> Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery).
Literally everything in this quote is speculation, or factually incorrect.
Covid-19 is not a "neurological disease" -- SARS-CoV2 is a virus that infects epithelial cells. Epithelial cells are not neural cells.
Blood clotting is observed in some patients, but the mechanism is unclear. Blood clotting is a common result of inflammation -- triggered by any disease.
It does not "strip blood of the ability to carry oxygen". This is simply wrong. Inflammation associated with SARS-CoV2 infection damages the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen.
The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage. Patients with severe inflammatory responses clearly do have some damage. It's not yet clear if the damage is due to the virus, or the response of the host's own immune system.
The claim that organ damage is caused by "worsened oxygen delivery" is speculation on speculation.
> What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is?
The loss of smell is believed to be due to infection of of supporting cells in the olfactory epithelium. Not the nerves.
Taste is lost because smell plays a huge role in the perception of taste.
"Loss of ability to think" is so vague as to be pointless to debate. Depression and anxiety are likely causes of the same symptom.
I have a blood clotting disease. Factor 5 Leiden. Basically destroyed my life once it activated.
I mostly had it under control with blood thinners. If I went off for a few days I would have issues, then a stroke. ( I hate side effects of Pradaxa)
Got covid. Sucked, but got over it.
However now I can’t miss any pills.
If I skip tonight’s, Tomorrow one side of my body will go numb. I get severe brain fog, Plus a host of other issues that take days to weeks to resolve.
Same crap as before covid, but I have no margin for error now.
Oh and now I piss blood, because blood thinners, yeah.
Clotting clearly does happen for a subset of patients. But it's wrong for the OP to claim that this is because the virus is doing something to the blood. That's a leap too far. Other infections cause similar sorts of issues -- sepsis, for example.
The distinction matters, because if the clotting is mediated by a runaway inflammatory response (e.g. an over-reaction of the innate immune system), it's inherently a problem that will affect a subset of people who are infected (for reasons we don't really understand). Whereas if the virus attacks some component of the blood, it would be expected to affect most people the same way.
But if we have a population of people who will experience this, wouldn’t that feed into the GP contention that no one is measuring the experience between alive and dead?
I completely buy the idea that all of these effects happen with other conditions, but if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
> wouldn’t that feed into the GP contention that no one is measuring the experience between alive and dead?
Well, no...there have been a lot of publications in this area. We hear about them all the time. Most of these publications are bad at the moment, but that's normal. It takes time for good research to be completed. It will happen.
> if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
Sure. I don't think anything I've written here implies otherwise.
This is fucking brutal. My ex-girlfriend had Polycythemia. I realise it's very different to what you're explaining here, but her symptoms when she didn't take her medication, or when she got hot, or did anything strenuous were very similar to what you listed.
In addition to pissing blood.
Is this a disease that you've always had? Came later in life?
If this is asking too much or prying to deep, don't answer my questions. I empathise as much I can with you, as much as I can.
2 parts. Genetic disorder factor 5 Leiden. Not aa problem until a few years ago.
Also have an Autoimmune disorder. Had it since I was a teen. Made worse by my teenage love of mountain dew.
It’s a risk factor for clotting, and probably contributes. It also causes inflammation and neuropathy. It was was annoying and a slow but growing problem.
Then I got exposed to a LOT of natural gas from a mega rental company house.
Well dormant gene for factor 5 activated and I my blood went crazy. Lots of clots. Autoimmune also went nuts and decided that nervous system and various organs needed to die in a most painful way possible.
Took a few years to get it under control..ish.
Covid has clearly made it worse.
Would you hire the developer that copy and pastes from StackOverflow without understanding the code or the developer who reads StackOverflow to come up with their own solution/conclusion?
In stead of a blithe comment, you could directly link evidence and instead you chose the less productive of two routes. It makes you look like an ass and doesn't contribute to the conversation.
You are wrong because it's not a claim. The pathophysiology of Covid is hard science. Gravity existing is not a claim either. No need to support either of those with ref's is because they are easily googleable. It's a waste of people's time.
Again, no sources to back up any of your claims. As Hitchens once famously claimed, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
That's interesting, thanks. But as you note, an in vitro study is still a long way from proof of claim -- just because something can happen does not mean that it does happen in actual people, and it certainly doesn't mean that it happens often. I would characterize this as evidence suggestive of a plausible mechanism.
