GonadTheBallbarian posted:

That's really the major driver there. They are so good at giving it to other people

StrangeThing posted:

I feel like this thread takes a way dimmer view on children's heath and COVID than the scientific community does, all the overwhelming evidence and discussion I've seen is that children are extremely well protected.

quote:

Influenza lineage extinction during the COVID-19 pandemic?

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has seen a notable global reduction in influenza cases of both influenza A and B viruses. In particular, the B/Yamagata lineage has not been isolated from April 2020 to August 2021, suggesting that this influenza lineage may have become extinct, which may provide opportunities for improving availability and effectiveness of influenza vaccines.

quote:

Competing interests
K.L. and S.R. are employees of Seqirus, an influenza vaccine manufacturer. The other authors declare no competing interests.

Stickman posted:

“We’ll protected” is a hell of a way to describe “literally not protected at all”. Better off than old people is a pretty loving low bar here.

Fritz the Horse posted:

I think maybe this is a miscommunication in terminology? I'm assuming StrangeThing means "children very rarely develop severe disease or require hospitalization." They still readily contract and transmit the virus, of course.

CommieGIR posted:

Guys if someone is making you angry, at least address their points before calling them out. Thanks.

https://twitter.com/jeremyfaust/status/1448709669900460044?s=20

One Doctor saying there's some data showing that the Pfizer booster may actually cause harm and not actually help lower hospitalization chances specifically in young males

Fritz the Horse posted:

A COVID-related good thing:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-021-00642-4

and since we've been asked to do this,

One of the influenza-B lineages might have gone extinct, which could potentially improve flu vaccination in the future.

Platystemon posted:

They spoke too soon.

If you look at CDC’s flu tracker, BYam was identified in the most recent week for which data is now available.

Platystemon posted:

You don’t have to be rude about it.

I didn’t go through the same page you did. I downloaded the CSV file, I didn’t think that a direct link to that would have been well-received or useful to anyone who wasn’t already familiar with CDC flu surveillance. I would have screencapped the chart, but I’m on mobile.

quote:

Rather helpful if you just directly link what you're referring to.

How are u posted:

My personal position with all the pre-prints and weird studies that pop up on covid brain damage or whatever is to just ignore them. If covid really does cause brain damage in every single person infected then I'll learn about it when it's plastered all over the front pages of the world's big papers, as in it's actually real.

e: to clarify, I think I'm exercising a healthy skepticism of falling down a "I know something that the mainstream media can't/won't/doesn't want to report on" hole. If doom is real then it won't be some secret whispered about the internet, it'll be something we all hear about very very loudly.

quote:

There is strong evidence for brain-related pathologies in COVID-19, some of which could be a consequence of viral neurotropism, or of neuroinflammation following viral infection. Most brain imaging studies have focused on qualitative, gross pathology in moderate to severe cases, most typically carried out on hospitalised patients. It remains unknown however whether the impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection can be detected in milder cases, in a quantitative and automated manner, and whether this can reveal possible mechanisms for the spread of the disease.

quote:

Using both hypothesis-driven and exploratory approaches, with false discovery rate multiple comparison correction, we identified respectively 68 and 67 significant longitudinal effects associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in the brain, including, on average: (i) a more pronounced reduction in grey matter thickness and contrast in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (min P=1.7×10-4, r=-0.14) and parahippocampal gyrus (min P=2.7×10-4, r=-0.13), (ii) a relative increase of diffusion indices, a marker of tissue damage, in the regions of the brain functionally-connected to the piriform cortex, anterior olfactory nucleus and olfactory tubercle (min P=2.2×10-5, r=0.16), and (iii) greater reduction in global measures of brain size and increase in cerebrospinal fluid volume suggesting an additional diffuse atrophy in the infected participants (min P=4.0×10-6, r=-0.17). When looking over the entire cortical surface, these grey matter thickness results covered the parahippocampal gyrus and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and extended to the anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. The increase of a diffusion index (mean diffusivity) meanwhile could be seen voxel-wise mainly in the medial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior insula, the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala. These results were not altered after excluding cases who had been hospitalised. We further compared hospitalised (n=15) and non-hospitalised (n=386) infected participants, resulting in similar findings to the larger cases vs control group comparison, with, in addition, a marked reduction of grey matter thickness in fronto-parietal and temporal regions (all FDR-significant, min P=4.0×10-6). The 401 SARS-CoV-2 infected participants also showed larger cognitive decline between the two timepoints in the Trail Making Test compared with the controls (both FDR-significant, min P=1.0×10-4, r=0.17; and still FDR-significant after excluding the hospitalised patients: min P=1.0×10-4, r=0.17), with the duration taken to complete the alphanumeric trail correlating post hoc with the cognitive and olfactory-related crus II of the cerebellum (FDR-significant, P=2.0×10-3, r=-0.19), which was also found significantly atrophic in the SARS-CoV-2 participants (FDR-significant, P=6.1×10-5, r=-0.14). Our findings thus relate to longitudinal abnormalities in limbic cortical areas with direct neuronal connectivity to the primary olfactory system. Unlike in post hoc cross-sectional studies, the availability of pre- infection imaging data mitigates to some extent the issue of pre-existing risk factors or clinical conditions being misinterpreted as disease effects. We were therefore able to demonstrate that the regions of the brain that showed longitudinal differences post-infection did not already show any difference between (future) cases and controls in their initial, pre-infection scans. These brain imaging results may be the in vivo hallmarks of a degenerative spread of the disease — or of the virus itself — via olfactory pathways (a possible entry point of the virus to the central nervous system being via the olfactory mucosa), or of neuroinflammatory events due to the infection, or of the loss of sensory input due to anosmia. Whether this deleterious impact can be partially reversed, for instance after improvement of the hyposmic symptoms, or whether these are effects that will persist in the long term, remains to be investigated with additional follow up.

