>Using nasal swabs and autopsy tissues from affected patients and animal models, researchers found that the virus blocks specific genes that use oxygen to create ATP, forcing the body to deplete finite energy reserves in the body.
More details from the paper:
>In nasopharyngeal samples with declining viral titers, the virus blocked the transcription of a subset of nuclear DNA (nDNA)–encoded mitochondrial OXPHOS genes, induced the expression of microRNA 2392, activated HIF-1α to induce glycolysis, and activated host immune defenses including the integrated stress response.
Plenty of researchers and patients have of course thought of creatine with no benefit.
Ribose also has little to no benefit.
Rather it's a "horse to water" kind of problem where the mitochondria themselves are damaged in such a way that they refuse to uptake and manufacture energy properly no matter how many resources are present.
And all fuel types are broken, not just glucose and glycogen but fat too.
What I personally don't get after 3+ years of this is why all the broken cells have not been replaced by the body, flagged for death because of malfunction and new ones put into place even if not optimized by exercise, etc.
Something is fooling the body to keep making bad copies of bad cells because it doesn't think anything is wrong.
This is all the same with me-cfs and also similar to athletes cut down by overtraining syndrome for years if not the rest of their lives.
We are going to unlock a lot of treatments if we can figure out how to fix mitochondrial issues.
I had a reaction to a drug. There is now research pointing to possible mitochondrial issues. I have some symptoms on/off.
Nerves are often affected as they are very energy dependent.
The insane thing is that if I get plenty of sun, like on a summer vacation my symptoms nearly disappear. A lot of people are having good results with red light therapy and it’s something I plan on trying.
I wonder if covid long haulers would also benefit from getting plenty of sun.
Plenty of long-covid and years before that me-cfs have of course thought of sun and vitamin D
The issue is far deeper and more complex than any offhand supplement or "biohack" anyone can casually ponder.
It's a core cell programming issue that is not easily resolved if even possible at all with the limit of current technology.
Many times it appears as an "energy issue" with many related diseases. Many long-covid patients also seem to spontaneously developed a new kind of diabetes which is definitely related to cell energy uptake (or rather lack of it). Some also develop sciatica, raynaulds and other nerve damage issues also tied to cell energy.
And I should clarify there is more than one kind of long-covid. Some people self-resolve in months, often giving credit the last thing they took or did but really it would have happened anyway.
But in contrast here is the very careful, very detailed journal of Brandon Gilles who was a very smart person, a hacker like us, who despite all that died from covid/long-covid.
Do you know the timeline of his symptoms and death? The symptoms are very similar to what flouroquinolone causes, but from my experience death is extremely rare.
I am in touch with physicians and many people and we discovered many things that people are trying that are mentioned in the blog. TNF-a inhibitors, anti-histamines and diets. Plus, many of the supplements listed.
I much appreciate all the work on that blog and will give it a good read at some point.
Those are the symptoms of a mitochondrial dysfunction. One cannot compensate it with only a diet, TNF-a inhibitors, or anti-histamines.
By quickly scrolling through the blog, "Energy Supplementation" section caught my attention. I already could see that the guy made a grave mistake there. Instead of meticulously compensating the activity of mitochondrial enzymes with the whole RDA spectrum of vitamins, including therapeutical quantities of B1, B3, and B7 coenzymes, he just sporadically included some stuff from here and there. Unfortunately, this is not enough to move the needle in terms of ATP yield. And without the sufficient levels of ATP, all other functions of the body go downhill. The speed of that decline is individual, sometimes it's mere months from onset to terminal. Most of the times, however, it's a multi-year and even multi-decade struggle.
The second grave mistake is concentrating too much on secondary symptoms (inflammation, shortness of breath, blood-clotting, autoimmune) without adequately fixing the root cause (energy depletion) that caused all of them.
The third grave mistake is presented in section "Things that hurt" -> "Supplements" -> "Thiamine is a histamine liberator and DAO inhibitor", which means that the guy didn't use it at all. And this is the gravest mistake of them all. It's true that the thiamine (B1) may increase histamine levels for some individuals, but mitochondria cannot function without it, like at all. The reason for that is thiamine-activated enzymes that sit at the very start of OXPHOS pathway. Without sufficient levels of thiamine, those enzymes cannot work. As the result, nearly all consequent parts of OXPHOS metabolic pathway become dysfunctional, rendering a low ATP yield at the output even lower. This is why one can see thiamine (B1) as an OXPHOS gatekeeper - not enough thiamine means that the input gates are mostly closed, leading to a diminished throughput of the whole chain of respiratory enzymes, unless a proper dose of thiamine is in place to "open" the gates. In a compromised mitochondrion, the right dose of thiamine is way higher than normal, reaching 100x-1000x of RDA.
(IMHO, this is what happens when a hacker incorrectly identifies a place to fix the bug and prefers to apply downstream workarounds instead of fixing the upstream root cause. In software, we almost always have a second chance, but in bioware - we may not have it at all.)
Returning to your question, the symptoms are very much like beriberi and pellagra. The cause of death is likely to be a multi-organ failure which can be manifested either as a heart attack, hypertensive crisis, liver dysfunction, renal failure, brain and nervous system damage, or a combination of those.
