Corona-zona

I've been doing this blog for just about a year now. The first regular post was January 6, 2021. I'll reflect on that in a few days. Meanwhile, what kind of a media outlet would this be if I didn't do a year-in-review post? Looking back over the year's posts, it's amazing how much has been going on, and how much there potentially is to review. I can't spend all day on a detailed summary.  So I will try to focus on a bird's eye view. Vaccines & Anti-Vaxxers Vaccines have to be the biggest topic on this blog over the past year. Vaccines were very hard to get this time last year. A lot of people wanted them and the distribution was just getting started.  People had to navigate really crappy systems, like one in Arizona , to make reservations. There were " vaccine tourists " who would travel from other states and even countries in an effort to get jabbed.   Then, around March last year, those who wanted the shots had largely gotten them, and incre...

  Yesterday my sinuses felt somewhat irritated, my nose was running a little, and I had a little pang that could have been the beginning of a headache. I am fully vaxxed and boosted, so I wondered: Could I have a breakthrough case of the Omicon variant? There is growing evidence that Omicron produces less severe disease. Some people are claiming that it has different symptoms than "classic" COVID-19 too, ones more like a common cold.  Experts warn  that it's too soon to tell if the symptoms are fundamentally different from those associated with Delta. But this doesn't stop people like me from wondering whether any respiratory symptom might be COVID-19. At least four people I know—someone I work with, a friend, and two toddlers of another friend—have  symptoms of mild respiratory illness. They are all worried that they could have COVID-19 and have gotten or are seeking tests. There are many other people in the same boat. Public health practitioners are saying that th...

For some time we have known that obesity elevates the risk of having a serious case COVID-19. The CDC says  "the risk of severe COVID-19 illness increases sharply with elevated BMI" (body mass index). New research, published in pre-print  (meaning it has not yet been reviewed), sheds light on why that is true: The virus attacks fat cells. This, in turn causes an inflammatory response. The more fat you have the bigger the response and the more severe disease you're likely to have. The relationship between fat and inflammation has been on scientists' radar for some time. They believe chronic low-grade inflammation caused by fat is responsible for the negative health outcomes associated with obesity, like heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. The coronavirus seems to turbocharge this process. Scientists think  this ability to infect fat cells may also help the virus evade our immune response. In other words, fat may serve as something of a reservoir where the viru...

  Today, a few notes on research I have run across about all the ways SARS-CoV-2 messes with your body. Spiking Your Lungs A lot of people assume the virus has to get into your cells and start replicating to do it's thing. Not necessarily true.    According to a recent study the "spike" proteins on the virus surface do damage all by themselves, whether or not the viral material enters your cell. Effects include severe lung inflammation.   The researcher said in an interview that “Our mouse model dramatically reduces the danger of doing this type of research by allowing COVID-19 lung injury to be studied without using the intact, live virus. This will greatly increase and diversify the ability to do COVID-19 research. Our model will also likely be useful for studying other coronaviruses.” Checking Your Gut's Immune Response To study how the virus affects your gut, scientists built 3-dimensional tissue cultures derived from actual human gut cells. They expos...

I urge everyone to watch this segment from tonight's PBS Newshour on COVID-19 "long-haulers." It tells the story of victims who got sick and have yet to fully recover, even after months.  Their chronic problems range from shortness of breath, to fatigue, to vision disruption, to brain fog, to teeth falling out, to other maladies. I personally know someone like this.  She was infected in July, was testing free of the virus after a month, but suffered lung damage and still requires supplemental oxygen. My friend is in her mid sixties, but in this segment there are no old people. Ages range from juveniles to a 40 year old, people in the prime of their lives. The segment doesn't interview people who have died, of course.  But people in this age range die too, as did this 33 year old fitness influencer who told his followers COVID-19 wasn't real. In the segment they also interview a medical researcher.  He talks about how in some cases COVID-19 destroys networks of b...