Category: Corona Virus

Vapers are susceptible to infection by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that spreads COVID-19 and continues to infect people around the world, a University of California, Riverside, study has found.

The liquid used in electronic cigarettes, called e-liquid, typically contains nicotine, propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, and flavor chemicals. The researchers found propylene glycol/vegetable glycerin alone or along with nicotine enhanced COVID-19 infection through different mechanisms.

Study resultsappear in the American Journal of Physiology.

The researchers also found that the addition of benzoic acid to e-liquids prevents the infection caused by propylene glycol, vegetable glycerin, and nicotine.

Users who vape aerosols produced from propylene glycol/vegetable glycerin alone or e-liquids with a neutral to basic pH are more likely to be infected by the virus, while users who vape aerosols made from e-liquids with benzoic acid -; an acidic pH -; will have the same viral susceptibility as individuals who do not vape."

Rattapol Phandthong, postdoctoral researcher, Department of Molecular, Cell and Systems Biologyand research paper's first author

The researchers obtained airway stem cells from human donors to produce a 3D tissue model of human bronchial epithelium. They then exposed the tissues to JUUL and BLU electronic cigarette aerosols to study the effect on SARS-CoV-2 infection. They found all tissues showed an increase in the amount of ACE2, a host cell receptor for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Further, TMPRSS2, an enzyme essential for the virus to infect cells, was found to show increased activity in tissues exposed to aerosols with nicotine.

Prue Talbot, a professor of the graduate division and Phandthong's advisor, said e-cigarette users should be cautious about vaping as some products will increase their susceptibility to SARs-CoV-2 infection.

"It would probably be best for vapers to quit vaping for the protection of their health and to stop nicotine dependency," she said. "If they cannot stop vaping, it is better to vape aerosols produced from an e-liquid with acidic pH or with benzoic acid to prevent the enhanced SARS-CoV-2 infection caused by nicotine, propylene glycol, and vegetable glycerin. However, inhalation of benzoic acid has its own risk, and data is still limited on this topic."

The researchers acknowledge that the relationship between e-cigarettes and SARS-CoV-2 susceptibility is complex.

"The complexity is attributed to a wide range of available e-liquids, the chemical composition of each e-liquid, and different models of e-cigarettes," Phandthong said. "Our study only used Classic Tobacco Flavor JUUL e-cigarette and BLU Classic Tobacco e-cigarette. Even with just these two e-cigarettes, we found the aerosols and individual ingredients produced different effects on SARS-CoV-2 infection."

Phandthong and Talbot hope the Food and Drug Administration will use their findings to implement regulatory laws on e-cigarette products.

"Our findings could also help improve the design of clinical trials involving the use of tobacco products and SARS-CoV-2 infection," Phandthong said. "In the meantime, it is worth bearing in mind that the scientific literature has shown that a vaper who contracted SARS-CoV-2 has more complications during the recovery period and is more likely to develop long COVID-19, which can be serious and last many months post-infection. We hope our findings encourage vapers to stop vaping and discourage non-users from starting to vape."

Phandthong acknowledged the team only investigated the initial stage of SARS-CoV-2 infection.

"There are many later stages involved in infection, such as viral replication," he said. "It is likely that these additional stages can also be affected by inhalation of e-cigarette aerosols."

Phandthong and Talbot were joined in the study by Man Wong, Ann Song, and Teresa Martinez.

The research was funded by grants from the Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program, National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Center for Tobacco Products of the Food and Drug Administration, and California Institute of Regenerative Medicine.

Source:

Journal reference:

Phandthong, R., et al. (2023). Does Vaping Increase the Likelihood of SARS-CoV-2 Infection? Paradoxically Yes and No.American Journal of Physiology-Lung Cellular and Molecular Physiology. doi.org/10.1152/ajplung.00300.2022.

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Vaping increases susceptibility to COVID-19 infection, study finds - News-Medical.Net

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officially changed its COVID-19 guidance on Friday, March 1.

What does it mean and how could it affect your everyday life?

Heres what to know:

The CDC no longer recommends that people who test positive for the novel coronavirus need to stay home for at least five days. However, you should still take precautions during that time.

Under the new guidelines, people can leave home isolation if they have been fever-free for at least 24 hours without fever-reducing medication, and their symptoms are not severe and are improving. This aligns with the guidance for other respiratory illnesses, including flu and RSV.