> The insane thing is that if I get plenty of sun, like on a summer vacation my symptoms nearly disappear. A lot of people are having good results with red light therapy and it’s something I plan on trying.
There’s a known link between infrared and mitochondria via the ATP cycle. I was submitted to infrared therapy for 2 months after a fracture on the cheek damaged the nerve and left my face numb. I would say I recovered 95% of the sensitivity by now, can’t prove or disprove it was definitely the treatment, but nerve damage tends to not have a great prognosis.
I only ask because I was left with CFS/ME and Small Fibre Neuropathy after a short dose of dapsone several years ago. If there's any new information about it, I'd like to hear about it.
As a layman, I find this extremely enlightening. Even now, (anecdotally) a lot/most people describe it as primarily a respiratory disease.
From the OP article:
> "Using nasal swabs and autopsy tissues from affected patients and animal models, researchers found that the virus blocks specific genes that use oxygen to create ATP, forcing the body to deplete finite energy reserves in the body. Without an energy source, cells throughout the body begin to starve, with the cells powering the brain and the heart suffering the most."
This is the first thing I've read which actually makes bloody sense.
"Of the 84 COVID-19 cases with known direct cause of death, the top 3 common direct causes of death were multiple organ failure (67.9%), circulatory failure (20.2%), and respiratory failure (11.9%), and were similar (P = 0.50) for males and females: multiple organ failure (64.8% vs 73.3%, respectively), circulatory failure (24.1% vs 13.4%, respectively), and respiratory failure (11.1% vs 13.3%, respectively)."
>> "Using nasal swabs and autopsy tissues from affected patients and animal models, researchers found that the virus blocks specific genes that use oxygen to create ATP (…) Without an energy source, cells throughout the body begin to starve, with the cells powering the brain and the heart suffering the most."
There is some weird reasoning going on here, as neuronal cells are famous for being powered anaerobically using glucose and/or ketones.
> neuronal cells are famous for being powered anaerobically
Neurons are among the most energy-demanding cells in the body, they die the first without oxygen. Then come muscles (including heart) and liver. This means that all those cells are mostly aerobic, and only slightly anaerobic.
It is true that all human body cells have an anaerobic metabolic pathway as well, but it is inefficient and cannot satisfy the energy demands for a human body to stay alive for too long without the oxygen supply.
> as neuronal cells are famous for being powered anaerobically using glucose and/or ketones
Neurons are not famous for being powered anaerobically; if anything, they're famous for being powered exclusivelly-aerobic.
AFAIK, the neurons are dependent on oxygen, thus aerobic. And unless I'm wrong, the ketones for energy is also an aerobic process. The place where we normally find anaerobic metabolism is in muscles, which are able to produce ATP using glucose to lactic acid without oxygen.
Well maybe a practical example [0] would be more convincing. It's really infuriating that most people still seem to discount even the existence of long covid.
Consumer masks don't work. And N95s are way too problematic to worth their use in general settings. In fact, prolonged use leads to many issues including cognitive impairment especially in children.
N95s are fine for prolonged use. Study after study has shown that wearing a mask has a negligible impact on blood saturation, heart rate or cognitive performance.
"Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence)."
come on now, be more creative.
the cochrane review has been debunked a thousand times. event the authors expressed concerns about how their conclusion was interpreted and themselves pointed out the flaws in the review design
What's a "consumer mask"? The Powecom KN95s are tested near top of list in effectiveness (aka "work"), available with ear loops or behind the head loops for a dollar a mask, so $4 - $5 per month:
Elastomeric half-face respirators with suitable filters are more comfortable than N95 masks, and if used and maintained correctly are probably more effective:
I wear a 3M 6800 or depending on situation (I now consider hospital visits high risk)a Cleanspace PAPR (surprisingly, so far, not all that intimidating to people around me)
lets see here you are compating a surgical mask (with a fit factor of 2 or 3 at best) with N95 (headstraps, earloops are fundamentally flawed) with a minimum fit factor of 100...
how about elastomerics? despite looking more intimidating they are less costly over time, more comfortable, and more effective (can expect fit factors in the thousands)
how about PAPRs? quite intimidating depending on the model, less costly over time, usually a lot more comfortable (breathing wise) and insanely more effective (can expect fit factors of 5000 or even sometimes hundreds of thousand)
N95 masks work. We have a handful of studies of sufficient power behind them to show that.
There are a lot of studies that have insufficient power to prove that surgical masks "work". There are a few studies of sufficient power to show genuine improvement from surgical masks--generally in the cohorts with greater risks.
As far as I know, there are zero sufficiently powered studies showing that surgical masks don't work or have a negative effect.
"Cannot prove for all cohorts" does NOT magically mean "does not work". The fact that some studies show that the masks have a provable effect shifts the Bayesian prior significantly towards "likely positive effect but difficult to prove without expensive trial".
After all, surgeons started wearing masks long before Covid-19.
A great follow-up study would be to estimate any effects on this from Paxlovid treatment on cutting down the viral load.
Naively (from a layperson) it make sense that leaving some cells uninfected via a lower load would help ameliorate the problems described in the OP. It is conceivable that even the "rebound" effect from Paxlovid is "simply" an indicator of where in the exponential growth of cell infection the treatment begins. To me, at least, that makes all kinds of mathematical sense.
