I like Eric (I know him personally), but his tweets have been a bit alarmist. He points out incidence levels, but if you look e.g. to the UK, whatever the incidence is, hospitalizations and deaths haven't really gone up.
Ideally if Europe numbers pop, there'd be more than one source to judge against. Maybe spread whatever new ungodly strain emerges to Russia and stir up some ****.
Hospitalization went up. The rise in cases in the EU should be due to BA2 (50% of their cases), a subvariant of Omicron. BA2 is only 10% of US cases. Should see a rise in cases here in a few weeks. US should face a similar risk to the Omicron winter wave with the primary risks to unvax, immunocompromised, & older and not recently (3-6M) boosted or infected. In the US, Omicron wave death > Delta wave. Shouldn't be as bad this round due to much more folks infected in the Omicron winter wave. The vulnerable continue to be at risk and that will be the norm going forward. At least with Omicron variants. New variant tbd.
I'm wondering if any rise has to do with the war in Ukraine? https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/12/world/europe/covid-ukraine-russia-war.html?searchResultPosition=1 Chaos of War in Ukraine Could Fuel New Covid Surge, Doctors Say War has pushed Covid out of people’s minds while forcing them into crowded and unsanitary conditions that are fertile ground for the coronavirus, polio and other pathogens. LVIV, Ukraine — The last thing on anybody’s mind these days in Ukraine seems to be Covid. With millions of people on the move fleeing the Russian invasion, health systems disrupted, and testing and vaccination programs suspended in many places, health officials fear that conditions could spread disease. But the pandemic, they said, was no longer a top priority. “People are not frightened about Covid anymore,” said Dr. Marta Saiko, head of the therapy department at the Clinical Municipal Emergency Hospital in Lviv, in western Ukraine. “People are frightened of the war.” The chaos of war has made it impossible to gauge how the pandemic is progressing. Coronavirus testing has largely been suspended since the war began on Feb. 24, and physicians have been told to make an observation of clinical symptoms without bothering with a laboratory test, Dr. Oleksandr Matskov, deputy director of the General Public Health Center of Ukraine, said in a written response to questions. As a result, new recorded cases have declined sharply in the last two weeks, but “the decrease also may be natural,” he added, noting that the Omicron variant surge was already waning before Russian troops and tanks crossed the border. The invasion has brought attacks on some of the largest cities, including the capital, Kyiv, and the second-largest city, Kharkiv, causing an exodus of people and a breakdown in services. Half the population of Kyiv, a city of about three million, has left, the city mayor said this week. Other cities are under siege with little or no access to medical services, Dr. Matskov wrote. Ukraine has a relatively low Covid vaccination rate, barely one-third of the population, and millions of people fleeing their homes have crowded into evacuation trains, resettlement centers, temporary housing and underground shelters — conditions ripe for a new surge of infections. The areas of Ukraine that remain relatively safe from the war for now face new problems as the medical networks in those regions are overloaded by the influx of displaced people, Dr. Matskov added. For the average Ukrainian these days, Covid ranks low on the list of worries. “It faded into the background,” said Oleksandr, 46, a seaman who was returning from his job in Norway to join his family in Odessa in southern Ukraine. He declined to give his surname for security in wartime conditions. “Our enemy is much more frightening.” His company in Norway had insisted on very strict rules during the pandemic, he said, but in Ukraine no one was bothering. He was resting inside a tent at the railway station in Lviv, waiting for the night train to Odessa. The half-dozen people inside were not wearing masks. “I am vaccinated and at home they all got sick with Covid already,” he said with a shrug. He was going home to defend his city and his brother had already enlisted, he said. Recently, Ukraine has also been grappling with a rare outbreak of polio, which spreads through the kind of unsanitary conditions and water contamination that are common in a refugee crisis. Compounding the threat, vaccination for polio and other diseases has slowed worldwide during the coronavirus pandemic. Europe had been certified as polio-free, but in October, 20 people in Ukraine tested positive for the virus, which can cause fever and paralysis, and then it spread to a second region in the country. The outbreak seems to have been contained, but two patients were affected by paralysis, Dr. Matskov said. The outbreak was identified by genetic sequencing to match a variant in Tajikistan, indicating that the virus was brought by someone traveling from Tajikistan. It is hard to tell when the threat has abated, because most people infected with poliovirus show no symptoms, but can still spread it for weeks or months. “The risk of the spread of polio has increased significantly since the beginning of the war, as there are crowds of people in shelters, places of temporary residence of refugees at the borders, which cannot provide adequate sanitation and hygiene,” Mr. Matskov wrote. “Due to the damage to the infrastructure and the humanitarian crisis, there are interruptions in the supply of drinking water and food.” Like much of Europe, Ukraine experienced a coronavirus