Acknowledging that people can be contagious even without symptoms, the CDC urged those who end isolation to limit close contact with others, wear well-fitted masks, improve indoor air quality and practice good hygiene, like washing hands and covering coughs and sneezes, for five days, The New York Times reported Friday.

Similar to the CDCs guidance, California public health officials say the length of someones isolation period should be determined based on the severity of their symptoms.

Under the state Department of Public Health recommendation, updated in January, Californians who test positive for the coronavirus no longer need to isolate for five days.

CDPH recommends people who test positive for COVID-19 stay home until they:

Reports first started circulating in mid-February about the potential changes to CDC guidelines.

At the time, Dr. Peter Chin-Hong told The Sacramento Bee that I think its reasonable to move on, but it comes with a responsibility. Hes a professor at UC San Francisco and specializes in infectious disease.

He said navigating the new protocols would mean an ongoing and collective effort to test and wear masks when sick, stay up to date on vaccinations and prioritize safety for the most vulnerable.

Chin-Hong said determining how to approach this new phase of COVID-19, four years after the pandemic, is really complex.

U.S. residential households are eligible for another round of free at-home COVID-19 self-tests through the U.S. Postal Service.

Each order includes four individual rapid antigen COVID-19 tests.

What do you want to know about life in Sacramento? Ask our service journalism team your top-of-mind questions in the module below or email servicejournalists@sacbee.com.

Continue reading here:

CDC shortens COVID-19 isolation period and aligns with California. Here's what to know - Yahoo News

From the very early days of the pandemic, brain fog emerged as a significant health condition that many experience after COVID-19.

Brain fog is a colloquial term that describes a state of mental sluggishness or lack of clarity and haziness that makes it difficult to concentrate, remember things and think clearly.

Fast-forward four years and there is now abundant evidence that being infected with SARS-CoV-2 the virus that causes COVID-19 can affect brain health in many ways.

In addition to brain fog, COVID-19 can lead to an array of problems, including headaches, seizure disorders, strokes, sleep problems, and tingling and paralysis of the nerves, as well as several mental health disorders.

A large and growing body of evidence amassed throughout the pandemic details the many ways that COVID-19 leaves an indelible mark on the brain. But the specific pathways by which the virus does so are still being elucidated, and curative treatments are nonexistent.

Now, two new studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine shed further light on the profound toll of COVID-19 on cognitive health.

I am a physician scientist, and I have been devoted to studying long COVID since early patient reports about this condition even before the term long COVID was coined. I have testified before the U.S. Senate as an expert witness on long COVID and have published extensively on this topic.

Here are some of the most important studies to date documenting how COVID-19 affects brain health:

Large epidemiological analyses showed that people who had COVID-19 were at an increased risk of cognitive deficits, such as memory problems.

Imaging studies done in people before and after their COVID-19 infections show shrinkage of brain volume and altered brain structure after infection.

A study of people with mild to moderate COVID-19 showed significant prolonged inflammation of the brain and changes that are commensurate with seven years of brain aging.

Severe COVID-19 that requires hospitalization or intensive care may result in cognitive deficits and other brain damage that are equivalent to 20 years of aging.

Laboratory experiments in human and mouse brain organoids designed to emulate changes in the human brain showed that SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the fusion of brain cells. This effectively short-circuits brain electrical activity and compromises function.

Autopsy studies of people who had severe COVID-19 but died months later from other causes showed that the virus was still present in brain tissue. This provides evidence that contrary to its name, SARS-CoV-2 is not only a respiratory virus, but it can also enter the brain in some individuals. But whether the persistence of the virus in brain tissue is driving some of the brain problems seen in people who have had COVID-19 is not yet clear.

Studies show that even when the virus is mild and exclusively confined to the lungs, it can still provoke inflammation in the brain and impair brain cells ability to regenerate.

COVID-19 can also disrupt the blood brain barrier, the shield that protects the nervous system which is the control and command center of our bodies making it leaky. Studies using imaging to assess the brains of people hospitalized with COVID-19 showed disrupted or leaky blood brain barriers in those who experienced brain fog.

A large preliminary analysis pooling together data from 11 studies encompassing almost 1 million people with COVID-19 and more than 6 million uninfected individuals showed that COVID-19 increased the risk of development of new-onset dementia in people older than 60 years of age.

