Today's News: "In the Covid era, the vulnerable die earlier, the remaining become vulnerable earlier"

I've been noticing and collecting a variety of recent posts and tweets about Covid and our situation these days, and the challenges we will be facing in 2023.

This pretty well sums it up, really:

In the COVID era, the vulnerable people die earlier, the remained ones become vulnerable earlier.

— Hiroshi Yasuda (保田浩志) (@Yash25571056) January 14, 2023

And as for the continuing political implications:

Many people expected a huge explosion in babies after everybody stayed home for COVID but I didn’t realize they would be 20-50 year old men flying “F*ck Trudeau” flags screaming about imaginary rights they don’t understand.

— Dean from Winnipeg (@Dean_Winnipeg) January 30, 2023

Yes indeed:

... the same people who were wrong to say that we all had to catch it are the same people who were wrong to say that there is no way to stop it are the same people who were wrong to say that it's just a cold are the same people who were wrong to say that kids don't get sick ...

— tern (@1goodtern) January 30, 2023

... are the same people who were wrong to say that there is no airborne transmission are the same people who were wrong to say that the pandemic would only affect people in China because western healthcare is better are the same people who are all complete and utter idiots.

— tern (@1goodtern) January 30, 2023

Why do we even hear from any single one of these people ever any more?

— tern (@1goodtern) January 30, 2023

But wait, there's more....

In Stat, Helen Branswell writes a good article about the "scariants" - XB what? BQ huh? Do you need to keep up with Omicron’s ever-expanding offspring?:

When people start to develop immunity to a virus, it must evolve to be able to continue to infect people. Three years into our coexistence with SARS-2, most people on the planet have either been infected (in some cases several times) or vaccinated (in some cases multiple times) or some combination of the two. The virus must employ new tricks to get around our mounting defenses.

“It is important to explain that variants will continue to emerge as the very survival of the virus depends on it,” Pollard explained. “We can expect new variants for the rest of our collective lifetimes, but we might anticipate less frequent waves in the future as immunity across the population continues to build.”

Others are not so sanquine about the virus evolution:

Canada had its worst year of the pandemic in 2022. Four waves caused by different Omicron variants. Now we have a sustained level of virus and hospitalizations caused by the "variant soup". Forgive me if I don't agree that we should stop talking about variant evolution. pic.twitter.com/4A1V5zYWWy

— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) January 17, 2023

In The Tyee, Andrew Nikiforuk writes We Now Face An Army of Covid Viruses -- a useful article to read in full, but here is a summary of his points:

Here are six observations on viral evolution and how it may shape our lives in this, the fourth year of the pandemic. 

1. One virus has become many...

2. The new COVID soup is a unique experiment in evolution...

3. What were viral peaks are now a constant rising sea of infections with high and low tides...

4. One pandemic has morphed into regional epidemics...

5. Reinfections rarely happened. Now they are commonplace...

6. We can do more to blunt the evolutionary threat of COVID subvariants...

Here is a useful tweet thread summary of the current situation -- I am copying some of the most significant tweets in this thread:

🇨🇦 Did you know that Canada recently passed 50,000 COVID deaths?https://t.co/UW7LCjptt1

3/

— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) January 26, 2023

~~~

🇨🇦 Did you know that there are now more than 700 Omicron subvariants, and that many of them can escape prior immunity and are resistant to available treatments?

9/ pic.twitter.com/9nhQVBaNfK

— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) January 26, 2023

~~~

🇨🇦 Did you know that the pandemic is not over?

11/ pic.twitter.com/0if90T3RPA

— T. Ryan Gregory (@TRyanGregory) January 26, 2023

Some recent comments on Covid epidemiology:

The COVID pandemic will not disappear until engineers address the niche the virus favours, says MIT nuclear engineer Charles Forsberg: dirty air in crowded indoor spaces, a product of modern buildings designed to save energy.https://t.co/t0FVc5Zpd1

— The Tyee (@TheTyee) January 12, 2023

We are dealing with a rapidly mutating, novel, airborne virus. Virologists said from the beginning that we needed to lower transmission or the virus would mutate too fast for our vaccines & treatments to keep up. That’s what’s happening now b/c ppl didn’t listen.

— Bree Newsome Bass (@BreeNewsome) January 16, 2023

The deadliest misinformation about Covid was that there was immunity by infection

In its pursuit

And in its aftermath

— Anthony J Leonardi, PhD, MS (@fitterhappierAJ) January 27, 2023

Here are some comments about Long Covid:

This is a must-read about how public health officials and government are silent on the crisis of Long Covid disability.

