The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 301 (801)

There is still no formal definition of just what "long covid" is, but it seems that as many as one in five adults who have recovered from covid have experienced at least one medical condition related to what is being called long covid. The same holds for one in four people ages 65 and older. The most common complaints among all adults were respiratory symptoms and musculoskeletal pain. Along with that "no formal definition" bit, there's also not agreement on just how often long covid occurs. The CDC estimates that five to 80 percent of people who had covid develop long covid; WHO puts the figure at 10 to 20 percent.

Has Peloton or the Mirror gotten boring? Is it safe to go back to the gym? A small study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may make you want to re-think things. The researchers looked at the number of aerosol particles exhaled at rest and during workouts. There were only 16 subjects, so take the findings with a grain of salt if you like. At rest, people exhaled around 500 particles per minute. While exercising, the total number of particles soared 132-fold, topping out at 76,000 particles per minute. Exercising outdoors is clearly safer, but if you must go to a gym, the researchers suggest you ask the gym to open windows and crank up fans, make sure that the air conditioning draws air from outside and does not re-use the air inside the room, and install in-room air filters. It generally takes 15 to 30 minutes between classes for the air in a room to clear. Finally, if at all possible, stay away from other people in class or using machines close to the one you're using. 

Here's a line from the abstract of a not-yet-peer-reviewed article you might want to think about or just plain forget about. The results of the study were based on 1,542,510 people in England. "Contrary to the perception that recent variants have become milder, Omicron BA.2 was associated with reporting more symptoms, with greater disruption of daily activities, than BA.1" 

Now may not be the time to mention that the BA.2.12.1 variant is now the dominant one in the US.

Finally, the WHO director general was re-elected for a five-year term. There was no opposition. After the vote, the re-elected director general warned, "It's not over anywhere until it's over everywhere." He's absolutely right about that.