#if you're sitting in these online echo chambers where everyone is telling you that long covid is aids and that you're fucked forever

[glutaminase]

Oh my god this kind of "covid is WORSE THAN HIV" alarmism is just as unscientific as the opposite end of the spectrum i'm sorry you cannot just read that a virus affects T cells and interpret that as "IT ACTS LIKE HIV". im not willing to accept some twitter rando's interpretation of scientific papers. I dont have the time or bandwidth to find and read every paper she's citing but just from looking at some of them:

first of all many of the papers in that first NYT articles had not been published or peer reviewed at the time of that article's publication lmfao so that's one thing

second of all simply saying [x] cell line is low in both HIV and covid = covid will have similar effects to HIV in terms of immunosuppression is bad science, and a complete misinterpretation of any of these papers. e.g. Yeah HIV and covid both cause lymphocytopenia...Ok so do about a million other things including other infections, autoimmune disease, cancer, even just being critically ill in the first place (which is the population many of these studies were looking at). so is it then useful to compare COVID to like, a lymphocytic leukemia because you can find lymphocytopenia in both of those? obviously not

also multiple papers she's citing that discuss the t-cell response in covid only looked at patients with SEVERE covid infections. which again is helpful in assessing the management of people with severe covid, but conclusions u draw from critically ill patients cant just be extrapolated to the general population

Ok so all that aside lets look at what some of these papers are actually saying about T-cells and covid.

The preprint that this person looked at and drew the conclusion that "Covid causes more T-cell death than HIV" looked at a grand total of 7 cases of severe covid. If there's any literature out there looking at the long-term t cell response in healthy individuals with non-severe cases of covid feel free to correct me though! but as it is, it's not useful to look at these populations and draw the conclusion that for the average person getting covid will have an HIV-like catastrophic effect on your immune system

MANY VIRUSES CAUSE TRANSIENT DECLINES IN T CELL COUNTS and T cell exhaustion in general can happen in situations of persistent antigen presence

The NIH article did find that people previously infected with covid had a weaker t cell response to vaccination. but i don't see the usefulness in reading this and making the leap to COVID IS LIKE HIV!!! because they both affect t-cells. this paper found a disproportionate response in CD8+ T cells in people with previous covid infections; HIV specifically infects CD4+ cells and essentially hijacks and destroys them, which is...very much not how covid works

none of these have examined the long-term changes in cell-mediated immunity in healthy people who had mild cases of covid. If there's a newer paper that does look at that though please correct me!

TLDR: "HIV and covid are comparable because they both affect the immune system" is a useless and alarmist comparison; many of this research was conducted on patients who were critically ill with severe covid, and critically ill pts have unique immune physiology that can't just be extrapolated to healthy people; any kind of critical illness, and many viruses in general, can cause immune derangements and/or transient T-cell exhaustion.

this is not to say that you shouldn't wear a mask or be cavalier about getting Covid, but this kind of junk science alarmism is not helpful

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