COVID wrecks people

For every person who dies of COVID, many more are badly damaged, and I think we’ve barely begun to realize how big of a deal this is going to be. This new data from Nature makes my skin crawl: almost any system/organ can get blasted, and it’s often nasty, even in patients with “mild” cases. They found long-term problems in…

…the respiratory system and several others including nervous system and neurocognitive disorders, mental health disorders, metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disorders, gastrointestinal disorders, malaise, fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, and anemia.

We show increased incident use of several therapeutics including pain medications (opioids and non-opioids), antidepressants, anxiolytics, antihypertensives, and oral hypoglycemics and evidence of laboratory abnormalities in multiple organ systems.

Analysis of an array of pre-specified outcomes reveals a risk gradient that increased across severity of the acute COVID-19 infection (non-hospitalized, hospitalized, admitted to intensive care).

This disease makes the flu look feeble. The COVID vaccines could be a thousand times riskier than they actually are and still be way less scary than COVID itself. Please get vaccinated as soon as you possibly can. I know that there are still many reasonable people out there who have honest doubts and concerns and I have had some of my own (because of my weird health issues). Despite my unease, I am completely convinced — by hard data — that vaccination is by far the lesser of evils here. It’s not even close. And COVID seems to become an even greater evil by the day.

I am still waiting for my vaccine opportunity, but we’re getting close now. Wife got her appointment scheduled today, finally — for ten days from now. Ten days! She’s just a bit older than me, so I should be in the next batch.

Alas, it’s been a bit slow here in Canada.