Symptoms of Covid-19

How Covid-19 can damage the brain

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-effects-of-covid-19-infection

Excellent article well worth reading in full. Things get even more complicated over time. Seems like questions are piling up before a single answer can be found.

*cough* encephalitis lethargica *cough*

Maybe not so much rare as missed.

 

i ran across that also, but i don't know what country it was attached to.


this reminds me of one thing i found peculiar in medical texts ca. y2k.

for example, "rarely, there will be a runny nose". (or a greek term meaning "runny nose".) what does this mean? i found that it could be confusing.

1) it is rare, but is sometimes the case
2) it is not really worth pointing out, but there you have it
3) it is rare, but it is worth pointing out

 

Merged thread

Radio progs on Covid tonight (2nd July 2020)

There are 2 BBC World Service programmes on Covid tonight, one at 22.00 and one at 22.30, but you can listen to them now.

The first one looks at the origin, bringing up the possibility that it escaped from a laboratory: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz6l7

The second one looks at loss of taste and smell: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3cszjq1

 

Two-thirds of people with coronavirus have no symptoms, ONS data shows

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coron...data-shows/ar-BB16rGcp?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=ASUDHP

 

Or to put it another way;

77 people, out of 115 tested from a pool of over 60 million candidates, and then found to have covid-19, had no symptoms, at the time of testing.

IMO it's a total non story, the sample size is just far, far, far, too small to allow any extrapolation, let alone meaningful extrapolation.

 

Title : Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms

Subtitle : UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering Covid-19 patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions

Link : https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-disorders-in-people-with-mild-covid-symptoms

 

That's interesting. Acute dissminated encephalomyelitis is what PK Thomas diagnosed in long-term RFH patients in 1987. The rest had better beware though. He thought their symptoms "volitional".
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(87)90033-X

 

Skin rash 'could be important Covid-19 symptom'

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...19-symptom/ar-BB16OWyK?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=ASUDHP

 

There appear to be six different groupings of symptoms for Covid-19:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...tudy-finds/ar-BB16Rqg5?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=ASUDHP

 

It seems to be based strictly on probability of developing severe acute respiratory distress. Which is very important in critical care, obviously, but otherwise not particularly significant as overall patterns of symptoms and course progression.

 

Jarred Younger talks about psychological symptoms of COVID-19 in this video. Anxiety, depression, hallucinations, paranoia and cognitive difficulties and dementia caused by the virus could be a result of either a massive immune respons, or the virus having crossed the blood-brain barrier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIOxKVrVRy4

 

Great video. Watched it yesterday and although I can't say I know much about the physiology, it makes sense in terms of how those effects relate to symptoms.

It also makes sense of my hypothesis that site of infection is largely a major driver of what symptoms occur and their severity, a combination of viral load, site of infection and localized immune resources, along with other chance factors such as prior immunity and simple stochastic randomness. So someone who breathes a small load through their nose may only have some neurological symptoms, through the olfactory bulb, and maybe loss of smell, but if that breath is deep enough it may reach the sinuses, throat trachea all the way down.

If someone breathes it through the mouth it lacks the benefit of nose hair and sinuses catching the virions, may more easily get into the throat, for the hacking cough, trachea and then the lungs. Then from the lungs, or the same with a more direct path through the olfactory bulb, it may get through the nervous system, possibly reaching the vagus nerve and climbing up, causing dysautonomic and cardiac symptoms, maybe reaching the brainstem where breathing reflex gets affected.

Then there are those who either have mostly, only or initially GI symptoms, who probably ingested it from contaminated food. From there it depends what kind of reception it gets from the microbiome and immune system. It may get through the enteric nerves, from then on to various organs.

All consistent with observation that wearing a mask reduces symptom severity even in those infected, likely having to do with the immune system having the ability to control the infection at its site of origin and stamping it down before it goes out of control. Lots depend on chance, viruses have no propulsion, they are simply carried by turbulent flow and everything depends on what immune response is available close-by. And considering that the size difference between a virus and a human is basically the same as a human and the Earth's volume, well, that's a lot of space to hunker down.

There have been several reports of only dementia-like symptoms, from hallucinations to catatonia. Great example to cite Cuomo, he mostly had those at first. I despair at what psychiatry will do with this, I think this is likely to be the model to finally explain most psychiatric diseases, it's basically the first actually coherent explanation ever, but I fear that the field is far too emotionally attached to their psychogenic delusions, too much commitment and future embarrassment to admit it was all a massive failure.

Great CGI, too. The design department outdid themselves

He finishes the video saying he will do more, the next likely on long COVID.

 

I agree, and many in the field, people who are actual grown ups and don't revert to magical thinking, are realizing this as well.
The research is building up more and more evidence that many psychiatric illnesses present with inflammation in the brain. Most anti psychotic medication have anti inflammatory effects. It takes a rather impressive degree of denial to ignore this fact.

This is an interesting video by Sam Vaknin, a professor in psychology, about magical thinking and how it's part of conspiracism. It also always involves ignorance.
Also about how gullible humans in general are, we believe 95% of what we're told, even utter nonsense, due to the base rate fallacy
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy)
and how phenomena that have been utterly debunked still leaves residues. This made me think of the BPS people...
(He talks about conspiracism about 30 minutes in)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJTA3Vno8LU

 

There may be a better place for this, but there are concerns about possible sepsis following Covid-19:

'At risk' COVID-19 survivors warned to look out for sepsis symptoms - including six key signs

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...-key-signs/ar-BB17hvly?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=ASUDHP

 

Davido, B., Seang, S., Tubiana, R., & de Truchis, P. (2020). Post-COVID-19 chronic symptoms: a post-infectious entity?. Clinical microbiology and infection : the official publication of the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, S1198-743X(20)30436-5. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cmi.2020.07.028

A report by a team of French infectiologists that suggests that some long COVID symptoms are compatible with dysautonomia (from COVID-damaged blood vessels).

 

And now hair loss?

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...19-symptom/ar-BB17PVLu?li=BBoPWjQ&ocid=ASUDHP

 

I recall adults with SARS also citing extreme fatigue.

 

How to distinguish the symptoms of the common cold and Covid-19 symptoms:

http://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/med...difference/ar-BB198HIX?li=AAnZ9Ug&ocid=ASUDHP