Trashed immune systems, Covid threat denial, Maximum contagiousness and more!

Long Covid brain disruptions and one article every minimizer should read

Nov 17, 2023

black stethoscope with brown leather case — Photo by Marcelo Leal on Unsplash

Welcome to the latest issue of the Covid-Is-Not-Over newsletter! This week we have a wide array of great resources. My hope is that the various readings will help us all understand our current collective predicament. Additionally, I hope what I’ve included here will be useful as suggested readings for others in our networks to help them understand that predicament too.

And on that note, let’s start with one article you should get all the minimizers in your life to read. Andrew Nikiforuk is a national treasure and his work on Covid in The Tyee is required reading.

The musical interlude feature is at the end as usual, and this week also sees the return of What Are We Even Doing?

Enjoy!

We Interrupt This Mood of Denial to Update COVID’s Threat by Andrew Nikiforuk / The Tyee

Although many Canadians act as though the pandemic has ended, the airborne virus that causes COVID-19 continues to evolve at an amazing pace with devastating consequences for both individuals and the public at large.
The pandemic may no longer be a major conflagration but it still kills about 140 Canadians a week while morphing into a steady viral blaze sustained by dirty air, waning immunity and overt political indifference.
What was once a giant wave of acute illness has become a series of often unpredictable wavelets driven by ever-changing variants that can cause chronic illness. Long COVID, a disabling health event that can affect multiple organs and destabilize the immune system, now affects millions and continues to claim new victims. …
Tara Moriarty, a University of Toronto infectious disease expert and co-founder of COVID 19 Resources Canada, recently tallied the imperfect data, and it is bracing. She calculates that about one in every 23 Canadians is now infected with COVID. We are not at the low point of the pandemic in Canada. To the contrary, compared with a previous time during the pandemic, infections are 25 times higher and the rate of long COVID is 19 times higher.
Meanwhile the hospitalization rate is 13 times higher and deaths are 25 times higher.
In the middle of October, Moriarty calculated that COVID patients occupied about nine per cent of intensive care beds and 21 per cent of hospital beds across the country. (The average hospitalization rate during the pandemic has been seven per cent.) The estimated cost of this sustained viral assault is $274 million a week.

When Covid Is Most Contagious and When You Stop Being Infectious by Erica Sweeney / Men’s Health

It’s not fully clear when you start being contagious after being exposed to Covid. But, typically, you’re most contagious during the first five days of symptoms, says Vincent Covelli, M.D., a board-certified infectious disease physician at telemedicine platform PlushCare.
The CDC suggests that people infected with Covid who are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms should isolate for at least five days after symptoms start and wear a mask through day 10.
If you have moderate or severe symptoms, you should isolate for at least 10 days, but you might be infectious for longer and may need to isolate for up 20 days, the CDC says.
You tend to be most contagious when your viral load is the highest, Dr. Russo says. A study published in Clinical Infectious Diseases in 2023 found that viral loads of the Omicron variant peaked on the fourth day after symptoms started. …
Usually, most healthy people are no longer contagious 10 days after first testing positive for Covid, Dr. Covelli says.
“It’s recommended that a second rapid at-home COVID test be performed to document negativity,” he says. “It’s at this point that a person is likely no longer contagious to others.”

The climate crisis could trigger the outbreak of new and lethal infectious diseases / Eureka Alert

The climate emergency poses a major threat to human health. Rising temperatures and changes in ecosystem conditions, coupled with globalisation and human action, such as the extensive use of fungicides and antibiotics in agriculture, can favour the emergence and spread of new species of hitherto underestimated potentially virulent pathogenic microorganisms, such as fungi.
An understanding of the evolutionary routes these potential pathogens have followed, how they have acquired their virulence, or how they have developed the capacity to infect humans is key to being able to monitor them and prevent future deadly epidemics, such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Let's Face It, Covid Trashed Our Immune Systems. Now We Get to Enjoy Outbreaks of Tuberculosis. by Jessica Wildfire / OK Doomer