Most recently, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine assessed cognitive abilities such as memory, planning and spatial reasoning in nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID-19. The researchers found that those who had been infected had significant deficits in memory and executive task performance.

This decline was evident among those infected in the early phase of the pandemic and those infected when the delta and omicron variants were dominant. These findings show that the risk of cognitive decline did not abate as the pandemic virus evolved from the ancestral strain to omicron.

In the same study, those who had mild and resolved COVID-19 showed cognitive decline equivalent to a three-point loss of IQ. In comparison, those with unresolved persistent symptoms, such as people with persistent shortness of breath or fatigue, had a six-point loss in IQ. Those who had been admitted to the intensive care unit for COVID-19 had a nine-point loss in IQ. Reinfection with the virus contributed an additional two-point loss in IQ, as compared with no reinfection.

Generally the average IQ is about 100. An IQ above 130 indicates a highly gifted individual, while an IQ below 70 generally indicates a level of intellectual disability that may require significant societal support.

To put the finding of the New England Journal of Medicine study into perspective, I estimate that a three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support.

Another study in the same issue of the New England Journal of Medicine involved more than 100,000 Norwegians between March 2020 and April 2023. It documented worse memory function at several time points up to 36 months following a positive SARS-CoV-2 test.

Taken together, these studies show that COVID-19 poses a serious risk to brain health, even in mild cases, and the effects are now being revealed at the population level.

A recent analysis of the U.S. Current Population Survey showed that after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an additional 1 million working-age Americans reported having serious difficulty remembering, concentrating or making decisions than at any time in the preceding 15 years. Most disconcertingly, this was mostly driven by younger adults between the ages of 18 to 44.

Data from the European Union shows a similar trend in 2022, 15% of people in the EU reported memory and concentration issues.

Looking ahead, it will be critical to identify who is most at risk. A better understanding is also needed of how these trends might affect the educational attainment of children and young adults and the economic productivity of working-age adults. And the extent to which these shifts will influence the epidemiology of dementia and Alzheimers disease is also not clear.

The growing body of research now confirms that COVID-19 should be considered a virus with a significant impact on the brain. The implications are far-reaching, from individuals experiencing cognitive struggles to the potential impact on populations and the economy.

Lifting the fog on the true causes behind these cognitive impairments, including brain fog, will require years if not decades of concerted efforts by researchers across the globe. And unfortunately, nearly everyone is a test case in this unprecedented global undertaking.

See more here:

Mounting research shows that COVID-19 leaves its mark on the brain, including with significant drops in IQ scores - The Conversation Indonesia

FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WFFT) - The Allen County Department of Health (ACDH) released an update today on the state of COVID-19 in Allen County.

They reported eight deaths and 882 positive cases from February 3 to today, bringing totals to 134,716 cases and 1,316 deaths as of today.

Other updates relating to COVID-19 can be found on the ACDH's COVID-19 website, which is time-stamped to provide the latest local data to the public.

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Latest COVID-19 update released by the Allen County Department of Health - WFFT FOX 55 Fort Wayne | Indiana News & Weather

By BIANCA VZQUEZ TONESS and MORIAH BALINGIT (AP Education Writers)

Four years after the COVID-19 pandemic closed schools and upended child care, the CDC says parents can start treating the virus like other respiratory illnesses.

Gone are mandated isolation periods and masking. But will schools and child care centers agree?

In case youve lost track: Before Friday, all Americans, including school children, were supposed to stay home for at least five days if they had COVID-19 and then mask for a set period of time, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Now the CDC says children can go back to school when their overall symptoms improve and theyre fever-free for 24 hours without taking medication. Students are encouraged to wear a mask when they return.

Still, the change may not affect how individual schools urge parents to react when their children fall sick. Schools and child care providers have a mixed record on following CDC recommendations and often look to local authorities for the ultimate word. And sometimes other goals, such as reducing absences, can influence a state or districts decisions.

The result can be a confusing variation among states and districts, confounding parents whose lives have long been upended by the virus.

For example, during the 2021-2022 school year, only 18 states followed CDC recommendations for mask-wearing in class. When the CDC lifted its masking guidelines in February of 2022, states like Massachusetts followed suit, but California kept the mask requirement for schools.

And in the child care world, some providers have long used more stringent testing and isolation protocols than the CDC has recommended. Reasons have ranged from trying to prevent outbreaks to keeping staff healthy both for their personal safety and to keep the day care open.

