Tootfinder

Good article summarizing a lot of things relevant to continued COVID'19 caution:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/beyond-long-covid-1.7485888
Key points:
COVID'19 weakens the immune system:
"""
So it's not just about infecting you and causing respiratory illness and fever and all of the things that we usually get with the viral infection. This virus also specifically causes your immune system to become weaker.
"""
It damages blood vessels:
"""
In addition to SARS-CoV-2's ability to dysregulate the immune system and suppress the immune system, the spike protein itself is very damaging to blood vessel structures as well as red blood cells and platelets themselves.
"""
The folk idea that infections make our immune system stronger and stronger like a muscle just isn't true (or at least, doesn't apply to COVID'19 because of how, unlike most other viruses, it damages the immune system):
"""
For the longest time in the field of immunology, there was the sort of adage that your immune system needs to be tested every now and again to stay strong. That's an old-fashioned idea.
The more new-fashioned and evidence-based idea is that, although your immune system can take on [a COVID] infection, you want to avoid testing it as much as possible because your body is sustaining damage with each infection that it survives.
"""

A supercharged HIV vaccine could offer strong protection with just one injection, a study in mice has indicated.
Developed by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Scripps Research Center, the vaccine includes two "adjuvants"
—materials that help stimulate the immune system response.
In the experiments, the dual-adjuvant vaccine was found to produce a wider diversity of antibodies to protect against an HIV protein than with either s…

HIV: Supercharged Vaccine Could Protect Well With Just One Dose
The approach employed by the research team could be used against other diseases—including COVID-19 and influenza.

Antibody Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition: A Systems Hypothesis for the Transition from Acute Immune Response to Post-Infection Sequelae
Shi Qiru
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06413

Antibody Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition: A Systems Hypothesis for the Transition from Acute Immune Response to Post-Infection Sequelae
The mechanisms underlying the formation of post-infection sequelae are complex and remain controversial. This hypothesis integrates Bystryn's antibody feedback phenomenon and Imbiakha's immune cost theory, proposing for the first time a "Consumption-Driven Dynamic Competition of Antibody Clones" mechanism. This mechanism posits that the immune system may regulate the proliferation and differentiation of corresponding B cell clones by sensing and responding to the consumption rate of specific an…

"There was a recent 2024 study that showed us that individuals who survive an acute COVID-19 infection (...) on average will lose somewhere in the neighbourhood of two to six IQ points per infection."
"although your immune system can take on [a COVID] infection, you want to avoid testing it as much as possible because your body is sustaining damage with each infection that it survives."
Seriously, wear a mask 😷 .

Beyond long COVID — how reinfections could be causing silent long-term organ damage | CBC Radio
Scientific evidence is painting an unsettling picture: COVID infections, even if mild or asymptomatic, may be causing long-term cellular and organ damage, as well as increasing your risk of developing long COVID.

Infected Smallville: How Disease Threat Shapes Sociality in LLM Agents
Soyeon Choi, Kangwook Lee, Oliver Sng, Joshua M. Ackerman
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13783

Infected Smallville: How Disease Threat Shapes Sociality in LLM Agents
How does the threat of infectious disease influence sociality among generative agents? We used generative agent-based modeling (GABM), powered by large language models, to experimentally test hypotheses about the behavioral immune system. Across three simulation runs, generative agents who read news about an infectious disease outbreak showed significantly reduced social engagement compared to agents who received no such news, including lower attendance at a social gathering, fewer visits to th…

Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
Anil Madhavapeddy, Sam Reynolds, Alec P. Christie, David A. Coomes, Michael W. Dales, Patrick Ferris, Ryan Gibb, Hamed Haddadi, Sadiq Jaffer, Josh Millar, Cyrus Omar, William J. Sutherland, Jon Crowcroft
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06469

Steps towards an Ecology for the Internet
The Internet has grown from a humble set of protocols for end-to-end connectivity into a critical global system with no builtin "immune system". In the next decade the Internet will likely grow to a trillion nodes and need protection from threats ranging from floods of fake generative data to AI-driven malware. Unfortunately, growing centralisation has lead to the breakdown of mutualism across the network, with surveillance capitalism now the dominant business model. We take lessons from from b…

Biden's record on covid
Saw a comment along the lines of: "seems unfair to criticise Biden's record on covid, while the situation now under Trump is so much worse".
But I don't think of them as separate. Biden's government _contributed_ to how covid stands under Trump.
If Biden's lot had taken the opportunity to educate people (at least the ones open to considering science findings) that
- it's airborne like smoke
- an empty room can hold infectious virus
- air filters, UV and fresh air reduce the levels of it
- masks work better the better they fit
- you can be infectious without/before symptoms
- you're fairly likely still to be infectious for 10 days, a few people longer
- current vaccines don't stop you catching it or transmitting it
- it can mess with your immune system so you're more likely to catch other things
- vaccinated people can still get Long Covid
- it's not "mild", it's just that the damage is quiet
then even if they hadn't done anything more to address the problem, people would be in a far better position to deploy their own common sense.
And unlike funding or laws, that investment in _knowledge_ is something it would be difficult for Trump's lot to roll back.
But Biden & co chose instead to play down the risks, and explicitly or implicitly mislead people (e.g. the 5-day quarantine, which contradicts the real infectious period).
So, yes it's worse now, but they _contributed_ to how it is now. They chose to encourage misapprehensions and confusion, and the effects of that choice are still playing out now.
Not letting them off the hook on the grounds of being comparatively "less bad", when they themselves laid some of the foundations of the current state of play.
#covid #Biden #USPol #CovidIsntOver

Cancer model with moving extinction threshold reproduces real cancer data
Frank Bastian, Hassan Alkhayuon, Kieran Mulchrone, Micheal O'Riordain, Sebastian Wieczorek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05992

Cancer model with moving extinction threshold reproduces real cancer data
We propose a simple dynamic model of cancer development that captures carcinogenesis and subsequent cancer progression. A central idea of the model is to include the immune system as an extinction threshold, similar to the strong Allee effect in population biology. We first identify the limitations of commonly used Allee effect models in reproducing typical cancer progression. We then address these limitations by deriving a new model that incorporates: (i) random mutations of stem cells at a ra…