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What Stress Does to Your Heart – Plus Some COVID-19 Catch-Up

By Michael Jorrin, "Doc Gumshoe", February 9, 2022

What put me on to this scary topic was an excellent piece by Jane Brody in Science Times on January 4th. Jane Brody’s weekly column “Personal Health” appears on the inside back page of Science Times every week. (For the non-NYTimes subscribers, Science Times is a section of the Times published every Tuesday.) Jane writes about scientific findings and how they affect people. Her perspective is that of a person who definitely understands the science and wants to express what that might mean to the rest of us. Doc Gumshoe has much the same motivation.

That mental stress has physical consequences is not news. It has been generally assumed that stress is not good for us. However, most of us have been quite vague about the particular ways that stress is harmful, and the specifics of the harm. Jane Brody in her column says that she regrets not telling her father to avoid stress after his near-fatal heart attack. He had been warned to avoid lifting heavy weights. But Jane wishes he had been cautioned about emotional stress, such as over-reacting to frustration when the driver ahead of him was going too slowly in a no-passing zone.

Which reminds me of my own experience many years ago. I was driving up a very long steep hill on Route 22 in New York, and I noticed that the driver behind me was hot on my tail, dodging left and right, hoping to find a quick opportunity to zip by me. Naturally, I stayed in the middle of my lane and kept on at the same pace. At the top of the hill I pulled in to a gas station. The other car pulled in right behind me, and as I was getting out of my ancient VW, the driver stormed up to me and yelled at me about sightseeing while other people had places to get to in a hurry.

I turned to him and said, leisurely, “Calm down, buddy. You’ll have a stroke.” The guy looked stunned. He nodded his head and went back to his own car without another word.

What I thought then was that it was entirely possible that he had already experienced some kind of adverse event as a consequence of an uncontrolled emotional outburst. Actually, it would take a good deal more than an outburst of temper to trigger a stroke. Strokes are caused by interruptions of blood flow to the brain, usually because a blood clot has lodged in an artery in the brain. However, mental stress does have immediate physiological consequences. It’s immediately obvious that the heart beats faster, and it’s easily observed that blood pressure increases. Many more subtle effects have been detected, including constriction and inflammation of the arteries, which can cause blood clotting, insulin resistance, and also an increase in body fat.

Studying stress as a risk factor

The kind of stress resulting from uncontrolled anger was identified as a risk factor for cardiovascular disease in the INTERHEART Study, which took place from 1999 to 2003. The study identified nine cardiac risk factors which they had determined were “modifiable”, meaning that it was possible to avoid or lessen the effect of each of these risk factors. These nine risk factors were smoking, lipids, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, diet, physical activity, alcohol consumption, and what they termed “psychosocial stress.” The study was very wide-ranging and comprehensive, taking place in 262 sites in 52 countries and involving 29,972 participants.

Calling these risk factors “modifiable” has a range of implications. At one end, a person can quit smoking and stay off the hooch. But hypertension and diabetes cannot be avoided by a simple exercise of will. These risk factors have to be treated in order to be modified, and many, many people have hypertension and diabetes for years before being diagnosed. “Modifiable” means that the risk factors are not the result of anatomy or genetics.

Even though the INTERHEART study was initiated more than 20 years ago, it was not until August of 2020 that a detailed examination of the association between psychosocial stress and cardiovascular disease was published. (Osborne MT. “Disentangling the Links Between Psychosocial Stress and Cardiovascular Disease,” Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging,” 2020;13:e010931).

That study leads off by citing instances where acute stress led to markedly increased short-term CVD risk. One example was the Northridge earthquake, in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles. That event was linked with a near quadrupling of sudden cardiac death on the day it occurred. And then, in the week following the earthquake, the incidence of cardiac death was unusually low. The implication is that the stress of the earthquake triggered those deaths in individuals with pre-existing cardiac risks.

Another example was the pattern of cardiac deaths that occurred in Germany during the 2006 Football World Cup. On days that the German team played, local cases of acute coronary syndrome increased 2.7 times, and on days when Germany was playing in close games or elimination contests, that rate increased by a factor of 6. In contrast, there was no increase in the rate of acute coronary syndrome on days when the German team did not play.

And a recent Scandinavian study reported that in the week after the death of a child, the parent’s risk of a heart attack tripled.

Those are examples of acute stress and probably outside the territory of usual psychosocial stress. It’s beyond me why having the home team involved in “crucial” soccer matches should constitute significant stress. I guess the take-away is that our bodies don’t question what kind of stress it is – if we experience something as stress, our physiology doesn’t question whether or not we should perceive that something as stress. What these examples do is confirm the relationship between stress and CVD.

