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Comment by imperialdrive | Hacker News Reader

This has very little to meaningfully do with anything, but I know someone that had long covid, and it ruined their life and career etc. because of barely being able to function more than a few "good" hours a day. They got covid again about two year later, was moderately sick for a week, and then completely healed, 100% back to normal. Absolutely blew my mind.

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A lot of the hypotheses about Long <insert virus here> are about how well your body cleared the remnants. You can have a persistent reservoir of something for quite a long time until your body finally decides to clear it out.

One of the canonical examples of this are warts from HPV. There are documented cases of people having persistent infections until they "injured" a wart somehow, their body finally took notice, and then their body proceeded to completely clear all of them.

Modern medicine really does not deal with active viruses or their aftermath very well.

Perhaps this suggest that a treatment for long covid might be a new exposure to covid itself - or maybe a safer drug that mimics covid, like a vaccine or something analogous, that gives the benefit of "restarting" the immune response, but without the complications of real covid.

That's really interesting. I wonder if the immune system is modal - I know there are tons of systems in place that kick it into gear for response to an infection, so I guess its reasonable to assume that the body prefers to keep it as dormant as possible the rest of the time to minimise auotimmune disease risks and the like.

If these sorts of disorders creep in underneath it, and persist at a sufficiently low level not to trigger it, I suppose these things can hang around. I wonder why the immune system can't clear it out otherwise though (since presumable plenty of other immune systems have to always be active, to prevent infections from cuts and the like from being imminently fatal..)

I think a lot of the problem here is the stunning complexity of the immune systems in living systems. A huge part of our immune system isn't our own, it's other viruses and bacteria that live in symbiosis with us. The war of the viruses and bacteria was going on for billions of years before cells decided to clump together and make anything complicated.

If this is how it is, then that explains why all of the people I know who have Long Covid are hyper-neurotic people. They didn't get the repeat exposure to rid themselves of the other one.

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