quote:

It is also worth noting that most of the cases involved in this study were either asymptomatic or mild — and indeed, most of our significant olfactory-related results stand when excluding the infected participants with more moderate or severe COVID-19 (hospitalised cases) — and most of the controls would have had also been exposed to higher levels of anxiety, stress and isolation during the pandemic in the UK. In addition, brain regions typically involved in these mental health factors, while overlapping with our limbic results, do not affect these regions consistently: higher and lower volumes have both been observed in these limbic structures for anxiety and stress, including higher (as opposed to lower in our study) volume of the parahippocampal gyrus in stress68–71, while social isolation impacts a different network of brain regions (the so-called “default mode” network), which does not overlap with the pattern associated with SARS-CoV-2 infection in our results.

enki42 posted:

Definitely something I've seen in all of Canada is that re-introducing any sort of restriction is incredibly difficult, and both government and most people are way too willing to bury their heads in the sand and pretend like nothing's wrong until it's way too late.

bane mask golem posted:

Following up on our previous discussion:
-The evidence shows that airborne COVID does cause brain damage.

PT6A posted:

Except in Alberta where, at the crisis point we finally said "okay, yeah, back to wearing masks and poo poo, and enjoy our Restrictions Exemption Program that's totally not a vaccine passport for various reasons" It's too late, but I can't actually tell at this point if it was also too little. Our cases do seem to be decreasing nicely.

It's actually completely possible to re-introduce restrictions, and people are by and large following them despite a lot of bitching. The government is just terrified of the small percentage of complete lunatics.

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

As your linked study say: "none of the 9 cognitive variables showed significant difference at baseline between SARS-CoV-2 and control groups"

bane mask golem posted:

Following up on our previous discussion:
-The evidence shows that airborne COVID does cause brain damage.
-It's now showing up in news articles more and more frequently, which was your criteria for taking this seriously.
-The brain damage is unrelated to anxiety or antisocial habits caused by lockdowns or fear of COVID.
-The brain damage is present in mild COVID cases as well as severe cases.

Based on these results, it seems clear that:
-Everyone should wear a respirator, and try to avoid catching COVID.
-The Biden administration should be paying people to stay home. Not just one-time checks then declaring July 4th to be Covid Independence Day.
-The current Biden administration policies of reopening the economy at all costs and not providing universal access to boosters falls somewhere between mass murder and intentional genocide of minorities.
-The Biden administration policy of appealing the court order to vaccinate the refugees they're keeping in concentration camps, rather than following the court order and vaccinating them, falls somewhere between mass murder and intentional genocide of those predominantly minority groups.

bane mask golem posted:

Tacier posted:

HelloSailorSign posted:

Right, this study should be taken with a large grain of salt in regards to it being a new and scary thing that COVID is capable of. There are a lot of diseases out there we are all exposed to regularly that could do similar.

Their observations are correct between their two groups (even if their overlaps are a bit ehhh), but the big thing here that's missing is the comparison to other illnesses and other conditions (that aren't infectious or neurodegenerative conditions) that could impact how the brain functions.

