Apocalyptic Virus Or Not?

[ghost2509]

Raccoon dogs may be responsible for the COVID pandemic, new report suggests

ABC News
msn.com
Mar. 17, 2023

A new report suggests the virus that causes COVID-19 may be linked to raccoon dogs that were illegally being sold at a wet seafood market in China.

irst reported in The Atlantic, a team of scientists from around the world announced Thursday they believe the virus, SARS-CoV-2, originated at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, where the outbreak began.

It comes amid swirling debate about the origins of the pandemic, after a report from the U.S. Department of Energy concluded with "low confidence" that it was the result of a lab leak.
MORE: What the 'lab leak' theory report about COVID's origins does and doesn't mean

According to the report, researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention uploaded new data from swab samples collected in January 2020 at the market -- including of the floors, walls and cages containing animals -- to the open global genome sequencing database GISAID.

From there, the international team, which included virologists and biologists, downloaded the samples and analyzed them.

The samples that came back positive for the virus also contained genetic material of several animals, particularly large amounts matching the common raccoon dog.

"In samples with a hot amount of virus, there was not a trivial amount of DNA and RNA of raccoon dogs," Dr. Jeremy Kamil, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Louisiana State University Health Shreveport, who was not involved in the research, told ABC News.

Although this doesn't definitively prove that the virus definitely jumped from raccoon dogs to humans, the team said it is the strongest evidence to date of the natural transmission theory.

"This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected," Dr. Angela Rasmussen, one of the virologists involved in the new report, told The Atlantic. "There's really no other explanation that makes any sense."

Kamil agreed the evidence is not irrefutable, but that it raises serious questions about the trade of animals at these markets.

Members of the research team, who have not yet published their findings, did not immediately return ABC News' request for comment.

The findings also support other scientific research indicating that the virus likely spilled over from animals into people in and around the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.

In a briefing Friday morning, the World Health Organization addressed the reports of the potential link to raccoon dogs.

"Last Sunday, WHO was made aware of data published on the GISAID database in late January, and taken down again recently," WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said. "The data, from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, relates to samples taken at the Huanan market in Wuhan, in 2020, These data do not provide a definitive answer to the question of how the pandemic began, but every piece of data is important in moving us closer to that answer."

Raccoon dogs are known to harbor other viruses that jump from animals to humans. For example, a October 2003 report found a virus very similar to SARS-CoV-1, which a cousin of the new coronavirus, in a raccoon dog and among humans at a live animal market in Guangdong, China.

Although most experts now believe the SARS outbreak in 2002-03 in China was linked to bats, raccoon dogs are believed to have been brief accidental hosts of the virus.

Currently, four U.S. agencies and the National Intelligence Council say the virus was the result of natural transmission that jumped from animals to humans.

Late last month, the Department of Energy changed its stance from "undecided" to "low confidence" that the COVID-19 pandemic "most likely" was the result of a laboratory leak, becoming the second agency, after the FBI, to believe a lab accident resulted in the global health emergency.

"This is also in the context that China sees itself as having just as much to lose from a market spillover as it would a lab leak," Kamil said.

China has cracked down on illegal trade and the selling of wildlife at markets across the country since the SARS outbreak of 2002. Kamil said if the virus did come from wildlife, it puts a spotlight on some practices not being enforced.

"If it is a spillover at the market, then it points to the government not enforcing their own laws and allowing illegal trade to occur," he said.

[ghost2509]

People Bought Crocs During the Pandemic. They Haven’t Stopped.

The New York Times
yahoo.com
Jordyn Holman
March 27, 2023

Like Peloton, Etsy and Zoom, Crocs saw its business boom during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. The company’s aesthetically questionable but easily slipped-on clogs were the perfect footwear for Americans puttering around their homes, gardens and kitchens during quarantine.

But while many people got off their exercise bikes, cut back on DIY arts projects and resumed in-person meetings as a sense of normalcy returned to the world, they have kept their Crocs on.

Maggwa Ndugga of Raleigh, North Carolina, bought his first pair in 2020 and now has five. And he is spreading his enthusiasm, giving his parents and sisters each a pair for Christmas.

“They’re not the most appealing things to look at,” said Ndugga, 25, but they offer support to his flat feet and can be worn whether he’s working at his standing desk at home, running errands, hiking on the weekends or lifting weights.

“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?’” Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”

Fans like Ndugga — along with celebrities like Questlove, who has been known to sport the clogs at award shows — have helped Crocs emerge as a rarity in the business world. It is a pandemic winner whose success might outlast pandemic shopping behavior.

