COVID-19 Outbreak Information Updates (Reboot) [over 150.000,000 US cases (est.), 6,422,520 US hospitilizations, 1,148,691 US deaths.] (3 Viewers)

[Saint_Ward]

Is it ever a good time to see Tool?
Just kidding, have fun!

Depends on the tool.....lol.

 

[superchuck500]

Really excellent piece on the ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2. I can't even find a proper section to tease because it's all so informative.

The Coronavirus Will Surprise Us Again

The variant after Omicron could look very different from any yet.

www.theatlantic.com

 

[Mr. Sparkle]

Dr. Scott Gottlieb says it’s time to consider dumping school Covid mask mandates

"We're going to probably have to tolerate, and probably should, a higher level of baseline spread," the former FDA chief told CNBC on Wednesday.

www.cnbc.com

 

[Dago]

Dude, I'm not going to argue with you about whether fasting is a good idea to treat long COVID or not. I don't know the answer to that and nothing you say is going to convince me otherwise. Personally, I seek medical advice from doctors. If their advice works, great. If not, I look for other doctors who can help. I just don't look to YouTube, the internet, famous people, or random guys on the internet to give me medical advice. As I said, if fasting worked for you and you got relief that's great and I'm happy for you.


As far as Rogan, I didn't "keep brining him up." I brought him up once and I was making a joke. Rogan is another unqualified celebrity who fancies himself an expert in pretty much so everything including medicine. Much like Gweneth Paltrow.

I'm not really interested in debating the merits of fasting in general. For things like dieting, general well-being, and some specific conditions, where there's some evidence to support it, sure, it might make sense for some people to try it depending on their circumstances. Most likely it'll work for some, and not others, but shouldn't do any harm provided it's not too extreme and there aren't underlying medical reasons that would make it dangerous.

But for specific conditions, like chronic fatigue ones, where people have found it made them worse, I will absolutely push back on glib assertions about the magic of fasting.

Because in those situations, it's not just that fasting may actually harm the individual, the perception that fasting is a solution can itself be harmful.

Because far from medical solutions being pushed, for years the standard treatment for CFS and ME in much of the world, including the UK, was graded exercise and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (insert wild conspiracy theory about Big Physiotherapy and Big Therapy here).

The problem was, the evidence for it was shoddy and the experience of a lot of sufferers is that it just didn't work, and in many instances made them worse. That some people think it did work for them does nothing to negate the fact that for many it did not.

But the perception of those as the effective treatments meant the conditions were perceived as psychological, and that if people weren't getting better, well, that was on them for not trying harder. The condition was treated too often as not a real condition, and those not getting better from exercise and CBT as being at best depressed, and at worst, lazy.

Those guidelines have only just been changed here, and there's still debate about it: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59080007

Pushing treatments with flimsy evidence as a solution can absolutely be harmful.

That's not to say there's no merit to someone saying, "I think this worked for me, might be worth considering?" That's one thing.

But saying, in response to evidence showing it made some people worse, that it must be a lie, that anyone saying that is in the pocket of the medical industry, and see, Gwyneth Paltrow says it works?

That's unhinged, and harmful.

A New Study Pinpoints a Cause of Long-Haul COVID Symptoms

As the pandemic continues, long COVID-19 remains very prevalent (affecting between 31 and 69 percent of COVID-19 patients) and somewhat bewildering because there's no clear connection between the severity of a patient's initial symptoms and how long they might linger. That was one thing that...

www.yahoo.com

If this research is correct and that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria, then fasting would absolutely be beneficial

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy"

www.nobelprize.org

in 2016 Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his research which showed the role that autophagy plays in cellular repair (including damaged mitochondria) and fasting drastically increases autophagy while the traditional 3 meals and snacks prevents autophagy

You claim to follow science....well this is science

 

[SaintInBucLand]

A New Study Pinpoints a Cause of Long-Haul COVID Symptoms

As the pandemic continues, long COVID-19 remains very prevalent (affecting between 31 and 69 percent of COVID-19 patients) and somewhat bewildering because there's no clear connection between the severity of a patient's initial symptoms and how long they might linger. That was one thing that...

www.yahoo.com

If this research is correct and that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria, then fasting would absolutely be beneficial

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy"

www.nobelprize.org

in 2016 Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his research which showed the role that autophagy plays in cellular repair (including damaged mitochondria) and fasting drastically increases autophagy while the traditional 3 meals and snacks prevents autophagy

You claim to follow science....well this is science

Also another interesting article talking about covid and autophagy.

