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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Neither one of you provided sources. I think that you're right, but how's a layperson to know?

UpToDate is what I use to manage patients, and is pretty good.

... which makes the "Don't confuse your Google search with my medical degree" meme a bit more amusing.

[1] "I'm going to throw in my two cents as a medical student"

I hope this is just sloppy writing on your part, because the sentiment your comment is actually conveying is downright dangerous.

You don't need to link references that gravity exists either.

Instead, you have doubled down and chose to continue making blithe remarks like "gravity doesn't need a reference."

Who knows why people do what they do.

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).

Unfortunately, there are strong indicators that Sars-CoV-2 is capable of infecting more than just epithelial cells: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0390-x

> 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...

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

(Interestingly, these people did retain the ability to sense the 'heat' of chili peppers...)

https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8...

This is little more than a story told with software.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267810/#:~:tex....

Next time, if you're going to try gatekeeping, be sure you have grounds for it.

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."

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.

I stand corrected.

> 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.

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."

It's a classic appeal to authority fallacy.

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.

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. "

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267810/#:~:tex....

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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

I moved because I had the privilege to choose and did

you are reading everything wrong here

We don't teach most high school graduates to fluency the math that would be needed for this reasoning to work fluidly.

Unless you can provide a source that proves loss of sense of smell is due to “blood clotting depriving oxygen and resulting in organ damage” your statement sounds like pure bunk.

Plus, severe influenza can result in similar organ damage so Covid is not unique in that aspect.

I used to work with somebody who was never the same after a bad case of flu in their 50s, so this kind of research—regardless of which virus—is very welcome.

just have a conversation bro

you know what would be even cooler, a US health agency investing $1B to investigate

He's in his 60s. Will he experience long term effects? Who knows.

I'm starting to get invited to meet in person for business and some are like "I get tested every week". And I just say sorry I don't make exceptions. I live with someone with a rare respiratory condition. A weekly test - what does that even tell me anyway? I know you're running your business and have employees coming in.

Everything is much easier with data. But when there is still so much to learn everyone weighs their risks differently.

Many of us here are extremely fortunate and can afford to pay for delivery and stay home.

So we need to understand that some people's perspective IS a real calculated risk tolerance.

If we can get data to understand long term effects, that will help with educating those that are really only weighing the risk of them dying.

right, yeah that doesn't tell you anything, it tells that person whether they need to quarantine for an additional week and is only useful if they hadn't seen anyone the prior 7 days.

I hear many quips like "I already had it last year" or still even people that think their one test once says they were negative and thats that.

The crazy thing, the crazy thing, is that these aren't even the people that don't understand thermodynamics and think seeing hot breath in front of a mask proves that masks offer no protection effective against covid aerosols.

Oh right. So we know for a FACT that you were exposed, and became a carrier and probably a spreader; maybe by bad luck and unfortunate circumstances, maybe by being a bloody idiot. But NOW you're even MORE blasé about it, because you feel invulnerable, so you're going to be engaging in MORE risky behaviour regarding an illness that we know people can have repeated bouts of ("catch" more than once). Thanks for letting me know, I guess. Video call it is.

Make a list now, so that you remember who the idiots are after everyone is vaccinated.

I've already had to re-plan my reintroduction to retail after finding out a few of my preferred shops weren't obeying mask mandates, or in one case actively flouting them.

It will be easy to forget and put it all behind us. Don't. We're lucky to receive such useful side-channel data.

Don't get me wrong, I'm enraged at the lunacy of some. But I don't think we're going to be better off in aggregate by insisting on payback.

On the contrary, spite definitely has a useful purpose in social structures. It strengthens the negative effect of unwanted behaviour.

That's not the only utility for this.

Understanding the networks of information flows over social media will allow for easier reintroduction of accurate concepts, using similar looking quacks and new language for people who prefer to believe quacks over any reputable institution.

It can also be useful to get people to realize how consistently they are led on, as many of them forgot their prior theories and are just subscribed to random causes alongside their vegan, spiritual or political journey.

I have for years had a big list of people, companies, and other organizations I wish to actively avoid. The pandemic just gave me higher resolution on the "undefined" set of humans and organizations.

I already avoid racists, extreme partisans, assholes, anti-science types, people who are mean to waitstaff, people who don't read books, et c. Covid gave me a few more categories.

Perhaps there are false positives; I am willing to take that risk for the immense benefits so far.

"it doesn't exist"

"its just the flu"

"nothing you can do to stop it anyways"

"5G over the air microchips"

"dna-rewriting vaccines"

ideas fell apart and were just led to other wacky ideas.

Feels like we went with the Chinese "it lasts for two weeks or you die" that doctors discovered like 1-2 months in.

The same places that did the tests had the infrastructure to follow up with people and could have been doing this 6 months ago, and that has nothing to do with the "top minds" at all.

That, alongside the failed, poorly implemented or nonexistent contact tracing methods have made getting this metadata much more difficult to do.

This will also flag long-term effects from other virii, as well.

One thing that Covid drove home is: "Infection with a virus can do a LOT of extra damage that we don't track very well."

There are lot of people who get diagnosed with "Lyme" (aka the modern equivalent to "hysteria" in many ways) who may very well just be "You had a bad cold/flu/other virus and your body took a lot of damage and now its going to take quite a while to clean up."

Modern medicine is amazing, but it has a gigantic blind spot around chronic conditions.

I also believe that "Lyme disease" became a medical/medical insurance bucket for "We don't know what's wrong with you, and you're annoying enough that we can't just ignore you, but we don't want to spend any more time or money on you figuring out what is really wrong."