surge earlier this year, averaging more than 35,000 cases per day in early February, and more than 200 daily deaths by the middle of the month, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. The official figures declined rapidly from those highs — and then fell to zero in the days immediately after the Russian invasion, indicating a rupture in reporting. Dr. Matskov said cases were once again being registered as before in the regions not directly affected by fighting. “For 9 March there were 6,112 cases and 115 deaths,” he said. Ukrainians had been relatively disciplined about wearing masks inside shops and restaurants and on public transport before the war, but most people seem to have abandoned any protocol. As refugees have crammed on to trains and into station waiting halls, social distancing became impossible and there is barely a mask to be seen amid the crowds. Dr. Saiko, at the hospital in Lviv, said she had 32 patients with Covid in her ward, four of them in intensive care at mid-week, she said. Only one patient had died this week, she said. The caseload was much less than that of previous months, she said. “Now it’s usually four or five patients a day and it used to be 20 to 25 a day.” She said cases could increase because of the influx of people into Lviv from other parts of the country, but the hospital has the largest Covid ward and can manage 730 patients at a time. Supplies, she added, were “good enough.”
4th, regular or whatever booster... Pfz and Big Pharm needs to stay out of public health policy. A clear conflict of interest. That needs to be the role of public health agencies.
I know a lot of people are "over" the virus. I am too. This is still worth a read though, IMHO. I Was A COVID Doctor. Here's The One Thing I Refuse To Do As We 'Get Back To Normal.' "For the past two years, I have wanted a megaphone to drown out the voices of those who didn’t seem to mind if their policies landed me in a body bag." By Dipti S. Barot, Guest Writer Mar. 15, 2022, 09:00 AM EDT I clocked out from my final COVID shift last week. For the past two years, I have done it all when it comes to the patients in our COVID inbox: screening for who gets tests when tests were rationed, triaging who should stay home when care was rationed, prioritizing who gets vaccines when vaccines were rationed, and deciding who gets treatments when treatments were rationed. Decisions made by those in power have affected every aspect of the health care we could offer, and the resultant toll on health care workers has been immeasurable. Health care workers are not OK. As the transition back to “normal” begins, our clinics — echoing the rest of the nation — are moving toward a new stage of the pandemic. A stage where the role of the COVID-19 care provider is dissolved and absorbed into the umbrella of primary care, where a collective problem gets shoved onto the individual, and where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our nation’s foremost health protection agency, places the burden of risk calculation onto millions of immunocompromised people by advising them to “talk to their health care provider” about masking and what measures they should take to stay safe. The CDC is essentially washing its hands of any policy-level responsibility to support or protect those who are most vulnerable. Never mind the millions of uninsured people who don’t have primary care providers. Never mind the fact that talking to your provider first requires overcoming the barriers of a visit and a copay. In other words, in place of guidelines, it’s “talk to your health care provider.” So we have moved on to the “live with it” part of the pandemic, even though more than 1,000 Americans a day are still in the “die with it” part of the pandemic. And with this push toward individual responsibility, we shift the burden onto individual clinics and onto already overstretched primary care clinicians who face the daunting task of trying to get antivirals to patients with COVID within the first five days of symptoms. It’s a task that can be achieved in well-staffed, patient-centered, functional health care systems. Ask your doctor whether we have one of those. Continued...
I agree with a lot of what this op-ed says and there are still many immuno-compromised people who are at risk along with people who can't get health care. The problem is that maintaining the type of restrictions is no longer politically or economically sustainable. We see this with even the opposition towards just wearing masks. I've made this point regarding why I am very leery about the possibility of going to war with Russia over Ukraine. A democracy can only sustain a continued significant war effort only as long as it has political support. The fight against COVID 19 was very much like what a major war would be with restrictions, rationing and mandates. This country performed poorly overall for that and it's clear that such things can't be held onto overall. At the sametime with most of the population vaccinated or having an infection that may grant immunity to at least prevent severe disease the risk overall is much much lower. Not everyone though is safe but those that are still very vulnerable are a much smaller portion of the population. It is nearly impossible though to sustain restrictions and mandates across all of the population just for that minority. What we need to be doing now is still trying to get as many people as possible vaccinated and boosted. For those who don't have access to health care we need to continue to try to expand access and affordability to it. This isn't just for COVID but for the longterm health of society.