We all know that loss of smell/taste is a significant symptom of COVID, whether mild or severe. The brain is not a slow moving organ, it's constantly and frequently changing and altering itself in response to stimulation... or importantly here, lack thereof. Neuroplasticity is a very large area of research.

In the non-illness side, the brain can change fairly rapidly when amputation or transection of nerves occurs. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19737843/ The question that I've not seen answered yet regarding COVID and anosmia is - is it the nerve getting toasted, or the sensory cells? Given the majority of people who lose sense of taste/smell get it back and get it back similar to before, could this suggest it may be the peripheral nerve being impacted if the linked study discussed transection of nerves and how later they're not as good as before? Or is that simply an aspect of such an important sense being essentially lost for 1-2 weeks (at least)? Remember too that smell has a huge influence on our emotional and memory states, and the loss of that sense could lead to a loss of input for those areas as well. We also have fast changes to the brain - including those visible to various brain scans - from a limb being casted https://www.cell.com/neuron/pdfExtended/S0896-6273(20)30353-6, likely because of a loss of use. Much like a muscle shrinking when not in use but capable of enlarging over time when needed, the brain may do the same. But, atrophy is not necessarily equivalent to damage.

On the illness side, influenza has been associated with neurological damage https://www.the-scientist.com/features/can-the-flu-and-other-viruses-cause-neurodegeneration--65498 that could take years to demonstrate. Could COVID be added to this list? Possibly! One feature to note though is that certain strains of influenza are noted to be able to bypass the blood brain barrier, and as of yet, COVID has not been reliably detected in brain tissue from those who've died from it https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/06/signs-of-inflammation-in-brains-of-people-who-died-of-covid-19.html https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/01/14/taking-a-closer-look-at-the-effects-of-covid-19-on-the-brain/. COVID's impacts seem to be more likely due to the issues it causes via clotting abnormalities and a severe systemic inflammatory response, which also would fit with the myocarditis issues seen in both true COVID and vaccination, that COVID simply can cause a significant inflammatory reaction and when that happens, loads of organ systems get impacted, but it's not necessarily because COVID is special, it's because we've done failingly little to research the diseases we've lived with for generations.

SpacePope posted:

You should probably read the stuff you're quoting before making up lies and complete bullshit while expecting people won't take the time to read the study.

Platystemon posted:

Why don’t we go back to letting kids ... play tackle football?

Zarin posted:

We ever stopped!?

Platystemon posted:

That’s how most kinds of damage work.

Does the passage of a single truck damage pavement? We know that it does, even if we can’t measure it. We don’t have to wait for the road to be functionally degraded and popping tires with its potholes to say “yes, damage happens”.

Why don’t we go back to letting kids bounce soccer balls off their head and play tackle football? Why don’t we allow a little lead exposure? We know that these cause brain damage in aggregate, but who’s to say that any particular individual was harmed by low‐level exposure?

Platystemon posted:

We never shut down the virus, either.

How are u posted:

Nobody could. May as well try to stop the seasons or the tides.

poll plane variant posted:

Platystemon posted:

That’s how most kinds of damage work.

Does the passage of a single truck damage pavement? We know that it does, even if we can’t measure it. We don’t have to wait for the road to be functionally degraded and popping tires with its potholes to say “yes, damage happens”.

Why don’t we go back to letting kids bounce soccer balls off their head and play tackle football? Why don’t we allow a little lead exposure? We know that these cause brain damage in aggregate, but who’s to say that any particular individual was harmed by low‐level exposure?

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

Yeah, if you make this study about older adults and make it about children and change "no significant cognitive impairment was found" to "significant permanent cumulative impairment was found" then this sure is a scary study! It's weird how studies are always saying scary things when you add made up scary things whole cloth to what the study says!

poll plane variant posted:

Ah yes the brain, noted for healing after repeated oxygen starvation and inflammation.

poll plane variant posted:

Ah yes the brain, noted for healing after repeated oxygen starvation and inflammation.

quote:

Limitations of this study include the lack of stratification of severity of the cases, beyond the information of whether they had been hospitalised (information on O2 saturation levels and details of treatment or hospital procedures is currently available on only a few participants), lack of clinical correlates (of particular relevance, potential hyposmic and hypogeusic symptoms and blood-based markers of inflammation), small number of participants from Asian, Black or other ethnic background other than White, some of the cases and controls’ SARS-CoV-2 infection status identified through antibody lateral flow test kits that have varied diagnostic accuracy.

bane mask golem posted:

-Everyone should wear a respirator, and try to avoid catching COVID.