How the continuation of the COVID pandemic is masked

I think this is important for me to explain. Most people are under the impression that once everyone had some immunity from vaccination or infection and the Omicron variant emerged, SARS-COV-2 stopped being a problem for the general population’s health. This is a mistake however.

Throughout the pandemic, only a small minority of the population who became infected suffered health consequences severe enough to result in the need for hospitalization or death. The hospitalization rate can be estimated at around 6.86% of infections and the fatality rate at around 0.95%, during the first wave.

These numbers came down further later on, but important to note here is that you have a huge demographic of people, whose health is damaged from infection, without ever showing up in either the hospitalization statistics, or the death statistics. All that damage is generally referred to as “long COVID”.

You may expect that with fewer people getting hospitalized or dying from SARS-COV-2, this problem, of the milder damage suffered from infections that did not require hospitalization, has now gone down too. That’s not the case however. What has happened, is that we have mostly been successful at masking the continuation of the pandemic.

We now have Paxlovid, which seems to reduce risk of requiring hospitalization by around 65%, regardless of vaccination status. Paxlovid has been widely used, starting in 2022. By autumn 2022, 25% of detected infections among American adults resulted in people receiving Paxlovid. Rates of receiving Paxlovid are highest among older adults, at 30% above 65, which is also where most of the hospitalizations take place.

So when you take 30% of infections and reduce hospitalization risk by two thirds, you’re effectively reducing hospitalizations by 20%. It would be more than 20% of course, if you suspect it’s mainly severe infections that result in people taking Paxlovid.

Other treatments being used for the same purpose, of preventing hospitalization, include Molnupiravir (Lagevrio), monoclonal antibody treatments, as well Remdesivir. There is now even a pre-exposure prophylactic treatment, a monoclonal antibody that is being given to immunocompromised people, before they’re even exposed to the virus.

So when people get severely ill from exposure to the virus, we manage to prevent the need for hospitalization. This however, means that we’re effectively masking the problem in the statistics. Healthy young people will never receive any of these treatments, so they continue to suffer damage to their lungs, brains, cardiovascular system and other organs.

We see cognitive damage that continues at least for a year after experimentally infecting young adults. Those people don’t notice their brain damage themselves, but it does show up when you test their cognitive abilities. This problem just continues to accumulate, even if you somehow were to prevent 100% of hospitalizations and deaths, by giving all the infected elderly Paxlovid and monoclonal antibodies.

All these therapies, particularly the monoclonal antibody treatments, also ensure that the virus is going to continue producing all sorts of new variants that ensure further infections in the future. Paxlovid is now used so widely that genetic mutations linked to resistance against it are also showing up everywhere.

What they see is that a mutation called E166V first commonly emerges, to create Paxlovid resistance. This mutation deforms the protein it targets (3CL protease), so it then develops further compensatory mutations, such as L50F and T21I. In other words, you are again just increasing the genetic diversity of the swarm. The greater the genetic diversity of the swarm, the greater its intrinsic virulence.

Note how we don’t do any of this with any other viruses. We don’t send immunocompromsied people home with a prophylactic monoclonal antibody so they won’t catch Influenza or one of the four hCov viruses. We do all this stuff to make SARS-COV-2 manageable, but by making it manageable, we just make the long term outcome worse.

The effect of all of this is that you just end up with a whole population that’s chronically ill. You now have roughly twice as many children absent from school as before COVID. The reason for that is because they’re constantly getting sick. They’re constantly getting sick, because they’re surrounded by unhealthy adults, who receive vaccines and a cocktail of drugs to keep their SARS2 infection under control.