Do the majority of infections clear completely?

The numbers are still unclear. Keep in mind that HIV/AIDS, TB et al have had a much longer time around to be studied. The researcher I quoted above mentioned studying HIV for 20 years. COVID is only approaching the end of year 5. In spite of its recency, we do still have a wealth of data to tell us how threatening it is, anyway. Being re-infected several times per year is certainly not tipping the odds in anyone’s favor, either.

The safest thing to do is also, thankfully, the simplest: wearing a well-fitting, N95-grade respirator whenever one is away from their home. These types of respirators are, regardless of anything you may have heard, extremely effective at protecting you and others from infecting one another, even one-way.

This is from 2 years ago, but was being discussed as early as 2020.

To be clear, McComsey isn’t suggesting that the viruses themselves are similar. Coronaviruses are not retroviruses like HIV, nor are they sexually transmitted like HIV. But it’s the way they make the people they infect sick that caught her attention. It hides in the body and continues to wreak havoc in the various organ system by driving inflammation and disrupting the immune response.

“HIV patients don’t die from the virus itself. They die from immune activation – from the high levels of inflammation that causes cancer, heart disease, liver and kidney disease,” she said.

“The only reason we cannot cure HIV is because the virus hides where the HIV drugs can’t go in. So it continues to fuel this high inflammation. That’s why somebody like me who has been studying HIV for the last 20 years found that COVID is extremely similar to HIV. It’s a virus that produces a lot of inflammation. We see a lot of conditions that are known to stem from inflammation, and now we have some evidence that it persists in different organs.” McComsey is referring to various published research papers that suggest the SARS-Cov-2 may linger in various organ tissues long after nasal swabs and blood tests come back negative.

If you wanted a more “academic” perspective, this is a study on “Long COVID” from this year.

We used ‘omic” assays and serology to deeply characterize the global and SARS-CoV-2-specific immunity in the blood of individuals with clear LC and non-LC clinical trajectories, 8 months postinfection. We found that LC individuals exhibited systemic inflammation and immune dysregulation.

This tells us that Long COVID manifests as persistent symptoms far after an acute COVID infection and appears to be, in reality, a continued infection by COVID that doesn’t go away, instead hanging out in various organs and constantly challenging your immune system – despite vaccination. Hopefully I don’t need another source to tell you why this is a bad thing.

It is no longer the acute symptoms one needs to worry about. This virus is like HIV/AIDS and will stay in your system long after you are “over it”.

I was just thinking about this post the other day! I couldn’t remember what the term they came up with was.

It’s the default option when you make an account which is where I assume most of the “I don’t give a shit about pronouns” stuff would land, yeah. I make a note of it whenever I see a bad take now lol

Forgot to say: good riddance lol

Also a big Covid minimizer from what I remember. Had this person blocked on my Lemmygrad account and didn’t remember on this one until recently when they made some subtly racist jab in a topic about the four Trump shooters being white guys.

epic

I really don’t think I am.

glad to see that’s sorted. thx

what point do you think you are making here exactly.

I need to know what the pro-LGBT message is in fucking Sonic Adventure.

Sorcerers et al have always spoken to me, so I beeline for those if no one else is playing them in the group. If magic were real I would be a Shantotto or a Matoya, no question. Leave me alone with my frogs and brooms, all of you are losers. In FFXIV specifically I play the dwarf/gnome race, and small wizards are only a little bit cliche, so Iike being a beefy tank. I am small and fat IRL and if I could swing an axe like that with the rage of a thousand beasts you fuckin bet I would

I wear one of these things everywhere now and as an even further bonus I get to look like I’m from the cyberpunk future

use your very big brain, i’m sure the answer is in there somewhere

People call me doomer but I am just witnessing events as they unfold. I do not have hope that it will get better anymore. I don’t.

people say not to cut off the lib friends

I think this is honestly just a big cope from people. I know how seriously they take their convictions when they say stuff like this because my militant masking and insistence on accomodations as an immunocompromised person since January 2020 has utterly destroyed my social life and I don’t just get to turn the other cheek about that, lol. So yeah, I’m with you. Fuck em. Your world will become far smaller, but what world? A world of people who will abandon you for this? For genocide? For an evening at Applebees? Kill the liberalism in your soul that makes you want to poison yourself in the company of these people and you can begin to figure out how to live.

Agreed. The original is the best for many reasons, but every Matrix movie is just very good sci-fi with poignant themes way ahead of their time. The Animatrix is especially incredible, imo. Per a letterboxd review of Reloaded from 2021:

i was lied to for many years this movie fucks

We live in different times than Mao. I don’t have an answer but it is that which should inform your praxis, not book worship, as it were.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.

Everything Americans say