I know most people have checked out of this, but this week had the fewest covid deaths in the US since the second week of quarantining, back in late March 2020. https://t.co/71EnrmNwl5 pic.twitter.com/rREU8j5R4S
— Zach Weinersmith (@ZachWeiner) April 22, 2023
A commentor (Currants, I think?) introduced me to a new resource, Your Local Epidemiologist. I personally found this helpful:
Do I need a spring booster?…
2. Timing. If you’re in one of the urgent groups, the next question is: When was your last infection or vaccine?
6+ months ago: Go get a spring booster today.
4-6 months: Schedule one, but you don’t need to rush to the pharmacy.
<4 months: Wait. But do not wait until past May/June, so that you enough runway time before the (anticipated) fall vaccine…
"Allowing the uninsured to access the vaccines at no charge is important but so is educating them about the program," said KFF Senior Vice President @jenkatesdc. https://t.co/dTFjGFLdNE
— KFF (@KFF) April 19, 2023
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As those best informed among us have pointed out, this is at least as much about internal political control as it is international dissemination:
… That the Chinese government muzzled scientists, hindered international investigations and censored online discussion of the pandemic is well documented. But Beijing’s stranglehold on information goes far deeper than even many pandemic researchers are aware of. Its censorship campaign has targeted international journals and scientific databases, shaking the foundations of shared scientific knowledge, a New York Times investigation found.
Under pressure from their government, Chinese scientists have withheld data, withdrawn genetic sequences from public databases and altered crucial details in journal submissions. Western journal editors enabled those efforts by agreeing to those edits or withdrawing papers for murky reasons, a review by The Times of over a dozen retracted papers found.
Groups including the World Health Organization have given credence to muddled data and inaccurate timelines.
This scientific censorship has not universally succeeded: The original version of the February 2020 paper, for example, can still be found online with some digging. But the campaign starved doctors and policymakers of critical information about the virus at the moment the world needed it most. It bred mistrust of science in Europe and the United States, as health officials cited papers from China that were then retracted.
The crackdown continues to breed misinformation today and has hindered efforts to determine the origins of the virus…
It is impossible to ascribe a single motive to the crackdown. Beijing controls and shapes information as a matter of course, particularly in moments of crisis. But some of the censorship changed the timeline of early infections, a delicate topic as the government faced criticism over whether it responded to the outbreak quickly enough.
There is no evidence that the censorship is designed to conceal a specific scenario for the origins of the pandemic…
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First person dies of the new #SARSCoV2 subvariant, XBB.1.16, also known as Arcturus. It's fueling Covid cases globally. The death attributed to Arcturus occrred in Thailand. Global cases are surging https://t.co/WjR8r4xkCC
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) April 21, 2023
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"Long COVID is costing the Australian economy at least $5.7 billion a year as tens of thousands are left unable to work by the debilitating disease"
Parliamentary Inquiry🙄🙄https://t.co/Y8W2QQ2om2
— David Joffe PhD, FRACP 🇦🇺 (@DavidJoffe64) April 23, 2023
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The #Lula govt is struggling to rebuild #Brazil's healthcare system, which was devastated by #COVID19 and the policies of his rightwing predecessor, #Bolsonaro . https://t.co/wtt1GQQr8I
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) April 25, 2023
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Depressing, but well worth reading the whole thing:
Charlie McCone has been struggling with the symptoms of long COVID since he was first infected, in March 2020. Most of the time, he is stuck on his couch or in his bed, unable to stand for more than 10 minutes without fatigue, shortness of breath, and other symptoms flaring up. But when I spoke with him on the phone, he seemed cogent and lively. “I can appear completely fine for two hours a day,” he said. No one sees him in the other 22. He can leave the house to go to medical appointments, but normally struggles to walk around the block. He can work at his computer for an hour a day. “It’s hell, but I have no choice,” he said. Like many long-haulers, McCone is duct-taping himself together to live a life—and few see the tape.
McCone knows 12 people in his pre-pandemic circles who now also have long COVID, most of whom confided in him only because “I’ve posted about this for three years, multiple times a week, on Instagram, and they’ve seen me as a resource,” he said. Some are unwilling to go public, because they fear the stigma and disbelief that have dogged long COVID. “People see very little benefit in talking about this condition publicly,” he told me. “They’ll try to hide it for as long as possible.”