Other types of stress


It should be no surprise that a great many people are under nearly constant stress because of how and where they live. In New York City, many people live in apartments that directly face onto the elevated tracks where the subway rushes by every few minutes, emitting huge noises that walls and windows do not keep out. Chronic environmental noise exposure is strongly linked with heightened systemic inflammation, oxidative stress, and risk for CVD and metabolic disease. People living in neighborhoods with lower socioeconomic status – higher crime rate and/or lower income – tend to have higher rates of CVD and other chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes. But some individuals living under conditions of chronic environmental stress do not experience higher rates of CVD events. These could be said to be neurobiologically resilient. Of particular interest, when some of these resilient individuals are examined, they reveal lower levels of activity in the amygdala, which is the brain center that processes any signs of stress. Some knowledgeable people call the amygdala the brain’s “fear center.” Perceptions that threaten us in any way are identified by the amygdala, which alerts us to the threat.

Stress and our brain

The amygdala responds by sending messages to other parts of the body to prepare us for the possible necessity of either engaging in combat with whatever it is that is causing the stress, or escaping from the potential aggressor – the so-called “fight or flight” response.

Some of the immediate physiologic effects of that response are increases in heart rate and blood pressure, and constriction of the arteries. All of these could be said to prepare us for combat. But also, the fight or flight response sends signals that lead to the accumulation of body fat, perhaps in anticipation of future need for stored sources of energy.

One of the main effects of stress is that the amygdala directs a switch from the parasympathetic nervous system to the sympathetic nervous system. These parallel nervous systems alternate their control over many of our physiologic functions. The parasympathetic nervous system is in control mostly when we are sleeping or at rest. Heart and breathing rates slow, muscles are relaxed, the digestive system is active; we are primed neither for fight nor for flight. The parasympathetic nervous system operates through a set of nerves distinct from those that the sympathetic nervous system employs.

The sympathetic nervous system (SNS) is the one that controls what we do consciously. When your doctor tells you to take a deep breath and hold it, it’s the SNS that sends the signals to your lungs and muscles. Then, when the doctor says to breathe normally, it usually takes a few moments for the SNS to let go and let the parasympathetic nervous system take over.

At the same time that the amygdala, in response to stress, tells the SNS to take command, it also triggers the activity of several glands including the pituitary and adrenal glands. One of the many effects is the release of glucocorticoids, which lead to increased fatty tissue, insulin resistance, and hypertension.

Another effect of SNS stimulation is the release of epinephrine and norepinephrine, which add to the general effects of the SNS in increasing arterial constriction and peripheral vascular resistance.

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Stress also has effects on the immune system, causing the release of inflammatory cells and macrophages, which are white blood cells that attack and consume bacteria. However, this stress-induced immune reaction and cytokine production also potentiates atherosclerosis. The glucocorticoids, whose release is triggered by stress, tend to suppress antiviral gene programs such as interferon factors. Thus, stress increases the risk of becoming infected with viruses.

The effects of stress on hormonal activity and inflammation also increases blood coagulation, which, together with the other avenues through which stress produces atherosclerosis, further raises the odds of an acute coronary event.

Measuring stress

There are basically two general approaches to measuring stress. One way is essentially to ask the subject whether he/she is experiencing stress, to what degree, and in what form. This is mostly done by using tools called “psychometric questionnaires,” such as the Perceived Stress Scale-10 and the Perceived Stress Questionnaire. The utility of these is limited, since they only measure a person’s perceived emotional response to stress, which may diverge from the neurologic and physical manifestations of stress.

There are several methods of capturing the physiological impacts of stress. Measuring heart rate variability and skin conductance response can reveal the variability of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activity. Blood, urine, hormone, hair, or saliva can yield measures of sympathetic nervous system activity affecting the pituitary and adrenal glands.

Advanced neuroimaging techniques, including positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can instantaneously measure the neural response to rapidly-changing stimuli. PET-computed tomography can measure metabolic activity in various body tissues including the brain. Uptake of one particular molecule, F-fluorodeoxyglucose, is associated with anxious temperament in adults and predicts future anxiety in juveniles. Activity in the amygdala, which we identified as the brain center that processes stress signals, predicts subsequent cardiac diseases and events.

