Category: Covid-19

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In its most recent guidelines on the use of over-the-counter (OTC) drugs for COVID-19, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that mildly ill patients can relieve symptoms such as fever and sore throat with acetaminophen or ibuprofen, but a team led by Florida Atlantic University (FAU) researchers says it's not that simple..

In a review in the American Journal of Medicine, the investigators conclude that the decision to take acetaminophen (eg, Tylenol), aspirin, or ibuprofen (eg, Motrin, Advil) should be done on an individual basis under the guidance of a clinician.

This is because the drugs aren't risk-free, with overuse of acetaminophen tied to irreversible liver damage, liver failure, the need for liver transplant, and kidney damage, the authors noted.

While aspirin's anti-inflammatory properties may be useful in treating moderate to severe COVID-19, it carries the risk of bleeding, especially in the gastrointestinal (GI) tract. This is of particular concern in COVID-19, which may itself lead to bleeding and clotting abnormalities.

Compared with aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen (eg, Aleve), and other non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) have greater adverse-event profiles, namely for gastroenteritis (inflammation of the GI tract) and peptic ulcers. As with acetaminophen, long-term use of these drugs can lead to liver and kidney toxicity.

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Scientists caution about CDC guidance on over-the-counter drugs for COVID-19 - University of Minnesota Twin Cities

Exactly four years ago today, Boris Johnson announced the UK's first COVID lockdown, ordering people to "stay at home".

Working from home became our reality and people were separated from their loved ones, while frontline workers tackled a new and unknown virus.

With a public inquiry under way into how the UK approached COVID-19, many have criticised when and how we went in and out of lockdowns.

So if another pandemic struck, would we have to lock down again - and how would it be different?

Sky News asks scientists and disaster experts whether we would ever be told to stay at home again, what lockdown measures would involve - and whether the public would comply.

When could a pandemic happen again?

COVID has often been referred to as a "once in a lifetime" event. But with more than six million estimated COVID deaths globally, the last comparable pandemic only emerged four decades ago.

HIV/AIDs was first identified in 1981 and has killed 36 million people worldwide. Prior to that, the Hong Kong flu pandemic in 1968 caused about a million deaths, and the Spanish flu of 1918 50 million.

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Scientists warn global warming and deforestation are also making it increasingly likely that a viral or bacterial agent will "jump" from animals to humans and cause another pandemic.

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"We're creating a situation that is rife for outbreaks," says Dr Nathalie MacDermott, clinical lecturer in infectious diseases at King's College London.

"I know that COVID was very hard for people and we want to believe we can just go back to normal and I understand that entirely.

"But the next pandemic is around the corner - it might be two years, it could be 20 years, it could be longer - but we can't afford to let our guards down. We need to stay vigilant, prepared and ready to make sacrifices again."

Dr MacDermott explains that by cutting down trees in the Amazon and parts of Africa, animals and insects are moving closer to people's homes.

And with rising temperatures, outbreaks of mosquito and tick-borne viruses such as dengue, chikungunya, and Crimean Congo haemorrhagic fever (CCHF) are happening in parts of Europe rarely seen before.

"As temperatures increase around the world, even the UK will become an area where it's possible for those types of mosquitoes to live," she says.

How long would lockdowns last?

While there were three lockdowns in England, each several months long, Professor Stephen Griffin, virologist at the University of Leeds, argues there should have "only ever been one".

"Lockdown was an extreme reaction to a situation that had already got out of control," he says.

But if there was investment in mitigations like air ventilation in public buildings and generic vaccines and antiviral drugs that could be adapted at speed, he argues, lockdowns would be shorter and less severe.

Dr MacDermott says that until the government, scientists and healthcare workers know more about an emerging virus and how it spreads, "a lockdown would be inevitable to some degree".

Professor Adam Kucharski, co-director of the Centre for Epidemic Preparedness and Response at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, says that if you can't contain severe infections and eliminate them completely - like Ebola in Africa and SARS-1 in East Asia - the only way to prevent a large disease epidemic is by heavily reducing transmission until a vaccine or treatment make the population less susceptible.