We're facing more than just Covid now. We have a world population with weakened immune systems. We can expect bad winters full of RSV, flu, strep, pneumonia, measles, fungal infections, and tuberculosis. Will it be on the news? Probably not. Because it's not news, not anymore. It's just a bunch of sick people, everywhere you go, and with hospitals too degraded to respond properly. It's going to be like living in the early 20th century. And it's downhill from there.
The collapse of our climate is driving accelerated mutation of viruses and increasing the odds of pandemics from zoonotic diseases, like avian flu and Nipah. Just recently, Fortune ran a story on multiple potential pandemic viruses, all of them circulating and spreading. They don't even have to reach pandemic status to cause major problems, just larger and larger outbreaks and epidemics. Scientists are calling for "urgent action." Meanwhile, all you see online are smiling selfies from figureheads who deny airborne spread. If we were smart, we would take advantage of the tools we have that fight all of these threats, saving us from a life of sickness and death.
We don't have to live like this. We don't have to live in denial and complacency while giving each other diseases that wreck our immune systems and health. We don't have to live in fear of germs while also worrying about what people will think about us for wearing masks. We could just do what works.

Pain, fatigue, fuzzy thinking: How long COVID disrupts the brain by Jon Hamilton / NPR Shots

"Unfortunately, long COVID, as we know it now, can affect nearly every organ system, including the brain," Al-Aly says.
People with neurological symptoms do get better, he says, but full recovery is rare.
Three years after getting COVID, Wilson continues to struggle with a range of symptoms, including an unreliable memory.
"I have trouble with word retrieval, concept retrieval — and sometimes, like, remembering where I was going," she says.
Wilson also has problems sleeping at night, a condition Al-Aly says affects about 40 percent of people with long COVID.
"As a result, they wake up fatigued," he says, which contributes to their exhaustion from even moderate activity.

What Tony Fauci Told Me About Long COVID and Other Postviral Illnesses by Emily Mendenhall / Scientific American

Fauci emphasized what makes long COVID distinct from ME/CFS, even when the symptoms are the same, is the presence of a specific virus and the knowledge of when the infection occurred. He told me that historically, we didn’t have the ability to pinpoint what infectious agent had caused a person’s ME/CFS. We could maybe see what antibodies a person had against different viruses, but we never knew exactly when the infectious event happened, so we couldn’t say with any certainty what caused someone’s disease.
Finally, Fauci emphasized to me how important it is to do more research on postviral syndromes and, specifically, on how long COVID affects people differently. He told me, “There is going to be a group of people that, somehow or another..., have a genetic predisposition, just the way you have a genetic predisposition to diabetes or to rheumatoid arthritis or to lupus.... When [these people] get a viral infection, [it] somehow dysregulates [multiple functions and organ systems].”
But the key, he said, would be the kind of long-range, multiple-year funding that isn’t necessarily dependent on a result for renewal—the type of funding that has existed in the past where so long as the work was good, he said, the researcher’s job would be safe. We talked about how current funding structures don’t really support this kind of open-ended research.

Long COVID expert Dr. Amy Proal discusses the ongoing dangers of the pandemic by Evan Blake / World Socialist Web Site

In this interview, Dr. Amy Proal discusses her research into Long COVID, which has focused on the role of viral reservoirs. Long COVID, also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), is a group of health problems persisting after an initial infection with SARS-CoV-2, which can impact nearly every organ in the body and is often debilitating. Scientists believe that there could now be hundreds of millions of people suffering from Long COVID symptoms and associated medical problems globally.

Long COVID changed the disability landscape. What does that mean for HR? By Caroline Colvin / HR Dive

Six out of every 100 adults in the U.S. have long COVID, according to federal data.
It’s a condition often marked by chronic pain, brain fog and fatigue. And as COVID-19 transmission continues, data suggests the condition could become even more widespread.
That leaves a big question for HR: If long COVID is here to stay, how will leaders address the effects it will have on the workforce and subsequently the business?
To start, the U.S. needs to acknowledge its “ableism culture,” Disability Management Employer Coalition CEO Bryon Bass told HR Dive. “We’re focused on things that people can do, and wanting them to be 100% physically, mentally and cognitively capable,” he said. “And those that don’t fall into that particular definition are seen as less than.”