These neuroimaging studies have demonstrated strong associations between stress, as measured by those studies, and cardiovascular disease. In an fMRI study in 36 individuals, heightened activation in the amygdala and connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex was shown to be strongly linked with atherosclerosis. The anterior cingulate cortex is a part of the brain where several cognitive functions take place, such as empathy, impulse control, emotion, and decision-making. In another study in 293 individuals with no prior CVD, activity in the amygdala was robustly linked with subsequent CVD events.

A clinical trial that induced stress in patients with coronary heart disease

This was an analysis of two prospective cohort studies in patients with existing stable coronary heart disease, recently published in JAMA (Vaccarino V, “Association of Mental Stress-Induced Myocardial Ischemia with Cardiovascular Events in Patients with Coronary Heart Disease.” JAMA 2021;326(18):1818-1828). One group, consisting of 618 subjects, participated in the Mental Stress Ischemia Prognosis Study (MIPS), which provoked a degree of stress and also myocardial ischemia by having participants engage in a public speaking task. (Myocardial ischemia occurs when blood flow to the heart is blocked or reduced, depriving the heart of the oxygen it needs to keep pumping.) A second group, 300 subjects, was enrolled in the Myocardial Infarction and Mental Stress Study 2 (MIMS2). Stress levels in all study subjects were assessed using neuroimaging techniques. Participants in the two studies were enrolled between June 2011 and March 2016, and the last follow-up was in February 2020.

The primary end-point of the trial was a composite of cardiovascular death or first or recurrent nonfatal myocardial infarction. A secondary end-point included hospitalizations for heart failure. Of the 918 subjects, 147 (16%) experienced mental stress-induced ischemia and 281 (31%) experienced conventional (i.e., due to an external cause) stress ischemia. Among subjects with mental stress, the pooled event rate – i.e., a composite of both end-points – was 6.9 per 100 patient-years, while in subjects without mental stress, that event rate was 2.6 per 100 patient-years. Subjects who experienced both mental stress-induced ischemia and conventional stress-induced ischemia had a significantly elevated risk of experiencing any one of the studies end-points, 8.1 per 100 patient-years, while the event rate in subjects who did not experience stress-related ischemia was 2.3 per 100 patient-years. Subjects who experienced only conventional stress ischemia did not have a significantly increased event rate, 3.1 per 100 patient-years.

It should be pointed out that the degree of stress in this trial was quite mild, compared with the death of a child or being in the midst of an earthquake – or, for that matter, financial or physical insecurity. It is also a near-certainty that in the several years that the subjects were involved in the study they experienced other forms of stress. However, the differences in the cardiac outcomes between the cohorts grouped as to the type and level of stress they experienced in the study confirm the conclusion that stress contributes to cardiovascular disease.

So, if stress does cause cardiovascular ills, what can be done about it?

Next steps

Dr Michael Osborne, one of the authors of the Circulation study cited above, is involved in a stress-reducing program called SMART-3RP (Stress Reduction and Resiliency Training – Relaxation Response Resiliency Program). The program will use techniques such as mindfulness-based stress reduction, yoga, and transcendental meditation, as well as stress-reducing practices such as physical exercise and good sleep habits.

The stress researchers have thus far abstained from recommending any pharmaceuticals as a means of reducing stress, although antidepressants have been mentioned by some. Speaking for myself, I would be highly surprised if, now that the relationship between stress and heart disease has been brought before the public eye, pharmaceutical companies did not put forward some of their own products as a means to minimize stress and thereby reduce the odds of experiencing a serious cardiac event. It may take a few years, but it’s coming.

I haven’t mentioned it up to this point, but we can be fairly certain that a major cause of stress at this time is the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Some people definitely experience stress when, in a public place, an unmasked person gets too close. And the daily barrage of news about the pandemic is not exactly relaxing, even if some of the news is relatively positive.

Doc Gumshoe has stayed away from the COVID story for the last while, but a bit of catch-up is probably needed.

Covid-19 Catch-Up

Here’s the overall picture as of Monday, February 7th. The unofficial US COVID toll is 76,513,221 cases and 902,650 deaths. The current 14-day average for new cases is 431,000, and for deaths it is 2,415. It’s generally admitted that those numbers are undercounts – with regard to cases, probably a huge undercount. As regards deaths, another unofficial figure is that, in the past couple of years, there have been upward of one million so-called “excess deaths,” meaning deaths in excess of the annual averages. So, in all probability, the number of COVID-19 deaths in the US is higher than the 902,650 recorded at this date. Some experts have put the likely number of fatalities to be well over one million.

