With Day 1000 soon to be here, there was a comment asking about what that felt like. That is a strikingly long time. I'm reflecting and will try to offer cogent thoughts when that day arrives. Stay tuned. For other numbers, today's notes are in what is the 19th journal or leftover notebook that I've used since I started hanging onto such things in December 2020. I may have to keep going so as not to face the countless blank pages that would go unused were I to quit writing in it now.
The media reports on the situation in China now may or may not even mention COVID. The response of the Chinese Community Party to the protests reports that they will "resolutely crack down on infiltration and sabotage activities by hostile forces." "Hostile forces" sounds so external--forces coming in from outside rather than rising up inside. Some cities are seeing governmental shows of force--armored vehicles, random ID checks, or looking through photos on a phone, etc. The number of people detained is not known. Some experts predict that zero COVID could last another year. Economists and health experts say that China can't relax the controls that are keeping most people out of China until tens of millions of elderly have been vaccinated. There are districts or cities in which vaccination of the elderly has been stepped up, but it's going to take a while.
The NIH bulletin I got today had some interesting reports. Research suggests that there is a new antiviral medication that acts by changing the receptor cell in a person rather than changing any part of the viral cells. In theory, this means it should work on whatever new variants might emerge. Another research program suggests that any rebound is not due to Paxlovid and rather might come from a more active response from the patient's immune system. That system goes into overdrive cleaning up the last bits of the virus, possibly stirring it up in the process. Preliminary reports suggest that the development of long COVID may be influenced by past respiratory infections including Epstein-Barr virus.
The research report I found most interesting was by researchers from the NIH Clinical Center, the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. They examined tissue from 44 patients who died of COVID or who had tested positive for COVID before they died. For some, the positive test was in the days before death; in others, it was months earlier. The patients ranged in age from six to 91 years old. SARS-CoV-2 was found in almost every organ and organ system including "skin, eyes, stomach, muscles, fat, glands, and six different parts of their brains." Whether a patient was symptomatic or not did not matter.
I found this report fascinating and not necessarily in a good way. We tend to think of COVID as a respiratory infection since it travels in aerosol form and starts out in the respiratory system. Unless we're physicians or scientists, we probably stop thinking about it there. Much as we would like to believe, it doesn't stop in the respiratory system in some (many?) cases. Every organ and every organ system. What we've been calling "long COVID" may be from viral matter left behind in non-respiratory organs and systems. Are people even trying to treat those other organs and systems? That said, I do know someone with long COVID who has been assured by her doctor that all her organs are fine. More on which to reflect in the coming days.
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