In the UK, it was eight months before the first COVID vaccine was administered and more than a year before it was rolled out more widely.

Would we be banned from socialising - and would schools shut?

Professor Lucy Easthope, expert in mass fatalities and pandemics at the University of Bath, says she would want to see what she calls a "nuanced quarantine".

"Lockdown is never a word I would have used - it's only really associated with things like school shootings," she says.

With regards to restrictions on socialising, she stresses how important "community and connection" are for disaster planning.

The 2016 UK flu plan says public gatherings are "an important indicator of normality" and that "there is little direct evidence of the benefits of cancelling such events".

Authorities should immediately prioritise creating "large ventilated safe spaces" for children, pregnant women, and vulnerable people, she says.

This would involve places like cinemas, leisure centres, and town halls being repurposed as community centres.

She adds the importance of people having a "purpose", so being able to meet people socially outside should be allowed as soon as the nature of the virus is clear.

Similarly, pubs, bars, cafes, and restaurants should be allowed to open outdoors as soon as possible, she says.

While the flu plan does advise schools in infected areas to shut, contingency measures have been suggested for temporary marquees to host lessons - or just spaces for children to go.

"Lots of children don't have gardens, so organised ways of getting them outside is important," Professor Easthope says.

"For the marquees for education, you might expect to see three or four schools consolidated together."

Another 'pingdemic'?

The government spent billions on its test and trace system, which included testing centres, the coronavirus helpline, manual contact tracing by what was then Public Health England, and the NHS COVID app.

While rapid tests are important to stop people from spreading the virus further, and the app "had a lot of promise", more innovative digital contact tracing may be required to avoid relying on another lockdown, Professor Kucharski says.

"The pingdemic was to some extent the NHS app doing what it was designed to do," he says.

"But with the digital contact tracing infrastructure that some Asian countries had, you can limit disruption to those people at higher risk in a particular outbreak rather than reverting to blanket measures."

He cautions that it would require "hard conversations" around privacy, but options include using smartphone location and debit card transactions to link people to identified cases.

In some countries, leaving quarantine would see people's phones automatically notify tracers of potential further spread.

Would the public comply?

When public health experts gave evidence to the COVID inquiry last year, they said they were wrong to assume the public would soon tire of a lockdown and suffer "behavioural fatigue".

Social psychologist and crowd behaviour expert Chris Cocking says it was a lack of trust in government that caused compliance rates to fall - not simply getting "tired" of restrictions.

"The overall message should be positive," the principal lecturer at the University of Brighton says. "Because if another situation arose, where it became necessary, people would be likely to comply."

Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News

He says if another lockdown was needed, the current Tory government would either have to minimise scandals over their own rule-breaking - or change hands completely to keep the public on board.

He adds: "If we had a new government, people would be far more likely to have faith in them because they would be less likely to say, 'it's the same bunch as before - why should we do it again?'

"And if they put more effort into not having situations like 'Partygate' or Dominic Cummings driving to Barnard Castle, they could appeal to the public's shared sense of identity, and it would be possible for compliance rates to remain relatively high."

From COVID fines to arrests made during Black Lives Matter protests and the Sarah Everard vigil, Professor Easthope describes lockdown legislation as "definitely bad" and "cruelly applied".

Dr Cocking argues lockdown laws are largely irrelevant to people's decision to adhere to restrictions or not.

"It's not the laws in place, it's whether people psychologically identify with the need to comply," he says.

And for people who don't, engaging with each reason individually is important to avoid creating a mass movement of "lockdown sceptics".

"People might feel unable to comply with restrictions for lots of different reasons. But it's a real mistake to lump them all together because you then identify them all as part of the same group, which further alienates them from the authorities," Dr Cocking adds.

Would we be well enough prepared?

Four years before COVID, the UK had carried out secret pandemic preparedness exercises for both flu and coronavirus outbreaks.