Looking at the case numbers, the pandemic appears to have peaked in mid-January, at least in parts of the US. The daily death counts have stayed relatively level; they do not seem to be on a downward trajectory at this time. But, at least for those of us who are vaccinated and boosted, a closer look at the death counts provides encouraging news.

Weekly average deaths per 100,000 population

Unvaccinated: 7.8 deaths per 100,000 – 78 deaths per million
Vaccinated: 0.6 deaths per 100,000 – 6 deaths per million
Vaccinated & boosted: 0.1 deaths per 100,000 – 1 death per million

These are CDC figures from November 2021, but I see no indication that they have changed much in the past month or so.

Globally, the picture is not that encouraging. According to the John Hopkins dashboard, as of February 1, there have been 5,680,118 deaths. However, this is certainly a major undercount. Over 100 nations on our planet do not record any reliable statistics on the number of deaths that have taken place in their countries, or on how many deaths normally occur in a year, so there is no accurate basis for comparing actual annual deaths with expected deaths. The Economist, a publication in the UK, did a careful estimate of the COVID-19 toll, based on the best data available from a huge range of sources, and came up with a range of the total death toll at this time – between 12 and 22 million deaths.

Sondre Ulvund Solstad, a data scientist who leads The Economist’s modeling work, said “The only fair thing to present at this point is a very wide range. But as more data comes in, we are able to narrow it.”

Here’s what the COVID-19 death toll looks like (per The Economist’s estimate) compared with the previous flu epidemics:

The assumption that excess mortality is entirely due to COVID-19 is questionable. Or perhaps we should say that some deaths from other causes or diseases might ultimately be due to COVID – for example, deaths in persons who could not get treatment for an emergency because hospitals were swamped with COVID patients, or deaths in persons who did not keep doctor’s appointments because they did not want to risk visiting the doctor’s office. It is also the case that the crime rate, including the murder rate, has gone up since the pandemic started. And traffic deaths are the highest in the past 15 years. So perhaps in a broad sense, we can attribute overall excess mortality to the worst pandemic in a century.

The Omicron variant

By now, everyone knows that Omicron is more transmissible than the SARS-CoV-2 strains that caused all those COVID-19 cases prior to November of 2021. And we know that the experts believe, or at least optimistically speculate, that Omicron causes significantly less severe disease in most people. We know this, because while currently Omicron is the cause of about 95% of tested cases in the US, neither hospitalization nor death rates have increased nearly at the same rate as new cases. Is this merely because hospitalization and death rates lag behind initial infection rates? That might be so if the steep rise in new case rates had begun a couple of weeks ago – we might not yet be seeing the resulting steep increase in hospitalizations, intubations, and death. But the steep rise started about six weeks ago, so if Omicron was as deadly as Delta, we’d be seeing signs of that.

A principal reason that Omicron may cause much less severe disease than previous coronavirus variants is that the virus seems mostly to infect the throat and the nasal passages, and does not travel to the lungs, which is where the most severe COVID pathology takes place. This is especially the case among the vaccinated.

Omicron, as some of us may have heard, is not a single variant. There are at least two sub-variants, thus far. The one that was spotted first has been labeled BA.1. A sibling virus, named BA.2, had been detected, but at first it wasn’t causing much trouble.

However, at this time there is evidence that BA.2 is even more transmissible than BA.1. It has now become the dominant variant in India and Denmark, and it’s picking up momentum in several countries, from South Africa to the Philippines to Sweden. The UK has predicted that BA.2 would become the dominant strain there this early 
Spring. US prevalence is very small, but it seems to be on the rise.

So far, nobody has any notion of whether the people who have recovered from BA.1 will have immunity from BA.2. The general expectation is that after vaccination plus exposure to the coronavirus, subsequent infections (if and when they occur) are increasingly likely to be mild. There is always the possibility of the virus evolving to become more virulent (meaning likely to cause more severe disease), but as I have tried to explain in these pages, a more virulent virus is much less likely to spread, because once symptoms emerge, substantial precautions are quickly adopted. Transmissibility goes hand in hand with asymptomatic infection.