Spermidine and COVID-19: supplements for improving immune health

After two years of the coronavirus pandemic, a cure for COVID-19 remains elusive. Spermidine supplements may play a part in immune health.

www.longevity.technology

 

[Saint_Ward]

Really excellent piece on the ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2. I can't even find a proper section to tease because it's all so informative.

The Coronavirus Will Surprise Us Again

The variant after Omicron could look very different from any yet.

www.theatlantic.com

I'd go with this note. Because it highlights so much of what's very true, and also what's so hard for people to understand. We put so many resources into this, we know more about this than a lot of other contagious diseases. We may very well find that many viruses present asymptomatic spread, but we just didn't care to know.

There are three possible explanations for why the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 looks so different from that of other viruses, and they are not mutually exclusive. First of all, we really haven’t looked that hard at other respiratory viruses. More than 7.5 million genomes of SARS-CoV-2 have been sequenced; just a few hundred or a few dozen for each of the four seasonal coronaviruses have been. When scientists try to reconstruct the relationship among these sequenced viruses in evolutionary trees, “the trees are so sparse,” says Sarah Cobey, a biologist at the University of Chicago. A whole suite of other viruses also cause common colds: rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, parainfluenza, respiratory syncytial virus, metapneumovirus, and so on. These, too, are poorly sampled. More than 100 types of rhinoviruses alone infect humans, but we don’t have a great understanding of how that diversity came to be or evolved over time.

 

[Saint_Ward]

A New Study Pinpoints a Cause of Long-Haul COVID Symptoms

As the pandemic continues, long COVID-19 remains very prevalent (affecting between 31 and 69 percent of COVID-19 patients) and somewhat bewildering because there's no clear connection between the severity of a patient's initial symptoms and how long they might linger. That was one thing that...

www.yahoo.com

If this research is correct and that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria, then fasting would absolutely be beneficial

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy"

www.nobelprize.org

in 2016 Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his research which showed the role that autophagy plays in cellular repair (including damaged mitochondria) and fasting drastically increases autophagy while the traditional 3 meals and snacks prevents autophagy

You claim to follow science....well this is science

I don't want to get too far down the intermittent fasting helping covid rabbit hole, but that's not the only way to induce Autophagy. A 10-40% calorie restriction (long term, like 3+ years) is the strongest inducer of autophagy. Intense exercise, probably HIIT, also induces it. There are lots of ways to starve cells.

However, it goes also delve into the whole point of overall healthy eating, and any improvements towards that, usually makes people feel better.

 

[Mr. Sparkle]

I think this is my favorite so far in the series of hypocrite Covid politicians - "I was maskless but I held my breath"

Garcetti: '0% chance of infection' if he holds breath when removing mask for photo

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says when people ask to take a picture with him, he removes his mask and holds his breath.

abc7.com

The dam is about to break on all these rules. It's a joke.

 

[SaintInBucLand]

I think this is my favorite so far in the series of hypocrite Covid politicians - "I was maskless but I held my breath"

Garcetti: '0% chance of infection' if he holds breath when removing mask for photo

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says when people ask to take a picture with him, he removes his mask and holds his breath.

abc7.com

The dam is about to break on all these rules. It's a joke.

I literally thought this was going to be an onion or Babylon bee article. Just wow.

 

[Dago]

I don't want to get too far down the intermittent fasting helping covid rabbit hole, but that's not the only way to induce Autophagy. A 10-40% calorie restriction (long term, like 3+ years) is the strongest inducer of autophagy. Intense exercise, probably HIIT, also induces it. There are lots of ways to starve cells.

However, it goes also delve into the whole point of overall healthy eating, and any improvements towards that, usually makes people feel better.