A detailed report on the flu exercise was compiled, but public health officials have told the COVID inquiry that the coronavirus drill wasn't acted on.

According to Professors Kucharski and Easthope, the more extensive flu plan could be easily adapted.

"The separation of a flu plan from a coronavirus plan is nonsense," Professor Kucharski says.

"The characteristics of COVID were a lot like the sort of infection in a flu pandemic. It should have been a wider discussion about what the acceptable outcome was from the horrendous trade-offs we were going to have to make."

Read more: Doctors suing NHS over long COVID How widespread is COVID now?

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Professor Easthope says in the late 2010s, she and other emergency planners identified holes in infrastructure that meant the UK "wasn't ready for even a relatively manageable pandemic" in terms of health and social care. She also says stockpiles of PPE "failed" in 2017.

But she says the internet's capacity to cope with so many processes moving online is both "enabling and unifying".

"We just didn't know how well it would perform, but in the end, it was one of the reasons we didn't fall apart completely," she says.

A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson told Sky News: "Throughout the pandemic, the government acted to save lives and livelihoods, prevent the NHS being overwhelmed and deliver a world-leading vaccine rollout which protected millions of lives across the nation.

"We have always said there are lessons to be learnt from the pandemic and we are committed to learning from the COVID-19 inquiry's findings which will play a key role in informing the government's planning and preparations for the future. We will consider all recommendations made to the department in full."

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'Next pandemic is around the corner,' expert warns - but would lockdown ever happen again? - Sky News

Last year, German health minister Karl Lauterbach did something politicians almost never do unless theyve been caught with their pants down: He apologized. Closing schools for long periods during the COVID-19 pandemic, Lauterbach said, had been an unnecessary mistake.

Where is our Lauterbach?

Though President Joe Biden wasnt in office at the start of the pandemic, he and other prominent Democrats have had ample opportunities to account for their roles in a slow-motion disaster that began almost exactly four years ago, when schools closed temporarily in the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic.

After what was supposed to be a merely temporary closure, New York City announced on March 23, 2020, that it was moving to remote learning for the rest of the year. That day, remote learning officially began in Washington, D.C., too, after days of haphazard experimentation with digital education. Similar experiments emerged across the country, as parents realizedwith dread, in many casesthat the societal disruption of the coronavirus was going to last.

Four years later, the wounds have not fully healed.

True, Republican resistance to masks and vaccines harmed and killed many more people than any policy embraced by liberals. But I dont think I am alone in expecting greater moral clarity from Biden than from Donald Trump. And when it comes to school, it is clear that Democrats have not truly reckoned with the decisions they made in 2020 and 2021.

Earlier this week, a data analysis by The New York Times summarized the effect of the closures that began four years ago: extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of COVID, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting. The longer schools stayed closed (or partly closed, with students only attending school in-person one or two days per week), the more children fell behind.

The devastating effects of remote learning are evident today in the absenteeism crisis, the teacher shortage, and the spike in mental illness among young adults.

This week, The Times also reported that city schools are grappling with a spike in discipline problems among children, evidence that the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic are having lingering effects, educators and experts say. Its not just about test scores. Our children lost something essential because adults lacked the courage to do the right thing.

Thus, the deep bitterness many parents felt about having to play teacher for months on end. That bitterness manifested in the suburbs of Northern Virginia in Nov. 2021, helping Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, become the states next governor. And it is still there, waiting to surface in Nov. 2024.

I think parents who saw their children suffer from politics rather than scientific principles in making policy decisions still think about the prolonged school closures in the U.S., Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco who bravely called for schools to reopen long before many of her peers, wrote to me in an email.

Grievances tend to work on voters more than promises, I have found. The grievances of parentsmothers in suburban swing districts, for instancecould hurt Biden much the way they did former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the presidents friend, when he ran confidently against the inexperienced Youngkin.

