Guys. We're at over 1 million cases. Corona-chan isn't slowing down. She keeps infecting people.
COVID-19 has turned the streets of Guayaquil, in Ecuador, into scenes from medieval plague paintings. They're literally leaving the bodies where they fall.
I don't know how many times I have to say it before it sinks in, but this is not flu with pneumonia.
COVID-19 is Super-SARS.
It can infect the lungs and cause ARDS and permanent pulmonary fibrosis and loss of lung function, leading to chronic fatigue and shortness of breath. It permanently scars the alveoli and reduces the capacity of the lungs by as much as twenty to thirty percent.
It causes myocarditis and pericarditis and causes the heart muscle to actually dissolve into your bloodstream. It precipitates excessive clotting which can lead to myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism, or stroke. Platelets are used up by what appears to be Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation. There is so much junk from the sepsis, everything begins to clot, and then one of those clots kills you. A lot of the people dying in the ICU are dying of cardiomyopathy and myocardial infarctions, not pneumonia.
It can cause viral hepatitis, indicated by abnormal AST/ALT and elevated ferritin. The heart muscle tissue breakdown and possible renal tubular damage can lead to AKI, or Acute Kidney Injury, requiring dialysis to treat.
Its cellular entry mechanism lures your own immune system into an extreme host response, precipitating cytokine release syndrome, a.k.a. "Cytokine Storm". This destroys otherwise-healthy functional tissues of the vital organs.
It causes bacterial co-infections and viral sepsis leading to multiple organ failure and the aforementioned excess clotting.
It can cause hypokalemia, low lymphocytes, low platelets, and low white blood cell counts.
It can induce male infertility and damage to the seminiferous ducts, indicated by abnormal testosterone and luteinizing hormone levels.
Last, but not least, COVID-19 infections can lead to medullary damage that causes dysautonomia, loss of automatic breathing, and perhaps even collapses and seizures with abnormal posturing (decerebrate/decorticate posturing) and the fencing response.
As a matter of fact, I discussed all this with a PhD neuroscientist, and you know what he had to say? The spitting and brawling and aggressive behavior that people have displayed with this virus may be a direct consequence of its neurotropic effects. In other words, all those videos of Chinese people spitting on elevator buttons and produce at the grocery store? They can't help it. This virus makes you basically rabid.
I don't care I was doxxed. I don't care I was banned from all my favorite forums. I don't give one solitary fuck about any of that shit. That's unimportant. It's very, very low on my list of priorities, right now.
If you don't pay attention to what's happening here, if you keep dismissing all of this as "doomposting", then guess what? We are all fucked. If this virus doesn't get us, then we're in for a decade-long recession and quite possibly widespread armed conflict.
