Halloween is nigh. This year, our eldest decided to dress up as a plague doctor, and looking through costume options reminded me of one of the worst pieces of doomscrolling churnalism that proliferated after covid. It is titled Get Ready for the Forever Plague, by one Andrew Nikiforuk, “an award-winning journalist whose books and articles focus on epidemics, the energy industry, nature and more”. Of course, back in March 2020 he was just “an award-winning journalist who has been writing about the energy industry for two decades”. So it goes.
Such is the nature of echo chambers that he continues to write, putting out articles like this month’s As COVID Surges, the High Price of Viral Denial. At first glance they are meticulously sourced, a hyperlink to a peer-review journal underlining each claim:
COVID can even whittle away your intelligence. A recent New England Journal of Medicine study looked at the memory, planning and spatial reasoning of nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID. Almost all had significant deficits “in memory and executive task performance” regardless of the variant.
Alas, the linked NEJM article says no such thing. In fact:
Participants with resolved persistent symptoms after Covid-19 had objectively measured cognitive function similar to that in participants with shorter-duration symptoms, although short-duration Covid-19 was still associated with small cognitive deficits after recovery. Longer-term persistence of cognitive deficits and any clinical implications remain uncertain.
And as for the “regardless of the variant” claim:
The largest deficits in global cognitive scores were observed in the group of participants with SARS-CoV-2 infection during periods in which the original virus or the alpha variant was predominant as compared with those infected with later variants.
Crucially, the control group was people with no documented covid infection; we have no idea how covid-19 compares to other coronavirus infections, other viral infections in general, and even any illness requiring hospitalization. Staying in the ICU takes a toll regardless of what put you there, and last I checked covid has been putting fewer and fewer people in the hospital, let alone the intensive care unit.
This is a common theme for most covid-19-related research. Here, again, is Nikiforuk’s latest article:
No COVID infection is completely benign because each infection plays a role in deregulating the immune system. Even a mild infection, as one recent study noted, can increase “autoantibodies associated with rheumatic autoimmune diseases and diabetes in most individuals, regardless of vaccination status prior to infection.”
Two things here. One, autoantibodies associated with a disease do not imply a disease: I myself have had high titer for antibodies associated with Sjogren’s syndrome for more than a decade without ever having symptoms of the disease (how I found out about those antibodies is a story for another day). Two, note that the study compared autoantibody levels of three groups of people: those with long covid and persistent neurologic and fatigue symptoms (“neuro-PASC”), covid convalescents, and healthy controls with no known exposure. Ideally it would have included people with non-covid “neuro-PASC” and/or convalescents of other, non-covid viral infections. But at the very least it should have mentioned prior similar research in other viral diseases and put the findings in context of other viruses and hypothesis for autoimmunity. Presented like this, SARS-CoV-2 is a celestial bugaboo unchained from other parts of reality — no wonder that the lab leak hypothesis is so tempting!
Because there are two things that could be happening here. Either a humanity-ending event occurred somewhere near the end of 2021 and we are living a somewhat prolonged but inevitable decline in which so many people will have symptoms of long covid that civilization as we know it will end (queue “the Forever Plague”). Or maybe, just maybe, we experienced a once-in-a generation spread of a new virus — new to us but something humanity has had to deal with throughout its existence — at a time when we have the means to analyze its genome, our genome, its proteins, Kudos to the Nature group of journals for their SEO. our proteins, the cells it infects, our cells responding to the infection, the microbiome, the food, the water, the air, the animals and yes, even art. And all that without the context of other viruses and other pandemics.