It should have never come to this. By summer 2020, we knew that children, for the most part, dont get especially sick with COVID-19. And around that time we also knew that schools were never the viral incubators some claimed they were bound to become. Studies from South Korea, the United Kingdom, and other countries confirmed as much. So did the safe reopening of schools in red states like Florida and Texas.

Somehow, evidence did not seem to matter. People who claimed to listen to the science turned away when the science said schools should reopen.

Liberals really poisoned the well when they decided to wage war against anyone who dared to make any public health calculations during the pandemic, despite the fact that such calculations were inevitable and necessary, wrote the perceptive writer Freddie deBoer in a recent Substack newsletter. The relentless braying about eugenics, the insistence that anyone who was not a [non-pharmaceutical intervention] maximalist hated the disabled and wanted them to die, contributed directly to the backlash that has resulted in so much COVID conspiracy insanity.

If Govs. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Greg Abbott (R-TX) were reopening schools, then reopening schools had to be wrong, because DeSantis and Abbott did not trust the science and were xenophobic bigots to bootso the righteous thinking went at the time. To oppose them was to oppose everything wrong with America under Trump. So the schools stayed closed in most deep blue municipalities.

In a harrowing article for The New Yorker published in fall 2020, reporter Alec MacGillis bracingly revealed the scope of devastation remote learning brought to poor kids, especially poor kids of color.

Most chilling of all was the transparently disingenuous defense of school closures by Becky Pringle, head of the powerful National Education Association (NEA), of which First Lady Jill Biden is a member. Pringle preposterously told MacGillis that if schools reopened, some 50,000 children would die. But no news outlet fact-checked her. No one accused Pringle of peddling misinformation, the way they would have if a conservative had made so flagrantly baseless an assertion.

Somehow, evidence did not seem to matter. People who claimed to listen to the science turned away when the science said schools should reopen.

Amazingly, some union leaders continue to defend having closed down schools for months on end. I do believe it was the right decision, Jerry Jordan of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers told The Times this week. It is a defiant statement, and an indefensible one. And unless Democrats renounce it, they own it.

It is true that we did not know how serious the virus was at first, which justified closing schools and businesses. But a state of permanent emergency was unsustainable; once we learned how the virus behaved, we should have adjusted accordingly. Yet some experts continued to insist on masking outside and keeping schools closed.

Four years ago, we were lost in the fog of war. The fog was thick at first, but by May it did begin to lift. We started to understand the true threat of the virus, whom it harmed and for whom it was a very minor risk. Yet in many highly-populated jurisdictions governed by Democrats, nothing changed. It was almost as if they longed for the fog to stay.

Now, there ought to be some honest accountability. We dont need blue ribbon commissions or Capitol Hill hearings to relitigate how we responded to the pandemic. But we do need elected leaders to have the decency to admit their own mistakes.

The Buck Stops Here, said the famous sign on President Harry Trumans desk.

Where does the buck stop in 2024? Nobody owns their decisions or owns up to their mistakes. There is an almost Soviet avoidance of responsibility. This sure is awful, but its not my fault. That guy over there, he looks guilty. Off to the gulag!

If you ask the White House, they will tell you that Biden quickly got schools open in 2021. Thats true. Kind of.

But it took billions of federal stimulus dollars, and in many districts, unsatisfactory hybrid learning continued. Then, when the Delta variant came along in late 2021, many schools closed againwith an especially protracted refusal to return to the classroom by the teachers of Chicago, where in several months Democrats will hold their national convention.

I think an apology and acknowledgement of the mistakes Democrats made in this epidemic towards children would go a long way in helping their constituents forgive, Dr. Gandhi wrote to me.

There were plenty of things that Democrats got right about the pandemic. But nobody, anywhere, got it completely right. Not China, not California, not Florida, not Sweden. We know that now. Our political leaders should be brave enough to say it.

Continued here:

Democrats Just Won't Admit They Blew It by Supporting Lengthy COVID School Closures - The Daily Beast

BOSTON (WWLP) Massachusetts businesswoman pleads guilty to submitting fraudulent COVID-19 loan applications.

