The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 445 (945)

It's Monday, and the coronavirus news is definitely of the Monday variety. The BQ.1 Omicron variant now accounts for 25 percent of covid cases in New York City. While case numbers there have been flat over the past month, hospitalizations are rising significantly. Unless things take a radical turn in the next two months, 2022 could be a single-variant year. The only "new" variants this year are all offshoots of Omicron. Another quickie: Respiratory infections in children have been associated with the onset of diabetes. The likelihood of the onset of diabetes is higher in children whose respiratory infection is covid. 

An article in Nature concerns how SARS-CoV-2 is associated with changes in brain structure. The researchers looked at 401 people who had had covid and 384 people who had not. All had had MRI scans done before the pandemic and again, during. Those who had had covid infections showed a greater reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex. They also showed tissue damage in regions functionally connected to the olfactory cortex. Given covid's effect on the senses of taste and smell, this result is not that surprising. Finally, people who had had covid showed a greater reduction in global brain size. 

Unvaccinated people who get covid during pregnancy run a greater risk of stillbirth. Pathologists are reporting that covid can directly infect the placenta. This can happen even if the covid case presents with mild or nonexistent symptoms. In people with severe symptoms, the mother's lungs can be damaged and blood, somewhat clotted, ill effects that can be passed to a fetus. These, says a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic, "are pregnancies that should not have ended." Pregnant or breastfeeding people were generally excluded from the vaccines' clinical trials, though there seemed to be little effect on pregnancies in rats. Parental high blood pressure, age, and diabetes status also raise the risk of stillbirth but are not as risky as being unvaccinated. Infants too young to be vaccinated, that is, 5 months old or younger, are hospitalized with covid at higher rates than any age group other than adults ages 75 and older. 

Dr Fauci has called long covid a public health emergency for millions of people, saying, "It's a very insidious beneath-the-radar-screen public health emergency. It isn't that you have people who are hospitalized or dying, but their function is being considerably impaired. For reasons that are obvious, that doesn't attract as much attention as a death rate." Describing the big picture of long covid, he notes, "There are more unanswered questions than there are answered questions." Finally, does Dr. Fauci think the pandemic is over? "If you declare victory, you're declaring an emergency victory because we haven't won the battle yet." 

Happy Monday!