Comments closedAs new variants continue to emerge and infect people, older adults remain highly vulnerable to long-term health effects from this pathogen. Continued multidisciplinary research is needed to understand and prevent long COVID to reduce morbidity and mortality and maintain quality of life in older adults.
The 2024 Olympic Games are serving up some less-than-subtle metaphors for how poorly we handle public health. Just after winning a bronze medal in the much-anticipated men’s 200-meter race, U.S. sprinter Noah Lyles collapsed on the track in exhaustion — not just because he’d completed a brutal run in just 19.7 seconds, finishing third, but also because he was sick with COVID-19, a diagnosis that he’d concealed from others. He had been favored to take home gold, as he did in the 100-meter race a few days earlier.
But seeing an American Olympic star sprawled out and gasping on the track, and then taken away in a wheelchair, was more than a shocking image. It also represented the general “mission accomplished” attitude toward SARS-CoV-2: We think we’ve won against this virus and we haven’t.
COVID isn’t just spreading like wildfire through the Olympic Village in Paris — we are undergoing surges across the globe, with the World Health Organization tracking steep rises in infections in 84 countries. After more than four years fighting this thing, it is still knocking us out.
Comments closedAbout 400 million people worldwide have been afflicted with long Covid, according to a new report by scientists and other researchers who have studied the condition. The team estimated that the economic cost — from factors like health care services and patients unable to return to work — is about $1 trillion worldwide each year, or about 1 percent of the global economy.
The report, published Friday in the journal Nature Medicine, is an effort to summarize the knowledge about and effects of long Covid across the globe four years after it first emerged.
It also aims to “provide a road map for policy and research priorities,” said one author, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, the chief of research and development at the V.A. St. Louis Health Care System and a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. He wrote the paper with several other leading long Covid researchers and three leaders of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, an organization formed by long Covid patients who are also professional researchers.
Comments closedAlberta Health Services (AHS) is closing down its long-COVID outpatient program that had been operating since 2021.
In a letter to patients dated Aug. 8, AHS says the program has concluded.
“Your health and well-being remain a priority, and we are committed to ensuring you receive support during the transition,” it reads.
“We understand that this change might be challenging for some and thank you for your understanding and co-operation during this transition period.”
Comments closedFor months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to 1% of the global economy.
Comments closedConfusion and frustration.
Those are the feelings that 56-year-old Calgary grandmother Barbara Pencala was left with after she learned on Wednesday via email that Alberta Health Services (AHS) is concluding its long COVID Inter-Professional Outpatient Program (IPOP).
The temporary initiative was set up in 2021 and was never meant to be permanent, but the news came as a surprise to hundreds of program patients, many of whom took to social media to express their concerns.
Comments closedCalifornia-based engineer and scientist Patrick Vaughan made a troubling discovery July 10. Dozens of facilities providing COVID-19 wastewater data went offline, seemingly overnight.
Vaughan had been following WastewaterSCAN, a national program that monitors wastewater for diseases. He noticed that 42 of the previously reporting 194 facilities suddenly displayed small blue triangles with the message “data is no longer collected from this site.” The development came just as people across the U.S. scrambled for information during a summer COVID wave that even infected President Joe Biden.
“This is a major blow to our COVID wastewater tracking abilities,” Vaughan told his followers in a video he posted the same day.
Comments closedThe Nassau County Legislature passed the Mask Transparency Act Monday – a law that prohibits the wearing of masks in public in some scenarios.
Those over the age of 16 will not be allowed to wear masks, unless it is being worn for the person’s health, religion or celebratory purposes. Officials say police will be the ones to determine whether or not the masks are being used for those purposes.
Legislators explained their reasoning for supporting the measure during the hearing.
Comments closedBritish Columbia’s top doctor has ended the COVID-19 public health emergency, which began nearly 1,600 days ago on March 17, 2020.
Declaring COVID-19 a public health emergency gave provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry the ability to issue mask mandates, travel and gathering restrictions and vaccination requirements for health-care workers to curb the spread of the virus.
While experts The Tyee spoke with agree the public health emergency may no longer be needed, they stressed that COVID-19 still poses a serious and potentially deadly threat to the general public.
“COVID is still a major, ongoing health issue and crisis,” said Tara Moriarty, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, an infectious disease expert and co-founder of the COVID-19 Resources Canada database.
Comments closedComments closedFor far too long, millions of Americans suffering from long Covid have had their symptoms dismissed or ignored — by the medical community, by the media, and by Congress. That is unacceptable and has got to change.
