I wonder what other infections and substances we'd find that cause these sorts of issues if we looked hard enough?
I'd say more than 1 million confirmed deaths and over 81 million confirmed cases (in the US) in two years is more than just topical. We are approaching half a billion cases globally with over 6 million deaths.
Yes, there have been lots of Corona viruses in the past, some of which result in things as ubiquitous as the common cold.
It's called a novel Corona virus for a reason: humans had essentially zero immunity to this virus and its ability to evade the body's defenses and mutate so quickly at this scale is something we haven't seen before. Each major variant is more transmissible and more elusive than the previous one. BA.2 is now the dominant strain and the FDA just authorized another booster [2]. In many ways, we are still coming to grips with what we're dealing with.
We don't have a choice but to continue to look hard at COVID-19--the results of allowing it spread so widely are right in our faces and we have to deal with it.
[1]: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
[2]: https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
What I'm saying is that to conclude that effect X (demyelination) is a cause for additional concern with respect to disease A (COVID-19), we should go back and see whether effect X is also present with respect to other diseases such as B, C, D (common cold, flu, etc). Because we may have found X linked to A because we are looking so hard at A, and not have found it previously with respect to B, C, D because we weren't looking as hard then.
The best evidence indicates we have seen something like this before, specifically in the 1889 pandemic. That was most likely caused by the HCoV-OC43 coronavirus (genetically very similar to SARS-CoV-2), although at this point we probably won't be able to prove the cause 100%.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/
Additional boosters may be beneficial for some patients with defective immune systems. But they're not advised for the general population. We can't boost our way out of the pandemic.
Like, there have been mini-pandemics in the past (Spanish Flu is one I read a bit about), how do we "win" against it instead of just "minimize damage"? Herd immunity? Given headlines like OP, it makes one pause to think.
https://www.businessinsider.com/delta-variant-made-herd-immu...
https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/94646
The mask mandates implemented in most of North America were never an effective public health intervention. Areas which never had mandates, or removed them sooner, had similar outcomes. Correlations with death rates were weak at best, and confounded by multiple other factors.
It's one of those ones that doesn't show up on an MRI but an fMRI shows characteristic changes, which suggests something wrong at a lower level I think.
Many are new too. Viral dynamics... changed with the rise of cities a few thousand years back.