Some states moved to more lenient guidelines ahead of the CDC. California and Oregon recently rescinded COVID-19 isolation requirements, and many districts followed their advice.

In an attempt to minimize school absences and address an epidemic of chronic absenteeism, California has encouraged kids to come to school when mildly sick and said that students who test positive for coronavirus but are asymptomatic can attend school. Los Angeles and San Diegos school systems, among others, have adopted that policy.

But the majority of districts around the country still have asked parents to isolate children for at least five days before returning to school. Some, including Boston and Atlanta, have required students to mask for another five days and report positive COVID-19 test results to the school.

A school or day cares specific guidelines are consequential for working parents who must miss work if their child cant go to school or child care. In October 2023, as the nations parents and caretakers wrestled with simultaneous surges of COVID, respiratory syncytial virus and influenza, 104,000 adults reported missing work because of child care issues, the highest number in at least a decade. That number has fallen: Last month, child care problems meant 41,000 adults missed work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Melissa Colagrossos child care center in West Virginia dropped special guidelines for COVID about a year ago, she said. Now, theyre the same as other illnesses: A child must be free of severe symptoms such as fever for at least 24 hours before returning to the center.

We certainly are treating COVID just like we would treat flu or hand, foot and mouth disease, said Colagrosso, CEO of A Place To Grow Childrens Center in Oak Hill.

As for kids without symptoms who test positive for COVID? Most parents have stopped testing kids unless they have symptoms, Colagrasso said, so its a quandary she has not encountered.

___

The Associated Press education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find APs standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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The CDC has relaxed COVID guidelines. Will schools and day cares follow suit? - The Morning Call

The Hawaii Department of Health is in general agreement with todays updated COVID-19 guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

DOH continuously reviews data on respiratory pathogens, including the virus that causes COVID-19.

When people get sick with a respiratory virus, the updated guidance recommends that they stay home and away from others. For people with COVID-19 and influenza, treatment is available and can lessen symptoms and lower the risk of severe illness. The recommendations suggest returning to normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, symptoms are improving overall, and if a fever was present, it has been gone without use of a fever-reducing medication.

Once people resume normal activities, they are encouraged to take additional prevention strategies for the next 5 days to curb disease spread, such as taking more steps for cleaner air, enhancing hygiene practices, wearing a well-fitting mask, keeping a distance from others, and/or getting tested for respiratory viruses.

CDCs updated guidance reflects how the circumstances around COVID-19 in particular have changed. While it remains a threat, today it is far less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease. Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19.

The trend in Hawaii is similar to that nationally, in which significant declines in COVID-19 hospitalizations and mortality have been associated with the high degree of population immunity, availability of vaccinations, and access to treatment. As the threat from COVID-19 more closely resembles other common respiratory viruses, CDC is issuing Respiratory Virus Guidance, rather than additional virus-specific guidance.

The new pan-respiratory guidance makes it easier for people to take actions to prevent disease spread, even if they are unable to identify the specific respiratory disease.

DOH will be reviewing CDCs guidance over the coming week as the department prepares updates to state-level guidance to align with these changes.

To read more about the CDCs changes, visit Protect yourself from COVID-19, Flu, and RSV.

Read more here:

Hawaii Department of Health supports CDC updates to COVID-19 guidance - Big Island Now

COVID-19 may have been intentionally created in a Chinese lab, a Rutgers University professor told the United Nations this week, and another expert says the evidence has reached the level of a smoking gun.

The virus that created a pandemic and killed millions around the world may have been made in Chinas Wuhan Institute of Virology, Richard H. Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers, was quoted saying in a Wall Street Journal article.

Mr. Ebright cited evidence found in a 2018 document from the lab that said it was working on exactly that. The document elevates the evidence provided by the genome sequence from the level of noteworthy to the level of a smoking gun, Mr. Ebright said in the article by former New York Times editor Nicholas Wade.

The disclosed documents describe a grant proposal known as Project DEFUSE, which outlined intentions to examine bat coronaviruses potentially transmissible to humans. The grant proposal was not approved by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and failed to secure funding.

Nonetheless, speculation persists about whether the research may have proceeded with support from the Chinese government. Project DEFUSE also suggested modifications to bat coronavirus spike proteins, introducing human-specific cleavage sites. Notably, these techniques are similar to those some biologists surmise could have played a role in crafting the coronavirus responsible for the global health crisis.