The legislation that we have introduced finally recognizes that long Covid is a public health emergency and provides an historic investment into research, development, and education needed to counter the effects of this terrible disease. Congress must act now to ensure treatments are developed and made available for Americans struggling with long Covid. Yes. It is time for a long Covid moonshot.
COVID-19 is surging in parts of North America and Europe, and even played a role in ending the presidential campaign of 81-year-old Joe Biden, who was infected for the third time last month.
Nevertheless, on Wednesday the Ontario government shut down its early warning system to detect COVID and other emerging diseases.
Doctors, citizens and researchers are calling the decision to kill the province’s wastewater disease surveillance program both wrong-headed and dangerous. Ending the program will make it harder to track and thwart viral outbreaks, they say, and thereby increase the burden on Ontario’s understaffed hospitals, which experienced more than 1,000 emergency room closures last year.
“Pandemics do not end because science has been muzzled,” Dr. Iris Gorfinkel, a well-known Toronto physician and clinical researcher, told the CBC.
In emails to politicians, more than 5,000 citizens have demanded restoration of the program, with little effect.
Comments closedFor the past three years, Alexandra Johnston has started her work day by reaching for the pickaxe in the trunk of her car.
It is her tool of choice for prying open manhole covers – a task she demonstrated with practised ease last week while on a tour of her wastewater sampling regimen in Toronto.
Wearing a surgical mask and gloves, Ms. Johnston dragged the heavy cover aside, then grabbed hold of the fishing line secured underneath. After hauling up a few metres of line, she displayed her catch: a dripping wet tampon she had placed there the day before.
Her teammate, Claire Gibbs, quickly moved in with a prelabelled plastic bag to capture the sewage-laden sample. Using scissors, Ms. Gibbs deftly snipped the line, sealed the bag and stowed it away in the trunk as part of that day’s delivery.
Comments closedAn examination of 23 common wildlife species in Virginia finds evidence of SARS-CoV-infection in 6 and antibodies indicating previous infection in 5.
For the study, published today in Nature Communications, Virginia Tech researchers collected 789 nasal and oral swabs and 126 blood samples from animals live-trapped and released or being treated at wildlife rehabilitation centers in Virginia and Washington, DC, from May 2022 to September 2023.
Comments closedA new US study has found that wildfire smoke may be worse for brain health than other types of air pollution and even increase the risk of dementia.
The findings, reported on Monday at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference in Philadelphia, come as millions spent the weekend under air quality warnings from wildfires spewing smoke across the western US, including a huge wildfire in California that has grown to more than 360,000 acres.
At issue is fine particulate matter or PM 2.5 – tiny particles about 30 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair that can be inhaled deep into the lungs and move to the bloodstream. This pollution – from traffic, factories and fires – can cause or worsen heart and lung diseases, and the new study adds to evidence it may play some role in dementia, too.
Comments closedOttawa’s wastewater surveillance program will continue after the Ontario government ends funding on July 31, a memo from Board of Health Chair Catherine Kitts says.
In a memo sent to Mayor Mark Sutcliffe and council members Wednesday, Kitts said the surveillance initiative, operated and managed under Robert Delatolla’s team at the University of Ottawa, will remain as it is while discussions about longer-term solutions continue.
The province announced earlier this year that it would stop funding for the highly regarded program as of the end of July — at a savings of around $15 million.
Comments closedWith just days to go until the Ontario government stops funding wastewater surveillance, researchers and residents who use the data fear crucial information about COVID risk is about to go dark, just as a new wave is spreading across Ontario.
Earlier this year, the Ontario government confirmed that it would stop funding the province’s widely respected wastewater surveillance program after July 31. At the time, a spokesperson said the government was ending the program, believed to cost in the range of $15 million a year, because the federal government was expanding its wastewater surveillance program and it didn’t want to duplicate the efforts.
The federal government currently operates four testing sites in Ontario — all in the GTA. It has said it wants to expand its program in Ontario to eight to nine potential sites. The Ontario program gathers surveillance at more than 50 sites.
With the end of provincial funding fast approaching — and a summer COVID-19 wave now beginning to surge in the province — there are growing fears that people who rely on the data on COVID-19 and other diseases will be left in the dark.
Comments closedIt was a familiar scene, but one that is becoming less common in Ottawa and across the country.
On a recent Friday, people arriving for an outdoor concert and dance at Saw Gallery in downtown Ottawa were greeted with signs telling them that masks were mandatory. The same signs thanked them for supporting their community.
Participants happily complied. Some said they have continued to mask and seek out COVID-safe spaces since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. Others said they don’t always wear masks in public, but do so when there is a higher risk or they are protecting those who are more vulnerable.
Comments closedSince 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.
The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.
Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.
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