> It is notable, then, that all of the strategies effective in reducing the risk of long COVID might affect SARS-CoV-2 viral load during early infection, directly or indirectly. We therefore hypothesize that long COVID can be predicted by the peak and duration of the SARS-CoV-2 viral load—the area under the viral load curve during initial infection.
what the artic doesnt meantion is long covi from which strain? it would make sense, logically, to assume that long cov from delt is not the same as omic.
I don't understand how a virus that evolved to jump species in the last five years could already have this massive swiss army knife of different ways to fuck us up. It's like every couple of months we discover some wild new thing it does. They could come out tomorrow and say it makes you go color-blind and I wouldn't even be surprised at this point.
It's had a very long time to evolve a toolkit of methods optimal to the bodies of mammals.
We share a lot of cellular similarities with other mammals and these techniques are very much a kind of base level lowest common denominator cellular hacking.
It doesn’t actually matter. The things SARS-CoV-2 can do already existed inside the world of bat viruses and bat immunology. What happened is that it found an “adapter” to fit to human cells. It could have been a lab leak, it could have been pure chance in a biologically risk-pressurized environment, and it doesn’t matter.
It messes us up. It is a threat to the health and wellbeing of people. It’s surprisingly easy to stop transmission, and surprisingly difficult to work with after infection. There’s a lot of clear scientific knowledge on actions we can take. The academic papers on this mostly lay unread. There is a waiting time from clear scientific results in molecular biology to medical and engineering applications, and this waiting time is far, far too long. Not as in “move fast and break things”, but rather “doctors should read”.
Ok, I'm not excluding the possibility of a lab leak, but I would expect it to be just badly handled regular microbiological/pathological research rather than genetic engineering.
Back when it was hard to prove that it was a lab leak, the theory was censored and we were called crazy. Now that it is obvious that it was a lab leak, we are told it doesn't really matter.
Knowing how it started might help develop treatments, and that seems like a really weird thing to ignore.
If it was a lableak, then there's documents and data that would have been extremely helpful, and which still matter.
There's also the other benefits of knowing: public health preparedness, scientific research policies, global biosecurity, international relations and trust, legal and ethical accountability, zoonotic spillover research, public clarity, etc.
It completely baffles me that people are still dismissing the lableak theory as unimportant.
I am afraid this is not true. It is not easy to stop transmission. I dont have on my phone links to studies but I remember that all mechanism we have except quarantine are working within a probability range.
With all measures that we took for this virus it is now probably in all communities around the glob.
I understand. I swear, however: It is surprisingly easy, it is literally surprising to learn how easy it is to stop transmission.
It’s essentially this:
People breathe it out. Don’t breathe it in. We have filtration materials that strip it out of the air.
It has been easy to avoid infection. I have found it easy. Mechanically speaking.
Socially, it has been difficult. Because of severe failures of judgement made by people in positions of responsibility in public health organizations. Because of obviously incorrect guidance.
I am aware that this is an extraordinarily tall claim. I ask to be forgiven, ask for your consideration, promise that I am in good faith and under a moral obligation to point to this. Here’s one reference for it out of many available:
edit: There are also recent studies which show that immunization does confer blocking protection, if the inhaled dose is lowered. Apologies; Am out of time, there’s a child to attend to.
Biology has the tendency to repurpose existing mechanisms for other things. If an illness affects one of these processes, it might affect others as well.
The reason is that comes from bats. Bat immunology is wild. As I understand it, coming from bats to humans, a virus is basically coming from thousands of years in the future – of an evolutionary arms race.
Bats have evolved much more complexity in parts of their immune systems than us, and viruses along with them. They have extremely rapid metabolism and live packed together in ideal condition for viral transmission. Flight metabolism in bats is absolutely bonkers. Intense energy generation and the requisite damage control. Of DNA. And other stuff.
Bats handle viral infections quite differently than we do and can for example tolerate chronic infections with viruses that can and would kill humans. The arms race is so advanced that for them it’s no longer a question of exterminaton but successful containment. As species and individuals of that species, we do not handle chronic infection well. Note that bats have evolved these mechanisms through selection by survival, naturally accompanied with non-selection through death.
It was known and we were warned that bat viruses would mess us up. It was a known hazard and we were warned to watch for it and not let this happen due do these reasons.
Of bats and men: Immunomodulatory treatment options for COVID-19 guided by the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 infection, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.abd0205
I wonder if this is the reason for the traditional association of bats with evil. Bats aren't directly dangerous to humans, they don't look scary like sharks, and they don't eat our foods, so it seems strange that they had such a bad image before conservationists started rehabilitating it. Maybe this was a mistake and we should have encouraged people to fear them.
> could already have this massive swiss army knife of different ways to fuck us up.
It's exactly _because_ it just jumped, that it fucks us up. Given time, milder strains develop which are more adjusted to humans and adapt in the right places to cause less havoc.
Ubfortunately this is not true. Viruses evolve to survive and reproduce more, like anything subject to evolution. That can create less virulent strains and it can equally create more virulent strains.
A virus has no reason to adjust to our body in ways that cause less harm to us, unless doing so increases its chance of reproduction.