The stock prices and sales of Peloton, Etsy and Zoom have dropped since their sharp rises in the pandemic, but Crocs’ stock has soared 167% since January 2020. The company’s annual sales have increased 200% since 2019.

At a recent conference in New York held by the wealth manager UBS, Andrew Rees, the CEO of Crocs, said he often heard from the investment community that “Crocs was a pandemic beneficiary and it’s going to return to its norm.”

“There is very little chance of that happening, quite honestly,” Rees told a room of investors and analysts.

Last month, after announcing that quarterly sales rose 61%, Crocs said it anticipated another record year of growth. Its management team laid out an ambitious business plan that promised more robust profits and revenues when many in the retail industry are trying to temper investor expectations. (Part of the surge in overall sales is coming from the company’s acquisition of the footwear brand Hey Dude.)

Crocs said in November that it expected revenue from its namesake shoe line to reach more than $5 billion in three years, a nearly 90% increase. It sees its adjusted operating margin staying around 26% even as other consumer companies are feeling a squeeze in their profits.

Of course, the company, which is based in Broomfield, Colorado, might not reach these goals. Fashion is notoriously fickle, and footwear is a category that relies on the popular apparel of the moment, such as the latest jean cut.

But the reason for the optimism, company executives and analysts say, is a steady stream of new products and shrewd marketing, especially on social media, where Crocs has cultivated a devoted customer base. It has 165,000 followers on Twitter and even more on TikTok (920,600), Instagram (1.6 million) and Facebook (6.9 million).

Over the years, the brand has developed a distinctive online voice through its use of emojis and memes, making shoppers feel that its aim is creating a community rather than just getting people to buy more clogs.

The company is adept at seizing cultural moments, as it did when it tweeted about Questlove wearing black Crocs on the Oscars’ Champagne-colored carpet this month. And during the pandemic, it drove customers to its mobile app with the promise of discounts, which it called Appy Hours.

“It’s not like people haven’t heard of using social media to create brand awareness and brand relevance, but this management team is just doing it better,” said Jay Sole, a retail analyst at UBS.

Crocs has steadily become more popular among Generation Z shoppers, a coveted demographic for any retail brand. In the fall, teenagers ranked Crocs No. 5 on a list of footwear brands, according to a biannual Piper Sandler survey. In 2017, it was No. 38. Hey Dude also cracked the top 10 in the most recent survey.

The more obsessive customers collect Crocs, which often sell for $49.99; it’s not uncommon for someone to have a dozen pairs or more. They can be accessorized with Jibbitz, the personalized trinkets pushed into the holes of Crocs clogs.

Adreanna Alleyne, who has at least 60 pairs, is the kind of loyal customer Crocs is counting on to spur future growth. She likes the look of the sandals and the wedges, is active in a Crocs Facebook fan page and sees the brand as a way to connect with others.

“My Crocs are part of my self-care,” said Alleyne, 33, of Roanoke, Virginia. “I’m not going to give up my therapy because the economy is going to crap. You go in for the shoe, but you stay for the community.”

Her 8-year-old son is now hooked, too. He owns 20 pairs and recently received a pair from his father, who lives in Kuwait. (Adreanna Alleyne and her son have a long way to go before catching up to Doogie Lish Sandtiger, whose 2,100 pairs of Crocs are reputed to be the most.)

This type of customer loyalty is cost-efficient because a company has to spend more money and time on marketing to win over a new shopper.

“The chance of them buying another one is high,” Sole said of customers who buy into Crocs’ community aspect. “That means you don’t have to remarket to them.”

To reach its ambitious sales targets, Crocs will rely on sandals and lightweight Hey Dude shoes in addition to its classic clog.

“Like any large company, the meteoric growth of the early years becomes more and more difficult to replicate,” said Matt Powell, the founder of Spurwink River, a retail consulting firm. “They recognize that the clog is the most important product. They’ve worked really hard to diversify away from that to take some pressure off of it.”

Crocs’ sandals carry lower profit margins than its clogs, but people generally buy sandals more frequently than other types of footwear. And a person who buys a pair of Crocs sandals, Rees said, is one who can be converted into a clog wearer.

Crocs’ sandal business had $310 million in sales in 2022, and the company is projecting $400 million this year. Rees said he and his team have more work to do overseas, noting that sandals are a $30 billion global category. They hope to increase sales in India and countries throughout Southeast Asia, where many people wear sandals year-round. Currently, North America accounts for 60% of all sales for the Crocs brand.