A few brief bulletins

Pfizer and BioNTech are about to launch a clinical trial to evaluate a specific vaccine for the Omicron variant. However, a recent study found that antibodies that can prevent infection from Omicron persist for about four months after the booster shot of the original Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

The central importance of cellular immunity, carried out by T-cells, was emphasized by Professor Galit Alter, who heads the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness. She stressed that once they identify cells as being infected, they eliminate them in a targeted way to curb disease. She said, “These mechanisms are shown to be critically important against many, many different viruses, including influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, as well as many bacterial infections, and they are critical for eliminating tumors. The T-cell response has not gotten quite as much attention as antibodies, but it is clearly induced by many of these vaccines, and likely to be a key mechanism by which we still continue to respond to the virus.” Even when the vaccines fail to prevent infection, the T-cell responses help clear the infection before it can cause disease.

Finally, the January 29th issue of Lancet published an article entitled “COVID Will Continue but the End of the Pandemic Is Near.” (Lancet 2022 01/29/22 399;10323;417-419). The gist of the article is that the Omicron wave will reach every corner of planet earth, with the estimated global rate of infection at about 125 million cases per day. The unprecedented level of infection suggests that more than 50% of the world will have been infected with Omicron by the end of March, 2022. The article describes the spreading infection and, at the same time, decreasing severity of illness, pointing to examples such as Greece, Canada, and South Africa, where only a very small percentage of infected persons require hospitalization.

The Lancet paper concludes with this:

“COVID-19 will become another recurrent disease that health systems and societies will have to manage. For example, the death toll from omicron seems to be similar in most countries to the level of a bad influenza season in northern hemisphere countries.

The era of extraordinary measures by government and societies to control SARS-CoV-2 transmission will be over. After the omicron wave, COVID-19 will return but the pandemic will not.”

I think they know what they’re talking about.

*****

The COVID pandemic has focused a lot of attention on vaccines, pro and con. And vaccine controversies have been around for quite a while. The rapid development and production of the highly effective COVID vaccines has been saluted as a major step in disease control, and not just the control of the coronavirus. The science has evolved to the point where effective vaccines against many other diseases are distinctly possible. Doc Gumshoe is going to take a look at the history of vaccines and speculation about their future. Meantime, comments and questions of every flavor are welcome. Best to all, Michael Jorrin (aka Doc Gumshoe)

[ed note: Michael Jorrin, who I dubbed “Doc Gumshoe” many years ago, is a longtime medical writer (not a doctor) and shares his commentary with Gumshoe readers a couple times a month. He does not generally write about the investment prospects of topics he covers, but has agreed to our trading restrictions.  Past Doc Gumshoe columns are available here.]

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ironmac
Irregular
ironmac
February 9, 2022 3:13 am

Silver lining to this pandemic, much like war, is that the medical field advanced and will help us in the future.

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calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 8:54 pm
Reply to  ironmac

For example I read that the technique(s) is being used in research & development for HIV.

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jbondo
jbondo
February 9, 2022 8:05 am

I tested positive with a home test on January 14. My wife tested negative on the same day with a PCR test, but came down with symptoms that evening. Our symptoms were very mild, with sniffles, muscle aches, and a slight cough. We quarantined for ten days. If this had been a normal time, we would have continued to go to work. I now consider Omicron to be “God’s vaccine”.

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calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 8:56 pm
Reply to  jbondo

You didn’t mention if you are vaccinated & boosted.

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new_key_God
Member
new_key_God
February 9, 2022 9:22 am

Don’t stir anything, don’t do it, but let the think remain:

What if?
_______

Something much bigger afoot today.

Is it possibly really surface area, not breath – the major contagion, worry?

Well, but your government stepped in anyway:

“My fellow countrymen, today we announce, going indefinitely into forward time, that your own personal breath of life now – put your masks on – is become the breath of death.”

btw, Had you read that Covid can live comfortably in the stomach for good lengths every time your ph drops because of eating?

And, able to survive that environ, THEREFORE EVERYWHERE ELSE IN THE BODY AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT AND BY THE NUMBERS.

In war, this kind of sluff and slouch can never do, that’s why we discern they very possibly never meant there really was one, therefore never declared one – just scaled back to look less obviously intrusive and invasive, while possibly the only real objective in town (ahem, under color of government or divinity, take your pick, what’s the diff to little people?), was and is going after their own for some fog of it – an usurpative-pursuing-objective, event.

Beware the quantum slither. Whoever does that – and of course your government might be better at it than some.

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Last edited 2 years ago by efrm73
bravobill
February 9, 2022 6:16 pm
Reply to  new_key_God

Misinformation, but it’s free speech.