Viruses made according to the DEFUSE protocol could have been available by the time COVID-19 broke out, sometime between August and November 2019, Mr. Wade wrote. This would account for the otherwise unexplained timing of the pandemic along with its place of origin.

Mr. Wade asserted that the genetic structure of the coronavirus that eventually spread around the world indicates the virus laboratory birth.

Whereas most viruses require repeated tries to switch from an animal host to people, SARS-CoV-2 infected humans out of the box, as if it had been preadapted while growing in the humanized mice called for in the DEFUSE protocol, Mr. Wade wrote.

For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.

Staff can be reached at 202-636-3000.

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'Smoking gun': Scientist claims evidence COVID-19 created by researchers in Chinese lab - Washington Times

Four years after what was once the novel coronavirus was declared a pandemic, COVID remains the most dangerous infectious respiratory illness regularly circulating in the U.S. But a glance at the United States most prominent COVID policies can give the impression that the disease is just another seasonal flu. COVID vaccines are now reformulated annually, and recommended in the autumn for everyone over the age of six months, just like flu shots; tests and treatments for the disease are steadily being commercialized, like our armamentarium against flu. And the CDC is reportedly considering more flu-esque isolation guidance for COVID: Stay home til youre feeling better and are, for at least a day, fever-free without meds.

These changes are a stark departure from the earliest days of the crisis, when public-health experts excoriated public figuresamong them, former President Donald Trumpfor evoking flu to minimize COVID deaths and dismiss mitigation strategies. COVID might still carry a bigger burden than flu, but COVID policies are getting more flu-ified.

Read: The flu-ification of COVID policy is almost complete

In some ways, as the populations immunity has increased, COVID has become more flu-like, says Roby Bhattacharyya, a microbiologist and an infectious-disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. Every winter seems to bring a COVID peak, but the virus is now much less likely to hospitalize or kill us, and somewhat less likely to cause long-term illness. People develop symptoms sooner after infection, and, especially if theyre vaccinated, are less likely to be as sick for as long. COVID patients are no longer overwhelming hospitals; those who do develop severe COVID tend to be those made more vulnerable by age or other health issues.

Even so, COVID and the flu are nowhere near the same. SARS-CoV-2 still spikes in non-winter seasons and simmers throughout the rest of the year. In 2023, COVID hospitalized more than 900,000 Americans and killed 75,000; the worst flu season of the past decade hospitalized 200,000 fewer people and resulted in 23,000 fewer deaths. A recent CDC survey reported that more than 5 percent of American adults are currently experiencing long COVID, which cannot be fully prevented by vaccination or treatment, and for which there is no cure. Plus, scientists simply understand much less about the coronavirus than flu viruses. Its patterns of spread, its evolution, and the durability of our immunity against it all may continue to change.

And yet, the CDC and White House continue to fold COVID in with other long-standing seasonal respiratory infections. When the nations authorities start to match the precautions taken against COVID with those for flu, RSV, or common colds, it implies that the risks are the same, Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland, told me. Some of those decisions are not completely unreasonable, says Costi Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology at UVA Health, especially on a case-by-case basis. But taken together, they show how bent America has been on treating COVID as a run-of-the-mill diseasemaking it impossible to manage the illness whose devastation has defined the 2020s.

Each not completely unreasonable decision has trade-offs. Piggybacking COVID vaccines onto flu shots, for instance, is convenient: Although COVID-vaccination rates still lag those of flu, they might be even lower if no one could predict when shots might show up. But such convenience may come at the cost of protecting Americans against COVIDs year-round threat. Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, told me that a once-a-year vaccine policy is dead wrong There is no damn evidence this is a seasonal virus yet. Safeguards against infection and milder illness start to fade within months, leaving people who dose up in autumn potentially more susceptible to exposures by spring. That said, experts are still torn on the benefits of administering the same vaccine more than once a yearespecially to a public thats largely unwilling to get it. Throughout the pandemic, immunocompromised people have been able to get extra shots. And today, an advisory committee to the CDC voted to recommend that older adults once again get an additional dose of the most recently updated COVID vaccine in the coming months. Neither is a pattern that flu vaccines follow.