Hey Dude has its own devoted following. On average, a typical customer owns four pairs of its shoes. The brand has expanded under Crocs by tapping into the company’s marketing resources and relationships with national retailers. It is on track to reach $1 billion in sales this year.

During times of economic uncertainty, companies often spend less money on marketing. Crocs said it would continue to lean on its slate of influencers, brand partnerships and digital advertising campaigns. It invests about 7% to 8% of its sales into marketing, and the company said it would spend more than $200 million on marketing initiatives this year. That will include rolling out more celebrity and big-name partnerships targeted toward specific regions around the world, and having a presence at live events like the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo.

This wasn’t a push that emerged during COVID. The company’s marketing strategy started to change when Rees took over in 2017. The focus became all digital — no more TV ads, for example — and celebrities like Post Malone, Zooey Deschanel and Bad Bunny were signed to endorsement deals.

The elements of Crocs’ current expansion plan are not all that dissimilar from what the company tried to do under previous management teams. After its debut in 2006 as a publicly traded company, it released leather boots and golf shoes and bought Jibbitz. It opened hundreds of stores, from fashionable neighborhoods like SoHo in New York to dowdy airports.

Executives said that initial expansion had come at a high cost. Without a cohesive global marketing strategy, the company lost focus on the classic clog as new merchandise flooded the market. The brand lost relevancy.

“They were selling everybody and weren’t delivering to very many people, at least consistently,” Powell said.

Crocs faces the risk that the cultural winds can shift away from them. Customers could start falling in love with another type of shoe. But analysts say its management team has shown that it can pinpoint consumer behavior and use those insights to sell even more shoes that customers like.

“They found a way to get into the better market — the more fashion-forward market,” Powell said. “They really are really hitting on a lot of the right notes right now.”

[ghost2509]

‘Everyone is kind of tired and has given up’ on COVID. But this new variant is ‘one to watch,’ the WHO says

FORTUNE
yahoo.com
Erin Prater
March 31, 2023

The World Health Organization has its eye on a new COVID variant thought to be driving a new surge of cases in India—at a time when reported cases are down in much of the rest of the world.

XBB.1.16, dubbed “Arcturus” by variant trackers, is very similar to U.S. dominant “Kraken” XBB.1.5—the most transmissible COVID variant yet, Maria Van Kerkhove, COVID-19 technical lead for the WHO, said earlier this week at a news conference.

But additional mutations in the virus’s spike protein, which attaches to and infects human cells, has the potential to make the variant more infectious and even cause more severe disease. For this reason, and due to rising cases in the East, XBB.1.16 is considered “one to watch,” Van Kerkhove says.

It’s a warning we’ve heard before about other Omicron spawn—XBB.1.5 in particular. The variant, which rose to prominence late last year and early this year, elicited warnings that it could cause more severe disease, based on new mutations it had developed.

It was a fate that didn’t play out—though the variant certainly took the lead when it came to transmissibility. XBB.1.5 accounted for just under half of all globally sequenced cases in early March, according to the WHO.

Only time will tell when it comes to what, if any, differences in severity XB.1.16 will display. Mutations that seem concerning in theory aren’t always concerning in real life because of the highly complex nature of population immunity.

Regardless, “the rapid increase in Arcturus in India is concerning,” Ryan Gregory, a biology professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, tells Fortune. He spearheaded the development of “street names” for COVID variants as it became clear that the WHO wouldn’t be assigning new Greek letters for them.

That XBB.1.16 is apparently gaining steam in a country with hefty population immunity from both prior infection and immunity is concerning, Gregory notes. While it’s not clear how big of a surge the new variant may cause in India or elsewhere, “large waves aren't the main pattern” of COVID cases anymore, he says. “It's the consistently high baseline that won't come down."

Here’s what we know so far about the latest variant to raise eyebrows—and the first to do so in several months.

When and where was XBB.1.16 discovered?

XBB.1.16 was added to the WHO’s list of variants under monitoring just recently, on March 22. COVID surveillance is at an all-time low. But so far, the bulk of cases have been identified where the new variant was first spotted, in India—one of the few countries where recorded COVID cases are on the rise, according to the WHO.

Where else has XBB.1.16 been seen?

From reported sequences, we know that the variant has also been spotted in the U.S.—in California, New Jersey, Virginia, Texas, Washington, New York, Illinois, Minnesota, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Indiana, North Carolina, Louisiana, and Delaware, to be precise.

