Back to long covid, a British study found that only about a third of patients who experienced symptoms after being hospitalized felt fully recovered one year later. Most patients saw little improvement in areas such as physical function and cognitive impairment. Some showed lingering cognitive decline similar to that measured after 20 years of aging. The degree of impairment seemed linked to the severity of illness. I found one aspect of the researchers' method quite interesting. Each of the 46 subjects were matched with 10 people matching them on characteristics such as gender, age, education, and first language; the 10 matches had not had covid.
Top FDA officials say that we may need to update covid vaccines every year and progress to annual covid vaccination similar to the seasonal flu shot we are now advised to get. That states are scaling back what covid statistics they report and how often they report them means it may be harder to identify outbreaks and new negative effects stemming from the virus.
As researchers delve deep into the variants of concern such as Delta or Omicron, we should not forget that the variants of interest that did not progress to concern may also yield important information. Learning what mutations in Gamma, Iota, Lambda, and Mu did not work and why will add to the study of the more concerning variants. It is also important to investigate variants that may not "work" in a certain place at a certain time but may thrive in others.
About a fifth of parents of children under the age of five say that they're "eager" to have their child vaccinated. Some 38 percent say they will wait and see how things go before deciding. I'm wondering if the other 42 percent are in the "hands off my kid" camp.
I once briefly wondered about covid and organ donation but never dug into the subject. Fortunately, someone else did. Between March 2020 and March 2021, nine covid-infected donors donated organs to 19 recipients. The three recipients who received bilateral lungs acquired covid. One died, while the other two transmitted covid to others. the 16 recipients of non-lung organs did not acquire covid. The three lung specimens tested negative for covid pre-transplant but post-transplant lung specimens came back positive. If you need lungs, be careful out there!
According to one "official" tally, as of this morning, the US had recorded 81,553,778 cases and 995,622 deaths. Another "official" tally has the number of deaths high enough that it could go over one million today. That's a number that should be marked but by no means celebrated.
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