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77_bear_model
Member
77_bear_model
February 10, 2022 8:58 am
Reply to  bravobill

Identify the fact asserted AS A FACT, and why it doesn’t hold up.

aldosov
February 9, 2022 11:06 am

What say you about masks and the vaxed…
Supposedly, fully vaxed people contract the Wuhan Virus every day. If they are asymptomatic, they are spreaders. If masks actually work, shouldn’t the vaxed as well as the unvaxed must wear masks everywhere and at all times?

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 9, 2022 11:42 am
Reply to  aldosov

Absolutely agree. I have been preaching this from the beginning. Kn95 masks are the ONLY known prevention treatment at the moment.

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its mine
its mine
February 10, 2022 12:37 am
Reply to  hedy1234

No sorry Masks DO NOT WORK
The Covid virus is 1/5000th the size of the holes in your masks cloth.
SCIENCE !!!

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 10, 2022 9:42 am
Reply to  its mine

Sorry. Not correct. 5 microns can be filtered with a proper mask. Kn95 for example. See article.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-n-95-filters-not-too-large-stop-covid-19-particles/5343537002/

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mattremote
February 11, 2022 10:04 am
Reply to  hedy1234

I have been a strong advocate of vaccines and masks all along. But I am becoming increasingly impatient with masks.

Here’s why: CDC data from November and December (January data is not out yet in a form I can access) indicates that the COVID19 death rate among fully vaccinated and boosted people is 1/1,000,000 (yes, one in one-million). That is WAY less than death rate for flu in an average year. The death rate for the unvaccinated population is 78 times higher than among the vaccinated and boosted. This is the same data quoted by “Doc” above but I believe that it is for a two-month period (Nov-Dec ’21).

My family is fully vaccinated and adults are boosted. Why am I still wearing a mask? Why are my sons wearing masks to school? Who are we protecting? It is not to protect us. It is not to protect other vaccinated and boosted people. So, I guess that we are masking to protect those too chuckle-headed to get vaccinated. If that’s the case then I am beyond impatient.

Leaving aside the basic truth that rights come with responsibilities to the common good, I am beginning to think that we ought to let the anti-vaccination/anti-mask folks go their own way. It is they who should be wearing masks, to protect themselves and those they care about. If they choose to forego vaccination and also choose not to wear a mask then the risk to me remains almost nil. They are welcome to bear their own risks. After all, this comports 100% with the motto of individual responsibility preached by so many of the anti-vaccination/anti-mask crowd. Let them go unprotected and stop making me protect them too.

Yet this remains a little troubling to me, beyond some worries about hospital overcrowding and better proof that a four-shot regime protects the immune fragile. I find it uncomfortable to align with folks I think are dingbats. So if you can convince me that I should continue to bear the brunt of precautions for those who won’t protect themselves then please do so!

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 11, 2022 1:47 pm
Reply to  mattremote

You wear the Kn 95 masks because they do filter out 500 micron particles. Thus there is some protection for you.

You also wear them if you wish to protect anyone you are near to since you could be asymptomatic at any time.

Why not reduce the risk if you can? No guarantees of course but you use a seat belt don’t you just in case.

And is it really that big an ask?? Just my opinion.

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mattremote
February 11, 2022 2:38 pm
Reply to  hedy1234

Hi Hedy 1234:

I do not disagree about the efficacy of high-quality masks. I am aware that when N95s are worn properly they are very effective at filtering droplets and particular matter.

But fully vaccinated/boosted folks (especially those who have also already had the O variant) do not generate large viral loads or shed much virus – certainly not enough to put other vaccinated and boosted person at risk. We are similarly not at risk of severe disease. In fact, the risk of severe disease from Flu is greater than that from COVID19 if one is fully vaccinated/boosted. So, I am not really at risk nor am I a risk to my vaccinated/boosted neighbors. Same for my kids.

The only folks at risk are those who refuse to take the vaccines. If they also refuse to wear masks or have their kids wear masks then are they not choosing to bear the risk? For adults, masks are more than a distraction but less than a handicap, though it would reduce misunderstanding if people could see my face when I communicate. So, agreed. Not such a huge big deal.

But for kids in school. . . I understand that masks reduce comprehension, learning and socialization in school. That is significant price to pay, a price that grows in relative cost given that kids often do not properly wear their masks and especially because mask requirements are usually met with far less-useful cloth masks instead of N-95s. Why are my kids paying that educational price in order to protect the children of families that refuse to protect themselves?

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 11, 2022 5:16 pm
Reply to  mattremote

Mattresses

Since a significant portion of the population that are vaxed and boosted have not had Covid, that is a good reason to wear masks.

Since the vast majority of all folks under 14 are also not fully vaxxed that is another reason.