It's complex, agreed, but in general, increasing the chance of survival of the host correlates with better reproductive capabilities of the virus. This works both ways. After a particularly virulent strain has hit a population, those humans that survive are more likely to be adjusted to the strain, so it causes less problems for them.
(For anyone wondering, expansion of the term in the journal title: "Translational medicine (often called translational science, of which it is a form) develops the clinical practice applications of the basic science aspects of the biomedical sciences; that is, it translates basic science to applied science in medical practice.")
I believe you that it's legit, but it seems pretty far by IF from Nature (IF 8 according to wikipedia, vs 65 for Nature, lower than eg Medical Journal of Australia or Mayo Clinic Proceedings).
"Diet, exercise, natural compounds, or a combination of the three, may be able to stimulate mitochondrial function, but whether or not they are effective for patients with long COVID is yet to be known."
What are those natural compounds? Vitamin D, and so on?
This is not a fun read when you've just got Covid for the 2nd time. This as I was about to get vaccinated for the 4th time...
The worst is that official doctor's advice is just to lay low, drink plenty of liquids and hope for the best.
PS Oh I am allowed to lower the temperature by ibuprofen or paracetomol but I figure I'd rather stay around 37.5 to help the fight than lower it. Then again, maybe the temperature in acute phase does not matter and I am suffering needlessly?
So doctors ended up treating this like the common cold after all?
That's honestly very frustrating to me personally. So much was spent to push the argument that Covid shouldn't be viewed as a common cold because its so much worse for you. That was part of the justification for closing business and schools, limiting travel, and preventing families from visiting sick or elderly relatives in hospitals and nursing homes. Now its all back to normal and Covid is just another cold worthy of rest, hydration, and ibuprofen for a fever.
over summer I met a woman that had just come out of her prepper bunker
all she could talk about was her discontent with big pharma and guided plans from billionaires, although not a fan of vaccines she was a fan of the personal responsibility approach of staying away from all of us enlightened and possibly infected (or vaccinated) rubes, that’s always a choice! too bad she was running out of money 3 years later and had to get a job. I met her at her job and asked her out successfully, our date was the same day where I learned this is all she reads about on the internet
Hah, yeah that's an interesting one for sure. Sounds effectively like the plot of a Brendan Fraser, just replace Covid with nuclear fallout.
Can't say that I consider myself a prepper, and definitely not to the extent of having a bomb shelter stocked with years of rations. I can see the view I raised here being more common in the prepped space, though to me it feels more like a rational retrospective (I'm biased obviously).
So much effort was put into making it clear that Covid wasn't similar to a common cold, to the point of labeling such a comparison and the person making it as dangerous.
If that really is how medical specialists treat it now, it seems worthwhile for us (or at least those who made such claims) to revisit how they got it that wrong. Maybe it comes down to simply learning more since then, which is totally reasonable but also something that could have been expected and led to a more reasoned and less certain message earlier on.
It doesn't come down to 'simply learning'. There's an inherent bias towards extreme risk aversion, conservatism and NIH syndrome in the expert groups that the UK government consulted. I'd love to think that such a smart group of talented individuals could self-correct, but I don't think many have yet seen their error. Three years is already too long to wait.
I wouldn't expect many political or medical leaders to own the over reaction or simply fear they may very well have felt. I seriously hope they've learned something though, I really don't want to see us thrown through another run of lockdowns, closures, and in some places forced vaccinations because leaders didn't learn to keep a level head and understand the risks before claiming to be certain of what is happening and will happen in the future.
Speaking from experience it was just the crazy leaking out into the real world. The top guys have been fighting over which way the sky is falling for 40 years. I was pretty surprised others didn’t pick up on it.
I guess it just comes down to how serious one thinks actions taken during 2020 and 2021 were.
Its definitely not a topic I think about often, but when it comes up I'm reminded of the mass hysteria we watched play out and the governmental overreach that sets dangerous precedents for future pandemics or public health concerns.
Sorry to say, but I don't understand why you don't understand something so simple (probably I am rude).
In the last three years there have been many strains of Covid. Of each one we didn't know if it would be more contageous and if it would make more people sick ( and dead). It turned out most strains of Covid did turn out to become more contageous, and thus the then dominant strain. They also, mostly or even all, made people less severe sick and caused less deaths.
If you get Covid today, it is not like getting Covid in June 2020. Strains are heading towards the other coronaviruses, you mostly get the common cold. That common cold can still be ugly, but not many people will have to go to the hospital for it or die from it.
There isn't a clear way to compare infectivity or severity of disease when the virus is a novel pathogen versus one that we have lived with for three years now. I'm not sure why we would expect that absolute risk of severe disease or death would be the same whether you've been previously infected or not.
Its absolutely possible, and even makes sense evolutionarily, that the virus would trend towards higher infectivity and lower mortality over time. I don't disagree with that at all, and ironically I recall that also being an idea that was considered dangerous and wrong early on.
My argument remains though, if the virus in 2020 couldn't be compared to the common cold and it was effectively blasphemous to do so it seems crazy to me that this would be accepted practice now. The sheer amount of both genetic and symptomatic differences required to make a deadly virus turn into a cold virus should warrant classifying it as a different virus and disease entirely.
