The failure to recognise the ongoing severity of COVID-19 is creating a reality gap that is being filled by groups peddling misinformation.
“You don’t want to get this disease once if you can avoid it, and you don’t want to get it four times for sure.”
— Dr Mike Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Programme
👀
34% have heart, kidney, & circulation-based symptoms; risk of heart failure post-COVID is almost doubled
33% have respiratory & sleep problems, anxiety, headache & chest pains
23% have musculoskeletal & nervous system symptoms
10% have combined digestive & respiratory symptoms
From Weill Cornell Medicine’s press release:
Only in the first symptom pattern was the sex ratio roughly 1 to 1; in the other three, female patients made up a significant majority (more than 60 percent).
On June 6th, 2022, Politico published: “How many Covid deaths are acceptable? Some Biden officials tried to guess.”
From the piece:
Biden officials in recent months privately discussed how many daily Covid-19 deaths it would take to declare the virus tamed, three people familiar with the conversations told POLITICO.
The discussions, which took place across the administration, and have not been previously disclosed, involved a scenario in which 200 or fewer Americans die per day…
Our opinion is that this reflects a broader issue: that, by this point, the Biden administration have clearly absorbed a central lesson, which is that as long as they attempt to make a good show of things––pretending everything is ok––the levels of illness, death, debility, and disability from covid that the US public will apparently just absorb without rioting is shockingly high.
Importantly though, one of the individuals cited says that the number of deaths floated, 200 a day, would be “aspirational.” And that individual was right: even with our now-restrained data reporting infrastructure, we’ve never gotten down to that level. In fact, the lowest we’ve gotten to for any significant stretch of time is still an average of 300 deaths a day, or over 110,000 deaths a year.
And in the UK:
Now that we’re getting to the end of the year, it’s worth looking at the toll of the ‘mild & acceptable’ illness that COVID is hailed as by many. Here’s a thread of measurable toll in the UK in 2022 since omicron – considered the ‘mild’ variant of COVID spread. 🧵
— Dr. Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) December 28, 2022
In fact not only have hospitalisations been high, the ONS data shows that almost at no point during the year did infection rates dip below 1 in 70. So extremely high infection rates, even between peaks – with impacts obviously seen in long COVID, and work/school absences.
— Dr. Deepti Gurdasani (@dgurdasani1) December 28, 2022
COVID isn’t just infecting you—it could be reactivating viruses that have been dormant in your body for years by Erin Prater (Fortune Well) – Dec 26, 2022
A mild or even an asymptomatic case of COVID can cause reservoirs of some viruses you’ve previously battled to reactivate, potentially leading to symptoms of chronic fatigue syndrome—a condition that resembles long COVID, according to a recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Immunology.
COVID may suppress our immune systems:
What If COVID Reinfections Wear Down Our Immunity? by Andrew Nikiforuk (The Tyee) – Nov. 6, 2022
T cells are a body’s key line of defence against infection. COVID infections can cause them to prematurely age, harm organs and become exhausted, warns Dr. Anthony Leonardi.
The epidemiology of long COVID in US adults by Robertson et al. (Clinical Infectious Diseases) – Dec 21, 2022
An estimated 7.3% (95% CI: 6.1-8.5%) of all respondents reported long COVID, corresponding to approximately 18,828,696 adults…We observed a high burden of long COVID, substantial variability in prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 and risk factors unique from SARS-CoV-2 risk…
Covid-19 and drug overdoses drive US life expectancy to lowest level in 25 years, CDC reports by Deidre McPhillips (CNN) – Dec. 22, 2022
Covid-19 was a major contributor to the decline in life expectancy, which is now nearly two and a half years shorter than it was at the start of the pandemic. After a drop of 1.8 years in 2020, another cut of 0.6 years last year brought US life expectancy down to 76.4 years in 2021.
[L]ife expectancy typically only changes by 0.1 or 0.2 years.
The number of young and middle aged people dying from heart issues has increased since the start of the pandemic.
The excess death, defined as the difference between the observed and the predicted mortality rates, was most pronounced for the youngest (25–44 years) aged decedents, ranging from 23% to 34% for the youngest compared to 13%–18% for the oldest age groups.
, , , et al. Excess risk for acute myocardial infarction mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic. J Med Virol. 2022; 1– 11. doi:10.1002/jmv.28187
COVID-19 activates similar response to Parkinson’s disease, study suggests
Lead researcher Trent Woodruff, from the university’s neuro-inflammation laboratory, said the findings illustrated a potential future risk for neurodegenerative conditions in people who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
I’ll just give you a non-comprehensive run-down of various biases (which are basically rules of cognition that become errors when they’re incorrectly applied) and heuristics (which are basically thinking shortcuts or strategies that can lead to thinking errors), focusing on those that can cause people to be more alarmed by risk reduction than by the risk posed by actual threats.