Since teachers are exposed to these groups, that is another reason

I personally believe the reduced comprehension of students caused by masking is not a proven, scientific fact. Kids adjust. It’s the parents that object.

mattremote
February 12, 2022 10:05 am
Reply to  hedy1234

Sigh. . .

I understand all your points. The first three are factual. The fourth is unclear, as you write. But socialization is one of the goals of education in little kids, a goal that has increased importance in an era of increased focus on technologies that tend to isolate. So I come down on the other side – a legitimate disagreement that will be the source of decades of study, debate and political hijacking.

But the facts we agree upon only beg the question: Why am I and my family bearing the cost of protecting people who will not protect themselves? Again, recent stats demonstrate that vaccinated and boosted teachers and vaccinated students are now subject to COVID19 risks far lower than those imposed by normal annual flu. I’m not talking about pre-school where there is no available vaccine. It is the unvaccinated who are at risk and in all but a tiny minority that is a choice they make for themselves and their families.

In my view the folks who refuse to get the shot are invoking rights but ignoring responsibility, even though they preach reliance on individual responsibility. They are, in effect, making choices for me. And I’m really beginning to resent it.

But I also have much personal experience of countries where individual interests are exalted far above the common good. So I will follow the rules – but I won’t like it in this case. And I won’t stop calling out the hypocrisy of those who impose their choices on me in the service of their so-called personal freedoms.

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 12, 2022 2:25 pm
Reply to  mattremote

Why did you need to “sigh” when we agree on the facts.

I don’t disagree with your frustration at those folks but many of them are being weeded out.

If masks can lower your and your family odds of contracting it why not wear them just for the selfishness factor? You just never know if someone has hidden issues.

calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 9:05 pm
Reply to  hedy1234

YES. Kids can HEAR, they can SEE. Masks just make speaking slightly different. As adults for example when we order coffee we know we have to speak up because we’re wearing one. It is not a big deal.

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Jen Dahme
Member
Jen Dahme
March 4, 2022 6:13 pm
Reply to  calnativ

Your ignorance of human development is dangerous. Children need to SEE faces to learn how to speak, see faces to learn NON-verbal communication as their brain develops. Because if they miss it they will be socially and emotionally damaged for life which negatively effects society.

calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 9:25 pm
Reply to  mattremote

A DECENT cloth mask ( not the simple one layer ones ) are good enough IF they have side adjusters to tighten, and have a pocket that you put a filter in.

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hedy1234
hedy1234
February 9, 2022 11:38 am

Regarding the death numbers. You say that they may be large numbers of undercounted deaths.

However, there has been alot of claims of overcounting where Covid wads put as cause when the primary reason was a different issue.

Last edited 2 years ago by hedy1234
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Casey
Casey
February 9, 2022 12:43 pm

And conversely, my dad, who was in poor health for years and in a skilled nursing facility died just over a year ago with cause of death listed as “Covid” though he showed no symptoms of the virus but had simply been tested for it when he went into the hospital the day before.

The hospitals have a financial incentive to list Covid as cause of death over other causes, along with the modified CDC guidance that came out in 2020 which changed how cause of death should be factored when dealing with Covid specifically.

It would be great to see you tackle the question of how natural immunity factors into all of this, Michael. You consistently indicate those who don’t wear masks in public and especially anyone who may not have gotten the vaccine are putting everyone else at risk (do you believe they should be given consequences for such actions?); however, I’ve not seen you address how natural immunity from having already contracted the virus modifies your thinking…???

buffetsopposite
February 9, 2022 7:18 pm
Reply to  Casey

The CDC has already tackled this for you, but I’m sure you’ve done your own research.

Link: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7032e1.htm

And relevant summary paragraph: “Among Kentucky residents infected with SARS-CoV-2 in 2020, vaccination status of those reinfected during May–June 2021 was compared with that of residents who were not reinfected. In this case-control study, being unvaccinated was associated with 2.34 times the odds of reinfection compared with being fully vaccinated.”

Your second paragraph is, I suspect, rubbish, but you’d need to provide a few cites before I’ll go to anything more than a cursory fact check–which didn’t turn up anything to back up that contention from a reliable source.

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bravobill
February 11, 2022 3:19 pm
Reply to  Casey

(I was censored) So, how about this .. it’s all just a Masquerade Party. You’ll figure it out.

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righting_off_the_wall
Member
righting_off_the_wall
February 9, 2022 2:01 pm

Title: An Aspect of Stress:

Please deposit one million dollars to continue. Full writing will be posted subsequent. 429 words, 16 paragraphs.

