Emergence of a Deadly Coronavirus

Post Reply New Topic

COVID-19 registered deaths by age and sex (a)(b)(c)(d)(e)
Age (years) Males Females
0-39 15 10
40-49 29 10
50-59 81 47
60-69 173 81
70-79 355 208
80-89 520 414
90+ 255 358

The median age for those who died from COVID-19 was 83.7 years (81.2 years for males, 86.0 years for females).

Life expectancy at birth was 81.2 years for males and 85.3 years for females in 2018-20

The National Institutes of Health are assessing whether ivermectin is effective against COVID-19, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Tuesday.

Fauci, President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, testified to lawmakers that there have been mixed guidelines about the use of ivermectin against COVID-19 from different health agencies around the world, and the NIH guidance panel previously concluded there was not enough evidence to say whether it is effective against COVID-19.

"Ivermectin has had noncontrolled trials suggesting that it might be effective — mostly anecdotal," Fauci said. "The NIH active studies are doing a whole bunch of studies with ivermectin, as well as others, to try and settle it once and for all."

Dr. Evelina Grayver ran in the Long Island Half Marathon and, most days, keeps up her training by running six miles.

But weeks after she was infected with COVID-19 last year, her heart felt so weak that walking up stairs at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset left her exhausted.

"I could barely walk up a flight of stairs in the hospital without getting shortness of breath," she said. "It was very scary."

Grayver, 42, a cardiologist and director of Women's Heart Health at Northwell, is a victim of "long COVID," a syndrome that leaves people debilitated months after they get infected with the virus.

So when researchers at Washington University in St. Louis came out with a study last week showing that even young and healthy people who get COVID-19 can suffer long-term cardiovascular problems, it hit home for Grayver.

She is seeing the trend in her own practice, where she estimated about a quarter of her patients developed heart problems after getting COVID-19.

Dr. Hal Skopicki, chief of cardiology and co-director of the Stony Brook Heart Institute, called the study a wake-up call and "rallying cry" that even younger people without major preexisting health problems should try to avoid getting COVID-19 because they can suffer long-term heart issues after getting infected.

The study, he said, "is profound," because many people think they can get infected with COVID-19 and suffer few long-term consequences. "Everybody may be at risk for cardiovascular complications over time," after getting the virus, he said.

"This is not the flu," he added.

The researchers found that even a mild case of COVID-19 can increase a person’s risk of cardiovascular problems for at least a year after diagnosis, according to Nature magazine, which first published the study.

They found that heart failure and strokes were substantially higher in people who had recovered from COVID-19 than in people of similar medical backgrounds who were not infected.

The risk was elevated even for those who were under 65 years of age and lacked risk factors, such as obesity or diabetes, the researchers found.

Skopicki said that "we’ve been telling everybody without preexisting diseases or who are young that they’re the ones not really going to be affected and that the vast majority of people who are going to be hospitalized or faced with a chance of dying, that they’re the ones with preexisting conditions. They’re the people who are over the age of 65."

The new research indicates "that’s not true."

The study was based on a database from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. The researchers looked at the cases of 150,000 veterans who survived for at least 30 days after contracting COVID-19. They compared them to two other groups of uninfected people: five million people who used the VA medical system during the pandemic, and a similarly sized group that used the system in 2017, before COVID-19 hit.

One cardiologist interviewed in the Nature journal noted that the study did have limitations.

Hossein Ardehali, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois said people in the group monitored during the pandemic weren’t tested for COVID-19 so some may have had mild infections. In addition the authors only dealt with patients of VA hospitals, which are predominantly white males, he said.

Grayver, who was fully vaccinated in January 2021 and first got infected with COVID-19 a month later in a breakthrough case, said she believes the potential impacts go beyond strokes and heart failure to include abnormalities such as arrhythmias. Besides a weakening of one wall of the heart, she herself suffered a syndrome that caused her heart rate and blood pressure to soar or plummet.

She warned people to see a doctor if their COVID-19 symptoms last more than a few weeks.

Skopicki said he is not an "alarmist" and "I don’t believe everybody should be walking around, saying, ‘I had COVID, oh my God, am I going to die of a heart attack?’"

But "this is a rallying cry. This is for those people who are saying, ‘I’m not afraid to get infected’ " because they think it can't impact their health long-term.

Thakore and Grayver both said that, with proper medical treatment, hopefully most people will make full recoveries, but medical experts are still learning about COVID-19 and its long-term impacts.

