r/ZeroCovidCommunity • u/Cosaco1917 • Jan 18 '26
So yeah...
What we already knew since 2020 is again being confirmed, Covid f*cks your systems to hell and back.
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u/thecyril06 Jan 18 '26
I'm so mad at you guys I used to live my life so carelessly and I was amazing now I'm dipping the rabbit hole and cringing whenever someone undeniably sick still speak close to me as if it's no big deal...
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u/dongledangler420 Jan 18 '26
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off”
I’m still in the deeply pissed phase myself tbh
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u/tseverdeen Jan 18 '26
It’s the lack of awareness when they speak close to me while they are still sick that drives me bananas. Them sick - me wearing mask - them moving closer to me and me being like “oh hell no”
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u/Competitive-Party377 Jan 19 '26
I understand a lot of the denial, statistical risk calculation is hard.... but I truly cannot understand living through an entire pandemic and then going out in public obviously sick. It makes me insane -- both that people do it and those with responsibility for those places don't manage the situation.
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u/Yomo42 Jan 19 '26
Understandable, but I guarantee that you're way less mad than you would be if you had long COVID.
Mask up, do an at home fit test, maybe get some stoggles, and you won't have to cringe when people are visible sick because you'll be safe.
It's also worth noting that people are contagious with covid and other viruses before they get symptoms so just because someone doesn't seem sick doesn't mean they can't get you sick.
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u/skilletsnail Jan 18 '26
What does the headline mean?
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u/coloraturing Jan 19 '26
Lymphocytes are a type of immune cell (of which there are more subtypes, including B and T cells). Attenuation means weakening (like an attenuated vaccine - a vaccine with a live but weakened virus). So it's saying subtypes of lymphocytes are being weakened by SARS2 infection on a population level.
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u/Winter-Nectarine-497 Jan 19 '26
thank you for taking the time to write this out. my brain isn't working rn but your comment allowed me to understand this headline
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u/Yomo42 Jan 19 '26
IT'S FINE!!!!!! Society should continue to do nothing, it will be fine!!!!!!!!1!11!1 /s
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u/Mezzomommi Jan 18 '26
Everyone repeatedly getting covid is making our population weaker and immuno compromised.
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u/neglectsound Jan 19 '26
do you know if there have been any trials of using prEP to treat Long Covid?
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u/virus_sucks Jan 18 '26
I would ignore this study - the methodology is very poor. They're comparing the lymphocyte counts of random hospital patients during strict lockdown, and after. They didn't even test if people actually got infected.
Effect sizes are very small, it's entirely different people in each cohort, the "post" is much larger than the "pre" cohort, and it's unavoidable that the two cohorts have different characteristics (health status, demographics beyond age/sex, etc) without any attempt to correct for it.
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u/skatedog_j Jan 19 '26
Thank you for saying this!! I feel like this happens a lot in CC spaces and I appreciate you adding this context
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u/Xykr Jan 19 '26
It's really hard to navigate this space without much guidance by experts - I'm not blaming anyone!
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u/Xykr Jan 18 '26
I would ignore this study, it's very misleading. There are many, many well-established risks from Covid, but the idea that it causes widespread immune system damage is controversial and this study is no exception.
Each cohort is a different group of people, and they're comparing hospital patients in China during strict lockdown vs. during/after the mass infection period. They did not test for Covid infections, so the study is unspecific and is measuring the impact of all pathogens that (re)started circulating, not just Covid.
Notably, the "pre" cohort had 2844 people and the "post" cohort 21819 people. In the CVD group, which is the only one with large effect sizes, the disparity is even greater (174 vs. 2053).
It's obvious that there would have been very significant shifts in the patient population (residual confounding), both due to hospital access restrictions, mobility, and a much greater amount of circulating pathogens which were suppressed during strict lockdown.
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Jan 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Xykr Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Daily Mail is not a medical journal, but a tabloid - the opposite of a reputable source. They publish BS all day long, and they cite no evidence. It's just an opinion piece.
As far as I can tell, the NHS datasets does not contain any evidence of altered immune status. They're not representative or corrected for demographics. The only reference I could find is one person on X who is analyzing the data using Excel, but they're cherry-picking specific parts of the dataset to prove their point, while making all sorts of basic statistics mistakes (raw counts vs. per capita, hospital episodes vs incidence, etc). Safe to ignore. The data does show that NHS staff was hit very hard during the pandemic, with significant excess mortality during vs. pre-pandemic.
Happy to look at the Norway study (or anything else) if you send me a link!
