Covid Stress Test: Persistent health problems, Inaccessible higher ed, Skipping life saving vaccines, and more
Bonus epic return of What are we even doing?
Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter!
Is there a theme or mini-theme this week? I certainly wasn’t thinking thematically as I was compiling this issue, but I think the mini-theme I ended up with was stress. One of the articles does indeed talk about how Covid is a kind of stress test for the body, but as I looked at the rest of my selections, they mostly do have some connection to stress. On the body, of course, directly and indirectly, that’s always been the case. But also on systems like education and public health.
Higher education isn’t as accessible. K-12 is stressed with more sickness and “absenteeism.” Covid has stressed faith in public health which has affected vaccine uptake across a whole range of vaccines, not just for Covid. And on and on.
Which just makes me want to shout out, “what are we even doing?” Which is back as a feature this week. I hope you enjoy some very bad takes. Oddly, since I haven’t included the feature in a while, the bad takes are actually quite old at this point. It’s like a bad take time machine. I’m thinking of declaring bad take bankruptcy and fastforwarding to the most recent. I’m also thinking of alternating with some “No shib, Sherlock,” but once again, there would be a time machine effect as many of the “no shibs” I’ve saved are quite old. We will see.
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As most have probably noticed, there is no paid subscription option for this newsletter. However, Substack does have an option where subscribers can pledge to subscribe “just in case” and a few kind subscribers have made that pledge. I very much appreciated the vote of confidence in what I’m doing here. What I’ve decided to do on a trial basis is to set up a “tip jar” on the Ko-fi platform. I’m not anticipating a huge surge of income from using Ko-fi but whatever revenue I do end up with, I plan to spend on supporting artists on Bandcamp. Sadly, who knows how long that will seem like a good idea.
Top Articles Everyone Should Read on Covid
Real Impact of COVID-19 Infection and Why We Should Care by Jeff Gilchrist, PhD
What COVID-19 Does To The Body (Fourth Edition, March 2024) / Pandemic Accountability Index
Let's Face It, Covid Trashed Our Immune Systems by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer
How the press manufactured consent for never-ending COVID reinfections by Julia Doubleday / The Gauntlet
Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores by Ziyad Al-Aly / The Conversation
What It’s Really Like to Live With Long COVID by Meryl Davids Landau / Prevention
Survivors of Severe COVID Face Persistent Health Problems by Victoria Colliver / UC San Francisco
UC San Francisco researchers examined COVID-19 patients across the United States who survived some of the longest and most harrowing battles with the virus and found that about two-thirds still had physical, psychiatric, and cognitive problems for up to a year later.
The study, which appears April 10, 2024, in the journal Critical Care Medicine, reveals the life-altering impact of SARS-CoV-2 on these individuals, the majority of whom had to be placed on mechanical ventilators for an average of one month.
Too sick to be discharged to a skilled nursing home or rehabilitation facility, these patients were transferred instead to special hospitals known as long-term acute care hospitals (LTACHs). These hospitals specialize in weaning patients off ventilators and providing rehabilitation care, and they were a crucial part of the pandemic response.
COVID-19 acts like a stress test, uncovering the vulnerable part of the human body: a retrospective study of 1640 cases in China by Tian-Yi He, Hong-Yu Zhou, et. al / European Journal of Public Health
The results of the study showed that age-related variability between different COVID-19 clinical manifestations may be due to increased susceptibility of cardiovascular endothelial cells, gastrointestinal glands, and brain neurons with ageing. Also, the tendency of the infected women to exhibit neurological lesions may be due to their social roles and life events. Furthermore, multifactorial regression analysis revealed the role of COVID-19 in exacerbating pre-existing disorders. Finally, we calculated and summarized the medical history of patients with different clinical manifestations.
Higher education was easily accessible to disabled people during Covid. Why are we being shut out now? by Rosie Anfilogoff / The Guardian
My route to university was never going to be simple. While my friends were flicking through university brochures and choosing Ucas options, I was signing chemotherapy consent forms in the teenage cancer unit at Addenbrooke’s hospital and throwing up in its weirdly tropical island-themed bathrooms. Even before then, my severe chronic illness made attending traditional university unthinkable – until the pandemic happened.
In 2020, for the first time, it became possible to attend a brick-and-mortar university online. Universities became accessible – or at least, more accessible than they had ever been – practically overnight. Accommodations that disabled students had been requesting for years, such as lecture recordings and software that would allow them to take exams from home, were slotted into place so that students could learn remotely. Suddenly, friends at university were having the kind of experience that would have enabled me to join them. But since the “end” of the pandemic, online learning has withered away and thousands of students have been left without sufficient access. By returning to the pre-pandemic state of affairs, universities are failing current and prospective disabled students like me.