Endorsed by Martha Stewart! 'This flu season, ask your doctor if covid is right for you.' The copy has shifted to 'this endorsement is not intended to replace a conversation with a health professional.'
> What are those natural compounds? Vitamin D, and so on?
The coenzymes and minerals participating in the Krebs cycle: B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, L-carnitine, Q10, magnesium plus some others. This is from the top of my head, but you will find more info if you look deeper. Some of the coenzymes are instrumental for metabolic pathways: B1, B3, and B7. To overcome an acquired metabolic dysfunction, those key coenzymes are usually needed in therapeutical quantities, while others just in RDA doses. Related diseases: beri-beri, pellagra.
P.S. If your body temp is lower than 38 C then it's usually not worth to suppress it.
I am not a doctor so treat this with caution, but from personal experience and limited medical understanding ibuprofen doesn't just "lower the temperature" and keeping the temperature high is not "helping the fight" in any meaningful and universal way. You will feel worse with the higher temps and even worse if you get a headache or muscle pains from covid, this will be an additional strain on your body, taking ibuprofen 2-3 times a day (with a 2-4h half life it lasts up to 6 hours realistically) for the worst 2-5 days of covid should usually help with this. Unless you have access to covid specific medication (to which most people won't have access for years or ever) it's hard to see how the official advice could be different.
In [1] the author, who is a doctor, "... plead(s) for recognition that fever may be used as a non-specific treatment of flu. The fever is not just an unpleasant symptom of flu but a crucial part of the body's defence mechanism that should be encouraged".
He generalizes this beyond just influenza:
"Infectious organisms are adapted to the temperature of the part of the body they colonise, so it follows that they will grow best at that temperature. Rhinoviruses, which infect the cooler upper airway and sinuses, grow best between 33° C and 35° C, so inhaling air at about 45° C for 20 minutes will much improve the symptoms of a common cold.2 Conversely, treating the common cold with aspirin causes an increase in the rate of production of the virus."
The author summarizes:
"A famous 17th century physician, Thomas Sydenham, said, “Fever is nature's engine which she brings into the field to remove her enemy.” The public and the medical profession have still not realised the full importance and potential of this statement."
Can someone far more involved in the research than me comment on the validity of this research and how this compares to other viruses and infections? As far as I understand, basically all infections cause a degree of impairment to energy production. Oxidative stress, which is induced directly and indirectly during infection, has a downregulating effect on energy production as to not result in the body potentiating the negative consequences of runaway stress to the cells. This is due to energy production directly producing reactive oxygen species as a natural waste product.
Article ignore how vaccination affect "long covid". Like most of articles about this topic. Even though we have plenty studies that monitor vaccine side effect injuries.
102 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadMore details from the paper:
>In nasopharyngeal samples with declining viral titers, the virus blocked the transcription of a subset of nuclear DNA (nDNA)–encoded mitochondrial OXPHOS genes, induced the expression of microRNA 2392, activated HIF-1α to induce glycolysis, and activated host immune defenses including the integrated stress response.
More info about the OXPHOS systems:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092544390...
Ribose also has little to no benefit.
Rather it's a "horse to water" kind of problem where the mitochondria themselves are damaged in such a way that they refuse to uptake and manufacture energy properly no matter how many resources are present.
And all fuel types are broken, not just glucose and glycogen but fat too.
What I personally don't get after 3+ years of this is why all the broken cells have not been replaced by the body, flagged for death because of malfunction and new ones put into place even if not optimized by exercise, etc.
Something is fooling the body to keep making bad copies of bad cells because it doesn't think anything is wrong.
This is all the same with me-cfs and also similar to athletes cut down by overtraining syndrome for years if not the rest of their lives.
I had a reaction to a drug. There is now research pointing to possible mitochondrial issues. I have some symptoms on/off.
Nerves are often affected as they are very energy dependent.
The insane thing is that if I get plenty of sun, like on a summer vacation my symptoms nearly disappear. A lot of people are having good results with red light therapy and it’s something I plan on trying.
I wonder if covid long haulers would also benefit from getting plenty of sun.
The issue is far deeper and more complex than any offhand supplement or "biohack" anyone can casually ponder.
It's a core cell programming issue that is not easily resolved if even possible at all with the limit of current technology.
Many times it appears as an "energy issue" with many related diseases. Many long-covid patients also seem to spontaneously developed a new kind of diabetes which is definitely related to cell energy uptake (or rather lack of it). Some also develop sciatica, raynaulds and other nerve damage issues also tied to cell energy.
And I should clarify there is more than one kind of long-covid. Some people self-resolve in months, often giving credit the last thing they took or did but really it would have happened anyway.
But in contrast here is the very careful, very detailed journal of Brandon Gilles who was a very smart person, a hacker like us, who despite all that died from covid/long-covid.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X3dNPgEuQ2j8x7w8OqLEDP7l...
I am in touch with physicians and many people and we discovered many things that people are trying that are mentioned in the blog. TNF-a inhibitors, anti-histamines and diets. Plus, many of the supplements listed.
I much appreciate all the work on that blog and will give it a good read at some point.