A descendant variant, XBB.1.16.1, has also been seen in Nebraska, Missouri, and Michigan.

Neither new variant accounted for enough sequences (1% nationally) to be listed in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s updated COVID forecast on Friday. Sequences of both are still aggregated under XBB, which is estimated to account for 2.5% of current cases in the country.

XBB.1.16 and its descendents have also been identified in Singapore, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Canada, Malaysia, Denmark, New Zealand, Germany, South Korea, Spain, the Netherlands, Thailand, Sweden, South Africa, Italy, and China.

How did XBB.1.16 evolve?

The variant is a recombinant, or combination, of two descendants of so-called “stealth Omicron” BA.2. When compared to “grandparent” lineage XBB, it has three additional mutations, according to the WHO.

And it's picking up additional mutations, Raj Rajnarayanan, assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology campus in Jonesboro, Ark., and a top COVID variant tracker, tells Fortune.

Is XBB.1.16 causing hospitalizations and deaths to rise?

So far, no lab studies regarding the variant’s disease severity have been completed. Reassuringly, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths have not yet risen due to the variant, according to a Thursday COVID-19 situational report by the WHO.

While the variant isn’t causing “large clusters” of illness, it is fueling a “steady increase in fresh cases” throughout India, Ma Subramanian, health minister for Tamil Nadu, an Indian state, said Friday, The Times of India reported.

So why is XBB.1.16 so concerning?

If the new variant is indeed capable of fueling a rise in hospitalizations or deaths, it may be too early to tell. Upward trends in such metrics can take weeks to materialize, which is why they were known early in the pandemic as “lagging indicators.”

XBB.1.16 has two new mutations in particular that “makes it fitter than any variant so far,” Rajnarayanan says. Those two mutations don’t exist on relative XBB.1.5.

“Currently, XBB.1.16 is the big dog,” he says. “It’s picking up mutations that are common in other variants that will increase its advantage further.”

Particularly concerning is mutation K478R, which may make the variant better at overcoming antibodies from prior infection and vaccination, making people sicker, and spreading in general, according to the WHO.

Additionally, XBB.1.16 has shown an ability to quickly outpace U.S.-dominant XBB.1.5 when it comes to spread. The new variant has shown a 188% growth advantage over it in past three months, Rajnarayanan says.

And in India, where XBB caused the last big wave, XBB.1.16 is displaying a 64% growth advantage, he adds.

Will the new Omicron COVID booster protect me from XBB.1.16?

Such boosters should offer “some protection if the dose is recent,” Rajnarayanan says, though the virus has continued to evolve since they were released last fall.

Paxlovid continues to work, he adds. But when it comes to monoclonal antibodies, “the rest of the toolkit is useless,” he says.

Why should I care about XBB.1.16—or any COVID variant—anymore?

It’s a fair question, Rajnarayanan says: “With so much going on, everyone is kind of tired and has given up.”

Unfortunately, it’s not safe to assume that therapeutics like COVID antiviral Paxlovid, vaccines, and tests will continue to work as viral evolution continues, he cautions.

“People want to know, will vaccines work? Are there tools? Should I mask?” he says. The answers are subject to change, however, and depend on what variants are circulating, and at what volume.

[ghost2509]

Humans may have spread Covid to Wuhan market as raccoon dogs 'not to blame', say scientists

The Telegraph
yahoo.com
Sarah Knapton
April 5, 2023

Humans may have brought Covid-19 to the Wuhan market where the virus first emerged, scientists have said, after finding no proof that raccoon dogs were to blame for the outbreak.

It comes after a controversial study suggested last month that raccoon dog DNA found at the Huanan Seafood Market in January 2020 provided “strong evidence” that the virus was transmitted to humans at the site.

The paper was based on samples taken by Chinese researchers at the start of the pandemic which had been uploaded to an international genetic database before they had published their own analysis of the data.

But on Wednesday, the Chinese scientists released their study in the journal Nature and said there was no way of knowing if the raccoon dogs were infected. They also cautioned that the origins of Covid-19 could not be determined from their samples.

Writing in the journal, the authors, which include George Gao, the former head of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (DCD), said: “These environmental samples cannot prove that the animals were infected.

“Furthermore, even if the animals were infected, our study does not rule out that human-to-animal transmission occurred, considering the sampling time was after the human infection within the market as reported retrospectively.

