I listened to a news item on NPR about long covid and the neurological glitches that covid-19 seems to causing (long after the patient is free of the virus) yesterday. The researchers have an abundance of data points mostly from relatively young, healthy (40-50 year old) nurses who contracted the disease and survived but still have issues a year+ later. Take-away – hey folks – Covid-19 is NOT just like a bad flu. And your best chance at surviving unscathed longterm is still the vaccine. After I listened for a while, very sobering, I realized how lucky my sister and I were, immediately in the early days, to take it seriously (I mean extremely seriously) not because we were so much smarter than anyone else but because of a peculiar set of personal circumstances that had us in early March already living an “avoid at all costs exposure to airborne diseases” lifestyle in preparation for surgery for my sister’s child; needless to say that surgery was postponed 2 (maybe 3?) times before it could be put off no longer and by then the full extent of the dangers of Covid was abundantly clear and we just continued the isolation lifestyle until the vaccine was available. But we so easily could have been infected in those early days. We could have been one of the unlucky ones. And even if we had survived it looks like a good 50% of the people who were sick enough to require hospitalization – if even just for a few days – now seem to have neurological problems linked to covid. Covid whacks out the blood/brain barrier. The news item is probably on the NPR website for anyone who wants to go searching for it.
From the outset, anti-maskers and anti-maskers have been trying to downplay the seriousness of covid by citing the supposedly high “survival rates”; as if “surviving” meant the same thing as “fully recovering”.
“Surviving” simply means “not dying”. Most people survive the loss of a limb, but that doesn’t make losing a limb trivial.