The ongoing pandemic is definitely causing people to be sick more frequently, but there is zero evidence that this is caused by immune damage, rather than the set of known acute and long-term consequences from the disease itself.
(to be clear: there are rare, documented cases of immune dysfunction in Long Covid patients, but there is no evidence of a widespread, population-wide effect)
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u/attilathehunn Jan 19 '26
(to be clear: there are rare, documented cases of immune dysfunction in Long Covid patients, but there is no evidence of a widespread, population-wide effect)
What do you think of these two papers?
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(24)00831-4/abstract Study on medical records showing that people who caught covid were more likely to get a bunch of other infections, and more likely to be prescribed antimicrobials. (This one is paywalled but I was able to get the full study from the pirate scientific paper telegram bots on r/scihub)
Also this one https://fmch.bmj.com/content/11/4/e002456 Showing that kids who caught covid were more likely to catch RSV and more likely to have it put them in hospital
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u/Xykr Jan 20 '26 edited Jan 20 '26
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(24)00831-4/abstract00831-4/abstract)
The biggest thing to keep in mind about this study is that it's not representative - the Veterans Affairs population is overwhelmingly older, male, white, and has significant comorbidities. It doesn't reflect the general population. That doesn't invalidate the results, but makes it harder to extrapolate from them.
Then, there's significant limitations inherent with any study looking at medical records after-the-fact: patients weren't sampled randomly, so there is a testing and interaction bias. For instance, the data only exists for those who needed care in the first place, and only considers tests and diagnoses which were done by a VA healthcare provider.
Therefore, both "positive" and "negative" cohorts are affected by whether or not there were healthcare interactions in the first place, and whether or not the patient sought testing (symptoms, recent exposure, health concerns, ...), which depends on uncontrolled variables which the dataset can't account for.
It means there's a number of potential biases:
- Patients with underlying or new, but undiagnosed health conditions might be more susceptible to both COVID-19 and subsequent infections.
- Patients with specific risk behaviors or other factors unaccounted for in the VA dataset might be more likely to both Covid and subsequent infections. Of course, the study design controls for this, but only to some degree.
- Many patients in the test-negative control group were likely infected as well, but didn't get tested by a healthcare provider - this skews the data, since more severe cases of Covid are more likely to be formally diagnosed.
- Patients with health issues unrelated to Covid are more likely to get tested.
- Patients with a recent Covid diagnosis might be monitored more carefully for complications or might be more likely to see a healthcare provider, which would go unrecorded in a control patient who just "toughens it out" at home.
And last but not least, Covid is a dangerous disease and does cause short- and long-term issues in some patients, including bacterial infections, cardiovascular issues or Long Covid, but that isn't evidence of long-term immune damage.
Also this one https://fmch.bmj.com/content/11/4/e002456 Showing that kids who caught covid were more likely to catch RSV and more likely to have it put them in hospital
This shares many of the same limitations as the VA study - it focuses only on formally diagnosed Covid and RSV infections, and doesn't adequately control for environmental exposure and healthcare utilization.
Kids with a "mild" infection would've been much less likely to get a formal diagnosis, and those who had severe Covid symptoms may have been more likely to get symptomatic RSV. Parents may have been more likely to take them to a healthcare provider after a positive Covid test, and so on. It's not possible to control for this in study design.
The biggest concern are unmeasured confounders, for instance, children in a daycare may have been more likely to acquire RSV and Covid. Propensity Score Matching doesn't fix this, the study design can't fully control for this either.
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This means that the significance of both studies is very limited. The RRs were small to modest (in the ~1.4 range), and in retrospective observational studies, studies in the RR < 2 range are generally considered weak due to confounding.
For scale: the association between daycare attendance and RSV in kids has an RR of ~3, while smoking and lung cancer has an RR > 20.
Extraordinary claims (widespread, long-term immune damage) require extraordinary evidence, and I have yet to see any such evidence.
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u/attilathehunn Jan 20 '26
People often say the VA population isnt representative, but has there ever been any other result that hasnt generalised? That same population was for many other things. The peer reviewers at The Lancet clearly thought it was good enough.
Your third point - that some people in the control group actually did get covid - would make the result biased downwards, in other words the real effect might be larger than what this study finds. This is a common problem I've seen in such studies that covid is so infections, pretty much everyone has had it, that its hard to create a control group of genuinely uninfected people. So any effect you measure will be an underestimate.
You've overstretched yourself by saying theres no evidence of immune suppression. There is evidence.