“Thus, the possibility of potential introduction of the virus to the market through infected humans, or cold chain products, cannot be ruled out yet.”

The Huanan Seafood Market was associated with a cluster of early cases, which has led some scientists to suggest that Covid-19 may have jumped to a human from an animal.

Raccoon dogs were thought to be a likely candidate for the initial spread because they are known to be susceptible to the virus.

But the researchers pointed out that humans had already been infected by the time they first took swabs in January 2020, so even if the animals were infected they could have caught the virus from humans.

The team also found traces of Covid-19 in sewers, suggesting that infected humans or animals may have helped spread the virus. Previous studies have pointed out that the largest concentration of Covid-19 was found near the market’s toilets.

Pandemic's origins 'unlikely to be Wuhan market'

Viscount Ridley, author of the book Viral: The Search For The Origin of Covid-19, said that maps of the collection areas showed there was little overlap between viral DNA and raccoon dog DNA.

“Not only were no raccoon dogs found to be infected, they were mostly in the wrong part of the market,” he said.

“The scientists who investigated the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan in 2020 have concluded that the pandemic probably did not begin there.

“To believe it did, you have to assume that they missed or covered up some infected animals.”

The earlier study, led by Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey, which had not been submitted for peer-review, was dismissed as “risibly thin” and misleading by some scientists.

In a pre-print last year, many of the same authors claimed to have “incontrovertible evidence” that Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade, but later rowed back on the assertions.

The experts were also criticised by the Gisaid database for taking the samples from another research group and submitting their own study while the Chinese scientists were going through a lengthy peer-review process.

Before publication, the story was also leaked to The Atlantic, who claimed it was "the strongest evidence yet that an animal started the pandemic."

However when they published their work, the authors acknowledged that animal DNA in a sample did not mean that animal was the source of the virus.

“The most abundant animal in the sequencing data of a particular sample is not necessarily the source of the virus in that sample,” they wrote.

The Chinese team said that “internationally coordinated efforts” were needed to investigate the origins of the pandemic.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has accused China of being obstructive in its efforts to determine whether the virus could have leaked from a lab.

The Huanan Seafood Market was just a few miles from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) which was collecting and carrying out experiments on bat coronaviruses - the closest relatives to Covid-19.

[ghost2509]

Video shows woman crying as she smells coffee for the first time in 2 years — thanks to an injection to treat her long COVID

INSIDER
yahoo.com
Amber Middleton
April 6, 2023

http://youtu.be/erMPoEr8Bgo

A woman who couldn't smell or taste properly for two years after a mild case of COVID regained her senses after she was treated with a pain injection.

Jennifer Henderson, 54, from Cincinnati, Ohio contracted COVID in January 2021 and experienced headaches, fatigue, and a loss of taste and smell, she told Cleveland Clinic.

While most of her symptoms subsided after a week, her inability to taste or smell remained. After nine months, they came back, but distorted so that things didn't taste or smell as they should.

Bananas tasted metallic, garlic tasted like gasoline, chicken tasted like rotten flesh, known as dysgeusia, and she couldn't smell her perfumes, flowers, or her husband's aftershave, known as parosmia.

"It was terrible. Most people don't understand how that affects you, with two of your major senses gone," she said.

After almost two years with an altered sense of taste and smell, Henderson received her first dose of treatment in December 2022. A video shows her crying after the treatment enabled her to smell and taste coffee for the first time since falling ill.

Henderson learned of the treatment in a support group

Prior to getting COVID, Henderson enjoyed going out for food and cooking new recipes at home. But she dreaded eating after she lost her taste and smell, and said that most food tasted like garbage.

"Friends would ask where we wanted to go out for dinner and I'd just shrug my shoulders," she said.

She would look at old pictures of herself and think "I used to be normal then" and wonder if she'd have to deal with this for the rest of her life.

She tried holistic remedies such as acupuncture but nothing helped.

After coming across a Facebook support group for people suffering from the same symptoms, Henderson learned of a treatment used for pain management called a stellate ganglion block, which had been used to improve smell and taste for long COVID sufferers.

SGB is a series of injections of local anesthetic into the nervous system that is believed to stop it from contributing to long COVID symptoms, according to Cleveland Clinic.

Dr. Christina Shin, a pain medicine specialist who treated Henderson, said: "There is a connection between our nervous system and immune system. Some propose patients with long COVID are suffering from persistent overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system or inflammation of their nervous system."