Read: Falls vaccine routine didnt have to be this hard

Dropping the current COVID-isolation guidelinewhich has, since the end of 2021, recommended that people cloister for five daysmay likewise be dangerous. Many Americans have long abandoned this isolation timeline, but given how new COVID is to both humanity and science, symptoms alone dont yet seem enough to determine when mingling is safe, Popescu said. (The dangers are even tougher to gauge for infected people who never develop fevers or other symptoms at all.) Researchers dont currently have a clear picture of how long people can transmit the virus once they get sick, Sifri told me. For most respiratory illnesses, fevers show up relatively early in infection, which is generally when people pose the most transmission risk, says Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan. But although SARS-CoV-2 adheres to this same rough timeline, infected people can shed the virus after their symptoms begin to resolve and are definitely shedding longer than what you would usually see for flu, Gordon told me. (Asked about the specifics and precise timing of the update, a CDC spokesperson told me that there were no updates to COVID guidelines to announce at this time, and did not respond to questions about how flu precedents had influenced new recommendations.)

At the very least, Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago, told me, recommendations for all respiratory illnesses should tell freshly de-isolated people to mask for several days when theyre around others indoors; she would support some change to isolation recommendations with this caveat. But if the CDC aligns the policy fully with its flu policy, it might not mention masking at all.

Read: No one really knows how much COVID is silently spreading again

Several experts told me symptom-based isolation might also remove remaining incentives to test for the coronavirus: Theres little point if the guidelines for all respiratory illnesses are essentially the same. To be fair, Americans have already been testing less frequentlyin some cases, to avoid COVID-specific requirements to stay away from work or school. And Osterholm and Gordon told me that, at this point in the pandemic, they agree that keeping people at home for five days isnt sustainableespecially without paid sick leave, and particularly not for health-care workers, who are in short supply during the height of respiratory-virus season.

But the less people test, the less theyll be diagnosedand the less theyll benefit from antivirals such as Paxlovid, which work best when administered early. Sifri worries that this pattern could yield another parallel to flu, for which many providers hesitate to prescribe Tamiflu, debating its effectiveness. Paxlovid use is already shaky; both antivirals may end up chronically underutilized.

Flu-ification also threatens to further stigmatize long COVID. Other respiratory infections, including flu, have been documented triggering long-term illness, but potentially at lower rates, and to different degrees than SARS-CoV-2 currently does. Folding this new virus in with the rest could make long COVID seem all the more negligible. Whats more, fewer tests and fewer COVID diagnoses could make it much harder to connect any chronic symptoms to this coronavirus, keeping patients out of long-COVID clinicsor reinforcing a false portrait of the conditions rarity.

The U.S. does continue to treat COVID differently from flu in a few ways. Certain COVID products remain more available; some precautions in health-care settings remain stricter. But these differences, too, will likely continue to fade, even as COVIDs burden persists. Tests, vaccines, and treatments are slowly commercializing; as demand for them drops, supply may too. And several experts told me that they wouldnt be surprised if hospitals, too, soon flu-ify their COVID policies even more, for instance by allowing recently infected employees to return to work once theyre fever-free.

Early in the pandemic, public-health experts hoped that COVIDs tragedies would prompt a rethinking of all respiratory illnesses. The pandemic showed what mitigations could do: During the first year of the crisis, isolation, masking, distancing, and shutdowns brought flu transmission to a near halt, and may have driven an entire lineage of the virus to extinctionsomething that never, in my wildest dreams, did I ever think would be possible, Landon told me.

Most of those measures werent sustainable. But Americas leaders blew right past a middle ground. The U.S. could have built and maintained systems in which everyone had free access to treatments, tests, and vaccines for a longer list of pathogens; it might have invested in widespread ventilation improvements, or enacted universal sick leave. American homes might have been stocked with tests for a multitude of infectious microbes, and masks to wear when people started to cough. Vaccine requirements in health-care settings and schools might have expanded. Instead, we seem to be in a more 2019-like place than a future where were preventing giving each other colds as much as we could, Bhattacharyya told me.

Read: Next winter, what if we test for even more viruses?

That means a return to a world in which tens of thousands of Americans die each year of flu and RSV, as they did in the 2010s. With COVID here to stay, every winter for the foreseeable future will layer on yet another respiratory virusand a particularly deadly, disabling, and transmissible one at that. The math is simple: The risk has overall increased for everyone, Landon said. That straightforward addition could have inspired us to expand our capacity for preserving health and life. Instead, our tolerance for suffering seems to be the only thing thats grown.

