3 ms·

I see a headline like this and I have to wonder: what are the lasting impacts of other, more pedestrian viruses? For example, I've never heard anything about h

I see a headline like this and I have to wonder: what are the lasting impacts of other, more pedestrian viruses? For example, I've never heard anything about how other coronaviruses, such as those associated with some common cold infections, leave lasting impacts. What about the various flu viruses? Is it that they don't? That they do and it isn't reported? That it isn't studied because the upfront consequences of these more common viruses are so much less dramatic? My fear is that, if this kind of reporting is just because SARS‑CoV‑2 infections are front of mind for the popular culture, these kinds of reports will be used to suggest there's more "special bad" with Covid when in fact there might not be. Bad policy tends to grasp onto any rationale it can find, and facts without context can be the worst for this.

johnchristopher 5y ago
> My fear is that, if this kind of reporting is just because SARS‑CoV‑2 infections are front of mind for the popular culture, these kinds of reports will be used to suggest there's more "special bad" with Covid when in fact there might not be. Bad policy tends to grasp onto any rationale it can find, and facts without context can be the worst for this. > reports will be used to suggest there's more "special bad" with Covid You are arguing in bad faith. Starting with asking innocent questions in appearance only to build your argument that there is no problem. There are more and more reports that there is a "special bad" with Covid. Denying it won't help.
notacoward 5y ago
In some cases we do know. For example, we know about the relationships between chicken pox and shingles. I don't know if measles is considered more pedestrian, but its "immune amnesia" effect is pretty well known. Polio is certainly not pedestrian, but post-polio syndrome is also well studied. So to at least some degree virologists do look for and at such connections. There's certainly more that could be done, but there are also only so many virologists and they have to pick their priorities.
- berberous 5y ago
  I heard an interesting podcast (can’t recall the name) with some scientist who does a lot of work diagnosing mystery diseases by just sequencing the shit out of everything possible, which only recently became feasible. One story he told, which I may be misremembering slightly, was someone who went blind in one eye suddenly. They sequenced his eye, and found a common virus that was best matched to a 1970s variant, which the patient recalled having that virus and being fairly sick one year in the 1970s. So the, terrifying, implication was that he got sick, recovered fine, and then 40 years later a latent bit of the virus blinded him in one eye, and pre-sequencing, no one would have ever known about the link between the two events.

johnchristopher 5y ago

> My fear is that, if this kind of reporting is just because SARS‑CoV‑2 infections are front of mind for the popular culture, these kinds of reports will be used to suggest there's more "special bad" with Covid when in fact there might not be. Bad policy tends to grasp onto any rationale it can find, and facts without context can be the worst for this. > reports will be used to suggest there's more "special bad" with Covid You are arguing in bad faith. Starting with asking innocent questions in appearance only to build your argument that there is no problem. There are more and more reports that there is a "special bad" with Covid. Denying it won't help.

notacoward 5y ago

In some cases we do know. For example, we know about the relationships between chicken pox and shingles. I don't know if measles is considered more pedestrian, but its "immune amnesia" effect is pretty well known. Polio is certainly not pedestrian, but post-polio syndrome is also well studied. So to at least some degree virologists do look for and at such connections. There's certainly more that could be done, but there are also only so many virologists and they have to pick their priorities.

berberous 5y ago
I heard an interesting podcast (can’t recall the name) with some scientist who does a lot of work diagnosing mystery diseases by just sequencing the shit out of everything possible, which only recently became feasible. One story he told, which I may be misremembering slightly, was someone who went blind in one eye suddenly. They sequenced his eye, and found a common virus that was best matched to a 1970s variant, which the patient recalled having that virus and being fairly sick one year in the 1970s. So the, terrifying, implication was that he got sick, recovered fine, and then 40 years later a latent bit of the virus blinded him in one eye, and pre-sequencing, no one would have ever known about the link between the two events.