COVID-19 Longhauler Advocacy Project
@C19LH_Advocacy
11:23 PM · Mar 1, 2022 · Twitter Web App

Tonight, millions of #Longhaulers were hoping that @POTUS would become a champion for #LongCovid by utilizing his platform to create more awareness & educate the American people about the sheer devastation Long Covid has caused & will continue to cause for decades. He didn't.

We hoped @potus would continue to emphasize mitigation efforts being essential in our battle against #COVID19 & #LongCovid. Instead, Americans were told they could remove their masks as we move back towards a "safer normal" & that those vaccinated & boosted are protected.

For #Longhaulers, there is no "return to normal." We also know that people can still get infected with #COVID19 even if vaccinated. While vaccination helps prevent severe disease during acute infection, we KNOW that #LongCovid most commonly occurs in mild-moderate cases.

Long Covid has also been documented to occur after asymptomatic infections at rates as high as 32% in one study out of CA. This is why it is essential to continue to "stack" our mitigation efforts & stop dangerous messaging that can lead to lifelong disability for millions.

Throughout the entire #pandemic, there has been ZERO public messagine about #LongCovid, its dangers & impacts or its prevalence. This information alone could potentially change behaviors to help us better mitigate the pandemic in general & better prevent disability from LC.

Instead @POTUS decided to completly ignore this mass disabling event, permanently removing people from the workforce & school, contributing to billions of dollars in debt for #Longhaulers, roadblocks to assistance, & complete disregard for pandemic precautions that save lives.

@Potus, if you cannot even mention the words #LongCovid, how can we count on you to take action to help 8-33 million #Longhaulers in the U.S. alone? How can you tell us you value first responders & HCW's, educators & single parents when you are willing to count us as a loss?

We are not expendable. Lax mitigation efforts in exchange for a return to "normalcy," that in reality, actually prevent the return to normalcy, create more disability, & accumulate greater costs for all, for decades to come & cripples the medical system even more so than now.

We are people. We are sons & daughters, mothers & fathers, neighbors, front line workers, & your childs teachers. We are the people who one day got sick & never got better, who had bright futures & families & now, we are a shadow of the person we used to be.

@POTUS we need immediate action to assist the #LongCovid community, but you cannot begin to help us until you publicly acknowledge #LongCovid & implement LC Assistance Programs & a LC Task Force & work w/ the LC community to do so. #PRIORITIZELONGCOVID https://bit.ly/LCComReq

Some patients with long COVID may have long-lasting nerve damage that could lead to fatigue, sensory changes, and pain in the hands and feet, according to a new study published in the journal Neurology: Neuroimmunology & Neuroinflammation.

The nerve damage, which has been seen even among mild coronavirus cases, appears to be caused by immunity problems triggered by infection.

“This is one of the early papers looking into causes of long COVID, which will steadily increase in importance as acute COVID wanes,” Anne Louise Oaklander, MD, the lead study author and a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said in a statement.

The research team analyzed data from 17 COVID-19 survivors with lingering symptoms who had no history or risks of neuropathy, or nerve damage or disease. The patients were from 10 states and territories, and all but one had mild infections.

They found that 10 patients -- or 59% -- had at least one test that confirmed neuropathy. Two patients had rare neuropathies that affected muscle nerves, and 10 were diagnosed with small-fiber neuropathy, which is a cause of chronic pain. Common symptoms included fatigue, weakness, changes in their senses, and pain in their hands and feet.

For treatment, 11 patients were given immunotherapies such as corticosteroids or intravenous immunoglobulins, and the five patients who received repeated immunoglobulin G treatments appeared to benefit. Over time, 52% of patients improved, though none had all of their symptoms go away.

If patients have long COVID symptoms that aren’t improving or can’t be explained otherwise, Oaklander said, they should discuss the possibility of neuropathy with their doctor, a neurologist, or neuromuscular specilist.

Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, who says he has long Covid, introduced a bill this week to help those who have long-term symptoms from the disease.

The Virginia Democrat said ever since he contracted the coronavirus in March 2020, he's had full-body nerve tingling "like 24/7."

"I describe it as like every nerve has had five cups of coffee, and it just hadn't gone away," he explained. "I can feel every nerve ending in my body right now."

Kaine said he went to a neurologist who told him that these types of "neurological aftereffects of viruses" sometimes never go away.

"I went to a neurologist and he said, 'Look, neurological aftereffects of viruses are common. Other viruses often have a neurological aftereffect,' and he said, 'Sometimes they never go away. So there's the bad news. The good news is they usually don't get worse.' And that's been true. It hasn't gone away since March of 2020, nor has it gotten worse."
"Maybe I have become comfortably numb," he said. "This Covid was designed to make me sit more on the edge of my seat, which I do everywhere now. But the good news for me is it's not debilitating, doesn't stop me from working or exercising or anything."

