I want to push back on this a little from a biological perspective. HIV is a retrovirus, which means it makes a reverse transcriptase that allows it to insert its genes into the genome of your cells. Coronaviruses don’t make that protein and, while they may be sneakier and more infectious than flu or other things, cannot lay dormant for years inside your cells before “waking up” and making you sick. Also they can be cleared completely by your body and medication, unlike retroviruses, where the genome is lying dormant in your own cells.
This was pedantic but they’re very different classes of virus and I didn’t want anyone to get the impression that SARS could be adding it’s DNA to your cells.
Yeah I will say it was eye opening when I read a papers criteria and my like, faint residual cough 6 weeks later would have qualified me as having “long Covid”. When I barely had a cough during my acute course of infection and it presented zero issues to my life, other than being a touch annoying. No activity intolerance, fatigue etc. And it was gone somewhere in the 2+ month out range. Totally a non issue for me.
We really need to get more stringent on data review with what we’re calling long Covid.
This is good to know! I just meant in terms of the result, not the reason because, as I have regretted several times over the past 2 years, I took forest biology instead of human biology and don’t understand the differences between viruses. Good to know you can completely clear SARS unlike retroviruses.
Is there a good place to learn like the taxonomy of viruses for economists with very short attention spans?
also I do want to have a talk about how brain fog and fatigue that many long covid folks are experiencing could be the very physical very real effects of living through a fucking pandemic and not necessarily caused by the virus itself.
Hmmm there are like… a lot of different kinds of virus. And usually the difference isn’t even retro vs non, it’s like enveloped and non-enveloped and double stranded DNA vs single stranded DNA vs RNA. It’s my job and honestly I mostly learn by Wikipedia-ing the one I’m currently working with.
Sorry I don’t have any good recs, there are other biologists on here who might though?
Yeah I feel like we need a control group for this. My worst brain fog and exhaustion was definitely depression related and was both covid winters. Now I feel pretty good minus the anxiety about if any particular symptoms is long covid or not.
my BIL and SIL are creating a pokemon-esque card game that’s all about cytokines i look forward to learning them since I don’t understand my immune system at all
Because I trust that the people here have looked into this,
If I just got covid (mild symptoms, positive test) how worried should I be about passing it to my cat? I’ve seen official things from the fda saying isolate from pets too but it seemed more of a cya thing than based on real data.
I think there are a bunch of reports of cats getting infected and testing positive (e.g. zoos worry about this). But I’ve only seen stories about them being potential reservoirs / carriers, not anything about cats themselves getting really sick.
Even if they get it, it doesn’t seem to actively sicken them from what I’ve seen. So, maybe limit a vulnerable family member cuddling one of them for 10 days or what have you (I don’t know cat viral clearance time, I guess pick a number) but I don’t think the cats themselves would be at any particular risk.
I think that some zoo cats have died of Covid, but I haven’t heard of house cats getting very sick from it. At any rate, when dd was had Covid in March, we just carried on normally. Our cats are strictly indoors.
The Very Old Cat is sneezier than she used to be for unknown reasons. Two rounds of antibiotics have improved the situation but not entirely cured it.
Chuck has always sneezed a lot because he’s a Himalayan and has a poor little smooshed up nose. It’s really funny when he sets off dh sneezing.
But none of the cats appeared to catch Covid from dd.
I had a doctors appointment this week so I asked if he thinks it’s time for my second booster since my first was in November. He said for generally healthy people he is saying to wait until fall and there may be a combination covid/flu shot. He said there’s an uptick of covid but it seems less severe than other strains and hospital rates are very low. My boss’s family just had 6 people get it and all were like a bad cold which was no fun, but not terrible.
I’m hoping that they learned from the first round and made sure they think the data will be good enough before allowing orders this time. But that could be too optimistic…