One thing missing, for example, is why this doesn't appear to happen frequently. Most of the highly touted claims of cardiac involvement from summer 2020 have been debunked (e.g. in athletes).
> The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage.
The problem: assuming a (made up, just for the argument here) 0.1% rate of coronavirus cases that end up in long-covid / systematic organ failures, and you have 1k of infections, that's not many total cases. Assuming you have 116 millions of infected people however, suddenly even a 0.1% rate translates into hundreds of thousands of affected people. The actual rate is possibly in double-digit percentage area (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7533045/), so ... yeah.
This is why combatting infections is so important, not just because of mutation risk...
Thanks I agree, I was just looking up the other day whether “brain fog” was an accepted term and reached the same conclusion as you
For me, the poor leadership and lack of consensus is enough for me to avoid exposure. When everyone can articulate what you said, instead of the reductive things they do say, I’ll be more comfortable
But I’ll likely be vaccinated before then, which is just as fine for my risk analysis
On the taste/smell thing- people I know who've had that symptom say that it is qualitatively different from the loss of taste/smell you get with a bad cold. In particular, they also lost the ability to taste things like salt and sugar, which people with a cold can still taste. My understanding of this may be outdated, but I thought that tasting those wasn't an olfactory thing- am I wrong, or is the ability to taste salt and sugar dependent on different epithelial cells that are also damaged?
(Interestingly, these people did retain the ability to sense the 'heat' of chili peppers...)
Parent is correct about COVID attacking the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. This has been known for a while. Many sources if you search. Here is one:
This is a paper that used a computer simulation method ("docking") of computer-generated protein structures to arrive at the conclusions you're citing. I did my PhD in this area. Docking methods are not anywhere near reliable enough to make this sort of claim.
This is little more than a story told with software.
One side is producing research papers and other sources. You are saying you have a PhD in this area so trust you.
I do not know you, I do not know if the PhD in question actually qualifies you to speak on the subject, and I do not know if it did that you would actually be fully up to date on the subject. I do not necessarily want to dismiss this out of hand as an appeal to authority, but as a layperson, you do not making a convincing argument when it boils down to "Listen to me, I have a PhD, trust me over these other people who have PhDs who are also publishing peer reviewed papers that disagree with me."
> One side is producing research papers and other sources. You are saying you have a PhD in this area so trust you.
That's not a paper. It's a pre-print. It isn't peer-reviewed. It isn't published. Literally anyone can push a document to a pre-print server.
I'm saying I have a PhD in this exact discipline, and this document isn't proof of what it claims. You certainly don't have to believe me, but saying "this is a paper, and therefore it is likely to be correct" is not a standard of evidence that exists.
> It is still at least showing some work beyond the "making claims with zero supporting evidence", which is what you are doing.
Really? OP knew exactly what was going on in this pre-print. Unlike you who took this for a published paper. Don't ask someone to show work when you yourself didn't read the summary.
Also the paper doesn't talk about the 'ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen', the attack is first and foremost reported to result in less hemoglobin being available. There is a difference here.
>Really? OP knew exactly what was going on in this pre-print. Unlike you who took this for a published paper. Don't ask someone to show work when you yourself didn't read the summary.
This is not the only reply from him in the thread going back to the top comment. There are other articles and papers posted, in response to his reply or backing the assertions of the original post he replied to, here and throughout the rest of the rest of the comment section. In none of his posts did he provide any response to them beyond his appeals to authority.
I had no desire to reply to multiple posts with the same general concern and instead picked a single one.
The top post should have included sources for their assertion. They did not. Others stepped in for them and did in the thread. Other threads include articles and sources for the same assertions. At that point, the burden of proof isn't on them - someone saying they're wrong needs to provide details on why that is not the case vs. just saying "I got a PhD in this so trust me."
I'm not saying "you should believe me because I have a PhD". That would be an appeal to authority.
I'm saying: I have deep expertise in this exact area, and based on my experience and knowledge and ability to read papers in this area, I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made.
You have no skill or experience in this area, and you choose to believe the paper instead of my assessment of the paper. That is certainly your right, but your basis for doing so is "it's a paper and I don't know who you are", which is self-evidently silly.
>I'm not saying "you should believe me because I have a PhD".