Still hovering around 1k covid death per day. The norm. It's going to go down and we are still heading toward the norm of ~200k covid death this year (and possibly next) - IF there is no newer deadlier variant. We still do not know why some healthy < 60 years old get seriously sick or die from covid. It's low, but it's not that low of a chance given we probably each will get infected 1-2/year going forward. To each their own. Good luck.
Preprint and not yet peer reviewed. 1/4 children has long covid after acute sars-cov-2 infection. Mostly neuropsychiatric symptoms. Long COVID in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-analyses | medRxiv 47357614 (medrxiv.org) Results The literature search yielded 68 articles for long COVID in children and adolescents. After screening, 21 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included in the systematic review and meta-analyses. A total of 80,071 children and adolescents with COVID-19 were included. The prevalence of long COVID was 25.24% (95% CI 18.17-33.02), and the most prevalent clinical manifestations were mood symptoms (16.50%; 95% CI 7.37-28.15), fatigue (9.66%; 95% CI 4.45-16.46), and sleep disorders (8.42%; 95% CI 3.41-15.20). When compared to controls, children infected by SARS-CoV-2 had a higher risk of persistent dyspnea (OR 2.69 95%CI 2.30-3.14), anosmia/ageusia (OR 10.68, 95%CI 2.48, 46.03), and/or fever (OR 2.23, 95%CI 1.22-4.07). The main limitation of these meta-analyses is the probability of bias, which includes lack of standardized definitions, recall, selection, misclassification, nonresponse and/or loss of follow-up, and the high level of heterogeneity. Conclusion These meta-analyses provide an overview of the broad symptomatology of long COVID in minors, which may help improve management, rehabilitation programs, and future development of guidelines and therapeutic research for COVID-19.
That doctor article was more a plea for empathy than one of reason. Kind of blurs what we expect what to hear from doctors... People are definitely shell shocked from the last 2 years of covid. No one will willingly relive that just for the sake of 7 million immunocompromised. I can see why it's not fair on both sides, and craven politicians do make that worse. A lot of these symptoms are hard to pin down..."Speech Disturbances"?? This feels like that oft repeated study regarding mercury laden vaccines causing autism... I agree long-covid is a BFD to look into, esp when children 5 and under do not take vaccines. I am curious about the infection rates and the possible percentage of long covid sufferrers among them.
They are and it's one of the limitation of such a study - "main limitation of these meta-analyses is the probability of bias, which includes lack of standardized definitions, recall, selection, misclassification, nonresponse and/or loss of follow-up, and the high level of heterogeneity." But overall, if this study is done well, there is a pattern that is hard to ignore.
These studies seem to serve as beacons for more comprehensive studies rather than something disseminated through the media or the lay public. I wouldn't classify this as The Science, but lay people reflexively think if it's a published paper, then it's considered The Science. Tl;Dr Moar butter, less margarine... Studies say gud 4 u
Meta-analysis is very common now in evidence-based medicine (not theory, but looking at the actual results) and is deemed very useful when done well. If not done well, it can be complete garbage. One of the major benefits is a 'better estimate of risk factors for disease by doing a quantitative review of large, often complex, and sometimes conflicting "studies"'.
I guess, but I'm not going to trust what's essentially a coin flip through my semi-untrained eye until further studies determine whether this preliminary data crunch is legit or not. In some ways, transparency is good for the public, but when it's abused, you get that anti vaxxer bs that grew a life of its own with journalists reporting on things that they might not fully understand the underlying conditions and/or just like the eye catching headline of the summary So the jury is still out for long covid with children. DISCLAIMER: Spoilers might or might not contain the true final ending
Yes this is all true and COVID will be with us for a long long time. Restrictions were never going to be able to maintained forever and at some point we were going to return to something like what life was like in 2019. As is there is an acceptable level of death in this society.
