On Friday, dozens of people went to our nation’s capital to demand more action be taken to address long Covid. Patients, advocates, and activists demonstrated in front of the Lincoln Memorial for the first Long Covid Awareness Day.
“When you become a nurse, you swear to a code of ethics. This code is why I’m standing here today,” said Dara York who organized the rally.
York is a nurse and mother of three from California who is battling long Covid. She and others called on Congress and President Biden to provide more resources for prevention, research and treatment.
Comments closedSome 6.8% of American adults are currently experiencing long Covid symptoms, according to a new survey from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealing an “alarming” increase in recent months even as the health agency relaxes Covid isolation recommendations, experts say.
That means an estimated 17.6 million Americans could now be living with long Covid.
“This should be setting off alarms for many people,” said David Putrino, the Nash Family Director of the Cohen Center for Recovery From Complex Chronic Illness at Mount Sinai. “We’re really starting to see issues emerging faster than I expected.”
Comments closedMonday marks four years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic.
Since the first cases in Wuhan, China, in 2019, there have been millions of infections and deaths around the world.
There have also been major successes including vaccines for nearly all age groups, the development of antiviral drugs to treat those at risk of severe illness and the proliferation of at-home tests.
Comments closedA study of 1,037,936 US children seen in 17 healthcare systems across the country shows that COVID-19 vaccines are moderately protective against long COVID: 35% to 45%, with higher rates in adolescents. The study was published today in Pediatrics.
The researchers estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) against long COVID in children aged 5 to 17 years. Though severe COVID-19 cases are less common in children than in adults, persistent symptoms in children do occur.
“It is difficult to establish how much this results from differential reporting of symptoms at different ages, greater difficulty distinguishing long COVID from other childhood illnesses or effects of the pandemic (eg, disruption of seasonal viral patterns, or of school progress,” the authors wrote.
Comments closedThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday mothballed its longstanding COVID isolation guidance, announcing that people no longer need to isolate for five days after catching the coronavirus. Instead, per the CDC, they should stay home if they feel sick but can leave home and resume normal activities as soon as their symptoms are getting better and its been a day since they had a fever (without the help of fever-reducing medication). That means that the CDC is now both streamlining and simplifying its recommendations and advising people to treat their COVID infections like they would the flu or any other respiratory illness — even though the novel coronavirus is nothing like the flu or other common respiratory viruses.
Many public-health experts are backing the move, which is the first major change the CDC has made to the guidance since it reduced the isolation period from ten days to five in late 2021 and had been previewed last month in a report by the Washington Post. The CDC and the experts supporting the plan have noted that it makes sense for the agency to align its isolation guidance with how everyone is now living with COVID, four years after the start of the pandemic. That new normal is that COVID isn’t going away and people are still catching it, but the threat it poses and harm is causes continues to decline thanks to virtually everyone having some form of immunity owing to prior infection or the administration of widely available vaccines, in addition to the availability of effective life-saving antiviral treatments like Paxlovid.
Comments closedThe US government’s free at-home Covid-19 test program will be suspended Friday, according to the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
Since November, residential households in the US have been able to submit an order through Covidtests.gov for four individual rapid antigen tests. All orders placed on or before Friday will be fulfilled, according to ASPR, an operating division of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
“ASPR has delivered over 1.8 billion free COVID-19 tests to the American people through COVIDTests.gov and direct distribution pathways and will continue distributing millions of tests per week to long-term care facilities, food banks, health centers, and schools,” an ASPR spokesperson said in a statement Tuesday.
Comments closedShortly before Joseph Ladapo was sworn in as Florida’s surgeon general in 2022, the New Yorker ran a short column welcoming the vaccine-skeptic doctor to his new role, and highlighting his advocacy for the use of leeches in public health.
It was satire of course, a teasing of the Harvard-educated physician for his unorthodox medical views, which include a steadfast belief that life-saving Covid shots are the work of the devil, and that opening a window is the preferred treatment for the inhalation of toxic fumes from gas stoves.
But now, with an entirely preventable outbreak of measles spreading across Florida, medical experts are questioning if quackery really has become official health policy in the nation’s third most-populous state.
Comments closedComments closedThe changes in the CDC guidelines [now] are really a result of political and corporate pressure. It’s a dangerous change that goes against the science, encourages disease spread, and prioritizes corporate interests, making it easier to exploit workers.
The overwhelmingly abundant evidence for this virus over the past 4 years tells us that it is a far more dangerous pathogen than flu, which lacks seasonality, is still evolving, has induced Long Covid in tens of millions of throughout the world, and cannot be ‘FLU-ified.’
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Comments closedPreventing infections and reinfections is the best way to prevent Long Covid and should remain the foundation of public health policy. A greater commitment to nonpharmaceutical interventions, which include masking, especially in high-risk settings, and improved air quality through filtration and ventilation, are requisite. Updating building codes to require mitigation against airborne pathogens and ensure safer indoor air should be treated with the same seriousness afforded to mitigation of risks from earthquakes and other natural hazards. Reducing the risk of serious outcomes after COVID-19 and some prevention of Long Covid can be attained with vaccination of a wider spectrum of the population.
A new study based on 4,605 participants in the Michigan COVID-19 Recovery Surveillance Study shows that the prevalence of long COVID symptoms at 30 and 90 days post-infection was 43% to 58% lower among adults who were fully vaccinated before infection.
The study appeared yesterday in the Annals of Epidemiology.
The 30- and 90-day timeframes were meant to compare two different definitions of long COVID. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines the condition as new or persistent symptoms 4 weeks after infection, while the World Health Organization definition defines it as 12 or more weeks after infection.
Comments closedAbout a quarter of U.S. adults who had COVID-19 during the past four years endured persistent symptoms lasting at least three months following their infection. But the prevalence of long COVID varied significantly by state, with California having a relatively low incidence compared to the national average, according to a report released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Long COVID encompasses over 200 symptoms that can last for months or even years after a coronavirus infection, including extreme fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, sexual dysfunction or digestive disorders.
The CDC’s breakdown of long COVID hotspots revealed a clear correlation between areas with higher rates of persistent symptoms and those with the greatest skepticism about the pandemic, per research from the National Institutes of Health.
Comments closedA single-center study conducted at a free community testing site in Maryland suggests that patient-administered BinaxNow COVID-19 rapid antigen tests (RATs) have similar accuracy as those performed by a clinician, although the results can be misinterpreted or falsely negative.
Researchers from the Baltimore Convention Center Field Hospital and Johns Hopkins University and their collaborators compared the sensitivity and specificity of Abbott’s BinaxNOW home RAT with those administered by a healthcare provider and reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) from February to July 2022, a period of Omicron variant predominance.
The median age of the 953 participants was 34 years, 60.6% were women, 58.6% were White, 98.2% were English-speaking, and 34.1% had at least one COVID-19 symptom. Hospital staff administered both a RAT and an RT-PCR test to participants, who then self-tested with a RAT, the results of which were both self-reported and reviewed by the researchers.
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