Kaine, who sits on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, introduced legislation on Wednesday to help people living with long-term symptoms of Covid-19.

The bill would aim to improve research of long Covid by centralizing data on patient experiences, according to a summary of the legislation. It also would increase research to give recommendations that would improve how the health care system deals with the disease.
He acknowledged that it isn't easy to address this disease as people report a whole spectrum of symptoms.

So, what the bill would do, he said, is "catalogue symptoms, do research into causes and therapies and then educate patients and providers."

He introduced the bill, called the Comprehensive Access to Resources and Education (CARE) for Long COVID Act, alongside Sens. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Tammy Duckworth, a Democrat from Illinois, and noted it's based on a House bill authored by Democratic Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia.

CnTechPost "Will viruses get weaker from generation to generation?" _{2020-02-11 19:21:26 (GMT+8)}-=-:-=-+

Labroots "At Least 15 Animal Species in the US Have Contracted COVID-19 So Far" _{DEC 20, 2021 9:30 AM PST}

-=-:-=-+

CBS News "Deer can carry COVID-19. Here's what that means for humans." _{Nov. 15, 2021/9:49 AM}

The good news is that with all known variants that have circulated in humans, the vaccines remain very good at preventing severe disease. The concern is that as the virus continues to circulate in other animals, it could accumulate mutations that render the vaccines less effective. Increased surveillance is key.

The world was slow to recognize long COVID as one of the most serious consequences of the coronavirus. Six months into the pathogen’s tear across the globe, SARS-CoV-2 was still considered an acute airway infection that would spark a weeks-long illness at most; anyone who experienced symptoms for longer could be expected to be dismissed by droves of doctors. Now long COVID is written into CDC and WHO documents; it makes a cameo in the newest version of President Joe Biden’s National COVID-19 Preparedness Plan.

But for all we know now about long COVID, it is still not enough. Researchers still don’t know who’s most at risk, or how long the condition might last; whether certain variants might cause it more frequently, or the extent to which vaccines might sweep it away. We do not have a way to fully prevent it. We do not have a way to cure it. We don’t even have a way to really quantify it: There still isn’t consensus on how common long COVID actually is. Its danger feels both amorphous and unavoidable. People already struggle to deal with well-known risks, let alone fuzzy, slippery ones. “You can be too afraid of what you don’t understand or just say, ‘It’s not well defined; I’m not going to think about it,’” says Erin Sanders, a nurse practitioner and clinical scientist at MIT. Concern, when we let it, can act like a gas. It expands to fill the space we give it.

This is a precarious position to be in with long COVID, as enthusiasm for pandemic precautions is crumbling. The Biden administration recently reinforced its stance on which COVID-19 outcomes matter most: Since we can’t stave off all infections, we’re shifting our focus to hospitalizations and deaths, a well-defined pair of metrics that we know we can prevent. Where does long COVID—a condition that can spin out of infections of all severities—fit in? “It doesn’t,” says Hannah Davis, of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, who has long COVID.

Millions of people have already developed long COVID; many of them, an untold fraction, have not recovered. This is the challenge of chronic illness: When people join its ranks, they do not always exit. With each new case of long COVID, the virus’s burden balloons.

“I worry, now that everyone is moving to the post-pandemic world, we’re going to sweep all these patients under the rug,” Al-Aly told me. Long COVID struggled to gain a toehold in the national consciousness; now it threatens to be one of the first major COVID impacts to slip back into the margins.

Researchers have known for many months that long COVID is more a category than a monolith.

Long COVID has hundreds of possible symptoms. It can batter the brain, the heart, the lungs, the gut, all of the above, or none of the above. The condition can start from a silent infection, an ICU-caliber case, or anything in between. It can begin days, weeks, or months after the virus first infects someone, and its severity can fluctuate over time.

All of this means that even diagnosing long COVID—an essential step toward understanding it—is still a battle. We don’t have a clear-cut, consensus clinical definition, a single name for the condition, or a standardized set of tests to catch it. Even the CDC and the WHO can’t agree on how long a person must be sick before they meet the condition’s criteria. Some researchers and health-care providers favor one agency’s definition; others, dissatisfied with both, come up with their own. And “there are still doctors out there that do not think long COVID exists,” says Alexandra Yonts, a pediatric-infectious-disease specialist at Children’s National Hospital, in Washington, D.C. That makes researching the condition fraught, and studies less uniform. Davis, of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, says many efforts are peppered with problems that misrepresent long COVID’s burden. Some studies miss cases because they omit many of the condition’s most common symptoms, for instance, or because they exclude the many long-haulers whose illness comes and goes. Others can botch the numbers when they neglect to include information about long-haulers’ baseline health before infection, or when they fail to establish good control groups of uninfected and infected people who don’t go on to develop long COVID’s chronic symptoms. Too many studies, Davis told me, have “inadvertently included COVID-infected people in their negative control groups” because they rely on fallible tests that can’t adequately determine who’s actually caught the virus.

