Tell me you’ve never had a proper job without telling me you’ve never had a proper job.
Sounds like CN has a backup - what’s yours?
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I don’t think this works quite the way you think it does. You’re technically not wrong, but it would require going back and doing a residency in something else or practicing in an discipline that he is not board certified in, which is possible, but severely limits your employment opportunities. For example, his current employer would be highly unlikely to just move him to another office and have him do primary care or whatever.
Nature abhors a vacuum and the covid thread abhors a trolling vacuum.
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This is how I took it as well. Brain fog is such a non-specific term. Depending on how it manifests itself, it could affect the other professions listed more than Cuse’s. Or less. It’s just unknown at this point.
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Is “brain cloud” a better term?
About the same, imo.
Grunching
Wouldn’t it be something if Covid did more damage i the species long term by making human lives shorter and more miserable vs directly causing short term deaths.
The Eye of Sauron swings in my direction it seems - this thread does indeed abhor a vacuum.
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Well that got dark quick.
Certainly wouldn’t be the first virus to do that.
It is a known fact that ME/CFS very frequently develops subsequent to a viral infection, for example:
Most commonly, the disorder develops in the aftermath of acute infections, predominantly from viruses, e.g., Epstein-Barr virus, SARS coronavirus, influenza virus, Ebola virus, enteroviruses, etc.
The article above is arguing for neuroglial dysfunction as an explanation for at least a subset of ME/CFS cases, although the evidence base is complex and unclear. There’s also some very interesting research coming out at the moment linking COVID brain fog to neuroglial dysfunction:
Microglia are sort of like the central nervous system’s hungry scavengers. They are immune cells that clean up the brain by chomping on dead and unwanted neural debris, among other important functions. “There’s a unique subpopulation of microglia in the white matter called axon tract microglia,” Monje says. These have a specific genetic signature, she continues, and “are exquisitely sensitive to a wide range of insults,” like inflammatory or toxic stimuli.
In response to these stimuli, microglia can become perpetually reactive. One consequence is that they can begin eating away at needed neurons or other brain cells, which further disrupts the brain’s homeostasis. In the case of Covid-19, the scientists found that this reactivity persisted even at seven weeks after infection. Monje’s team had seen similar elevation in this activity following chemotherapy and in brain samples from human patients who were infected with Covid-19. In the hippocampus (the area of the brain closely associated with memory), this overenthusiastic cleanup effort can deter the creation of new neurons, which are linked to maintaining healthy memory.
I don’t pretend to have a detailed understanding of any of this, but it seems very likely to me that a subset of “long COVID” (generally including the people complaining of brain fog) is a post-viral neurological syndrome which can happen after a wide range of viruses, and that it’s just more obvious now because millions of people all encountered a novel virus in a very short time frame.
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I think this is also plausible and depending how common it is after COVID vs say influenza would determine whether I file it under “thing” or “not a thing”.
Australia has scrapped vaccination requirements for incoming travellers. Also just hit 10,000 COVID deaths.
Just staggering the difference between you and the US.
The price you pay for actual freedom!
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Obviously , US handled it about as badly as possible, but when you consider the population difference (which already accounts for one order of magnitude) and the geographic isolation of Australia, it is s still a huge difference, but probably not as massive as it may seem if we just sort by number of deaths.
Yeah, not even sure what was meant by the brain fog comment. First, there are obviously huge distributions of impact, so saying “brain fog” doesn’t mean anything. Secondly, the notion that it wouldn’t affect ~everyone at the level it would affect anyone is bizarre.
To be fair I haven’t really followed US closely as everyone here but I think our case numbers are similar per capita but deaths way less. Also our geography is interesting internally, I’d guess we are actually way more urban (or at least 1m+ cities) based than USians which would support huge case numbers.
We were able to control case numbers until we got everyone vaccinated is the point though. This would have been a lot harder for the US for a bunch of reasons - they have land borders, COVID was in the community all over the place before anyone knew what was going on, states closing borders to each other as was done in Australia is unconstitutional in the US, etc etc.
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Ah interesting. As I said I am less familiar than virtually everyone on this site with how the US managed/didn’t manage this outside of much more of the country being rabid anti-vaxxers than any developed (probably also non-developed) country on Earth.