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I have a recommendation for you:

You need to exercise. You are in your mid-thirties now. It's a big problem if you don't. But you have bad air quality where you live. I've dealt with this myself in the past.

A relatively inexpensive solution that I recommend for anyone in areas with poor air quality is to build your own filter fans. Get a standard box fan, get a furnace filter that has HEPA ratings, duct tape the furnace filter to the back of the fan. One of these in a whole house does a good job. Put three of them in there and it's crazy how big of a difference it makes. My wife has respiratory issues and my son has asthma. My wife had to be hospitalized twice for wildfire smoke in my neighborhood. Once I started doing the filter fan trick the issues went away. You can then work out in your home. Used cardio equipment is ridiculously easy to come by. I purchased a reflex punching bag for my basement a few months ago and it's the best piece of cardio equipment I've ever gotten. Doesn't take up too much space wasn't too expensive either.

I applaud you on your diet though. You definitely have a good grasp of the metrics that matter. Low triglycerides and high HDL are crucial, and good for you keeping that blood pressure solid. That diet is clearly doing good things for you.

Just keep in mind that exercise does great things for mental health by relieving stress via hormones.

One side note:

You may have contracted covid and never known it. The only reason I knew I caught it back in February of 2021 was because of my complete loss of sense of smell. If not for that single symptom I would have never known I had it. It didn't impact me in any other way. My wife and kids caught it as well and had absolutely no symptoms. They only knew they caught it because they got tested along with me.

I appreciate this. I used to row competitively through high school and college, so I do consider myself an "athlete" as an identity, but non-practicing. I recently lost 30 lbs (6'0" from 200lbs to 170 lbs) over the past year through diet, but need to exercise.

Your advice for air filters is good general advice, IMO. I have a 700 sqft apartment with:

1x Honeywell HPA300 (rated for 465 sqft)

6x Coway AP-1512HH (each rated for 361 sqft)

1x Honeywell HPA100 (rated for 155 sqft)

I also have a Honeywell FPR 10 filter on the HVAC air return. So, over 2800 sqft of CADR-rated filtering for a 700 sqft apartment. Activated carbon pre-filters are changed every 2 weeks and the HEPA filter is changed once a month. We spend about $400/mo on filters, on top of $1,100/month rent.

Unfortunately, HEPA filtration does little for the type of air contamination that we're dealing with. Ethylene oxide is more like a "VOC" than a "PM2.5". The activated carbon filters help a bit, but are "used up" very quickly (1-2 days IME). The HEPA filters do very little/nothing for VOC contamination as far as we can tell.

Indeed, it is time to move away. I am in one of the most heavily-affected featured areas in this article[0]. However, my wife and I work in the chemicals industry, so we have personal experience identifying most of the compounds by smell and have unusual awareness of their effects vs. most of the nearby citizens.

0: https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air

Wow. Just wow.

Really terrible to hear this. You aren't fucking around with this, but it's still not enough. $400 a month on filters is insane.

Thanks for that article. Very eye-opening.

I hope you get out of there soon, but I can't imagine the guilt you feel for the citizens left behind. Horrible.

You can use more than one filter. I've heard it called a Corsi box: https://www.texairfilters.com/a-variation-on-the-box-fan-wit...

Basically, you're making a cube. One side is the box fan, with the intake coming from the inside of the cube. The other sides are taped together filters. It significantly reduces the strain on the motor of the fan, and you can use the cube for a long time before replacing the filters, since each one is filtering so much less air.

>Get a standard box fan, get a furnace filter that has HEPA ratings, duct tape the furnace filter to the back of the fan.

Please be very careful with this. This significantly strains the motor of your average cheap box fan, and hot motors tend to die faster and can get hot enough to melt plastic and start fires.

I'd really recommend an actual air purifier instead, especially if it will run while you're asleep or not at home.

I always run it on the lowest setting, but yes, you need to be careful. Good point.

"Ethylene oxide/mercaptans/styrenes/acrylates" are chemical pollutants and thus won't be taken care of by particulate filters. You need something like an activated carbon filter for that.

