I just had Covid and I have no symptoms anymore except for being exhausted. Why is this? What actually keeps you tired during the recovery process?
In: Biology
Infections don’t just disappear overnight, even when the symptoms vanish. You’re still fighting the remnants of the disease, the stragglers that are too few in numbers to make you actively sick but are still too plentiful for your immune system to ignore.
Also, your immune system uses a lot of energy to function AND is deploying chemical weapons that risk damaging parts of your own body, so in addition to recovering from what the disease ate/killed, you have to spend more energy cleaning up your own self-inflicted harm. Every time you fight off a disease, you’re praying that your immune system kills the disease before either the disease or your own immune system kills you – the ultimate game of biological chicken.
And in case you were wondering, you do have *some* protection from your own immune system, but if you were perfectly defended against it, you’d instead have ALL the cancer because your cells would grow and mutate unchecked.
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