A plea of guilty was entered by Vanessa Nixon, 45, of Framingham, for bank fraud. In February 2024, Nixon was charged with this crime.

Among Nixons businesses in Massachusetts were Mass Homes Investments LLC, Nixon Homes LTD, and Alpha Auto Body, Inc. As a result of her multiple fraudulent loan applications submitted to banks and the U.S. Government between April 2020 and November 2022, Nixon fabricated millions of dollars in business income through the Paycheck Protection Program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan Program.

She also created fake tax documents to substantiate the fabricated business income and submitted them with loan applications. As a result, Nixon received more than $450,000 in loans, which were subsequently forgiven by banks and the Small Business Administration.

A conviction for bank fraud may result in a sentence of up to 30 years in prison, five years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $1 million.

Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. Senior District Court scheduled the sentencing for June 26, 2024.

Kayleigh Thomas is a digital reporter who has been a part of the22Newsteam since 2022. Follow Kayleigh on X@kayleighcthomasand view herbioto see more of her work.

Continued here:

Massachusetts businesswoman pleads guilty to submitting fraudulent COVID-19 loan applications - WWLP.com

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Biden Mocks Trump's Suggestion Of Using Disinfectant To Treat COVID-19 - HuffPost

Nearly

The small study, which was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, analyzed blood samplesspecifically, serum and plasmafrom 76 patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 in March or April 2020, along with those from 25 people taken before the pandemic. The researchers discovered that people who said they had brain fog had higher levels of a protein in their blood called S100 than people who didnt have brain fog.

S100 is made by cells in the brain and isnt normally found in the blood. That suggests that the patients had a breakdown in the blood-brain barrier, which blocks certain substances from getting to the brain and spinal cord, the researchers noted.

The scientists then did MRI scans with dye of 22 people with long COVID (11 of them who reported having brain fog), along with 10 people who recovered from COVID-19. They found that long COVID patients who had brain fog had signs of a leaky blood-brain barrier. Specifically, the dye injected into the bloodstream leaked into their brains and pooled in regions that play a role in language, memory, mood, and vision.

Traditional imaging approaches havent shown any real sign of damage in the brains of patients [with long COVID brain fog], says study co-author Matthew Campbell, Ph.D., a genetics professor and head of genetics at Trinity College Dublin. Our approach made use of a dye called a contrast agent as well as a special type of analysis to pinpoint blood vessel leakiness in distinct regions of the brain.

What does this mean for long COVID patients with brain fog? Heres what we know right now.

Brain fog is a term used to describe a range of neurocognitive symptoms that can include trouble with focus, concentration, and memory, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). That can lead to an inability to perform effectively at work or in school or making a significant financial error, says Scott Kaiser, M.D., a board-certified geriatrician and director of Geriatric Cognitive Health for the Pacific Neuroscience Institute at Providence Saint Johns Health Center in Santa Monica, CA.

But, the definition of brain fog is a little vague. You can ask 10 patients and 10 healthcare providers and get literally 20 different answers, says Jim Jackson, Psy.D., neuropsychologist and professor of medicine at Vanderbilt Medical Center and author of the book Clearing the Fog: From Surviving to Thriving with Long CovidA Practical Guide.

Nizar Souayah, M.D., a neurology professor at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, agrees. You can ask patients to describe their brain fog, and they will have totally different answers, he says.

Brain fog is listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as one of the main symptoms of long-COVID, along with fatigue, chronic cough, and shortness of breath. But brain fog isnt just related to COVID-19lack of sleep, certain medications, and a poor diet can also contribute to brain fog.

This is still being explored, but science has uncovered a few things. In the latest study, people with long COVID brain fog had blood vessel leakage in areas of the brain that are involved in memory and attention, Campbell points out. This leakiness likely disrupts the integrity of neurons in the brain by shifting the delicate balance of materials moving into and out of the brain, he says. Cue the brain fog.

