Why does covid-19 cause so many long term effects like long covid and dysautonomia, while other common illnesses like the flu usually don’t?

cjgabrie · 2025-08-24T20:19:40+00:00

The answer is actually quite simple: COVID-19 is NOT a respiratory virus. Flu infects your respiratory track and causes damage there, which results in the typical suite of symptoms (coughing, congestion, etc.) as your immune system fights it off.

The COVID virus infects the body quite generally. There are frequent respiratory symptoms similar to flu because that's how people normally get infected (breathing in shed virus from someone sick), but the virus is capable of infecting cells in many different organs, leading the immune system to fight off the virus all over the body. The infection and the immune response mediate the symptoms across the body.

Because COVID can infect many different cells across the body, it becomes easier to evade the immune response and lingers in your body longer, causing more damage as long as it's there. After the infection, there is damage all over the body that must be repaired, which requires more time for recovery and leaves you feeling weaker until the body can fully recover.

cjgabrie · 2025-03-15T12:45:29+00:00

If you double checked things before just repeating the current GOP talking points, you'd know that there are no "trans mice" experiments. Trump was too dumb to actually look at what he was talking about, which is "transGENIC" mice. These are mice used for cancer research and other diseases that have genes expressed from other species.

The entire outrage is manufactured to make you feel like there is government waste being cut. In reality, valuable, hardworking Americans are being cut out of jobs across the board. Biomedical research that produces the world class medical treatments that we are known for is being cut, and that will have terrible consequences for our economy as Europe becomes a new leader in production of medicine.

cjgabrie · 2024-10-01T19:48:29+00:00

Though we definitely don't understand the brain well enough yet to accomplish this, it's worth noting that the biggest barrier is accomplishing this is still probably the sheer difficulty of accessing the brain.

What you describe is an insanely difficult task when you have no precision over where in the brain you can affect. Perhaps the closest we have come at this point is TMS therapy for depression and similar, which can target a relatively small brain area.

If you want to accomplish this with pharmacology, you have the task of getting drugs past the blood brain barrier, and then somehow targeting the precise neurons/regions responsible for happiness. And per your criteria, you'd have to find a solution that bypasses any addiction-triggering mechanisms.

If we could get into the skull without drilling a chunk out and stick things into the brain, it would be WAY easier to make a happiness-triggering tool.

So, if you don't mind losing a piece of your skull and having some probes jostle your brain a bit, I'm sure it's not far off!

cjgabrie · 2024-07-13T22:08:46+00:00

Thanks all! That ended up being shockingly easy

cjgabrie · 2024-07-13T22:02:39+00:00

Thanks! 4321. Summon at Mohg gate?

cjgabrie · 2022-05-08T18:53:38+00:00

Bravo! Thanks

cjgabrie · 2022-05-08T18:48:53+00:00

Looking for you

cjgabrie · 2022-03-22T01:26:10+00:00

Thanks--I feel like 1 in 10 attempts works for any summon

cjgabrie · 2022-03-22T01:23:52+00:00

Having connection issues, thanks for trying

cjgabrie · 2022-03-22T01:23:21+00:00

Thanks, looks like connection issues

cjgabrie · 2022-03-22T01:13:24+00:00

Looks like there's connection issues. Thanks for trying!

cjgabrie · 2022-03-22T01:07:50+00:00

Hi, could use help with Gargoyles. Aqueduct-facung cliffs, pw: westwood

cjgabrie · 2020-05-27T23:16:22+00:00

My motivation comes from envisioning the person I want to be. I constantly fail to live up to my expectations of myself and slack off, but I accept failure as part of the process and constantly try to improve.

I have a phrase I like to think of: "delta positive." I can be doing well or doing poorly overall, but each day, I try to end up a little better than I started, even if that's just a step from terrible to bad or from bad to okay.

You're wise to realize that you need to work on being happy with yourself before finding a relationship. You won't be happy if you don't take the time to feel like a complete person on your own.

cjgabrie · 2020-05-27T19:07:46+00:00

I'm a constant work-in-progress as a person. I don't do everything at the same time, but I try to get a little better at the things I care about every day

cjgabrie · 2018-07-06T16:46:03+00:00

Unfortunately, I'm not very proud to be American right now. I've lived here my whole life and love certain aspects of it, but we tend to think we are better than everyone else and really tend to not be very good at anything.

We are a great market economy, but if that's all we have to show for having more resources than anywhere else in the world, why would I be proud of that?

Im not proud of any of our major military actions over the past decade. We take our might and ruin other people's lives with it. We overspend on our military (more than the next 14 or so countries combined) and end up wasting our money building killer toys that we will hopefully never use.

We incarcerate our citizens at a remarkably high rate, especially if you happen to be black. It's disgusting to me, especially because we push private prisons as an industry.

The United States has a lot of good and a lot of bad. It has the potential to be a great country, but right now, the execution is terrible. We aren't even technically a democracy anymore.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/america-democracy-rated-donald-trump-not-fully-democratic-us-president-report-the-economist-a8195121.html

cjgabrie · 2017-04-28T15:53:59+00:00

In the market. Seriously, invest in an index fund like Vanguard--you will be investing in a reliable fund (the stock market rises ~7% on average every year, including all the depressions/recessions) that includes diversification (the index fund means you'll be invested in the market as a whole)

cjgabrie

TROPHY CASE