PSA: this is wild speculation. There's no definition of what "long covid" is, and there's certainly no evidence that it is made worse by getting Covid more than once. If anything, the opposite is true: we know that repeat infections lead to fewer symptoms and milder illness.
Regardless, Covid is an endemic cold virus now, along with the other four circulating coronaviruses. It isn't going away. Everyone is going to get it multiple times in their lives, whether or not they work remote or in person.
The cognitive effects don’t seem to be entirely evenly distributed- the impact is bigger on older (40+) people, and I’ve heard (but not read the study) that people with ADHD are also much more likely to experience cognitive issues after covid.
Covid is also not yet endemic. We are still in the pandemic phase- there is not yet a regular and predictable load of infections or a reasonable model for the evolutionary trend of variants. In any case, endemic does not mean not dangerous, it just means predictable and well understood.
Calling it a cold virus is also just a rhetorical trick to downplay the severity. Yes, some colds are caused by other coronaviruses, but covid19 remains far more severe on average than any of the other common coronavirus infections that we lump in with common colds.
Finally, it’s probably true on our current trajectory that most people will be infected multiple times, even people that work from home. Given the evidence of compounding risks, it’s still better to prevent whatever vectors of infection that you can. It also gives people more flexibility in their own risk tolerance. I’m still avoiding bars and restaurants, but many of my coworkers aren’t. If we were in an office I’d be obliged to take on a much higher level of risk due to unavoidable exposure to higher risk people.
It's not a matter of "a bit inconsistent". There is no definition of "long covid". Literally anyone can claim they have it and not be wrong.
> but there’s evidence that both repeated infections do tend to be worse with the omicron variants (possibly due to t-cell exhaustion but I’m not sure if that’s the only factor)
No, there isn't, and "t-cell exhaustion" is not a thing. It's a phrase made up by pop scientists.
> I’ve seen at least one estimate that puts the impact of an asymptomatic Covid infection on the brain as being equivalent to 10 years of normal aging.
There are, sadly, a large number of irresponsible people making hysterical, pseudo-scientific claims with no data to back them up. This is a great example.
Even if it were possible to quantify "10 years of normal aging" on "the brain" (it isn't), the specific claim advanced here -- asymptomatic infection leading to accelerated 'normal aging' -- is not backed by any evidence.
Individual studies tend to look at different things, but most of the relevant studies give a particular definition. It generally involves symptoms 3,6, or 8 months after an acute infection, and some studies further limit the definition to a particular set of symptoms. Most control for the occurrence of those symptoms in the general population too.
> No, there isn't, and "t-cell exhaustion" is not a thing. It's a phrase made up by pop scientists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-019-0221-9
https://www.pennmedicine.org/news/news-releases/2021/july/pe...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288064/
Anecdotally it's anti-science / conspiratorial types that tend to do these obscenely large link dumps with references to dense studies, and then pretend that they've read them all. I consider you and other proponents of the Long COVID theory to be in the same category; deploying gish gallop as a rhetorical tactic hurts your case more than it helps it, when encountered by skeptical people like me.
> In this Viewpoint article, 18 experts in the field tell us what exhaustion means to them, ranging from complete lack of effector function to altered functionality to prevent immunopathology, with potential differences between cancer and chronic infection.
Also, the final link explicitly rebuts your claim:
> However, because CD8+ T-cell exhaustion is not evident in patients with COVID-19, it is assumed that COVID-19-experienced individuals successfully develop functional CD8+ T-cell memory following vaccination. Recent studies have reported that a single dose of mRNA vaccine robustly induces spike-specific T-cell responses in COVID-19 convalescent individuals [131].
> whether the differentiation state and transcriptional profiles of functionally impaired CD8+ T cells in respiratory viral infections are similar to those of exhausted T cells is not clear.
> In addition, the differentiation dynamics of CD8+ T cells during the course of COVID-19, particularly whether SARS-CoV-2-specific CD8+ T cells become exhausted, remain enigmatic.
Immune escape is the process where viruses basically evolve to either evade antibodies that your body has created, or do things to prevent your body from creating effective antibodies in the first place. This is a really common thing with a lot of viruses, including some other coronaviruses. We were pretty lucky that, until omicron, Covid didn’t have the greatest immune escape- but now it does. For whatever reason, omicron infection alone doesn’t give you great immunity against omicron variants or other variants. Having been vaccinated before your first omicron infection helps some, but not as much as it did with earlier variants.
Now, the thing about the immune system is that even when it can’t completely stop a virus, it can often help make it more mild over time. Unfortunately, for Covid, and especially for omicron, the opposite seems to be true. On average, reinfections are worse than earlier infections. Again, the vaccine seems to make this a little better, but not a lot.
The fact that reinfections are worse isn’t unknown in other diseases either. Antibody dependent enhancement is a known thing, and we know a lot of the effects of Covid seem to come from the immune system- so maybe ADE is the cause? It seems like that’s unlikely because the vaccine worked so well- but also, it seems like there are a bunch of other diseases that get worse for someone after they’ve had Covid. That would make it seem like whatever is happening to the immune system after an infection might be bigger than just Covid itself.
There are a bunch of ideas about why this might be- including reservoirs of virus lingering in the body, damage from Covid making it harder to fight off other infections, and the lockdown just generally making our immune systems a bit less effective for lack of use. One of the ideas for why this might be happening is this idea of “t-cell exhaustion” which, as I understand it, is basically just a kind of broad term for “t cells don’t seem to be working like they should and we don’t know why” with a few specific hypotheses about the possible mechanisms. I don’t think this is something that’s like, broadly accepted and well understood yet so much as it is a plausible non-specific idea for one way to explain some observed data.
At any rate, whatever is happening seems to be related to a natural Covid infection and either the spike protein encoded by the current vaccines isn’t enough to cause the immune system problems, or vaccination doesn’t produce enough of them over a long enough period of time to cause the problem.
I know that “ the data is weird” isn’t a very satisfying answer but it seems to be where we’re at.
The antibodies of the vaccines don't work anymore. That's the opposite of "It seems like that’s unlikely because the vaccine worked so well". Antibody effectiveness against omnicron is negligible a few months after vaccination. As far as I understand the T-cells are still being trained, which might prevent you going to a hospital. But for the first week, you are totally on your own.
In 2022, we're already at 76,776 flights cancelled and not even halfway through the year, so nearly the amount cancelled in 2018 and 2019 combined. I'm curious if there's anything different that's happening this year vs those other two that would account for such a stark increase in cancelled flights, likely due to an impacted labor force. Probably just people out with colds.
That's a leap. My understanding is that airlines are affected by the same thing every other employer is seeing -- they can't hire. It might be exacerbated by the fact that airlines reduced/eliminated their training pipeline. For example:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/15/us-pilot-shortage-forces-air...
> The pandemic exacerbated a pilot shortage by slowing down training, hiring and creating a wave of early retirements.
> Airlines offered pilots early retirements to cut labor bills during the depths of the pandemic.
> The process to become airline-qualified in the U.S. is lengthy and expensive, making the barrier to entry high.
> An EasyJet spokesperson attributed the increase in cancelled flights to "higher than usual staff sickness levels" due to a recent surge in COVID-19 cases across Europe.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/airlines-face-mask-covid-rules-...
I’m not going to try to make a bet on where the lines will get drawn between remote and in person, but I expect hybrid work will become less common since it often ends up being then worst of all worlds (you pay for office space, limit your hiring pool, and decrease worker efficiency by encouraging repeated Covid exposure leading to both more short term leave due to sick employees and less effective employees in the long run due to long Covid, but you still have many of the organizational, communication and infrastructure challenges of a remote team)