I agree that fasting isn't the only way, however research shows that fasting is just as good if not better than exercise for autophagy.

Simply reducing caloric intake will not do it. Autophogy doesn't really happen while the liver has glycogen and even small amounts of protein, fat, or carbohydrate halts autophogy

 

[SaintInBucLand]

I agree that fasting isn't the only way, however research shows that fasting is just as good if not better than exercise for autophagy.

Simply reducing caloric intake will not do it. Autophogy doesn't really happen while the liver has glycogen and even small amounts of protein, fat, or carbohydrate halts autophogy

Yep, plus I like that autophagy begins around the 16-20 hour mark with fasting.

 

[brandon8283]

Really excellent piece on the ongoing evolution of SARS-CoV-2. I can't even find a proper section to tease because it's all so informative.

The Coronavirus Will Surprise Us Again

The variant after Omicron could look very different from any yet.

www.theatlantic.com

Here’s a part that confirms what I was arguing before:

The coronavirus normally has two ways of infecting cells, either fusing directly with them or entering through a bubble. Omicron has become a specialist in the latter, which happens to work less well in lung cells than in nose and throat cells, and may explain the variant’s lower intrinsic severity. To get around the immune system, the virus ended up changing one of its most basic functions.

So many people are assuming that the next variant and all future variants will become less severe because someone told them “that’s what viruses do.” And maybe over the very long term they do, but not necessarily over just a couple of years.

The evolutionary pressure that led to omicron’s lessened severity was that it’s ancestor needed immune escape, not the fact that it was too deadly for the ancestor to effectively transmit from one host to the next.

As long as the evolutionary pressure is primarily coming from immune escape (which, as long as COVID continues to transmit within the first few days of infection, it will), there’s no real evolutionary pressure to become any more or less deadly.

We may get lucky with the next one that like Omicron, the mutations that provided immune escape just happen to also make it less deadly. But that’s absolutely not a guarantee for the next variant. Not at all.

 

[bonnjer]

Here’s a part that confirms what I was arguing before:



So many people are assuming that the next variant and all future variants will become less severe because someone told them “that’s what viruses do.” And maybe over the very long term they do, but not necessarily over just a couple of years.

The evolutionary pressure that led to omicron’s lessened severity was that it’s ancestor needed immune escape, not the fact that it was too deadly for the ancestor to effectively transmit from one host to the next.

As long as the evolutionary pressure is primarily coming from immune escape (which, as long as COVID continues to transmit within the first few days of infection, it will), there’s no real evolutionary pressure to become any more or less deadly.

We may get lucky with the next one that like Omicron, the mutations that provided immune escape just happen to also make it less deadly. But that’s absolutely not a guarantee for the next variant. Not at all.

In other words, we're at the casino and the longer we play the game, the more likely it is that the house wins. We need to leave the table sooner rather than later, but we just don't seem to care to do that.

 

[Arathrael]

A New Study Pinpoints a Cause of Long-Haul COVID Symptoms

As the pandemic continues, long COVID-19 remains very prevalent (affecting between 31 and 69 percent of COVID-19 patients) and somewhat bewildering because there's no clear connection between the severity of a patient's initial symptoms and how long they might linger. That was one thing that...

www.yahoo.com

If this research is correct and that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria, then fasting would absolutely be beneficial

OK, so first, the research is a pilot study, that hasn't shown that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria. It's found data suggestive of metabolic reprogramming and mitochondrial dysfunction, which is not the same thing, because there are different mechanisms which can cause that. Additionally, it's based on a small cohort size, lacks contemporaneous control, may not be generalizable, and should be treated as a hypothesis.

Second, even if we put that aside, it would still be a wild jump to conclude that 'fasting would absolutely be beneficial'. I'm getting the impression you think that stavation-induced autophagy is like a magic wand that you just wave and it fixes any problem with mitochondrial dysfunction. That's not how that works. I'm by no means an expert in this area, but I know enough to know it's a lot more complicated than that, and there are a whole bunch of scenarios where starvation-induced autophagy would be unhelpful.

