[conspire] A mini-smackdown on Covid :D

[Deirdre Saoirse Moen]

Something I wrote for the Baypiggies list.

On Mon, Dec 13, 2021, at 3:26 PM, $SOMEONE wrote:
> It's time to stop playing pandemic.

Seriously. That's where you're going with this. *side eye*

* We have had 800,000 deaths from Covid in the US. That's still going on. It's not *just* a mass casualty event, it's also a mass disabling event.

* We have a national shortage of doctors and nurses (and everything else in healthcare) because of the sheer horror of it all.
https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-series-part-2-workforce/ <https://morningconsult.com/2021/10/04/health-care-workers-series-part-2-workforce/>

Much of that shortage is caused by misbehavior on the part of patients and their families. Especially the families.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/rakxun/my_career_of_treating_patients_has_ended/ <https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/rakxun/my_career_of_treating_patients_has_ended/> (Note: some very visceral descriptions from this doctor.)

* Even morticians have been getting PTSD.
https://news.yahoo.com/texas-embalmer-shares-nightmare-covid-130817817.html <https://news.yahoo.com/texas-embalmer-shares-nightmare-covid-130817817.html>

* Covid is the first endothelial pandemic we've had (so far as we know). The endothelium lines the blood vessels:
https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/41/32/3038/5901158 <https://academic.oup.com/eurheartj/article/41/32/3038/5901158>

* The endothelium forms the blood/brain barrier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood–brain_barrier <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier>

That's why you can get things that cross the blood/brain barrier from Covid like autoimmune encephalitis. Fun times.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160770v1 <https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160770v1> (preprint, full text) https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20081236 <https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2020.20081236> (peer reviewed, excerpt)

* The endothelium also performs kidney (glomerular) filtration:
https://www.osmosis.org/learn/Glomerular_filtration <https://www.osmosis.org/learn/Glomerular_filtration>

That's why there have been cases of new onset Diabetes type 1 and type 2 as a side effect of Covid, as well as kidney failure. (I can't find my papers on that at the moment, and I don't feel like digging for it.)

* The endothelium also controls things like hemostasis, whether you've got enough blood everywhere or not. Coagulation, or letting the mast cells know to release some of that sweet heparin for anti-coagulation, etc. Then you've got fibrin that's resistant to fibrinolysis and thus leads to the microclots that are known in many aspects of covid (e.g., "covid toes"), etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8380922/ <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8380922/>

And so on. Nothing like having a lifelong (possibly) endothelial disease, e.g., atherosclerosis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endothelial_dysfunction <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endothelial_dysfunction>

So, dude, you do you, but I'd be happy to be at a conference of the vaccinated.

Deirdre

PS - reminder to anyone reading that vaccines and booster shots are available if you haven't gotten yours yet.

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