Referring to a collection of nerves at the front of the neck, she said: "By injecting local anesthetic and temporarily blocking neuronal activity at the stellate ganglion, we may be disrupting this abnormal feedback loop."

This treatment doesn't work for everyone, Shin told NBC News, and some get their senses back over time. But for some, like Henderson, the results are immediate.

Henderson has had two more injections since and found that she's seen improvements in both taste and smell each time, including being able to smell her favorite perfumes once again.

In a video documenting her first round of the treatment, Henderson said: "You feel like you're in this box. For two years two senses are completely gone. And now I feel like I'm getting my life back."

[Reclaimed08]

Interjecting my own personal experience here again.

With my wonderful and amazing therapist we're coming up to start processing my survivor's guilt about COVID.

On the physical side of possibly long COVID it's really awful and my nearly-forty-year-old body feels closer to seventy years old. I feel that it's going to be a long haul if it's even possible at all to bring my body closer to it's chronological age. It sucks I sneeze frequently (even without the presence of irritants), I'm fatigued and everything just hurts, brain fog makes it difficult to concentrate or even to SPELL and put words together in a coherent sentence, my sense of taste and smells goes from OK to very faint and let's not forget the sexual dysfunction.

It really sucks, I'm committed though to put in the work so I can be healthy when I really do get old.

[holdmynose]

It seems to me, that we have had a similar experience these past few months. Your description of symptoms mirrors my own. I have not quite gotten rid of the breathing issue and the snot issue but the rest has cleared mostly. I was not tested and as such have no idea if I had contracted it. It seems that I may have.
Rest, liquids, eat. All I did for this 'thing'. I am feeling much better as I hope you are soon.

[ChE Sailor]

Originally Posted by RedMage

With my wonderful and amazing therapist we're coming up to start processing my survivor's guilt about COVID.

What is survivors guilt? Do you feel guilty you didn't die? I don't get it. Not trying to be a dick, genuinely confused.

[Reclaimed08]

Originally Posted by holdmynose

It seems to me, that we have had a similar experience these past few months. Your description of symptoms mirrors my own. I have not quite gotten rid of the breathing issue and the snot issue but the rest has cleared mostly. I was not tested and as such have no idea if I had contracted it. It seems that I may have.
Rest, liquids, eat. All I did for this 'thing'. I am feeling much better as I hope you are soon.

The uncertainty is the worst of not knowing if you had it or didn't. I suspect I contracted it in February 2020 because I was ill with the 'worst cold ever' for three weeks and even after I got well there was a marked difference in my health from January and March.

Speaking of brain fog, how could I have forgotten the breathing issues? There has been a shortness of breath, I'm hopeful that the more we understand long COVID the more treatments can be found and hopefully one day those that suffer will either be cured or at least have had significant improvements.

Thank you very much for your tips; I have been doing better with self-care in the last several months and continuing to improve and hopefully with it my own symptoms will be alleviated.

Originally Posted by ChE Sailor

What is survivors guilt? Do you feel guilty you didn't die? I don't get it. Not trying to be a dick, genuinely confused.

I didn't think you were being a dick at all; if anything the mental health impact of COVID isn't talked about enough so I'm very happy to answer your questions.

Yes, basically survivor's guilt is feeling guilty to survive when other people have died. The examples most often cited refer to natural disasters and plane crashes. Speaking only for myself it's a very confusing feeling such as I feel responsible for COVID, there's confusion over how I managed to survive and a enormous guilt wondering if I infected other people who may not have made it.

There's questions such as did I do everything possible to keep myself and others safe? While I did make a conscious effort to do so, I feel there's two reasons I've managed to survive: I'm relatively young and I'm socially isolated and I feel that the latter is the most likely answer.

There's another part about the randomness of mortality; people my age have passed away from COVID, younger than me and older than me. A family member lost their childhood best friend at the age of forty-two if my memory is correct.

I hope I answered your questions and cleared up some of the confusion.

[ChE Sailor]

Originally Posted by RedMage

Yes, basically survivor's guilt is feeling guilty to survive when other people have died.

I personally can't fathom spending any effort on such a wasted emotion. How would you have any culpability in a global health issue?

Perhaps it's just a different personal outlook on the universal system of "justice." I rely heavily on providence, I believe things will work out the way they are meant to, in all aspects of life, for better or worse, it's karma or joss, or whatever vernacular one uses. You can't possibly have any guilt in such firestorm.

I don't get it but I hope you can move past it and not let it weigh on your conscience, you bear no responsibility.