The conclusion of the study is essentially, "Now we need to follow up on this, see if can identify mechanisms of mitochondrial dysfunction in people with Long Covid, and that should help accelerate the development of therapies." You're trying to skip past that all the way to what that therapy would "absolutely" be. That's not how that works.

Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2016 was awarded to Yoshinori Ohsumi "for his discoveries of mechanisms for autophagy"

www.nobelprize.org

in 2016 Yoshinori Ohsumi won a Nobel Prize for his research which showed the role that autophagy plays in cellular repair (including damaged mitochondria) and fasting drastically increases autophagy while the traditional 3 meals and snacks prevents autophagy

No, snacks don't prevent autophagy! Autophagy occurs at a basal level. Eating would typically limit starvation-induced autophagy - because of course it would - but that's neither the only form of autophagy nor the only way that it's induced. Mitochondrial dysfunction itself may be responsible for induction of autophagy. Viruses can also induce mitophagy. Including Sars-CoV-2, for a recent example: e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-021-00807-4.

You claim to follow science....well this is science

No. Taking a pilot study, misrepresenting its findings, and combining that with a very oversimplified understanding of autophagy in order to reach a wild conclusion is not science.

We know fasting may be harmful, and we know it may exacerbate some conditions and diseases. We also know, as I've said, that it may be effective for some things, for some individuals, depending on their circumstances. That's not a contentious position.

So I just don't understand the drive to argue with that and start being evangelical about it. In much the same way I didn't understand people (not necessarily you @Dago) rushing to push hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for Covid-19 treatment.

I mean, it'd be great if there was a magic bullet, but we can't just will one into existence by insisting that it exists, regardless of evidence.

 

[Dago]

OK, so first, the research is a pilot study, that hasn't shown that Long Covid is caused by damaged mitochondria. It's found data suggestive of metabolic reprogramming and mitochondrial dysfunction, which is not the same thing, because there are different mechanisms which can cause that. Additionally, it's based on a small cohort size, lacks contemporaneous control, may not be generalizable, and should be treated as a hypothesis.

Second, even if we put that aside, it would still be a wild jump to conclude that 'fasting would absolutely be beneficial'. I'm getting the impression you think that stavation-induced autophagy is like a magic wand that you just wave and it fixes any problem with mitochondrial dysfunction. That's not how that works. I'm by no means an expert in this area, but I know enough to know it's a lot more complicated than that, and there are a whole bunch of scenarios where starvation-induced autophagy would be unhelpful.

The conclusion of the study is essentially, "Now we need to follow up on this, see if can identify mechanisms of mitochondrial dysfunction in people with Long Covid, and that should help accelerate the development of therapies." You're trying to skip past that all the way to what that therapy would "absolutely" be. That's not how that works.


No, snacks don't prevent autophagy! Autophagy occurs at a basal level. Eating would typically limit starvation-induced autophagy - because of course it would - but that's neither the only form of autophagy nor the only way that it's induced. Mitochondrial dysfunction itself may be responsible for induction of autophagy. Viruses can also induce mitophagy. Including Sars-CoV-2, for a recent example: e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41423-021-00807-4.


No. Taking a pilot study, misrepresenting its findings, and combining that with a very oversimplified understanding of autophagy in order to reach a wild conclusion is not science.

We know fasting may be harmful, and we know it may exacerbate some conditions and diseases. We also know, as I've said, that it may be effective for some things, for some individuals, depending on their circumstances. That's not a contentious position.

So I just don't understand the drive to argue with that and start being evangelical about it. In much the same way I didn't understand people (not necessarily you @Dago) rushing to push hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for Covid-19 treatment.

I mean, it'd be great if there was a magic bullet, but we can't just will one into existence by insisting that it exists, regardless of evidence.

Actually I put the caveat in saying IF the study is correct already

Furthermore, as I stated, hormonal changes in response to the body breaking down nutrients stalls autophagy.

Before I say this, let me once again reiterate that I am am vaxxed and boostered.

People in here who are questioning the science behind fasting and autophagy had no problem accepting the vaccines at face value.

There was far more evidence of the results of fasting and autophagy than there was on the effectiveness and side effects of the vaccines and yet anybody who questions the vaccines gets bashed.

There is a huge double standard there