Do they sell any furnace filters capable of stopping these?

Well it's more like neutralizing as opposed to filtering, and sure there probably are some aimed at people with central air that want to reduce VOCs. I believe I've seen standalone filters in the context of plant growing. And perhaps there are carbon aquarium filters that would work for DIY? I myself just went for some off the shelf air "purifiers", which have a prefilter + particulate filter + carbon filter stack. It's the path of overpaying for a fan and gimmicky replacements, but they're quiet, automatically ramp up speed for high VOCs, and didn't require me to DIY something for once.

Tell your doctor about your symptoms and then ask for an ECG. You want to know if you have an underlying heart condition. Depending on what you find, there may be options that will eliminate your arrhythmias.

Anecdotally, I also had arrhythmia and after a few months and visits to doctors I figured out it was the type of coffee I drank. Changed back (from Espresso so standard) and the arrythmia was gone. YMMV

I agree, if you think you are having arrhythmias you should see a cardiologist as the first step. Try to exhaust the well-known medical avenues before considering that your health problems are from an unknown cause. Strep infections in particular can have cardiac effects (rheumatic heart disease).

> I've never had COVID but I did get the mRNA vaccines + booster.

> my heart goes into light arrhythmia all too frequently. It used to be maybe once or twice a year I'd notice 1-3 seconds of "off-beat" heart pattern. All of of a sudden it's a few times a week. I'm also getting older (entering mid 30's now)

This is my situation exactly, starting a few weeks after getting my second booster (Moderna). I've read enough anecdotes and news reports to believe there are many people dealing with this:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/myocarditis-ottawa-mrn...

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/she-thought-she-wa...

It gradually improved (enough to stop waking me up), but I still get a lot more "off-beats" than I used to. Got my third booster recently (Pfizer), so far no major regressions.

> Got my third booster recently

Out of curiosity, if you noticed these negative side-effects affecting the health of your heart after the second shot, why did you choose to proceed to get a third shot?

Not the parent poster, but I stopped after first Pfizer dose due to chest pain that lasted for three weeks. My entire family and all my coworkers berated me to get the second dose. Not saying parents friends/family did that to them, but there is a subset of people that don’t believe you should opt out of the vaccine if you have adverse reactions.

Lesson learned in honestly answering “are you fully vaccinated”. I still get told I should do it 8 months later.

Are you sure it's caused by COVID, or perhaps ever since you were sick you were exercising less?

I had similar symptoms to what you describe after just not being very active for quite a while, but it resolved after I did regular cardio (cycling) for a while and ate better.

I noted:

> I've never had COVID.I did get the mRNA vaccines + booster.

Regardless of root cause, probably just need to exercise more. See a doctor for good measure. Could be age/underlying condition, but exercise improves most of these things.

I had similar symptoms in January 2019, I went to Urgent Care and then the ER because of heart arrhythmia, I felt sick, but no major fever. I put it down to anxiety (never suffered with before), but part of me wonders if it was COVID.

Out of curiosity, where do you live? I too live next to a bunch of chemical/steel plants and have been tracking air quality, weather, traffic, etc. https://millerbeach.community in Gary for a few years. Winds from North>South produce the best air quality, E>W or W>E produce worse, same with S>N.

Propublica has some excellent research published lately (it's an entire series of articles based on one primary analysis): https://www.propublica.org/article/toxmap-poison-in-the-air

It's based on somewhat-voluntarily reported data, rather than measured air samples. Mainly because we don't have effective air monitoring stations in anywhere near enough density to any kind of useful data science.

There was no COVID in January 2019. However there are a zillion other infectious diseases and other medical conditions that can cause cardiac symptoms.

You might be interested in reading this (very long, amateur, pseudononymous, non-peer-reviewed) analysis theorizing "SARS-CoV-2 presence in China as far back as March 2018." [0]

[0] https://theethicalskeptic.com/2021/11/15/chinas-ccp-conceale...

