After seeing studies like this, and how the shingles vaccine reduces dimensia, I have become increasingly convinced that it’s bad to get almost any disease, even transiently. I used to think that it was kind of good to train your immune system (kind of whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). I no longer believe that. I believe that diseases often cause unknown effects and it’s better to avoid disease entirely, that vaccines are actually more beneficial than current studies show in this regard, and new universal vaccines to prevent the common cold and flu will likely have significant health span improvements over time beyond the acute prevention of symptoms.

It's established that COVID can persist in tissue/blood - particularly in immunocompromised patients - and is associated with long COVID [1]. This abstract only reports a cut-off of >60 days from COVID infection, so it's hard to know how many of these deceased patients are truly outside the acute infection phase.

Although this research area is the most promising avenue for long COVID -- wrt biologic rationale -- the major anti-viral trials for long COVID were negative.

STOP-PASC trial [2] and PAXLC [3] were both 15-day courses of Paxlovid and showed no benefit across patient reported outcomes.

The real question however, is whether anti-virals have benefit in patients with active viral replication. Like only cases of long COVID can be implicated to viral persistence.

STOP-PASC did collect stool PCR at baseline, but every tested sample was negative. PAX LC later reported a exploratory biomarker analysis of 82 PAX LC participants did measure circulating SARS-CoV-2 S1 and full-length Spike, and wasn't powered to find a difference. Notably, spike presence doesn't necessarily mean active viral replication [4].

As an aside, mchusma's post is probably right. Viral disease is not being associated with more and more long term diseases. EBV is being linked to MS, cervical cancer to HPV, and so on.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147330992... [2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... [3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40188838 [4] www.medrxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.02.24.26347001v1.full

The science is interesting but I must admit I learned a new word today.

A deceased person is also a decedent. Adjective vs noun. Cool.

So did these people take the poisonous shot? Is that covered?

I'd be curious to look for any investigation into whether extended paxlovid treatment fixes a significant subset of long COVID.

Has this been found in other tissues?