Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2 / COVID-19) and Tinnitus

In Russia they reckon they are going to start a mass vaccination campaign in October (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53621708). All seems a bit rushed to me just to say they were the first with a vaccine.

I doubt I am going to take the risk and will wait. Certainly not letting my kids anywhere near it.

 

COVID-19 might affect hearing too, a small study shows

Found this article buried in CNN this morning. Small snapshot of hearing related complications including tinnitus due to COVID-19 out of England. I believe a few folks pontificated about what it could mean for tinnitus research if COVID-19 was a possible causation.

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news...01-20-intl/h_52f02991238db2bae12a90885ec482e3

 

Okay, explain to me how this is nonsense. Disprove what they found (78 out of 100 people with something on their heart). These were also asymptomatic or mild cases included. Are you suggesting the researchers are making this up? There are other studies too showing swimmers with mild cases having issues appear on their lungs after covid. Just because you cannot "feel" these issues doesn't mean they don't exist.

Also, explain to me why my girlfriend's daughter doesn't have her full taste after three months. I'm waiting.

 

I am curious what these numbers would look like if they controlled for age. Older people are more likely to be hospitalized for COVID-19 and also be more prone to hearing loss. I am curious how many young people with severe COVID-19 symptoms developed hearing loss/tinnitus.

 

the post you're responding to makes a bunch of claims that are contrary to current scientific models, and contains no citations or anything, so I wouldn't be too worried about it. I hope your girlfriend's daughter recovers soon. Building functional mental models of this thing is hard. If the mortality for people 40-49 with COVID is in the realm of 1:250 - 1:500 as some studies would suggest, this makes it ~50-100x as deadly as the flu for that age bracket, but infection numbers mean most people in that age range may not (yet) know someone who's died of COVID. Adding to the complexity we have a a large number of articles about the disease science aspects of this being written by economists, which would be laughable if it wasn't so dangerous. (It's much harder to find bad economic takes written by disease scientists, I wonder why that is?)

C19 has a weird mortality curve with a fatter tail than influenza but weighted heavily towards people > 40, without the high mortality in the very young seen in the flu. Exposure to other coronaviruses might be part of this, but -- we really don't know, and we also don't know if we're raising a generation of kids that are going to have complications of one kind or another. At least one of the studies you've mentioned that found widespread cardiac issues included people as young as 18.

We'll know a lot more a couple years down the line and it's certainly possible that actually severe long-term complications are very rare. I hope so! In the meantime I'm going to keep doing my best to not get sick.

 

Came across this article on possible preliminary subtyping. No substitute for a pulse oximeter but, if this holds, might help with self triage:

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/six-distinct-types-of-covid-19-identified

 

from the "More Evidence Opening Schools Is An Awesome Idea" file:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willia...19-more-efficiently-than-adults/#735e3e3819fd

If children don't seem to get nearly as sick or exhibit the strong immune response seen in adults, but can in fact carry and spread the virus, then it intuitively makes a lot of sense that their viral loads could be a lot higher. Children are great at being little disease factories.

As for places that are already reopening, well, that seems to be going about like you'd expect:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/01/us/schools-reopening-indiana-coronavirus.html

https://www.mississippifreepress.or...ric-covid-crisis-threatens-families-teachers/

Note that very few districts are open, compared to the totality of the US school system. One of my friends who is a teacher in California for middle-school kids has already been told they will definitely be fully remote all fall and Spring is a wait-and-see. Google, which obviously has a huge presence in CA as well as the rest of the US, has announced they are keeping their campuses closed until at least June 2021.

I predict that virtually all schools which open in any capacity are going to be doing the "contact tracing and quarantining large numbers of kids", and some of them will pull the plug and close entirely, while obviously schools in other places will simply decide to not open.

I think it's actually a lot worse, both for kids and parents, to do a half-ass open-close-trace-open-close-trace routine, than to just say "this is all going to be online only at least for fall 2021". The reason is, if that decision is made, then everyone in the community is in the same boat. If school is "open" then parents might be expected to go to work in the office (also insane, of course) -- how does that work if your too-young-to-be-alone kid suddenly has to quarantine at home for 14 days straight because they were in the same room with someone who had been in the same room with someone who had COVID?

 

When my girlfriend's daughter (17 years old) had COVID-19 in April, she was getting an ear pain in one ear and had very sensitive ears. She couldn't even really listen to her music on her headphones as she typically would. Fortunately, that all faded away. She is just still waiting for her full taste to return.

Now, my girlfriend's mother (close to 70 years old) thinks her hearing is worse now after COVID-19, but it wasn't perfect beforehand so hard to say here.

As I mentioned earlier, when I did my TRT with Dr. Jastreboff and looking at various hearing tests, he said the type of hearing loss I had was either from: a) ototoxic antibiotics (which I never took) and/or b) virus - which, of course, I've had over my lifetime like everyone else.

 

What do you expect in a country with a dictator who can manipulate the entire electoral/political system to extend his term?

Speaking of Europe, at least Germans are protesting this nonsense.

 

This thread should be deleted:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/starts...do-your-own-research-when-it-comes-to-science

Don't read - listen to the priests instead.

 

COVID-19 is poorly understood, but it is true that this year there is a lot of people getting sick in strange circumstances. A guy I know, very young, just had an ictus.

