My niece, a nurse, 30s: "I was just getting more and more tired, and I was getting really short of breath, and needed to sit down loads, so I saw my GP who told me it looked like one of my lungs had collapsed."
Me: "And...?"
Her: "Yes, so I had a scan and an x-ray, and there's fluid round that lung. It could have been like that for a whole year, gradually getting worse"
My brother-in-law: "I don't know why you're so concerned about catching it. I had Covid, Flu, and Pneumonia last year, and covid was nothing compared to the other two."
Me: "Which did you get first?"
Him: "Covid"
Me: "So when did you get them?"
Him: "I had Covid first in October, then I had pneumonia in November, then Flu in December"
Me: "You had Covid in October, then pneumonia in November? You were well on 20th October."
I had heard of several more serious DKA episodes leading to hospitalisation, disability, and death since I last wrote about it in May, then this last week, I heard of two more.
Let me tell you about one of them.
This is a very miserable thread, so stop reading now if you need to.
Two weeks ago, a 49 year old dad of three set out with his wife and kids to spend a fortnight in the mountains.
Look.
They know that covid infections are still causing death, damage, and disability, but they're still gambling on it *going away* once everyone's been infected enough times.
Can't you see how dangerous that gamble is if each infection is harmful to your long term health?
And how especially dangerous it is if the gamble is pointless, because it's not going to work to make covid 'go away', and because the damage is actually cumulative.
And meanwhile there's a generation of young kids growing up here who are suffering developmental delays due to the damaging infections they're getting more than once a year.
I've been trying to write a thread on a huge huge huge problem, but like many of my threads, it has become messy and complicated.
But here goes anyway.
You've heard of the theory of evolution, and natural selection.
Right?
And you've heard of selective breeding too?
Where you manipulate a species by selecting for a certain trait. Like crop yield, or size, or disease resistance, or aggression?
It's how you end up with things like XL Bullies. Dogs that are selectively bred to be both insanely strong and insanely aggressive.