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Revolutionary-Copy71 t1_ist3cx6 wrote

Reply to comment by ottpro in If I am just recovered from a typical cold (5 days long / 2 days off work), am I now more immune to all infections for a period of time, or less? by [deleted]

Yep. There's a few hundred rhinoviruses, coronaviruses, enteroviruses, and adenoviruses that can cause what is commonly thought of as the "common cold". I used to work with toddlers, and despite our best efforts to mitigate spread of infections...it's toddlers, stuff is gonna spread. I'd get 6-8 colds per year. I seriously felt like I was always in some stage of sickness lol.

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JetKeel t1_istkpg0 wrote

And correct me if I’m wrong, even if you catch the same virus after losing immunity, it is still possible to experience very different symptoms. This can be caused by how long the virus had a “foothold” before your immune system really ramped up against it, where the virus settled and multiplied, and also your own general health before your body started fighting it off.

So for example, if you caught a specific rhinovirus, your body caught it early, you might only experience a mild fever and a little tiredness. But if you caught that same virus later, you were already tired, it reproduced more in your lungs, you could develop more of a severe cough.

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spaceman60 t1_istx78q wrote

Don't forget dose as well. Were you 5ft from someone that is sick and they sneezed, or were you licking the subway handles?

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Chickentrap t1_isu8rol wrote

How do you get your daily salt intake without a little handle licking?

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heiferly t1_isujwz5 wrote

I'm a behaviorist who happens to have OCD. I did exposure therapy and I believe in its effectiveness... But I saw a TV show where an OCD therapist wanted her patient to touch a port-a-potty seat and lick her hand after. I don't know if the patient did it, bc it went against the medical ethics courses I took and I didn't watch the rest of the show. I can't believe a provider would think that's acceptable.

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Chickentrap t1_isuqlze wrote

I didn't realise exposure was effective in adults. I always assumed it to be mostly beneficial to children to develop a robust immune system.

And that's ridiculous, but was probably dramatised for tv purposes. I don't think any credible therapist would sanction that method.

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murgatroid1 t1_isut2l6 wrote

Exposure Therapy is a psychological treatment for anxiety disorders and isn't the same as deliberate exposure to pathogens in order to trigger an immune response, like you're talking about with children. And *that* sort of exposure does work with adults to some extent (like in vaccines), but it happens more in childhood because that's when everything is new to the immunue system.

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regular_modern_girl t1_isvq55f wrote

Yeah it seems that a number of people thought it would be a good idea to do that sort of “exposure therapy” with covid early in the pandemic, and it…generally didn’t work out so well for a lot of them.

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heiferly t1_isuxlab wrote

What murgatroid said. It's a behavioral-based psychological treatment, related to cognitive behavioral therapy, applied behavior analysis, etc. It's used to treat OCD or specific phobias (which I think they changed in the latest DSM but I'm old and out of school and that's not my field of practice and I'm gross with covid fever so no googling, sorry).

Basically you get exposed to things that cause you mild anxiety and slowly increase until you acclimatize to your biggest anxieties; in recent years research has shown pairing this with beta blockers can be highly effective and faster.

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SuurAlaOrolo t1_isvgiwv wrote

May I ask: I have a phobia of flying in an airplane that developed in my 20s. (Previously I flew dozens of times; now I haven’t flown since 2012.) I saw a psychologist who recommended exposure therapy, and I’ve heard about its effectiveness, but I simply can’t fathom how it works for flying. I tried it per my psychologist’s suggestion: looked at magazines with pictures of cabin seating, watched YouTube videos of turbulent flights, went to the airport and looked at flights taking off. It felt silly. I have no anxiety response to these things—they aren’t dangerous. Could you please explain how it is supposed to work?

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heiferly t1_iswck9o wrote

Technically I can't give a professional opinion over the internet, but given a hypothetical situation presented as you've described above, my knee-jerk reaction would be that for whatever reason, the practitioner planned and executed the treatment incorrectly. The planning aspect in particular is closely tied to the same theories and techniques I learned in graduate applied behavior analysis courses; laypeople commonly hold misconceptions about the jargon of my field but a psychologist should definitely be familiar with the concepts and their application.

I'm sorry you had such a poor experience. I'm terminally ill, immunocompromised, and currently ill with my third acute bout of covid (plus long covid since the 2nd bout) so I intend to return and answer here more but for now rest.

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slacker346 t1_isuz5tl wrote

I remember once sitting behind a mother and her toddler on the light rail train, and she was completely, blissfully unaware of that kid was doing. She thought he was looking out the window. Maybe he was, but he seemed most focused on licking every part of that window. Ewwwwww....

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Revolvyerom t1_isukvi0 wrote

> licking the subway handles

Wait, we're not supposed to do that?

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[deleted] OP t1_isuaevi wrote

[removed]

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ontopofyourmom t1_isune10 wrote

Yep. When I got Covid the active infection was noticeably spreading through my throat and sinuses rapidly (like over the course of half an hour). My immune system beat off the major infection before it got into my lungs and I just wound up with a month of "long" symptoms.

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Emu1981 t1_isuv4u0 wrote

>When I got Covid the active infection was noticeably spreading through my throat and sinuses rapidly (like over the course of half an hour). My immune system beat off the major infection before it got into my lungs and I just wound up with a month of "long" symptoms.

It depends on the variant that you caught. Some target the lower respiratory tract more while others target the upper respiratory tract more. One of the reasons why the early Omicron variants were not as dangerous as the Delta variant was that they targeted the upper respiratory tract more which meant that you were far less likely to end up with viral pneumonia or other issues with your lungs.

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VoilaVoilaWashington t1_isus8hm wrote

Basically, the common cold is any mild response to a respiratory infection. There isn't anything about those 4 families of viruses that unite them, unlike "the flu" which is always an influenza virus.

In that regard, SARS-CoV-2 ("covid") is basically just a "common cold" on steroids, which ended up being taken seriously and the variants are being tracked. Outside the effect it has on people, it's not all that unique.

Same as those super-flus. It's all just influenza, just some hit humans way harder than others.

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regular_modern_girl t1_isuw941 wrote

This is why omicron was able to so easily end up with some genetics from a milder coronavirus that regularly circulates as the “common cold”, because they’re pretty much the same thing, SARS-CoV-19 is essentially just a novel cold virus that humans lacked pre-existing immunity to, and thus it was able to cause far more harm to the body than it normally would’ve. Eventually, the descendants of this wave of Covid will probably become perceived as little more than a somewhat-bad colds as we continue to adapt to its presence (and to some extent, as it continues to adapt to us, as in general it’s actually more advantageous for viruses to keep their hosts alive while still being as virulent as possible, rather than killing them. Viruses in general don’t actually benefit evolutionarily from killing their hosts).

iirc, there are H1N1 influenza strains directly descended from the 1918 pandemic virus that continue to crop up as seasonal flus, and only occasionally does another one pop up from that lineage that causes serious enough illness to be especially noteworthy (“swine flu” back in the early 2010s was actually an example of this if I recall).

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