 

Hearing loss in 20 asymptomatic patients, small sample but all of them had hearing loss on their diagrams, thoughts?

 

SARS-COV2 appears to cause multisystem damage through vascular events and possibly other yet to be identified means; it doesn't surprise me that hearing can be impacted.

My hearing has taken a lot of hits over the years and none have required a lung transplant or killed my parents, so for me this is pretty far down my list of worries. "Don't get COVID if at all possible" still seems like the best plan.

 

It's the asymptomatic part I am worried about, if this happens to relatively young people without symptoms what can happen to our already compromised ears when we get ill with symptoms?

 

Good question, hence my view of doing as much as I can to avoid it

 

I saw this news article where it looks like a woman got tinnitus from COVID-19. Pause the video around 1:08.

https://www.clickondetroit.com/heal...attles-severe-covid-19-symptoms-for-131-days/

 

It's in her notes but she doesn't even mention it verbally, what she does mention is "seizures" and "hallucinations"

She's about the same age I am.

The rate that anecdotal reports of disturbing long-term complications from COVID definitely exceeds common illnesses. This same clip says CDC found that 1:5 previously healthy people were not back to their old selves weeks after clearing the virus.

It's going to be 3-5 years before we really have accurate data on mortality and specific rates of complications, let alone any real data about how well the vaccines that are in production work and how safe they are.

I am still going with "tinnitus is far from the most worrying aspect to any of this, but it's one ding in the long long list of reasons to avoid covid".

Are you in Russia? If not it's unlikely this vaccine will be available anywhere else because they're not publishing real data sets, it's all super rushed and I'm assuming it's a smoking pile of bullshit under medical experts from other countries get their hands on it.

The Oxford drug is probably safer, but the immunity it appears to confer might not be that great. Based on that I think it's nuts they were able to find volunteers for their challenge trial, bless their souls, at least we'll have some real data from a basically trustworthy apparatus about it.

I hate Moderna simply because US taxpayers paid 100% the costs of the design and synthesis of the drug, but if it works Moderna still plans on charging US taxpayers around $40 a dose for it. Fuckers. When GlaxoSmithKline is making you look bad by comparison, you done goofed up.

https://www.citizen.org/news/paying-twice-for-a-vaccine-moderna-is-taking-taxpayers-for-a-ride/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-vaccine-moderna-charging-more-rival-treatments/

 

One other thing I'll mention -- when I again described in detail the symptoms of the flu-like illness we all had last year to a nurse at my MDs office, including my wife's loss of smell and our breathing issues, she said "that's suspicious as hell". I pointed out we'd gotten sick at the end of Feb, and she said "the virus was here sooner than we knew, we just don't know how much".

If we have COVID I guess we got off on the lighter side, it only laid us out for ~4 weeks (I still have a little niggling breathing thing in one spot) -- but not being able to find out is super obnoxious. We wouldn't really change any of our behaviors because length of immunity is unknown along with a lot of other stuff, but it would be "nice to know".

I believe I will go get an antibody test next week now that they are available here so I can stop wondering about this.

 

Maybe, maybe not. It is not clear that an infection in Feb will still result in antibodies being traceable today. That's another complication that this funny virus throws our way.

 

Any chance it could've been here in November? That flu I had absolutely knocked me flat, and probably helped contribute my tinnitus worsening.

I've only ever felt that sick twice in my life. Once was pneumonia, and once with food poisoning. But even those didn't make me want to actually die. Perhaps it was COVID-19?

 

Yeah, I'm in Russia. I'm not going to touch the stuff. Just a little concerned that they try and push it on people, especially kids.

 

Does the clip say what these numbers are for the common flu?

Check out the daily deaths graph for Sweden at the bottom of
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

Herd immunity is a beautiful thing.

 

Why are people still going on about the 'flu? I thought this was put to bed months ago.

 

Many Western European countries opted for the herd immunity strategy, but they soon changed their minds when they saw that it failed in Sweden (too many deaths plus people can still get COVID-19 if they were infected before), whereas in neighbouring countries (Denmark, Finland, etc.) death count was very low due to hard lock down policy. So it is better to contain COVID-19 outbreaks through moderate / hard lockdown measures and sit out until a vaccine is commercialised.

There's Spanish research on the antibody matter that makes it credible that herd immunity is not the way to go: https://medcitynews.com/2020/07/spa...mmunity-against-covid-19-may-not-be-possible/

 

It seems Russia has approved its vaccine for use - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53735718

My wife is going to get it, I am not, and neither are my kids.

If it turns out that it works then fair enough, but I feel it is being pushed through for political gain.

 

Is there any info on this vaccine other than Putin said it "passed all the checks"?

 

There probably is, but I've not looked into it. I simply don't trust the information here.

 

Well, I now know another person who has had coronavirus. Lives in the same building as us.

I was talking to his wife today, and she says that she knows loads of people who have had it, yet the official statistics don't show it.

 

How incredible that they have been able to keep this up. The king could be raping some people's mouths, and they will still think that he is fully clothed and decent.

 

This study seems like a very small sample size and it doesn't specify whether they took these specific individuals because they had hearing loss recently or if it was a random sample. I have a feeling it was they took these specific individuals because they had hearing loss. The virus has been around for about 6 months so I feel we would have heard more about something like this.

It is definitely another reason not to contract the virus, but I wonder what percentage of people actually experience this.