The return to solely in-person learning ignores everything experts in the field have recommended and, I believe, neglects universities’ legal duty to make “reasonable adjustments” to ensure people with disabilities are not disadvantaged. Organisations that represent disabled students have made it clear that continued online provision is crucial, with many students requesting the same. “I’d like the option for remote learning to still be given to students who ask for it,” said one student in a report from the Disabled Students’ Commission. “As a disabled student, I have found remote learning – although challenging at times – easier than the challenges I would have to deal with if I had to attend on-campus teaching.”. Similarly, in a survey of 326 disabled students by Disabled Students UK, 84.5% said the option of online learning post-pandemic would benefit them.
Conspiracy Theorists Said People Who Got the COVID Vaccine Would Be Dropping Like Flies. That Hasn’t Remotely Happened by Noor Al-Sibai / Neoscope
Conspiracy theorists have for years now insisted that COVID-19 vaccines were the real killers, especially among young men — but a new study shows that there's no data to back that up.
Published in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, the new study conducted by the Oregon Health Authority's public health division used data from June 2021 through December 2022 to investigate whether there was any actual link between COVID vaccines and cardiac deaths in young men, which conspiracists have relentlessly claimed are linked.
Looking at death data from that time period in the state of Oregon, the OHA identified only three cases out of nearly 1,300 young men aged 16-30 who'd had mRNA vaccines within 100 days of their untimely passages. Of those, two had had underlying illnesses that resulted in their deaths, while the cause of death for the last person had remained undetermined.
While these findings would seem to pretty conclusively put to bed vaccine misinformation campaigns claiming that the jab causes cardiac arrests in otherwise healthy young men — as was the case when Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamilton collapsed on the field in early 2023 due to such a rare heart event — it's hard to say whether it will put a dent in any conspiracy theories, which tend to operate in an emotional realm beyond concrete data and evidence.
Kids don't need to get sick to be healthy by Kristen Panthagani / Your Local Epidemiologist
In response to rising measles cases this year, some are claiming that measles is actually good for children—that fighting off the infection will make them stronger.
These rumors are catalyzed by the overall sentiment that children in our modern era are less healthy than they used to be. While there are some types of disease where this is true—metabolic syndrome is on the rise, for example—infectious disease is certainly not one of them.
Infections are not good for children—they have historically been the top killer of children—and our modern age is an anomaly, in a good way, when it comes to the ultimate marker of childhood health: not dying.
The mythical “good old days”—when children had flourishing immune systems from their natural lifestyles and didn’t need antibiotics or vaccines—simply did not exist. Back in those days, a lot of children died.
We have forgotten how many children used to die before their fifth birthday.
Oregon data: COVID vaccines not tied to sudden cardiac death in young people by Mary Van Beusekom / CIDRAP
A review of death certificates of previously healthy Oregon residents aged 16 to 30 years who died of cardiac or undetermined causes from June 2021 to December 2022 found no link between mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and sudden cardiac death. …
"These data do not support an association between receipt of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and sudden cardiac death among previously healthy young persons," the study authors wrote. "COVID-19 vaccination is recommended for all persons aged ≥6 months to prevent COVID-19 and complications, including death."
"Although the rate was higher during the pandemic year of 2021, myocarditis remained an infrequent cause of death among persons in this age group," they wrote. "Detection of a small difference in mortality rate from myocarditis would require a larger sample size."
The authors noted that electronic health records from 40 US healthcare systems from January 2021 to January 2022 revealed that the risk of cardiac complications was significantly higher after COVID-19 infection than after mRNA COVID-19 vaccination among people aged 5 years and older.
Race for the next generation of Covid-19 vaccines by Katelyn Jetelina, Andrea Tamayo / Your Local Epidemiologist
We could definitely use better Covid-19 vaccines. While our current ones work well against severe disease, they could be better in other departments, like:
Stopping transmission
Covering future mutations
Having fewer side effects
Ability to combine with other vaccines, like the flu vaccine.
A suite of vaccines—considered next-generation (NextGen)—are in the clinical trials pipeline. While some are showing positive results, there is still a long road ahead. Where are they in the process? Let’s dig in.
Feds launch indoor air quality research program by Lisa Schnirring / CIDRAP
The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) this week announced the launch of the Building Resilient Environments for Air and Total Health (BREATHE) program, which is a platform with a goal of improving indoor air quality across the country.
