The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 396 (896)

The coronavirus seems to be of the out-of-sight, out-of-mind genre now. Not a lot of coronavirus news, and what I found was not in the mainstream media. I hope we're not forgetting about it, though I fear we are. We'll see what happens nest.

A study in the British Medical Journal looked at peer-reviewed articles on the association between regular physical activity and at least one covid outcome. Together, the studies involved almost two million adults. People who engaged in regular physical activity had a lower risk of infection, hospitalization, severe illness, and death related to covid. The greatest benefit came from 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity spread over a week's time. Doing more than that much activity had no added effect. Other research has shown that physical activity strengthens the immune system. People who log regular exercise time are also less likely to have some of the comorbidities associated with more severe disease.

The pandemic is opening a dark door on the social media world. As the pandemic has progressed, many people have used social media as an outlet for their grief. This was especially important in the early days when people did not gather together in person to mark someone's death. Before the pandemic, reactions to such posts were generally positive or neutral. The pandemic has replaced those supportive responses with abusive ones. Internet trolls question whether someone really died of covid or died at all, suggest the deceased brought it on themselves with underlying conditions, or say that the deceased wasn't worth remembering.  

Finally, the latest covid surge appears to be lessening. Omicron infections have generally been milder than but have led to as much long covid as earlier variants. Some researchers warn that an extremely large number of Omicron cases means that a flood of long covid cases is looming. The US has recorded in the neighborhood of 38 million infections so far in 2022, or 40 percent of all infections reported since the onset of the pandemic. It's been estimated that 82 percent of Americans have been infected, which means that most new cases are reinfections, some of whom are still wrestling with covid symptoms from one of their earlier infections. Long covid is not well understood, but from what I understand, I don't want to risk developing it, which means continuing to avoid covid as much as possible.