low sample size mostly just means a higher bar for statistical significance. It doesn't mean a study is useless.

Nothing good comes out of being pessimistic (by definition), sometimes I get into a state where I confuse my pessimism with realism, but remember: everywhere you look you see what you are looking for.

I generally support the right for people to choose euthanasia under appropriate circumstances, but this is a really disappointing and frankly entitled comment.

Countless millions of people are born with or acquire from disease or injury chronic illnesses and conditions that can significantly impact their quality of life. Some of these are treatable but many in parts of the world these treatments are not accessible.

Most of those people don't off themselves. They move forward in life, as difficult as it might be. And some of them not only find ways to survive life, many make incredibly meaningful contributions to their families, communities and the world at large.