I’m an emergency physician. I practice community emergency medicine.  I am NOT a virologist, infectious disease specialist or epidemiologist. Unlike some physicians, I don’t even consider myself a ‘scientist’ in any real sense of the word.  At best, I’m an ‘applied scientist,’ like an engineer or really, a mechanic.

But I AM an observer.  As a physician and writer I make connections between things that seem unrelated and try to explain the connection.

So here is what I wonder.  COVID vaccination rates are not what public health officials want, but also not bad.  And yet, some patients with the vaccine continue to develop symptomatic disease.  Areas with high vaccination rates continue to have outbreaks. Furthermore, and more to the point, patients who have had COVID (which might prove to afford equivalent or better immunity than the vaccine) are experiencing re-infection.

COVID causes loss of taste and smell, fatigue and ‘brain fog’ so there is clearly some encephalitis happening.  The virus affects the central nervous system.

What if COVID remains in the central nervous system similar to Varicella-Zoster.  VZ is the virus which gives us chicken pox then hides the the spinal cord and re-emerges later in life as shingles.

If COVID stays hidden in the central nervous system then it could re-emerge over and over. And what appears to be ‘re-infection’ is simply re-activation.  And maybe the stressors of other illnesses, or assorted emotional distresses, or low Vitamin D levels of Autumn and Winter set the biological state for re-activation.

We just don’t know enough yet.  Who knows what we’ll find out in the next ten years?

Have a great day.

Edwin

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