ARPA-H is a funding agency that supports research that could result in biomedical and health breakthroughs. The Biden administration proposed ARPA-H's creation, and its establishment within the Department of Health and Human Services was approved by Congress and signed into law in March 2022.
The agency said the BREATHE program focuses on enabling the next generation of "smart buildings" that have integrated systems that continually assess, measure, and report indoor air quality and make real-time interventions such as extra ventilation or disinfection to reduce airborne threats to human health.
The platform will engage experts across a range of specialized areas, including molecular diagnostic testing and biosensor instrument developers, data analysts, risk-assessment software developers, property management firms, building automation system providers, healthcare systems and hospital network professionals, and long-term care facility operators.
Approximately 17 Million American Adults Have Long COVID Right Now by John Parkinson / Contagion Live
Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC), or Long COVID, continues to be a difficult and challenging condition for millions of Americans. And according to new survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and being reported by KFF, we have some figures on how many Americans are affected by it.
In fact, there are an estimated 17 million American adults who currently have Long COVID. According to the Census Bureau, there are 258 million American adults, and in the latest CDC Household Pulse Survey, 6.7% of respondents say they have Long COVID right now. The data suggest approximately 3 in 10 report having Long COVID at some point, and roughly 1 in 10 report having long COVID now.
School attendance held back by sickness - Ministry of Education / RNZ News
Just over half of students regularly attended school in term four last year, up on the same term in 2022.
Fresh figures from the Ministry of Education show 53.6 percent of students met the criteria for regular attendance - present for more than 90 percent of the term.
That was 3.5 percentage points higher than term 4 in 2022, but still 12.5 percentage points lower than the same term in 2019.
All regions saw improved attendance, with the largest increase in Waikato - up 6.6 percentage points.
There was an increase across all year levels too, and the trend of higher attendance between years 1 and 6 followed by a fall through intermediate and secondary years remained.
Term four last year was the first not to be affected by Covid-19 health requirements, like self-isolation, since the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the ministry said.
But sickness was still the main driver of non-attendance.
COVID, Flu and RSV Vaccines Are Lifesavers. Why Aren’t More Older Adults Getting Them? by Sarah Meyer, Georgina Peacock / Scientific American
The CDC surveyed unvaccinated older folks to better understand their reasons for not getting vaccinated, and the results varied. People 65 and older who said they were probably or definitely not going to get the influenza vaccine were concerned primarily about vaccine effectiveness and side effects and said they were not worried about the flu. For the COVID vaccine, participants most often shared concerns about heart-related or unknown serious side effects, followed by concerns about effectiveness and having “vaccine fatigue,” meaning they were likely burned out on vaccine information. The primary reasons for people age 60 and older not getting the RSV vaccine were not being worried about RSV, not knowing enough about RSV or the RSV vaccine, and the vaccine being “too new.”
These reasons for not getting vaccinated and the differences across vaccines are perhaps understandable in the context of where we are in the vaccine rollouts. Influenza vaccines have been licensed in the U.S. since the 1940s. In contrast, COVID vaccines were introduced little more than three years ago, and while these vaccines have undergone the most rigorous safety monitoring in U.S. history, some people still have misconceptions about the vaccines’ safety.
In addition, the vaccine fatigue expressed by respondents to the CDC survey is a genuine challenge. In the early days of COVID vaccines, older adults enthusiastically accepted vaccination. But over time, fewer and fewer seniors have been willing to get additional recommended doses. Many people are also less concerned about COVID itself, despite the fact that many people are still dying from it each day in the U.S.
COVID infections are causing drops in IQ and years of brain aging, studies suggest by Amanda Buckiewicz / CBC News
Take me through some of these effects that COVID has had on the brain. What have you seen?
One of the key manifestations that people experience after SARS-CoV-2 infection is what we call colloquially as brain fog. That's the mental haziness, the inability to remember things, to connect the dots, to really think clearly.
In addition to brain fog, we see people coming back to the clinics with mini strokes. We see a lot of people with headache disorders, sleep disturbances, sleep problems. A lot of people come back to the clinic with tingling of the extremities, tingling in the legs or sometimes in the arms. In rare cases, seizure disorders. So really a variety of health problems in the brain.
What Are We Even Doing: Bad Takes on the Pandemic
Alberta seeing deadliest flu season in recent memory; experts point to low vaccination rates
Unvaccinated Florida kids exposed to measles can skip quarantine, officials say | Ars Technica
One of my favourite covers! Gov’t Mule covers Humble Pie’s 30 Days in the Hole.