Rest assured I needed 15 million, but am willing to show I earn it – a million at a time.

Thank you,

Last edited 2 years ago by efrm73
jazzman777
Member
jazzman777
February 9, 2022 6:10 pm

I lost my dog and I had such sever anxiety that it wasn’t until I started taking Paxil that I was able to get back to normal. It was so severe that I wanted to check out. I now do meditation and breathing exercises to help.

geoff
geoff
February 9, 2022 6:20 pm

Thanks for the article and reference. The guy in the car is a classic example of deadline thinking. Wanting life to fit his timetable and desires. A recipe for a stroke alright. #soiamthat

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calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 9:12 pm
Reply to  geoff

We who live in big cities see insane levels of that at times: fools rushing straight through an intersection by using the right hand turn lane for example.

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its mine
its mine
February 10, 2022 12:33 am

Hi Doc.
Please start your research at FLCCC.net for Everything your going to need.
Cordially
Gordon K.

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Covid Dilemma
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mattremote
February 10, 2022 2:41 pm
Reply to  its mine

Sure, go to FLCCC if you want to get hooked up with anti-parasitic meds prescribed by pseudo-scientists and conspiracy theorists, many of whom are accused felons. In humans, Ivermectin is used to treat roundworm and river-blindness. In that context, I ran into legitimate human uses of Ivermectin long ago when I was working in tropical places for a few years. River blindness is a terrifying disease and Ivermectin was (and still is) a scientific “miracle” in treatment of the parasites that cause the disease. Roundworm is highly unpleasant and it’s debilitating (and disgusting) but it does not usually significantly infect organs beyond the intestines unless the ill person is also immuno-suppressed. Such immunosuppression can occur with very strong steroids. In that case, roundworm will go everywhere including the lungs and the infected person will almost certainly die a horrible death.

No studies, not one, has shown that Ivermectin has any utility against COVID19 – with one possible exception. That is in the case of a serious COVID19 infection in a person who also has an infection with a parasite susceptible to ivermectin. This is because powerful steroids are used to treat the inflammatory reaction caused by COVID19, the so-called “Cytokine Storm.” The parasite takes advantage of the reduced immune response engendered by the steroids and spreads in an overwhelming invasion throughout the body (and especially the lungs) in a deadly hyperinfection.

That is the one and only circumstance when Ivermectin can have a positive effect on COVID19 outcomes. Unscrupulous scoundrels and charlatans parlay that single situation into an utterly incorrect and dangerous conclusion and sell it to the foolish or gullible. So, unless you have recently bathed in the Niger River or walked barefoot through rice paddies in SE Asia you have absolutely no need of Ivermectin. Get vaccinated.

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calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 9:14 pm
Reply to  mattremote

Now for example we read some fools are spraying in hydrogen perroxide to “prevent/cure” themselves.

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Kevin
Member
Kevin
February 13, 2022 9:55 am

Please stop calling science the Science.
I am happy to notice the media has realized that science changes, often, and sometimes rapidly. As demonstrated in the past two years, those in the media are quite shallow in the understanding of anything technical and therefore write their stories with the same level of low knowledge, assuming the readers are also of a low level of science education.

storm
February 13, 2022 5:18 pm

Just for the record, I am vaccinated and boosted. I object strenuously to the requirement to show “proof of vaccination.” I am always reminded of the WWII movies with the “Show me your papers” line. It appears to me that the whole thing is an effort to get the unwilling to get the shots. If those who are vaccinated can be infected and contagious, why is there discrimination in gatherings? The Canadian truckers have a point.

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calnativ
Member
calnativ
February 17, 2022 9:18 pm

Stress: prime example, the way Trump has abused his body ( including lack of exercise ), the huge stress he’s now experiencing puts him at risk. #TrumpEmpireIsCrashing

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Anita Kumar
Member
Anita Kumar
February 19, 2022 11:00 pm

Jorrin – I’m happy we have vaccines, but concerned about the nanoparticle delivery mechanism. I understand we can be naturally exposed to nanoparticles. Nevertheless, I’m still concerned the high surface area to volume ratio of nanoparticles can be so reactive it’s possible it can do unintended damage, even though it should be short-lived in the body. Thoughts?

borne0fan
borne0fan
February 24, 2022 9:18 pm

critical discrimination, Humans do poorly with constant stress, something they cannot rise above. Humans do well with a temporary crisis they can rise to meet.

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