Last year on this date, I published a Tyee article about the fifth anniversary of the first public announcement of what we now know as COVID-19.
My conclusions then were that we hadn’t learned much from the experience. A year later, many of us have unlearned the value of vaccination. Outbreaks of measles and whooping cough have predictably followed. Alberta has stopped reporting COVID-19 in hospitals.
Comments closedIt’s more than just a bad cold: influenza can also raise your risk of a heart attack shortly after an infection, medical experts are warning as the H3N2 strain spreads rapidly in Canada.
At the same time, flu season is coinciding with another risk factor for heart attacks – shovelling snow.
“Any time you get an infection, including a viral infection, there’s the release in your body of molecules that both trigger inflammation and sustain inflammation. And part of that is an increased tendency for your blood to clot,” said Dr. Fahad Razak, internal medicine physician at St. Michael’s Hospital and professor at the University of Toronto.
“That can have immediate effects within the weeks following an infection, resulting in things like strokes or heart attacks.”
Comments closedHeather Hanwell’s 12-year-old daughter recently missed almost two weeks of school after being hit hard by a viral infection. She’s among many parents who are caring for sick kids this flu season, which so far has seen a surge of cases among school-age children.
But the experience was particularly frustrating for Dr. Hanwell, an epidemiologist who says that improving the air quality in schools would help reduce the spread of contagious respiratory illnesses.
Comments closedThe volunteer-led organization Ontario School Safety is renewing calls to the Ontario government to improve indoor air quality in schools.
The call comes as Ontario sees a rapid increase in cases of the flu, particularly impacting young children.
In April, 2021, the Government of Ontario announced it was investing over $130 million, in addition to funds from the Canadian government, to upgrade school infrastructure to protect children from COVID-19. The majority of this funding was earmarked for ventilation projects to improve indoor air quality.
Comments closedWork-related factors may increase the risk of developing long COVID, according to a new population-based study from Spain.
The findings, published in BMJ Occupational & Environmental Medicine, suggest that the primary work-related drivers of increased long COVID risk were irregular or limited use of respirators, close contact with coworkers and/or the public, inability to physical distance, and use of public transportation to commute to work.
Comments closedNova Scotia Health says masking is required throughout all its facilities beginning Thursday.
However, the health authority says masks are not required in:
Alberta’s government quietly eliminated its public reporting dashboard of COVID-19 outbreaks in acute care facilities, saying the province is under no legal obligation to continue publishing the data in a “post-pandemic context.”
Alberta Health Services’ (AHS) acute-care outbreaks webpage provided weekly public reports on COVID-19 outbreaks in AHS and Covenant Health facilities, including the location where an outbreak had been reported, the date the outbreak was declared, the number of units affected, and how many patients and health-care workers were infected.
Comments closedTORONTO – A new poll says that about three-quarters of Canadian adults still have confidence in vaccines, but hesitancy has increased over the last five years.
The survey conducted by Leger Healthcare and released on Tuesday says 74 per cent of respondents said they were either “very confident” (42 per cent) or “somewhat confident” (32 per cent) in the safety and effectiveness of vaccines.
But about a quarter of respondents said they are less confident than they were before.
Comments closedWork-related factors play a significant and independent role in the risk of developing Long-COVID, shows a new study based on the COVICAT cohort and led by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal), a centre supported by “la Caixa” Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Turin and the Germans Trias i Pujol Institute (IGTP). The findings, published in BMJ Occupational & Environmental Medicine, highlight that a substantial share of Long-COVID could be prevented through targeted workplace measures and policies.
The public health impact of Long-COVID is far from over. Beyond ongoing infections that continue to cause illness and deaths worldwide, millions of people are living with lasting health consequences. Globally, around 6 in every 100 COVID-19 cases develop Long-COVID, amounting to 400 million affected people and an annual economic impact of roughly 1 trillion dollars, or 1% of the global economy.
Comments closedCOVID-19 does not just affect the respiratory system, but also significantly alters the brain in people who have fully recovered from the infectious disease, highlighting the long-term neurological impact of the virus.
Researchers from Griffith University’s National Centre for Neuroimmunology and Emerging Disease (NCNED) used advanced MRI techniques to ascertain the neurological implications of COVID-19 compared with those who had never been infected.
The research provided compelling evidence that even in the absence of ongoing symptoms, prior infection with the virus could leave a measurable imprint on the brain.
