Azaran on 22/9/2022 at 17:22
(
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/health/canadian-study-finds-most-long-covid-patients-recover-within-a-year-434292)
Quote:
Most people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus recover within 12 months, irrespective of the severity, according to a study.Although 75 per cent people in the study recovered at the 12-month mark after becoming ill with the virus, 25 per cent of patients still had at least one of the three most common symptoms, including coughing, fatigue and breathlessness, the researchers said.
Long-COVID conditions can include a wide range of ongoing health problems that can last weeks, months, or longer.
The team led by researchers at the McMaster University in Canada also found that patients with persistent symptoms had antibodies associated with autoimmune illnesses, as well as raised levels of cytokines, which cause inflammation.
The study, published in the European Respiratory Journal, surveyed 106 people recovering from COVID-19 infections at three, six and 12 months after contracting the disease.
“Generally, one should not worry if they are feeling unwell right after their infection, as the chances of recovering within 12 months is very high, and just because you have typical long COVID symptoms at three months does not mean they will stay forever,” said Manali Mukherjee, senior author of the study.
“However, the study highlights that at 12 months, if you still feel unwell and the symptoms are persisting or worsening, you should definitely seek medical attention,” Mukherjee said.
In patients who recovered, a reduction in autoantibodies and cytokines was matched by their symptoms improving, the researchers said.
Those who had elevated antibody and cytokine levels after one year were those whose symptoms persisted, they said.
“Sometimes, while the body is fighting the virus, the immune system gets so amped up that, in addition to making antibodies that kill the virus, it can produce those that attack the host,” said Mukherjee.
“However, the general tendency of the body after it fights a severe virus like SARS-COV2, is to recover, and its often paced out varying from individual to individual,” the scientist added.
Pyrian on 23/9/2022 at 01:08
They say that like it's a good thing, but 25% of people being still sick a full year later is kinda terrifying.
demagogue on 23/9/2022 at 01:55
My dysautonomia symptoms (which I read is the most common profile) went on from the end of March until around the end of September with a fade out from there. I think January was the last big hurrah for it. And then there was a relapse around mid~late summer this year just for about 2 weeks, right at the peak of our 2nd wave, which I guess had something to do with it. The thing is, even when it ends, there are remnants of it still lingering even now, which aren't incapacitating any more, but kind of knock the wind out of me on any given day.
What's sobering is 25% of the population suddenly only doing half or less of the work they're used to doing for that long. I have to imagine that's going to wreck not just the economy but a lot of people's life plans, and that will have a long term effect.
Azaran on 23/9/2022 at 14:11
Hmmm, so I was led to believe from the headline that it's 75% of long covid patients, but the article text implies it's anyone infected with covid. Not so good after all. I need to find the original study for clarification
Quote:
Canadian study finds most long-Covid patients recover within a year
Cipheron on 29/9/2022 at 12:53
Quote Posted by Azaran
Hmmm, so I was led to believe from the headline that it's 75% of long covid patients, but the article text implies it's anyone infected with covid. Not so good after all. I need to find the original study for clarification
Yeah, you have to be careful with interpreting headlines like that.
For me the "regardless of severity" bit is the clincher. So the study would seem to include people with mild cases, so that suggests it's not saying "long covid" as the test group at all.
But that actually sounds bad when you think about it. "Regardless of severity" implies that 25% of people with mild cases still had some type of symptoms after 12 months, the same rate as people with more severe cases.
Although we need to keep in mind it was a very small study and we don't know if any selection biases are present, for example a lot of cases do go undiagnosed.
Cipheron on 3/10/2022 at 23:20
(
https://twitter.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1576916442229837824)
Quote:
New study of almost 600,000 deaths in Ohio and Florida shows that registered Republicans had far higher excess-death rates than registered Democrats during the pandemic, with almost all of the gap coming after vaccines were available.
The study shows there was no difference in excess deaths between Dem and GOP voters in 2018 and early 2020 (control). And there was no real gap pre-vaccine. But beginning spring 2021, and accelerating w/Delta Republicans began dying at a significantly higher rate.
This paper is based on individual-level data (that is, the authors matched mortality data to individual voter registrations), which makes it more accurate. And the clear implication is that if Republicans had gotten vaxxed at higher rates, many more of them would have lived.
From the PDF
Quote:
Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.
So the big deal here is that this is matched on voter registrations and is the individual excess death rate for registered Republicans vs registered Democrat, not just data saying that red counties in general have higher excess deaths than blue counties. It's also limited by which states it covers which hopefully reduces other possible confounding variables such as the actual infection rate that could vary by state. Democrats
in Florida were much less likely to die than Republicans
in Florida.
Azaran on 5/10/2022 at 14:54
(
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20220930/Simple-nasal-wash-can-prevent-hospitalization-and-deaths-from-COVID-19.aspx) The viral load= severity theory seems to pan out
Quote:
Simple nasal washes with mild saline water can prevent hospitalization and deaths from COVID-19, if applied twice daily following a positive diagnosis, according to research led by the US-based Augusta University.
Reducing the amount of virus entering the body cuts the severity of the disease, says the study published September in the Ear, Nose & Throat Journal. It found that nasal washes conducted within 24 hours of diagnosis can prevent the virus from entering the lungs and possibly causing permanent or fatal damage to patients.