Poor housing and Covid deaths: it’s the same damn map by Tania Jennings / Architects’ Journal

Before Covid, we believed that fuel poverty’s impacts on health and life expectancy were hard to verify and that the evidential symptoms, such as damp, mould, and overheating have slow, immeasurable effects. The pandemic showed the reality to be quite different. Respiratory and circulatory illnesses are significantly increased in the residents of poorly insulated, under or over-heated homes, especially those with carbon-based heating systems and those where damp and mould are present. And, when a global respiratory illness comes knocking on a poorly insulated door, the impacts are immediate and quantifiable. Fuel poverty kills, and it does not always take its time.

Schools cut covid-19 sick days by 20 per cent using HEPA air filters by Clare Wilson / New Scientist

Air filter machines put into a handful of UK schools reduced the number of covid-19-related sick days by more than 20 per cent, the first such randomised trial of the intervention has found.
HEPA filters, devices about the size of a tall kitchen waste bin, were placed in the classrooms of schools in the Bradford area. The results haven’t yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but one of the researchers revealed the 20 per cent fall at a conference last month.
“You could still have outbreaks even if you have HEPA filters in your classrooms, but the underlying illness absence was over 20 per cent reduced when you have got the air cleaners in place,” said Catherine Noakes at the University of Leeds, UK, at the World Health Organization Europe Indoor Air Conference.

From COVID to gastro, why are cruise ships such hotbeds of infection? by Thea van de Mortel / The Conversation

On cruise ships, people tend to crowd together in confined spaces for extended periods. These include dining halls, and during social activities in casinos, bars and theatres.
The risk goes up when the environment is noisy, as more droplets and aerosols are shed when people are laughing, shouting or talking loudly.
Passengers may come from multiple countries, potentially bringing variants from different parts of the world. Influenza, which is usually seasonal (late autumn to early spring) onshore, can occur at any time on a cruise ship if it has international passengers or is calling at international ports.
Human behaviour also contributes to the risk. Some passengers surveyed following cruise ship gastro outbreaks indicated they were ill when they boarded the ship, or they became ill but didn’t disclose this because they didn’t want to pay for a doctor or be made to isolate, or they thought it wasn’t serious.
Those who became ill were more likely than those who did not to think that hand hygiene and isolation were not effective in preventing infection transmission, and were less likely to wash their hands after using the toilet. Given faecal contamination is a major source of norovirus transmission, this is concerning.

An ‘Unsettling’ Drop in Life Expectancy for Men by Azeen Ghorayshi / The New York Times

More than 1.1 million people in the United States have died of Covid, a staggering death toll that has caused precipitous declines in life expectancy. Between 2019 and 2021, the life expectancy in the United States dropped from around 79 to 76 years.
But men have died of Covid at a higher rate than women. The reasons for this are complicated. Biological factors, like differences in inflammation and immune responses, likely played a significant role.
But social and behavioral differences mattered, too. Men are more likely to work in industries with higher rates of Covid exposure and fatalities, including transportation, agriculture and construction, or to experience incarceration or homelessness. Women are also more likely to be vaccinated.
From 2019 to 2021, Covid was the leading contributor to the widening gap in life expectancy between men and women, contributing nearly 40 percent of the difference in years lost.

Poll shows a third of Americans believe they don't need flu, COVID vaccines by Stephanie Soucheray / CIDRAP

A third of Americans surveyed in a new poll from researchers at Ohio State said they do not believe they need vaccines for the flu or COVID-19 this season because they do not consider themselves high risk for complications from the viruses.

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What Are We Even Doing?

Living in Toronto, it’s almost mandatory to love the prog rock band Rush. While I’m not personally their biggest fan, the recently released Geddy Lee autobiography looks like it’s worth reading. For what it’s worth, Dreamline is perhaps my favourite Rush song. Enjoy!

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