I’ve heard similar sentiments from many of the dozens of long-haulers I’ve talked with, and the hundreds more I’ve heard from, since first reporting on long COVID in June 2020. Almost every aspect of long COVID serves to mask its reality from public view. Its bewilderingly diverse symptoms are hard to see and measure. At its worst, it can leave people bed- or housebound, disconnected from the world. And although milder cases allow patients to appear normal on some days, they extract their price later, in private. For these reasons, many people don’t realize just how sick millions of Americans are—and the invisibility created by long COVID’s symptoms is being quickly compounded by our attitude toward them.
Most Americans simply aren’t thinking about COVID with the same acuity they once did; the White House long ago zeroed in on hospitalizations and deaths as the measures to worry most about. And what was once outright denial of long COVID’s existence has morphed into something subtler: a creeping conviction, seeded by academics and journalists and now common on social media, that long COVID is less common and severe than it has been portrayed—a tragedy for a small group of very sick people, but not a cause for societal concern. This line of thinking points to the absence of disability claims, the inconsistency of biochemical signatures, and the relatively small proportion of severe cases as evidence that long COVID has been overblown. “There’s a shift from ‘Is it real?’ to ‘It is real, but …,’” Lekshmi Santhosh, the medical director of a long-COVID clinic at UC San Francisco, told me.
Yet long COVID is a substantial and ongoing crisis—one that affects millions of people. However inconvenient that fact might be to the current “mission accomplished” rhetoric, the accumulated evidence, alongside the experience of long haulers, makes it clear that the coronavirus is still exacting a heavy societal toll…
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Covid and the “substantially increased risk of developing a diverse spectrum of new-onset autoimmune diseases.”https://t.co/EMALanswU2 pic.twitter.com/C9ryALLAIb
— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 23, 2023
At 2 years #LongCovid: 4 Nordic countries, >22,000 individuals with Covid vs uninfected controls
"An overall 37% higher prevalence of severe physical symptom burden (PHQ-15 score ≥ 15, adjusted prevalence ratio [PR] 1.37 [95% CI] 1.23-1.52])." https://t.co/r4mnCTeMZB pic.twitter.com/C5R2OfIWzi— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) April 21, 2023
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Can artificial intelligence predict future pandemics? Apparently before the 1st cases of #Covid became known, an algorithm based on AI developed by a Canadian company had already detected a new virus spreading across Wuhan. Why are we just finding out? https://t.co/jgV2ninhaX
— delthia ricks 🔬 (@DelthiaRicks) April 22, 2023
Joking is a natural defensive response, but this could turn scary:
we found the man jair bolsonaro aspires to be https://t.co/kAYDiBwujs
— the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) ?? (@merovingians) April 24, 2023
Thread:
Perhaps the most important question that MUST be answered BEFORE removing masks in healthcare: What is the infection mortality rate of hospital-acquired covid? This is actually a straightforward question, and the answer is undoubtedly known/knowable – yet it's not shared. ?? 1/7
— Noha Aboelata, MD (@NohaAboelataMD) April 17, 2023
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Pandemic relief efforts did not reach immigrant families
Immigrant families living in the United States took some of the hardest economic hits during #COVID19https://t.co/kInlpF6nzi pic.twitter.com/tBcxlNqJQ6
— CIDRAP (@CIDRAP) April 24, 2023
A group was formed to lay the groundwork for a federal commission into the US response to the #Covid pandemic. When a commission was never established, they issued a report themselves, an account of what went wrong & what needs fixing. https://t.co/p9VWDZVJil
— Helen Branswell 🇺🇦 (@HelenBranswell) April 24, 2023
1. It's not a Senate Report it's from "the Republican leadership of the Senate health committee".
2. No evidence presented, just conjecture, unrelated factoids.
3. And zero scientific publications, and you know why? For reasons stated in the previous sentence
4. Repeat & rinse https://t.co/QjkT5UalXP— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) April 18, 2023
Many people have "forgotten" there were mass graves in NYC in 2020, and without public health measures that would have happened everywhere.
Our new piece in @CMAJ is about a kind of historical negationism @CaulfieldTim and I call "lockdown revisionism."??https://t.co/z172KmgKfW pic.twitter.com/buhpQ9kFsD
— Blake Murdoch (@BlakeMMurdoch) April 17, 2023
This is a terrific??by @mileswgriffis. The callous insouciance, the vicious neglect that happened with AIDS, is happening again with #Covid. Our leaders do not lead. We pretend it’s all over. While hundreds die each day, we insist everything is A-OK. https://t.co/E9bLruBTVQ
— Gregg Gonsalves (@gregggonsalves) April 17, 2023
COVID-19 Coronavirus Updates: April 26, 2023Post + Comments (64)