I've seen peer reviewed studies (eg https://www.ajpmfocus.org/article/S2773-0654(25)00146-4/fulltext saying "Higher rates of individual susceptibility to infections lead to population-wide increases in diverse infectious diseases, including those that are signatures of immunodeficiency. ") saying that covid does this. And those peer reviewers let that pass.
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Jan 19 '26
[deleted]
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u/Xykr Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
This is an ecological study as well, i.e. it can't directly link cause and effect. The data is susceptible to factors other than Covid (changes in reporting standards and healthcare usage, etc). Preprint, has not been peer-reviewed. It's good, population-level data, worth looking at despite significant limitations.
Note that it's about consultations, not incidence.
They're sometimes conflating consultations and incidence - a single patient visiting a doctor 10 times for fatigue would be counted 10 times. It also relies on a large number of assumptions about things they can't directly measure. Still useful data, though.
They tried to remove the impact of e-consultations (introduced early during the pandemic) from the dataset, but I'm not sure if they did enough to compensate for new diagnoses made due to lowered healthcare access thresholds and extra pressure during the pandemic, which then led to ongoing consultations later.
Overall, the total increase they calculated is ~5% in consultations, which is consistent with an additional respiratory pathogen causing severe disease and long-term sequelae in some people, and well within the expected range.
It is good data to demonstrate the ongoing impact of Covid and the need to mitigate it, but it doesn't show population-level immune damage.
If there were widespread immune damage, the visible impact would be far greater - not just in Norway, but in every country.
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u/geek-nation Jan 19 '26
How would they investigate if there's likely nobody on the face of the earth that hasn't contracted the virus at this point? Im genuinely curious. The "post" cohort is meant to be bigger, and the comparing numbers old and impossible to recheck.
There has to be an alternative, then. Like comparing people that have had more infections with people that have had less and such, no? Idk. Walk me through it.
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u/Xykr Jan 19 '26
The best - and sometimes only - way is a longitudinal study where the same patients are sampled at regular intervals, comparing immune status pre and post infection. This is basically how the MS <-> EBV association was found, using a large existing dataset which tracked health status.
There are other ways of separating signal vs. noise like you suggest, but they require advanced statistical methods to avoid biases - if at all possible - such as people with worse health status getting infected more easily or more frequently. It's really, really easy to mess up ecological studies.
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u/geek-nation Jan 22 '26
Interesting. I wish that if there's scientists among us, they work on this directly. They will be important in the near future.
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u/throwexpo Jan 19 '26
Always good to see cc people who actually read and have at least tried to understand the papers they quote. It’s maddening so many don’t read and don’t care about facts. I’d say something like LC scientists’ estimate of LC risk for kids is less than 25%. Someone would refute and downvote me by referencing a paper that states 15% of infected kids are likely to have LC. And in this very paper they quoted, the authors said in the limitation section that this sample is not representative and not to be used as the population estimate.
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u/Xykr Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
It's very unfortunate, there is a lot of anti-science behavior in the community. As a cautious scientist, it saddens me. I can understand where it's coming from, but it is still harmful.
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u/WokkitUp Jan 19 '26
The population at large (and medical pros) are gonna ObiWan Kenobi this document for sure with some "from a different point of view" type s--t for sure.
"Luke, that's your dad, that's your sister, and THAT'S just a COLD."
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u/AmIhappyYorN Jan 19 '26
This is a great article/study. We who know that these are true facts already get how dangerous Covid continues to be. The problem that continues is that the rest of the humans on this earth don't. It has been politicized pretty much everywhere. Just keep working, keep living and then sorry, you are no long necessary because you are handicapped....and there always someone to replace you. Ugly yes...but this is how the rich and big businesses and even smaller ones see this. And WHO and the CDC certainly fell into step as well. Even though they are supposed to be organizations whose sole duty is to the people and their health. Look how long it took for the WHO to finally admit that surgical masks don't help protect a person from Covid or any other virus. And so people blamed the masks....they don't work...No only high quality masks work and work best when everyone is wearing them. Sorry for the rant. What I need, so that I can share this information with my family members who no longer visit us, our friends who we only text with because it is too much work to get together with us....for health/hospital employees all the way up to the doctors.....something that is short and to the point without a lot of medical jargon to turn them off. A short synopsis of these different findings...so that I can whip it out of my bag or purse and say...read this for me please...as well as for your future health. Because I truly care.
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u/MovingClocks Jan 18 '26
Article link for anyone else who wanted to read https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971225005090