@trendless 💧️ pseudoscience like "immunity debt" will easily spread because it lets people believe that their communities and leaders aren't harming them. that's it, really. the more the evidence points to the wanton harm, the more others will need to believe that this is for their own good
“I think if someone’s going to make a claim like ‘Covid doesn’t harm your immune system’, that’s a bold claim.
The claim itself is contrarian, as it flies in the face of the established science. It’s beyond meaningful debate at this point that some cases of Covid -even mild ones- lead to depletion of immune system components for months.
The people who would have us believe that this is no cause for concern base their argument on the fact that it (a) only happens to some people, (b) only happens for a little while or (c) happens with other viruses as well. All three statements are true. And irrelevant here.
This is a disease that most people can expect to get multiple times in their lives (our modeling suggests 1-2x/yr, in the absence of precautions), cumulative damage is well documented for other organ systems. Some -very nonzero - fraction of infections is persistent as well.
There’s no evidence suggesting that some people are uniquely vulnerable to immune depletion while others aren’t. It’s a Russell’s teapot to make the claim, and those who make it should produce the evidence to support it.
If you get the disease once a year and your immune system spends 6 months recovering each time, you are functionally immunocompromised- on average- when you look at it across the entire year.
Repeated infections cause cumulative damage & intrahost viral evolution during persistent infections leading to immune evasion is well documented. Those who make the claim that such intrahost evo during persistent infections is rare should produce evidence to support it.
False analogies to other viruses have been used by minimizers to confuse the issue from the get-go. Covid is not HIV, the flu or a cold. It’s an unprecedented public health threat, and the claim that there is no cause for concern is speculative.”
Biggest disappointment with :mastodon: 4.2 webUI thus far: can't hide link previews. At the very least, the card should be blurred (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/29431), but I'd still like the option back to not show it at all.
But, like, this problem is new to 4.2. In 4.1, this didn't and couldn't happen, because of how cards/previews were handled. They somehow managed to unsolve it.
@trendless We're making it common. We're not making it a cold. Abundance of evidence from studies that even sub-acute "minor" infections may be taking a serious health toll on the population. The "hard numbers" studies these last few months showing cognitive impairment are particularly scary to me.
@Okanogen The vaccines are neither highly effective at preventing infection nor transmission. And yet, nearly everyone has foolishly given up on non-pharmaceutical interventions. The policy now is to let it rip. So, let's maybe temper the urge to celebrate. Saying we haven't eliminated measles, malaria or polio is drawing a false equivalence. Do we let those bugs freely circulate, as we do with covid? Do people falsely claim they're "mild" and "over," as they do with covid?
“...anytime a government or health officials says we have the tools to deal with Covid-19.
No we don’t.
We had the tools. All we have now are the memories of those tools.
We (and by we, I mean collectively, societally we) blew it. We threw the tools away. We traded them in for something we believed was so much better.
Why? Because the very leaders we are supposed to trust to look out for our best interests, like General Manager Tim, told us to. They gave us permission. They told us it was more important to get back to normal than to rely on those tools.”
Vitacore's having a RIDICULOUS clearance sale on a few 3M respirators; in particular, a case of Aura 1870+ is as cheap as I've ever seen it (or any other Aura, for that matter) -- works out to $0.70/ea
Desperate to hold onto their ever-shrinking workforce, but still unwilling to walk back their ignorance and lose face, Dell management thinks, “hey, let's screw our healthiest, most productive employees using whatever leverage we have left,” is the way?
@sb@trendless Stuff like air quality monitoring, filtration and good ventilation should be long hanging fruit which shouldn't annoy the "I don't want to a wear a mask" contingent. Same with paid sick leave of a scientifically appropriate period (10+ days) following confirmed infection. Stuff like free repeat workplace testing following confirmed exposure should imo be in there too.
@sb@trendless High quality masks should also be paid for by employers for those who want to use them and formal fit testing should be part of that process.