Comments closedTORONTO – A new study says the COVID-19 vaccine protects pregnant women from getting severely ill or giving birth prematurely.
Researchers with the Canadian Surveillance of COVID-19 in Pregnancy (CANCOVID-Preg) program, led by the University of British Columbia analyzed public health and clinical records of 19,899 pregnant people diagnosed with COVID between April 5, 2021 and Dec. 31, 2022.
That time period covered infections with both Delta and Omicron variants in eight provinces and one territory.
Comments closedThe Centre intégré de santé et de services sociaux (CISSS) de l’Outaouais has decided to reinstate mandatory mask wearing upon entry into its care facilities.
Starting on Tuesday, wearing a mask is mandatory in hospital centres, including the outpatient ward, the Pierre-Janet mental health hospital (including units 5 and 6 of the juvenile wing), the Physical rehabilitation centre, La RessourSe, residential and long-term care centres and seniors’ homes and alternative housing.
Comments closedIn a major boost to research on long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), the German government has announced that it will provide €500 million (US$582 million) in research funding to support a National Decade Against Post-Infectious Diseases from 2026 to 2036.
Germany is one of many countries facing an unprecedented health burden owing to long COVID and other post-infection syndromes since the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost one in five people in a German cohort had long COVID in 2022, and around one in seven people in the United States were affected by long COVID by late 2023. This translates to a considerable burden on health care and the economy — the syndrome is estimated to cost the world economy US$1 trillion every year.
Comments closedA new study in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases should end any lingering idea that SARS-CoV-2 is ‘just another cold virus.’ It shows that a single, relatively short Omicron wave left a long, measurable scar on the adaptive immune systems of tens of thousands of adults and that people with cardiovascular disease (CVD) may be living with something close to chronic immune compromise nearly two years later.
This isn’t about individual anecdotes, or small clinic cohorts. It’s a population-scale signal, drawn from more than 40,000 patients in a region of China that had almost no SARS-CoV-2 circulation until late 2022. It is, in many ways, the cleanest before and after picture we have of what one mass SARS-CoV-2 exposure does to human immunity.
Comments closedCOVID-19 vaccines have not caused an increase in mortality in France since their appearance in the early 2020s, according to a study that refutes the widespread false theories prevalent in vaccine skeptic circles.
“COVID messenger RNA [mRNA] vaccines do not increase the long-term risk of all-cause mortality,” states Epi-Phare, a French organization comprising the Agence nationale de sécurité du médicament (ANSM) and Assurance maladie, in a study published in JAMA Network Open (opens in a new window).
To reach these conclusions, its authors examined data from nearly 30 million French people between 2021 and 2025, representing the entire 18-59 age group.
Comments closedOntario wrote off more than one billion items of personal protective equipment at a cost of $1.4 billion since 2021, the province’s auditor general found.
Shelley Spence found the province continues to purchase masks, gowns and other protective gear at the same levels as the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, despite significantly declining demand.
“We found that expired products began to accumulate in the provincial stockpile as some of the products purchased during the pandemic fell short of desired quality standards and were not used,” Spence wrote in her annual report.
Comments closedDr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine division, sent a memo to staff that linked children’s deaths to the COVID-19 vaccine, but did not provide data to back the claim.
The memo said that a review “found that at least 10 children have died after and because of receiving COVID-19 vaccination,” according to multiple sources familiar with the email. The memo was first reported by the New York Times.
Prasad suggested that the deaths were related to myocarditis, or the inflammation of the heart muscle. Prasad did not share any data used in the review, including the children’s ages, whether they had existing health conditions, or how the FDA determined there was a link between their death and the vaccine. The findings were not published in a peer-reviewed medical journal.
Comments closedPreliminary results of a national survey conducted by researchers at the Simon Fraser University Faculty of Health Sciences (SFU FHS) has found that Canadians with Long COVID identified virtual healthcare services as essential to their care.
“Many of the 621 survey respondents from across the country shared how lifesaving and essential these virtual services are in providing accessibility to care that reduces risk of infections, travel time, and PEM”, shared FHS Research Fellow Kayli Jamieson, who also has Long COVID herself.
PEM, or Post-Exertional Malaise, is common in many people with Long COVID, meaning that physical, mental, or sensory activity triggers can cause a flare-up in symptoms lasting from hours to weeks. It is one of many factors that contributes to the chronic and frequently disabling nature of Long COVID.
Comments closed