For a very long time I've held a theory that the general pandemonium due to the mischaracterization of the media regarding the danger of the virus to the average person resulted in substantially more voluntary hospital admissions than would have otherwise occurred, thus reducing availability for those who actually needed to be hospitalized, thus increasing deaths.

I, and nearly every colleague in the downtown San Francisco office I worked at, contracted Covid in early January 2020. There should be no doubt that there was already widespread community transmission in California in late 2019. Yet, strangely, "hospital capacity" did not become a concern until right after the U.S. declared a nationwide state of emergency in March.

Why was it not a problem in the nearly 4 months prior? I believe many people were convinced that the virus was far more dangerous than it was, and voluntarily began seeking hospitalization when none was actually needed.

You'd be more informed (less uninformed in reality) reading a tabloid about bigfoot on the moon than whatever the hell that is.

Do you have any substantive critique to offer of the various lemmas established throughout the piece, which refers to itself as “an argument and petition for plurality under Ockham’s Razor?”

Or do you rely solely on appeals to authority when filtering signal from noise? I’ve noticed throughout this pandemic that many arguments supported on such a weak basis have later been disproven or severely undercut by further evidence.

Some examples: the virus likely leaked from a lab (at some time); masks reduce transmission; the virus is airborne; there is no sterilizing vaccine; vaccinated people can catch and transmit Covid; vaccines have waning efficacy; “fully vaccinated” will eventually turn to “recently vaccinated;” the mRNA vaccines can lead to myocarditis to such a degree that their risk may not outweigh their benefit for some age groups; a variant will eventually emerge with a high degree of immune escape…

There are many examples of conspiracy theories becoming mainstream narrative months later. So while many of them remain conspiracy theories, and the information environment continues to be overwhelmingly noisy, it seems imprudent to discount a source based on appeal to an authority that has been so consistently wrong, sometimes even willfully so (like when CDC lied that “masks don’t work” in order to save them for healthcare workers).

Are there any conspiracy theories you don't believe or do you just assume they're all equally plausible?

It's a workday and I'm busy but I'll grant you one substantive critique; the OP heavily relies on "mutations per year" as a metric to derive how plausible it is that something like Omicron could have mutated in the timeframe necessary.

Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections? It should. The rate of mutations/year is a useful metric for determining the average mutation rate between two different viruses given certainty of their dates -- it's not at all useful for "aging" a specific variant because the calculation is independent of the number of infections.

We're in the midst of a pandemic with hundreds of millions of infections, so the selection pressure for more "fit" viruses is immense. OP tries to get around this by claiming that the rate of mutation that we've actually measured (which is an order of magnitude higher than his assumption!) is suspect and would "extinguish SARS COV2 within a season" but that's just gibberish.

> Are there any conspiracy theories you don't believe

I don’t like words like “believe” that imply a reliance on faith. I seek truth through evidence and my goal is to filter signal from noise.

> Does it strike you as a bit suspect to rely on a mutations/time period, and completely ignore the number of infections?

I’m far from a virologist, but I think OP’s postulation around mutation frequency is a bit more subtle than simply N / time.

See Exhibit [7.7] for example, which makes it visually clear just how distinct omicron is from any other variant. I’m not qualified to speculate beyond this, but it seems OP is saying a bit more than “there are a lot of mutations” – indeed, he spends multiple sections disambiguating the evidence of pure volume of mutations from that of phylogenetic distance. Still, you may have a point — maybe it only takes one mutation into a new dominant “clade” to produce such distinction, with any subsequent mutation being of little surprise given the prevalence established by the first one.

> It's a workday and I'm busy

On this we can agree.

[7.7] https://i0.wp.com/theethicalskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

Any one of us could have had an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection without knowing it. But there are myriad different medical conditions that can cause arythmia.

I had heart arrhythmia after a full-blown covid. The 1-3 seconds of strange patterns sound very familiar.

It slowly resolved itself after some 4-6 months, but not on its own, I needed small dosage of Concor prescribed by the cardiologist.