By quickly scrolling through the blog, "Energy Supplementation" section caught my attention. I already could see that the guy made a grave mistake there. Instead of meticulously compensating the activity of mitochondrial enzymes with the whole RDA spectrum of vitamins, including therapeutical quantities of B1, B3, and B7 coenzymes, he just sporadically included some stuff from here and there. Unfortunately, this is not enough to move the needle in terms of ATP yield. And without the sufficient levels of ATP, all other functions of the body go downhill. The speed of that decline is individual, sometimes it's mere months from onset to terminal. Most of the times, however, it's a multi-year and even multi-decade struggle.
The second grave mistake is concentrating too much on secondary symptoms (inflammation, shortness of breath, blood-clotting, autoimmune) without adequately fixing the root cause (energy depletion) that caused all of them.
The third grave mistake is presented in section "Things that hurt" -> "Supplements" -> "Thiamine is a histamine liberator and DAO inhibitor", which means that the guy didn't use it at all. And this is the gravest mistake of them all. It's true that the thiamine (B1) may increase histamine levels for some individuals, but mitochondria cannot function without it, like at all. The reason for that is thiamine-activated enzymes that sit at the very start of OXPHOS pathway. Without sufficient levels of thiamine, those enzymes cannot work. As the result, nearly all consequent parts of OXPHOS metabolic pathway become dysfunctional, rendering a low ATP yield at the output even lower. This is why one can see thiamine (B1) as an OXPHOS gatekeeper - not enough thiamine means that the input gates are mostly closed, leading to a diminished throughput of the whole chain of respiratory enzymes, unless a proper dose of thiamine is in place to "open" the gates. In a compromised mitochondrion, the right dose of thiamine is way higher than normal, reaching 100x-1000x of RDA.
(IMHO, this is what happens when a hacker incorrectly identifies a place to fix the bug and prefers to apply downstream workarounds instead of fixing the upstream root cause. In software, we almost always have a second chance, but in bioware - we may not have it at all.)
Returning to your question, the symptoms are very much like beriberi and pellagra. The cause of death is likely to be a multi-organ failure which can be manifested either as a heart attack, hypertensive crisis, liver dysfunction, renal failure, brain and nervous system damage, or a combination of those.
There’s a known link between infrared and mitochondria via the ATP cycle. I was submitted to infrared therapy for 2 months after a fracture on the cheek damaged the nerve and left my face numb. I would say I recovered 95% of the sensitivity by now, can’t prove or disprove it was definitely the treatment, but nerve damage tends to not have a great prognosis.
I only ask because I was left with CFS/ME and Small Fibre Neuropathy after a short dose of dapsone several years ago. If there's any new information about it, I'd like to hear about it.
From the OP article:
> "Using nasal swabs and autopsy tissues from affected patients and animal models, researchers found that the virus blocks specific genes that use oxygen to create ATP, forcing the body to deplete finite energy reserves in the body. Without an energy source, cells throughout the body begin to starve, with the cells powering the brain and the heart suffering the most."
This is the first thing I've read which actually makes bloody sense.
A 2020 study linked below:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7443557/#:~:tex...
From the aforementioned 2020 study:
"Of the 84 COVID-19 cases with known direct cause of death, the top 3 common direct causes of death were multiple organ failure (67.9%), circulatory failure (20.2%), and respiratory failure (11.9%), and were similar (P = 0.50) for males and females: multiple organ failure (64.8% vs 73.3%, respectively), circulatory failure (24.1% vs 13.4%, respectively), and respiratory failure (11.1% vs 13.3%, respectively)."
There is some weird reasoning going on here, as neuronal cells are famous for being powered anaerobically using glucose and/or ketones.
Neurons are among the most energy-demanding cells in the body, they die the first without oxygen. Then come muscles (including heart) and liver. This means that all those cells are mostly aerobic, and only slightly anaerobic.
It is true that all human body cells have an anaerobic metabolic pathway as well, but it is inefficient and cannot satisfy the energy demands for a human body to stay alive for too long without the oxygen supply.
Neurons are not famous for being powered anaerobically; if anything, they're famous for being powered exclusivelly-aerobic.
AFAIK, the neurons are dependent on oxygen, thus aerobic. And unless I'm wrong, the ketones for energy is also an aerobic process. The place where we normally find anaerobic metabolism is in muscles, which are able to produce ATP using glucose to lactic acid without oxygen.
PDF : https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Emmett/publication...
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydgkCCXbTA
(eg https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-99100-7)
https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD...
https://bonafidemasks.com/powecom-kn95/
Add a stick-in nose bridge seal for easier seal without having to be as tight or as carefully adjusted:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08HJH2TQM/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK540078/
If I felt I needed to wear a PAPR, I would. Who cares what others think about it?
how about elastomerics? despite looking more intimidating they are less costly over time, more comfortable, and more effective (can expect fit factors in the thousands)
how about PAPRs? quite intimidating depending on the model, less costly over time, usually a lot more comfortable (breathing wise) and insanely more effective (can expect fit factors of 5000 or even sometimes hundreds of thousand)
There are a lot of studies that have insufficient power to prove that surgical masks "work". There are a few studies of sufficient power to show genuine improvement from surgical masks--generally in the cohorts with greater risks.