So many researchers have to make do with the limited data sets that are already available to them. As a result, some studies end up biased toward patients who were hospitalized, while others wind up favoring people who have the time, means, and trust in the health-care system to sign up for long-term studies. Neither group fully captures long COVID’s wide-ranging toll. The situation’s especially tough for pediatric patients, who might be too young to articulate the severity of their symptoms and are often excluded from long-COVID studies. Long COVID certainly exists in kids, but it may not perfectly mirror what goes on in adults: Children’s susceptibility to the virus is different, and their bodies are so rapidly changing, says Yonts, who runs a pediatric-long-COVID clinic in D.C.

All told, the study of long COVID has become, as Sanders of MIT puts it, “a data disaster”. Most of the experts I spoke with said they feel comfortable working in the 10 to 30 percent range, which is where many studies seem to be starting to converge. Finding one answer is tricky, without knowing how many forms long COVID can take—some could be more common than others. Formally splitting the disease into subdivisions could help address some of these ambiguities. But we don’t know nearly enough to start slicing and dicing, says Bryan Lau, an infectious-disease epidemiologist working with Mehta and Priya Duggal.

If researchers aren’t comprehensively capturing who currently has long COVID, they can’t say for certain who’s most likely to get it either. Many researchers have found that women contract long COVID more frequently than men. Others have uncovered evidence that people who end up infected with gobs of the coronavirus, or who produce antibodies that attack the body’s own tissues, also seem to tilt toward long COVID. Chronic health issues, including diabetes, could up a person’s chances of getting sick and staying sick as well. So might a lingering Epstein-Barr virus infection. But some of these trends are still being confirmed, experts told me, and the extent to which they toggle risk up or down isn’t known. And it’s definitely too early to pinpoint any of these factors as long-COVID causes.

Still, a couple of other variables feel a bit more nailed down. “The risk is high in people who need hospitalization or ICU care,” Al-Aly said. Deepti Gurdasani, an epidemiologist at Queen Mary University of London, says she’s fairly confident that the nature of a person’s exposure to SARS-CoV-2 plays a role as well: Heavier and more frequent viral encounters seem to tip the scales toward symptoms that last and last. That’s a concern for people in essential occupations, who “aren’t able to shield themselves,” she told me.

If these last few factors directly affect how and whether long COVID unspools, vaccination—which reliably staves off hospitalization and, to a lesser degree, infection—could be a partial preventive. Several studies have shown that shots do seem to muzzle long-COVID rates. (Other interventions that lower exposure also help: masks, distancing, ventilation.) They don’t, however, eliminate long COVID’s odds. To date, experts have yet to find any demographic that has been spared from the condition, despite persistent myths that certain groups, particularly kids, are somehow immune. “We’ve seen it in children of all ages,” says Laura Malone, a pediatric neurologist at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, in Baltimore. Some of her patients are toddlers. The virus isn’t pulling any punches either. Every iteration we’ve encountered so far, Omicron included, seems capable of causing long COVID. ”No one is not at risk,” Al-Aly said.

To this day, most countries do not keep a running tally of long-COVID cases. But ballparks of the burden are staggering. Some 2 percent of all U.K. residents—not just those with documented infections—might currently have long COVID, according to the Office for National Statistics. Another analysis estimates that up to 23 million Americans have developed the condition since the pandemic’s start.

Many of the experts I’ve spoken with over the past two years have told me that while they think long COVID is essential to study, it’s too complex for them to want to tackle themselves. Meanwhile, long COVID remains the pandemic’s looming specter.

That strain is already being felt by the health-care workers on long COVID’s front lines. Yonts, the Children’s National pediatrician, told me that she’s currently booking patients “out to Memorial Day.” COVID’s global crisis can, in some ways, end when we decide to treat it as done. But that is not an option for a growing fraction of the planet, who cannot put COVID fully behind them. “This is going to be the pandemic after the pandemic,” Gurdasani said.

It’s flaring back up in China.
https://www.reuters.com/business/health ... 022-03-14/