Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember: First: I had been thinking that mRNA vaccines gave you 1/8 the risk of catching the virus, 1/20 the risk of passing it on, and 1/50 the risk of dying from it. But this appears to suggest that the numbers are more like 1/8, 1/8, 1/25. And with the Delta variant having an R[0] of 7.5 suggests that the epidemic is almost fully self-sustaining in a fully vaccinated population. And it also raises the possibility that, unless infection-acquired immunity is stronger than mRNA vaccine immunity, it needs only one small mutation to become self-sustaining no matter what the primed-immune-system status of the population...
Even if you're fully vaccinated, or as fully vaccinated as current tech permits, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext is of interest. They find guaranteed cognitive deficits due to COVID infection. And yes, 100% anything in biology is a big red flag. But there's another one -- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v2 -- which, yes, preprint, but they use the baseline for a big longitudinal study to find that you've got guaranteed brain tissue loss from COVID. So perhaps they're not finding the truly mild cases; perhaps a certain percentage of the population is for reasons of genetic luck immune to these effects. Perhaps larger studies would provide greater resolution and nuance. But for now, for risk assessment purposes, I think it would be prudent to consider these two papers likely to be substantially correct.
That's not actually the scary stuff; the scary stuff is https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v2 which finds universal Lewy body formation in a macaque model post-COVID. (Lewy-body dementia is fatal, even less well understood than Parkinson's, and at the present state of the art they can only detect Lewy bodies via specialised work post-mortem.) If that holds in humans -- a very large if, but one to which we cannot attach any present facts -- the 10 year mortality rate of COVID is plausibly 100%.
Even if you're fully vaccinated, or as fully vaccinated as current tech permits, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext is of interest. They find guaranteed cognitive deficits due to COVID infection. And yes, 100% anything in biology is a big red flag. But there's another one -- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v2 -- which, yes, preprint, but they use the baseline for a big longitudinal study to find that you've got guaranteed brain tissue loss from COVID. So perhaps they're not finding the truly mild cases; perhaps a certain percentage of the population is for reasons of genetic luck immune to these effects. Perhaps larger studies would provide greater resolution and nuance. But for now, for risk assessment purposes, I think it would be prudent to consider these two papers likely to be substantially correct.
That's not actually the scary stuff; the scary stuff is https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v2 which finds universal Lewy body formation in a macaque model post-COVID. (Lewy-body dementia is fatal, even less well understood than Parkinson's, and at the present state of the art they can only detect Lewy bodies via specialised work post-mortem.) If that holds in humans -- a very large if, but one to which we cannot attach any present facts -- the 10 year mortality rate of COVID is plausibly 100%.