As far as I know, there are zero sufficiently powered studies showing that surgical masks don't work or have a negative effect.
"Cannot prove for all cohorts" does NOT magically mean "does not work". The fact that some studies show that the masks have a provable effect shifts the Bayesian prior significantly towards "likely positive effect but difficult to prove without expensive trial".
After all, surgeons started wearing masks long before Covid-19.
Naively (from a layperson) it make sense that leaving some cells uninfected via a lower load would help ameliorate the problems described in the OP. It is conceivable that even the "rebound" effect from Paxlovid is "simply" an indicator of where in the exponential growth of cell infection the treatment begins. To me, at least, that makes all kinds of mathematical sense.
> It is notable, then, that all of the strategies effective in reducing the risk of long COVID might affect SARS-CoV-2 viral load during early infection, directly or indirectly. We therefore hypothesize that long COVID can be predicted by the peak and duration of the SARS-CoV-2 viral load—the area under the viral load curve during initial infection.
https://academic.oup.com/ofid/article/10/10/ofad466/7264811
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/study-regardless-variant...
We share a lot of cellular similarities with other mammals and these techniques are very much a kind of base level lowest common denominator cellular hacking.
It messes us up. It is a threat to the health and wellbeing of people. It’s surprisingly easy to stop transmission, and surprisingly difficult to work with after infection. There’s a lot of clear scientific knowledge on actions we can take. The academic papers on this mostly lay unread. There is a waiting time from clear scientific results in molecular biology to medical and engineering applications, and this waiting time is far, far too long. Not as in “move fast and break things”, but rather “doctors should read”.
If it was a lableak, then there's documents and data that would have been extremely helpful, and which still matter.
There's also the other benefits of knowing: public health preparedness, scientific research policies, global biosecurity, international relations and trust, legal and ethical accountability, zoonotic spillover research, public clarity, etc.
It completely baffles me that people are still dismissing the lableak theory as unimportant.
I am afraid this is not true. It is not easy to stop transmission. I dont have on my phone links to studies but I remember that all mechanism we have except quarantine are working within a probability range.
With all measures that we took for this virus it is now probably in all communities around the glob.
It’s essentially this:
People breathe it out. Don’t breathe it in. We have filtration materials that strip it out of the air.
It has been easy to avoid infection. I have found it easy. Mechanically speaking.
Socially, it has been difficult. Because of severe failures of judgement made by people in positions of responsibility in public health organizations. Because of obviously incorrect guidance.
I am aware that this is an extraordinarily tall claim. I ask to be forgiven, ask for your consideration, promise that I am in good faith and under a moral obligation to point to this. Here’s one reference for it out of many available:
What Were the Historical Reasons for the Resistance to Recognizing Airborne Transmission during the COVID-19 Pandemic?, submitted 2021, published 2022 – https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3904176
—
edit: There are also recent studies which show that immunization does confer blocking protection, if the inhaled dose is lowered. Apologies; Am out of time, there’s a child to attend to.
The reason is that comes from bats. Bat immunology is wild. As I understand it, coming from bats to humans, a virus is basically coming from thousands of years in the future – of an evolutionary arms race.
Bats have evolved much more complexity in parts of their immune systems than us, and viruses along with them. They have extremely rapid metabolism and live packed together in ideal condition for viral transmission. Flight metabolism in bats is absolutely bonkers. Intense energy generation and the requisite damage control. Of DNA. And other stuff.
Bats handle viral infections quite differently than we do and can for example tolerate chronic infections with viruses that can and would kill humans. The arms race is so advanced that for them it’s no longer a question of exterminaton but successful containment. As species and individuals of that species, we do not handle chronic infection well. Note that bats have evolved these mechanisms through selection by survival, naturally accompanied with non-selection through death.
It was known and we were warned that bat viruses would mess us up. It was a known hazard and we were warned to watch for it and not let this happen due do these reasons.
Bat virome on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bat_virome
Novel Insights Into Immune Systems of Bats, 2020: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.0002...
Decoding bat immunity: the need for a coordinated research approach, 2021: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-021-00523-0
Revising the paradigm: Are bats really pathogen reservoirs or do they possess an efficient immune system?, 2022: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9379578/
Bats are “blind” to the deadly effects of viruses, editorial / paper highlight, 2018: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.aau2259
Of bats and men: Immunomodulatory treatment options for COVID-19 guided by the immunopathology of SARS-CoV-2 infection, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciimmunol.abd0205
Long-Read Sequencing Reveals Rapid Evolution of Immunity- and Cancer-Related Genes in Bats, 2023: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evad148
Antiviral Immune Responses of Bats: A Review, 2012: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1863-2378.2012.01528.x
Comparative Analysis of Bat Genomes Provides Insight into the Evolution of Flight and Immunity, 2012: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1230835
Immunological Control of Viral Infections in Bats and the Emergence of Viruses Highly Pathogenic to Humans, 2017: https://doi.org/10.3389/fimmu.2017.01098
It's exactly _because_ it just jumped, that it fucks us up. Given time, milder strains develop which are more adjusted to humans and adapt in the right places to cause less havoc.
A virus has no reason to adjust to our body in ways that cause less harm to us, unless doing so increases its chance of reproduction.