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Why Are We Still Flu-ifying COVID? - The Atlantic

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its COVID guidelines for 2024, removing the five-day isolation recommendation as the agency said it aims to mirror guidance for other respiratory infections. So what do you need to do if you test positive for COVID?

The change marks the first time the U.S. agency has loosened its COVID isolation recommendations in three years.

Our goal here is to continue to protect those at risk for severe illness while also reassuring folks that these recommendation are simple, clear, easy to understand, and can be followed, said Dr. Mandy Cohen, the CDCs director.

Here's a look at what you should know:

The changes mean people can return to work or regular activities if their symptoms are mild and improving and it's been a day since they've had a fever, but the CDC still recommends those with symptoms stay home.

"The recommendations suggest returning to normal activities when, for at least 24 hours, symptoms are improving overall, and if a fever was present, it has been gone without use of a fever-reducing medication," the guidance states.

Once activities are resumed, the CDC still recommends "additional prevention strategies" for an additional five days, including wearing a mask and keeping distance from others.

There is no change to guidelines for nursing homes and health care facilities, however.

The agency is emphasizing that people should still try to prevent infections in the first place, by getting vaccinated, washing their hands, and taking steps to bring in more outdoor fresh air.

As part of the guidance, CDC suggests:

The change comes at a time when COVID-19 is no longer the public health menace it once was. It dropped from being the nation's third leading cause of death early in the pandemic to 10th last year.

Most people have some degree of immunity to the coronavirus from past vaccinations or from infections. And many people are not following the five-day isolation guidance anyway, some experts say.

"While it remains a threat, today it is far less likely to cause severe illness because of widespread immunity and improved tools to prevent and treat the disease," the CDC stated. "Importantly, states and countries that have already adjusted recommended isolation times have not seen increased hospitalizations or deaths related to COVID-19."

COVID-19 is not causing as many hospitalizations and deaths as it did in the first years of the pandemic. The change is an effort to streamline recommendations so they are similar to longstanding recommendations for flu and other respiratory viruses. Many people with a runny nose, cough or other symptoms aren't testing to distinguish whether it's COVID-19, flu, or something else, officials say.

This may not be as stringent, but also emphasizes that all people with respiratory symptoms should stay home while they are sick, said Dr. David Margolius, the head of Cleveland's health department.

There's been no recent change in the science of how long people with COVID-19 are likely contagious, said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown Universitys School of Public Health.

What has changed is how much COVID is harming us as a population, Nuzzo said.

However, some experts worry that the change may increase the risk of infection for those people who are more vulnerable to developing severe illness.

Illinois' health department has not yet released a statement on the new guidelines, but when reports surfaced last month of potential changes in store, the department said it was still evaluating its guidelines.

State health officials said they were "aware of the CDCs consideration of new COVID-19 guidelines and are continuing to evaluate our own statewide guidelines."

"As we work with our federal partners to provide the most appropriate recommendations to our residents moving forward, IDPH continues to emphasize the importance of using all preventative tools to protect yourself and your loved ones from COVID-19," the Illinois Department of Public Health said at the time."Especially for those with certain underlying conditions, COVID-19 even today poses a more serious risk of severe health outcomes than RSV or flu. The lessons we learned during the pandemic continue to remain valuable for COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases. This means washing your hands frequently if you have a cough/cold/respiratory symptoms and even considering wearing a mask to prevent the transmission of those germs to others.You shouldalso get tested if you are experiencing symptoms, as it can help you access time sensitive treatments for Flu and Covid-19. And, lets not forget vaccinations.Vaccinations continues to remain the most effective tool to protect you from serious illness from these respiratory infections."

Some experts said the move isn't unexpected, but even some who understand the rationale for the change have concerns.

My biggest worry in all of this is that employers will take this change in guidance to require employees to come back to work ... before they are ready to, before they feel well enough, and before they are not likely to pose harm to their co-workers, Nuzzo said.

Others, however, said the guidelines are more "reasonable" for those who do contract a more mild illness.

"I think this is expected because they're trying to give guidelines that are going to be reasonable that people will follow," Dr. Jonathan Pinsky, the director of infection control at Edward Hospital, told NBC Chicago last month. "We already have guidelines for other viruses like influenza about how long people need to stay at home, so they wanted to kind of get in line with those guidelines and give people a reasonable instructions about how to behave."