Amy Baxter, corresponding author of the study affiliated with the department of emergency medicine at Augusta University, says that extra hydration of the sinuses makes them function better. "If you have a contaminant, the more you flush it out, the better you are able to get rid of dirt, viruses and anything else," she explained.
ACE2 receptors in cells — which bind to the spike protein of the virus resulting in COVID-19 infection — are plentiful in the nasal cavity, lungs and mouth and a nasal saline wash can help prevent the virus from attaching to receptors, they said.
The researchers say nasal washes are inexpensive and safe and can be administered at home using half a teaspoon each of salt and baking soda in a cup of boiled or distilled water.
The research involved comparing data from high-risk COVID-19 patients, such as those with obesity, hypertension or diabetes and aged over 55, who had carried out nasal washes, with datasets of 3 million COVID-19 cases from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The researchers found that only 1.3 per cent of COVID-19 patients who underwent nasal wash required hospitalization, suggesting that they were more than eight times less likely to be hospitalized compared with the 11 per cent in the CDC dataset.
According to the US-based University of Wisconsin-Madison, for conditions like acute and chronic sinusitis, common cold, and allergic rhinitis, nasal irrigation can be advocated for rinsing the nasal cavity. The practice of nasal irrigation likely originated in India's Ayurvedic medical tradition called 'jala-neti', said a paper by the university's department of family medicine and community health.
"Having lived in Thailand, I know that nasal rinsing was a common hygiene practice in Thailand, Vietnam and Laos where they had lower case fatality than the US," Baxter said.
Kyle Schwartz, co-author of the study affiliated with Edinburgh Napier University, in Scotland, tells SciDev.Net that South-East Asian countries had "a few cultural practices which might have given them an advantage" in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.
"Masking was also relatively normalized even at the start of the pandemic and local greeting practices involved bowing rather than shaking hands," Schwartz said. "We think that what really gave countries like Thailand, Vietnam, and Laos the edge compared to other parts of Asia, was the very widespread use of nasal irrigation."
Shantanu Panja, eye-nose-throat and head and neck surgeon at Apollo Multispecialty Hospitals in Kolkata, India, who was not involved in the study, believes that the findings can be "easily implemented without adding extra cost to the patient".
"Jala-neti has been a part of Indian yoga practices for thousands of years. So, it is nothing new to the Indian subcontinent," Panja said.
heywood on 5/10/2022 at 19:46
My own anecdotal experience is consistent with that.
The first time COVID hit our family in Feb 2021, it was my son who brought it home from school. This was before any of us were vaccinated. He was sick for an afternoon and evening, then recovered the next day. Two days later, my wife and I developed a low grade fever that lasted for about 24 hours, and she felt fatigued for a day. That was it.
The second time it hit our family was a month ago. This time my daughter brought it home after her first week at school. She turned out to be a super-spreader, because she gave it to everyone in our household plus everyone in another family that we spent a day with at the amusement part. And this time, it kicked our butts. It took my wife and I two full weeks to clear it, and it was the sickest I've ever been.
We presumably got the Omicron BA.5 strain this time, which was dominant here, and that's supposedly not as virulent as the early strains. So I'm not surprised there's a connection between the amount of virus you were exposed with and the severity of the disease.
Pyrian on 11/10/2022 at 00:36
Got the new "Bivalent" vaccine with updates against recent strains. :D
Cipheron on 12/10/2022 at 22:44
Shredding the new anti-vaccine report put out by Florida's batshit insane Surgeon General:
(
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/10/that-florida-analysis-on-covid-vaccines-is-you-guessed-it-total-garbage/)
While the whole thing is worth reading, here are a few key points:
No authors were willing to put their name on this. So it's not published, no peer review etc etc.
It claims to show a slight increases in heart attack deaths right after a vaccine.
However, there was
no control group in the study. Basically, each person was their own control. While this is a real methodology, it's been misused here, as I'll explain.
Basically, they looked at the number of heart-attack deaths in the 28 days after the vaccine and compared that to the likelihood of the SAME people dying of a heart attack in a later "control period".
the problem is that they didn't exclude already-dead people from the "control period" so people who had died before were still counted in the total numbers. Clearly, already dead people have a 0% chance of death by ANY cause, so this deliberately skewed the numbers.
For example, say the chance of dying in a period was 20%, and you started with 100 people, and saw that 20% of them died in the first time period. THEN you said "well what's the chance of these same 100 people dying in a later period". Well, in the later period, there are only 80 people left, and 20% of 80 is 16. But instead of excluding the dead people they worked this out as a "16% death rate" in the later period, and thus claimed that there was a higher chance of dying in the first time period. Also, the longer you wait between periods, the more of the group will have died, thus further skewing the "numbers". So they were able to rig the numbers further by merely putting more time between the study period and the "control" period.
So it's obviously nonsensical if they're not excluding already-dead people while working out the chance of death in a specific time-frame.
However, even this wasn't enough to show any statistically significant difference, so they then turned to p-hacking. They sliced and diced the data by every metric possible, then did this:
Quote:
It's also suspicious that this analysis of those ages 18 to 39 combined two age groups used in the first analysis, 18 to 24 and 25 to 39. Experts speculated that combination could have netted them the finding they wanted, while keeping them separate didn't.
So they had two sub-groups which DIDN'T show statistically significant excess deaths, but when they blended the data between them, they did. Which is statistically quackery.
EDIT: I knew there's a name for that: Simpson's Paradox
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)