From a quick layman glance, the publishing journal, Science Translational Medicine, does not have a very high impact factor but isn't bottom barrel either. (https://journalsearches.com/journal.php?title=Science%20Tran...
(For anyone wondering, expansion of the term in the journal title: "Translational medicine (often called translational science, of which it is a form) develops the clinical practice applications of the basic science aspects of the biomedical sciences; that is, it translates basic science to applied science in medical practice.")
What are those natural compounds? Vitamin D, and so on?
This is not a fun read when you've just got Covid for the 2nd time. This as I was about to get vaccinated for the 4th time...
The worst is that official doctor's advice is just to lay low, drink plenty of liquids and hope for the best.
PS Oh I am allowed to lower the temperature by ibuprofen or paracetomol but I figure I'd rather stay around 37.5 to help the fight than lower it. Then again, maybe the temperature in acute phase does not matter and I am suffering needlessly?
That's honestly very frustrating to me personally. So much was spent to push the argument that Covid shouldn't be viewed as a common cold because its so much worse for you. That was part of the justification for closing business and schools, limiting travel, and preventing families from visiting sick or elderly relatives in hospitals and nursing homes. Now its all back to normal and Covid is just another cold worthy of rest, hydration, and ibuprofen for a fever.
over summer I met a woman that had just come out of her prepper bunker
all she could talk about was her discontent with big pharma and guided plans from billionaires, although not a fan of vaccines she was a fan of the personal responsibility approach of staying away from all of us enlightened and possibly infected (or vaccinated) rubes, that’s always a choice! too bad she was running out of money 3 years later and had to get a job. I met her at her job and asked her out successfully, our date was the same day where I learned this is all she reads about on the internet
it was so funny, didnt expect to see that in 2023
Can't say that I consider myself a prepper, and definitely not to the extent of having a bomb shelter stocked with years of rations. I can see the view I raised here being more common in the prepped space, though to me it feels more like a rational retrospective (I'm biased obviously).
So much effort was put into making it clear that Covid wasn't similar to a common cold, to the point of labeling such a comparison and the person making it as dangerous.
If that really is how medical specialists treat it now, it seems worthwhile for us (or at least those who made such claims) to revisit how they got it that wrong. Maybe it comes down to simply learning more since then, which is totally reasonable but also something that could have been expected and led to a more reasoned and less certain message earlier on.
If the sky is always falling, you overreact no matter what.
There will never be a resolution to that treatment in 2020 and 2021. How is that a part of anyone’s identity, still?
I like irony too, we can all see the irony. But it was only interesting irony in 2021, not two years later
Its definitely not a topic I think about often, but when it comes up I'm reminded of the mass hysteria we watched play out and the governmental overreach that sets dangerous precedents for future pandemics or public health concerns.
In the last three years there have been many strains of Covid. Of each one we didn't know if it would be more contageous and if it would make more people sick ( and dead). It turned out most strains of Covid did turn out to become more contageous, and thus the then dominant strain. They also, mostly or even all, made people less severe sick and caused less deaths.
If you get Covid today, it is not like getting Covid in June 2020. Strains are heading towards the other coronaviruses, you mostly get the common cold. That common cold can still be ugly, but not many people will have to go to the hospital for it or die from it.
Its absolutely possible, and even makes sense evolutionarily, that the virus would trend towards higher infectivity and lower mortality over time. I don't disagree with that at all, and ironically I recall that also being an idea that was considered dangerous and wrong early on.
My argument remains though, if the virus in 2020 couldn't be compared to the common cold and it was effectively blasphemous to do so it seems crazy to me that this would be accepted practice now. The sheer amount of both genetic and symptomatic differences required to make a deadly virus turn into a cold virus should warrant classifying it as a different virus and disease entirely.
The coenzymes and minerals participating in the Krebs cycle: B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B7, B9, B12, C, L-carnitine, Q10, magnesium plus some others. This is from the top of my head, but you will find more info if you look deeper. Some of the coenzymes are instrumental for metabolic pathways: B1, B3, and B7. To overcome an acquired metabolic dysfunction, those key coenzymes are usually needed in therapeutical quantities, while others just in RDA doses. Related diseases: beri-beri, pellagra.
P.S. If your body temp is lower than 38 C then it's usually not worth to suppress it.
In [1] the author, who is a doctor, "... plead(s) for recognition that fever may be used as a non-specific treatment of flu. The fever is not just an unpleasant symptom of flu but a crucial part of the body's defence mechanism that should be encouraged".
He generalizes this beyond just influenza:
"Infectious organisms are adapted to the temperature of the part of the body they colonise, so it follows that they will grow best at that temperature. Rhinoviruses, which infect the cooler upper airway and sinuses, grow best between 33° C and 35° C, so inhaling air at about 45° C for 20 minutes will much improve the symptoms of a common cold.2 Conversely, treating the common cold with aspirin causes an increase in the rate of production of the virus."
The author summarizes:
"A famous 17th century physician, Thomas Sydenham, said, “Fever is nature's engine which she brings into the field to remove her enemy.” The public and the medical profession have still not realised the full importance and potential of this statement."
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC529400/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37999349#38006436