"My reaction was, 'It's about time,' you know? We're going to have some changes in terms of these quarantines as we get year to year to year into our COVID pandemic because it is becoming, for many people, a more mild illness and it's time we sort of treat it and approach it like other respiratory viruses that we commonly see in the fall- influenza RSV - more typical durations of contagiousness and durations of isolation," said Dr. Mia Taormina, infectious disease chair at Duly Health & Care.

Taormina even added that it could make things safer in some cases.

"I'd rather have folks staying home for a day or two, going back to work or to their usual activities on day three or four if they're feeling better, as opposed to not testing at all because they don't want to be hung up on this mandatory five days away from work away from their activities," she said.

But many still stress that staying home if you're ill and masking will be more important than before.

"It's important to know that once you have COVID or another virus, you can still spread it especially in those first few days. And so it'll still be important to wear a mask to protect other people," Pinsky said. "If you're going leaving your home, especially if it's only after a day or two of infection, you're still going to be infectious. So it's important to wear the mask to protect other people for full 10 days."

"We're not saying that this is any less contagious, that we can go out and about - it's just for people that are having improvement in their symptoms. otherwise healthy hosts, they are less likely to be meaningfully contagious once those fevers are gone and their symptoms are getting better," Taormina said. "So with some mask wearing and picking and choosing your activities, we should be in a better place ... the messaging stays the same. If you're not feeling, well stay home."

Here are the protocols previously listed by the agency:

Regardless of vaccination status,you should isolate from others when you have COVID-19, the CDC reports.

You should also isolateif you are sick and suspect that you have COVID-19 but do not yet havetestresults.If your results are negative, you can end that isolation.

If you test positive for COVID-19, you shouldstay home for at least five days and isolate from others in your home. The CDC notes that people are "likely most infectious during these first five days."

When you have COVID-19, isolation is counted in days, as follows:

If you had no symptoms:

If you had symptoms:

Other guidance for those who test positive:

If you had no symptoms, you can end your isolation after day five, but for those who experience symptoms, that line might be different, the CDC notes.

Those who have mild symptoms can end isolation after day five if they are fever-free for 24 hours, without using fever-reducing medication, but those with more moderate or severe illnesses will need to wait until day 10.

Those who have mild symptoms that are not improving should also wait until those symptoms are improving and they are fever-free for 24 hours.

Those with more severe illness may also want to consult with their doctor before ending isolation and could need a viral test to end their isolation period.

Despite ending isolation, those who test positive should continue to avoid people and mask through at least day 11, according to the CDC guidelines.

Originally posted here:

What to do if you test positive? Here are the new CDC COVID guidelines for 2024 - NBC Chicago

Were four years into the pandemic, and by this point, most Americans have had Covid at least once. But when the virus comes for us (again), it can still feel just as alarming as your first bout.

Heres a guide to what Covid looks like now and how to treat it.

The most common Covid symptoms havent changed much since the start of the pandemic, and they remain consistent for the latest dominant variant, JN.1, said Dr. Soniya Gandhi, the associate chief medical officer at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. They include fatigue, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, headache, body aches and cough.

All or any of those in isolation can still be Covid, Dr. Gandhi said.

Some people may develop conjunctivitis, also known as pink eye, or experience gastrointestinal issues, like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, but those symptoms are rarer. Anecdotally, experts said, one of the most notable symptoms early in the pandemic the loss of taste and smell also appears to be less common these days.

The biggest change is that people are having milder symptoms overall, said Dr. Amanda Casto, an acting assistant professor of allergy and infectious diseases at the University of Washington. Thats because virtually everyone has some pre-existing immunity from vaccines, a prior infection or both.

While Covid is mild for most people, it can be dangerous and even fatal for some. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that, as of mid-February, more than 21,000 people were hospitalized with Covid, and there had been roughly 10,000 Covid-related deaths in 2024.

Severe illness is a lot less prevalent now than during the first few years of the pandemic, but were still seeing it, said Dr. Stuart Ray, a professor in the division of infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore. The people who are getting sickest tend to be those with compromised immune systems and underlying health conditions, such as heart disease, diabetes or lung problems. Adults over age 65 are also at higher risk for severe infections.

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Read the original here:

The Latest Covid Guidance: Symptoms, Treatment and More - The New York Times