science

STILL? I haven't checked in months. That's crazy.

No, not everyone who got long covid didn't take it seriously. But the people who were super spreaders or spread misinformation are certainly to blame.

People don't get it. The inflammatory process can do these sort of thing to any organ or system, or parts of them.

People got a thing called COVID Toe. This is where you and every person already has some fungus that live on their feet and which gets into the skin and toenails. Maybe you have a little yellowing of the toenails or you're just "prone to athletes foot."

Then you get COVID and suddenly your immune system is working overtime. The fungus starts to multiply faster and spreads more aggressively. Your toes start to get itchy and red, more than usual. They swell. They yellow. Then they start to crack and ooze, possibly requiring surgical debridement or in the most severe cases, such as where the patient already had diabetes affecting their peripheral nerves, amputation of the foot to prevent necrosis and sepsis. Imagine dying from athletes foot because your immune system was overwhelmed fighting a coronavirus.

If they're US American, a plane is likely the only public transportation they've ever taken. If they live anywhere remotely rural, it's likely the only one available to them.

Signed, -An American

I walk to work ten minutes to work. Partner and I each have cars. We take uber when we want to avoid driving.

Airports and planes see a lot of traffic from all over the world constantly rotating through. With some variation depending on the size of the city and your personal schedule, you're running into more of the same people on normal public transport.

Chronic fatigue syndrome.

It's another one like long covid where so much of the medical community thinks it's all in people's heads and not real, but unlike long covid it's less prevalent and thus studied less. We still don't know what it is.

There's even some hopes that figuring out long covid might lead to new ways to look into what cfs really is.

Lifelong disease usually triggered by viral infections. Very functionally disabling.

Known immune abnormalities which seem to affect the brain and mitochondria. I think @[email protected] is specialised in it.

Also “chronic fatigue syndrome” was the name back when it was classified as psychological. Now that it’s classified as neuroimmune the name has been changed to Myalgic Encephalomyelitsis (ME) (Or ME/CFS).

As usual though for a medium quality source like ScienceAlert, the article is written by someone who has no specialisation in Long COVID/ME, or even medicine. So there’s a bit of oversimplification and overstating findings from one study in that article. Very few researchers think it’s a brain injury. Most think the immune system has been compromised (with some deficiencies and abnormalities) and it’s affecting the brain in unknown ways (hence the abnormalities found. It’s weird though because the immune system problems seem to cause some immunodeficiencies but also autoimmune reactions. They’ll need to be quite a bit more studies before we get a clear picture.

CFS is a syndrome rather than a disease because, until recently, it only presented as symptoms instead of as an identifiable problem with a person. I know that a some people who get diagnosed for CFS get later diagnoses as neurological disorders like multiple sclerosis.

It sounds like the more powerful MRI scanners are seeing inflammation in the rest of those suffering from CFS.

That would mean CFS is a lifelong degenerative condition.