Today is Veterans Day to honor all who have served in whatever service in whatever role. If you can't thank someone in person, thank someone via email, or just with appreciative thoughts. We who did not serve owe them a lot.
I read a couple of studies this morning with information worth remembering. Reading about the first told me that still masking in public is a good thing for me, especially given that I've had one round of COVID. That statement gives away that the study had to do with repeat infections. A paper in Nature Medicine reported a study of some 40,000 reinfections among over 440,000 COVID cases and over five million controls. I should say up front that the subjects were at Veterans Administration hospitals meaning that they are not representative of Americans in terms of age, sex, or race.
Reinfections are bad for your health. A second or third infection was more closely associated with worse acute and post-acute (long COVID) outcomes than was a single infection. The study looked at a range of factors including hospitalizations, presence of at least one symptom, cardiovascular, coagulation and hematological, diabetes, fatigue, gastrointestinal, kidney, mental health, musculoskeletal, neurological, and pulmonary. For all of those factors, two infections were worse than one infection, and three infections were worse than two. Vaccination had no substantive protective effect in reinfected people.
In other words, the more times you have COVID, the greater the odds that you'll have some or another problem later. I've had it once, and my plan is not to have it again. I'll be getting my third booster around the end of the year, about when the experts say the natural immunity from my case will be wearing down. Masks will be my friend for quite a while.
A German study on long COVID looked at 157,000 people, 12,000 of whom were children or adolescents. There were five times as many matched control subjects. Rather than give the details of the study, I'll jump right to the conclusion: "The results of the present study indicate that post-COVID-19 cannot be dismissed among children and adolescents."
The bottom line is you don't want to get COVID, and if you do get it, you don't want to get it again. And if you're wearing a mask somewhere, any kids going with you should be wearing one as well.
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