Coronavirus COVID-19 (2019-nCoV) Thread - 2021 Breaking News

The Quarantine Zone
724

You do realize there are risks beyond death, including permanent disability. COVID-19 isn’t just a bad cold; it’s a disease that causes inflammation of the brain and it can absolutely wreck vessels – perhaps permanently. Try holding down a job when you can’t remember shit you said five minutes ago and can’t walk five minutes without needing to lay on a couch. Try living with yourself knowing you were an asymptomatic carrier that inflicted such damage upon others.

Vaccines should not be viewed as long-term protection at this time; they’re a short-term layer of protection - a very important one - that can reduce the spread and hospitalizations, giving us more time to come up with better vaccines and more research to better protect ourselves.

725

This is also very much true.

726

I agree. The authors even admitted that their method was not very quantitative. They counted particles visualized by shining a laser on droplets coming out of someone’s mouth. It was more to demonstrate a method people could do at home.

727

Yes, this can occur in a minority of people. But statistically, this isn’t something the majority of people need to worry about.

728

A majority is slightly more than 50%; what kind of majority we talking about here? We know from the data that a majority of patients aren’t hospitalized but anywhere from 70-90% (somewhere in that range) who do end up being admitted have persistent noticeable symptoms more than six months after discharge. That’s a lot of people who don’t necessarily die but have major problems afterward.

729

Cite?

I’ll try to dig up the cite, but IIRC I’ve seen a study finding something like 98% of people report no symptoms after a few months. Anecdotally, given that something like 20%-30% of the US population has likely been infected with COVID wouldn’t we see lot more cases of impaired people walking around if a huge number of people were being severely adversely affected?

I suspect that, like COVID mortality, the non-lethal effects of the disease are extremely different based on age. The rate of hospitalization and death grows exponentially with age. I don’t doubt that when looking at the population of people likely to be hospitalized with COVID, a high percentage of them are also likely to suffer lasting symptoms. At the same time, it can also be true that the overwhelming majority (much closer to 100% than 50%) of younger people are not statistically likely to suffer long term effects.

We probably shouldn’t hijack the breaking news thread here…

730

Here’s one cite; the research is ongoing.

Here’s one article for non-hospitalized patients.

Again, the research is ongoing. Obviously we’re not talking half of patients being wheelchair bound or coming down with dementia, but there are enough people with serious long-term symptoms to take this illness very seriously. You could end up with impacts that are well-short of death but leaving you with some form of long-term impairment.

731

That first one is interesting. Though, as with all of the studies I’ve seen on long COVID, nearly all the symptoms are self-reported (I realize there probably isn’t a good alternative at this point) and likely hard to disentangle from non-COVID causes. The Lancet study reports

At 6 months after acute infection, COVID-19 survivors were mainly troubled with fatigue or muscle weakness, sleep difficulties, and anxiety or depression. Patients who were more severely ill during their hospital stay had more severe impaired pulmonary diffusion capacities and abnormal chest imaging manifestations, and are the main target population for intervention of long-term recovery.

Pretty much the entire world is suffering from increased anxiety, depression, and fatigue - with or without a COVID diagnosis. How does the studied population compare to a control group? Lumping the serious, abnormal chest imaging patients in with people experiencing some degree of mental distress seems pretty low-information to me.

The second study:

The CDC report is based on telephone surveys of 274 COVID-19 patients.

Ehhhh… this is on the quality level of self-reported Facebook groups for me. The headline “One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren’t hospitalized have long-term illness” is absurdly misleading.

Found the cite I was looking for: LINK

We analysed data from 4182 incident cases of COVID-19 who logged their symptoms prospectively in the COVID Symptom Study app.

558 (13.3%) had symptoms lasting >=28 days,
189 (4.5%) for >=8 weeks and
95 (2.3%) for >=12 weeks

Long-COVID was characterised by symptoms of fatigue, headache, dyspnoea and anosmia and was more likely with increasing age, BMI and female sex.

There’s obviously a ton a research still to be done, but for me, based on my understanding of the stats at this moment in time, serious, long-term symptoms shouldn’t be terribly large concern for the majority (again closer to 100% than 50%) of the population. As more and better data comes out I will adjust my opinion.

732

115,768,952 total cases
2,571,785 dead
91,469,136 recovered

In the US:

29,456,377 total cases
531,652 dead
20,003,325 recovered

Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:

733

I created a thread to discuss long term covid here. Please join if you care to.

734

i use the multi-layer gaiter at the office. much more comfortable and easier on/off. then i wash it when i leave so it is ready for the next day.

735

Brazil is making the news on another freont , not only is it claimed to be the source of another variant, it has just hit its all time high for daily deaths.

Worth noting that Brazil’s leadership is closest to that of Trump when it comes to Coronavirus management.

So that means not supporting maks mandates or social distancing, and interference in the covid repoirtiung structure.

Meantime individual Brazilian states are trying to do the best they can, so if you want to see where Texas and Mississippi are headed, just maintian observation on Brazil

736

Oklahoma:

This seems high. The entire population of Oklahoma is only 4 million people.

737

Unemployment claims over the last 10–12 months have consistently been higher than ever before in history. Only the Great Recession came anywhere close.

738

116,233,565 total cases
2,581,943 dead
91,902,761 recovered

In the US:

29,526,086 total cases
533,636 dead
20,093,442 recovered

Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:

739

116,674,473 total cases
2,592,128 dead
92,285,355 recovered

In the US:

29,593,704 total cases
535,563 dead
20,183,329 recovered

Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:

740

A small but significant step in vaccine nationalism - Italy used an EU provision to block the export of Astra-Zeneca vaccine to Australia, saying it was not vulnerable, which is true, but also neatly eliding over the lower than expected take-up of AZ vaccine in Europe, leading to potentially significant wastage.

Doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 Vaccine Pile Up in Europe Amid Government Restrictions - WSJ [paywall might apply]

741

Here’s some news:

742

You can get gaiters with pockets in them for inserting filters that will cover your nose and mouth if you position them properly. Three layers of fabric + however many the filters are.

743

:cry: :grimacing: Not surprising. I guess we can expect something like that here soon.