“Why people don’t seem to care about the health risks”
“Why do people seem to care so much that YOU care about Covid health risks?”
“People wish to be seen (by themselves and others) as reasonable. Because of this, when folks try to decide on a “rational” response to an environmental threat, they often look at the array of available risk mitigation options and try to pick a percentage of these that is neither an ‘under-response’ or an ‘over-response.’” “Unfortunately, that’s not the way risk actually works; a threat is what it is, and it isn’t going to negotiate with you regarding how much you have to do or what is a “fair” amount of effort.”
The Geek’s Guide To Long Covid is offers information on how to use technology like apps and wearables to collect data, monitor your health and self-advocate with medical staff. Plus general info and news on Long Covid.
Signs of autoimmune disease, difficulty exercising noted 1 year after COVID (CIDRAP)
Two studies published today in the European Respiratory Journal describe long-COVID findings, one revealing signs of autoimmune disease in 41% of blood samples taken 1 year after recovery, and the other showing that 23% of patients still had exercise intolerance a year after hospital release.
Small sample size? (106 studied + 56 baseline)
Two-Year Health Outcomes in Hospitalized COVID-19 Survivors in China (JAMA Network)
In this longitudinal cohort study that included 1864 patients, the most common symptoms at 2 years after SARS-CoV-2 infection were fatigue, chest tightness, anxiety, dyspnea, and myalgia, and most symptoms resolved from 1-year to 2-year follow-up, although the incidence of dyspnea showed no significant change.
People still short of breath two years later 😔
Researchers are hunting through waste water for heavily mutated SARS-CoV-2 variants that could be the next Omicron.
Just in time for the boosters no one is taking anyway 🤪
Impressive sleuthing work from this team, supported by the good folks in Public Works. I can only imagine how frustrating it is to narrow your search to 30 people but not be able to figure out which is sick. Modern shades of Typhoid Mary with 40% not willing to be tested to see if they are carriers.
Updating information regarding convergent variants BA.2.3.20, BN.1, BA.2.10.4, BN.2.1, BA.4.6.1, BQ.1, BQ.1.1.
In short, BA.2.75.2 and BQ.1.1 are the most antibody-evasive convergent variants tested, far exceeding BA.5 and approaching SARS-CoV-1 level. (1/4) https://t.co/BzknQBSF5e— Yunlong Richard Cao (@yunlong_cao) September 23, 2022
Big COVID-19 waves may be coming, new Omicron strains suggest (Science)
“The scale of immune evasion has never been seen before, and the virus is still rapidly evolving,” [Cao] says. “It’s very bad.”
jUsT a CoLd 🤪
For COVID-19, endemic stage could be two years away (YaleNews)
How Quickly Can You Get Infected With Omicron After An Exposure? (HuffPost)
1/ What works to prevent long COVID?
Here's a study of 2560 healthcare workers in Italy.
29% got COVID, of whom 31% got long COVID.https://t.co/GYQ7suaLdC— Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA 🇺🇦 (@celinegounder) September 21, 2022
It's interesting that when the rich and powerful talk about "back to normal," they don't include life expectancy. pic.twitter.com/9A5X5b9n0J
— Dr. Lucky Tran (@luckytran) September 22, 2022
CEO of Pfizer tests positive *TWICE* within 40 days. This is the new normal our public officials are creating by only focusing on pharmaceuticals and giving up on source control with masks and not urgently implementing clean indoor air with filtration and ventilation. pic.twitter.com/7KmXU4XGnJ
— Joaquín Beltrán (@joaquinlife) September 24, 2022
Another climate/covid overlap is people are growing accustomed to a fucked up baseline. We've normalized mass death and mass infection in the US. What used to shock has become another day. Similarly, as anamolous weather has become the norm we remark on it less
— Kendra "Gloom is My Beat" Pierre-Louis (@KendraWrites) September 25, 2022
“Covid is here to stay, so are we just supposed to keep masking some places FOREVER?”
I mean, if the choice is between that or mass death and disability… yes?
Has humanity really lost all ability to adapt? Because that doesn’t bode well for the climate crisis… 😕
— Stephanie Tait ♿️ (@StephTaitWrites) September 25, 2022
Shifting baseline is a known phenomenon in ecology that’s led to / accompanied complacency with the collapse of the salmon population, for example. I didn’t really think people would adopt a new baseline for wildfires and drought and flooding but I guess I should have expected it 🤷♀️ People *really* hate making changes to their own life — and admitting when things aren’t working — and they’ll accept a *lot* before they’ll acknowledge the need for drastic change.