Yes, you fundamentally are.
>I have deep expertise in this exact area, and based on my experience and knowledge and ability to read papers in this area, I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made.
There is no functional difference between the here because you don't even provide an argument as to why this is.
What is the real difference between "I have deep expertise in this area and knowledge and experience" and "I have a PhD"? Is a PhD not a proxy for expertise, knowledge, and experience in a subject?
What is the difference between "believe me" and "I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made"? Are you not asking me to believe your conclusion based entirely on your authority? You have made no argument for me to evaluate.
One form is more verbose, but it is still 100% an appeal to authority.
It is one thing to state your credentials and then make an argument. It is another to state your credentials and a conclusion with no argument.
"We speculated that in COVID-19, beyond the classical pulmonary immune-inflammation view, the occurrence of an oxygen-deprived blood disease, with iron metabolism dysregulation, should be taken in consideration. "
The guy complaining here is simply wrong. He's backpedalling because he made an unscientific and unsupported statement that oxygen deprivation is caused only by inflammation. There is plenty of evidence of other mechanisms at play. Nitpicking them is fine, pretending they don't exist is foolish, which is what he is getting called out on.
To be fair, the OP mentioned "the ability of the blood to carry oxygen", not blood cells, which would be correct if the overall concentration of hemoglobin was lowered.
OP here. This is a great discussion and I'm glad this particular subthread chose not to dismiss it and instead chose to debate the progress of the research into it or lack thereof.
Would be even greater to get NIH to invest $1B into looking into it further.
6 months ago people would have retorted slightly differently, although they would have balked at the assertion they would have assumed that people already researched it and ruled it out, and therefore I would have been "fearmongering" because the scientists already researched it! now we can acknowledge that they haven't and needs to be peer reviewed.
so the goal post has moved, but I'm all for data being collected.
There's nothing wrong with publishing a computer model. But until it has been experimentally validated in humans then it's medically irrelevant. You're really reaching on this one.
The person you're responding to is understandably scared and is ignorantly propagating the sensationalism that the news has been hammering into our brains.
The news is not science..people need to realize.
It's a business and even the biggest news companies peddle sensationalism.
Even if only one person has some strange side effect like 'covid toes'...the news media can prey on humans emotional response which overrides statistical reasoning to lay claim that it's a possible Covid outcome.
And while it's not an outright lie...it's extremely disengenuous and very sensational. And they do it all the time.
We need to teach people statistical reasoning in school and we need to hold news agencies accountable for statistically irresponsible news.
I've relocated twice during this pandemic and have no qualms going out and making judgements for my personal probability of exposure.
"Scared and unable to derive statistics" is a large inaccurate stretch of the imagination, I'll make my own stretch of the imagination and say you were probably pasting this response a year ago on things that turned out to be real threats for 500k Americans that didn't even know they had a meaningful pre-existing condition.
We don't have statistics on who has the "inflammatory response" or any other side effect.
At the end of this month when the eviction moratorium ends, there's about to be tens of thousands of people relocating to the streets.
Apologies that you had to switch houses during this trying time. My heart goes out to you and your struggle.
80% of the population is under the age of 55. That age group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are showing signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies increasing inequality.
The price we're about to pay for this economically is going to be significant.
Poor people and future generations will probably have to pay it though. #yolo
Literally everything in this quote is speculation, or factually incorrect.
Covid-19 is not a "neurological disease" -- SARS-CoV2 is a virus that infects epithelial cells. Epithelial cells are not neural cells.
Blood clotting is observed in some patients, but the mechanism is unclear. Blood clotting is a common result of inflammation -- triggered by any disease.
It does not "strip blood of the ability to carry oxygen". This is simply wrong. Inflammation associated with SARS-CoV2 infection damages the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen.
The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage. Patients with severe inflammatory responses clearly do have some damage. It's not yet clear if the damage is due to the virus, or the response of the host's own immune system.
The claim that organ damage is caused by "worsened oxygen delivery" is speculation on speculation.
> What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is?
The loss of smell is believed to be due to infection of of supporting cells in the olfactory epithelium. Not the nerves.
Taste is lost because smell plays a huge role in the perception of taste.
"Loss of ability to think" is so vague as to be pointless to debate. Depression and anxiety are likely causes of the same symptom.