As @sophiehh14 reminds us, BC has not even tried to determine how many are suffering from Long Covid. How much of the workforce is affected? https://t.co/ZUqU50BBkO

— Andrew Longhurst #VaccinesPlus (@a_longhurst) January 27, 2023

And we shared the frustration that most clinicians can’t or won’t see the linkage between upstream sars-2, and downstream infection or autoimmunity. They ARE linkable via history, serology or even PCR (seeing a high cycle positive “tail”)

— David Fisman (@DFisman) January 27, 2023

Which effects of Covid are permanent?
Are people who are 25 now and infected twice a year going to carry their immune system damage all their life?
I would recommend not using yourself for practical research to answer this one. https://t.co/vNCYYAIOof

— tern (@1goodtern) January 27, 2023

I read a lot of Covid research.
See my pinned tweet for the angle I view it from.
I don't understand all the research, but here's what I do understand:

Specialists representing every bodily function are completely freaked out by what SARS-CoV-2 is damaging in their area.
🔥👇

— tern (@1goodtern) January 17, 2023

~~~

Do you know the prefix 'dys'?
It basically means 'off balance'.

Use Google's search engine.

Write ' Covid dys ' into the search bar, wait a moment, then look at the autocomplete suggestions. pic.twitter.com/tnSTf9tmAO

— tern (@1goodtern) January 17, 2023

Long Covid now seems to be called Covid DECATI - Delayed Effect Cardiovascular And Thrombotic Injury:

A friend had Covid in July and a heart attack four weeks later.
That's Covid Decati.

Covid DECATI.
Delayed
Effect
Cardiovascular
And
Thrombotic
Injury.#CovidDecati

— tern (@1goodtern) January 21, 2023

' ~~~

If you want to know what you can do about it, I'm afraid my best advice is to stop catching Covid, and try to live healthily.
Good diet, good weight, good lifestyle.

I come at this from the risk reduction and hazard prevention point of view. 😔

— tern (@1goodtern) January 21, 2023

Finally, some new statistics on excess deaths.

The anti-vaccine and anti-public health restrictions crowd has always tried to pin excess deaths on anything but the actual virus that vaccines and public health restrictions try to contain and limit, and the data keeps telling them, nope.

— Bruce Arthur (@bruce_arthur) January 20, 2023

Stats Canada recently released some info about Canada's excess deaths over the last three years -- more than 50,000 extra from January 2020 to October 2022, mostly due to Covid and its damage to our health, but also due to drug overdoses. 

Stats Canada says:

There is evidence of excess mortality when weekly deaths are consistently higher than the expected number, but especially when they exceed the range of what is expected over several consecutive weeks.

Provisional data show there were an estimated 53,741 excess deaths in Canada from the end of March 2020 to the end of August 2022, 7.6% more deaths than expected had there not been a pandemic. During this period, at least 42,215 deaths were directly attributed to COVID-19.

The worst times in Canada for excess deaths were January/ February 2022 in Ontario and Quebec, and  mid-April/ mid-May 2022 in Alberta and BC. 

Though Canada's 7.6 percent excess death percentage seems high to me, England is reporting even worse percentages:

Excess deaths in 2022 among worst in 50 years https://t.co/k2txe3is2V

— BBC News (UK) (@BBCNews) January 10, 2023

Modern humans are actually terrible at holding more than one piece of information in our minds at a time, but please try to understand that 20% excess deaths probably means excess other things like disability and hospitalisation and unemployment and illness. https://t.co/T0QDFvaN2y

— tern (@1goodtern) January 25, 2023

Finally, an interesting thread on Covid in the workforce:

The merchants of doubt spent a year trying to make the labour shortage seem like a mystery that had nothing to do w the virus. They openly mocked anyone that brought up long covid. It took a year but the media is finally pointing out that millions of workers are dead or disabled.

— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) January 30, 2023

Most of the media and their go-to pundits avoid addressing any science and data that might cause fear or discomfort for as long as they possibly can. Until it can’t be ignored anymore. When did feeling scared in times of uncertainty become a fate worse than long term disability?

— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) January 30, 2023

All of the soothing messaging being pushed in the media seems to be designed to dismantle our self-preservation instinct. Meanwhile, you know who’s still big on self-preservation? The Davos class. Hmmm 🤔

We should all be #DavosSafe.

— Dr. Lisa Iannattone (@lisa_iannattone) January 30, 2023

Tern gets the last word:

Which one of these two points do you think will come first?
A) The moment it's forking obvious that the reason everyone's unable to work is long covid.
B) Widespread brain decerebration to the extent that no one can understand anything at all anyway

— tern (@1goodtern) January 30, 2023

UPDATE: Just saw this one, about booster shots:

Great thread here about a very pertinent study. Echoes a lot of my thoughts re. COVID-19 boosters.

In practical terms, I'm going to be hunting down either a second Moderna bivalent dose or Novavax in the next 1-2 months. I wish they were updated much more frequently, though. https://t.co/VoCr1ylboO

— Adithya Ramachandran (@AdithyaR_YXE) January 31, 2023