This phenomenonhaving a leaky blood-brain barrieris a very common route through which cognitive impairment occurs in a wide array of diseases and syndromes, Jackson says, listing off multiple sclerosis, sepsis, and major depression as a few examples.

Research published last year in the journal Cell also found a link between low levels of serotonin, a chemical that sends signals between nerve cells, and brain fog. For that study, researchers analyzed data from 1,540 people with symptoms of long COVID, as well as blood samples from 58 people who had brain fog between three and 22 months after they had COVID-19.

The researchers found that people who had recovered from COVID-19 but had brain fog had much lower levels of serotonin than people who were in the early stages of a COVID-19 infection and those who had no symptoms after recovering from COVID-19. The researchers pointed out that, while its normal for the bodys production of hormones and chemicals to be lower than usual during a viral infection, those levels usually bounce backand serotonin was the only one that didnt recover in patients with brain fog.

Overall, though, theres still a great deal of uncertainty about what causes COVID-19 brain fog, Dr. Kaiser says.

If you have brain fog and suspect its due to long COVID, Dr. Kaiser recommends contacting your healthcare provider. There are now many specialty resources available to support people experiencing prolonged symptoms and there may be opportunities to better understand the nature of an individuals cognitive dysfunction and tailored strategies to address this, he says. However, Dr. Souayah points out that it can be difficult to get an appropriate diagnosis. We don't have any good biomarkers for this, he says.

Still, Dr. Kaiser says that lifestyle moves that can be good for overall brain health may also help, including:

Some people may even benefit from a formal cognitive rehabilitation program, Dr. Kaiser says. Jackson agrees. We see many people with cognitive impairment after COVID make significant improvements over time with the help of cognitive rehabilitation, he says. It isn't a 'magic pill' but, for many, it is the treatment that allows them to function again.

But Campbell notes that there are currently limited treatments for patients. We do hope that drugs that have the potential to treat blood vessel damage might have utility, he adds.

Korin Miller is a freelance writer specializing in general wellness, sexual health and relationships, and lifestyle trends, with work appearing in Mens Health, Womens Health, Self, Glamour, and more. She has a masters degree from American University, lives by the beach, and hopes to own a teacup pig and taco truck one day.

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Study: Long COVID Brain Fog Linked to Damaged Blood Vessels - Prevention Magazine

The FDA issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) for pemivibart (Pemgarda) as COVID-19 pre-exposure prophylaxis in immunocompromised individuals who are unlikely to mount a sufficient immune response following vaccination, the agency announced on Friday.

A long-acting monoclonal antibody, pemivibart is specifically authorized for people ages 12 years and older (and weighing 40 kg or more) with moderate-to-severe immune compromise either because of a medical condition or due to immunosuppressant medications. Pemivibart is given as a single intravenous infusion and is not for use as post-exposure prophylaxis or in people currently infected with SARS-CoV-2.

The EUA was based on immunobridging data involving other human monoclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 demonstrating that pemivibart may be effective for COVID prevention.

"Serum neutralizing antibody titers of Pemgarda were consistent with the titer levels associated with efficacy in prior clinical trials of adintrevimab and certain other monoclonal antibody products," the FDA stated.

According to the EUA, individuals who would qualify for the antibody include those undergoing active treatment for cancer (including those receiving CAR T-cell therapy or stem cell transplant); patients with hematologic malignancies associated with poor responses to COVID vaccines regardless of their treatment status; solid-organ transplant recipients; those with moderate-or-severe primary immunodeficiency; people with advanced or untreated HIV; and those on high-dose corticosteroids, B-cell depleting agents, and other immunosuppressants.

No long-acting monoclonal antibody has been available for preventing COVID infection in individuals with moderate-to-severe immune compromise since the agency pulled the EUA for tixagevimab-cilgavimab (Evusheld) in January 2023 -- the move followed data showing the combination was unlikely to be sufficiently active against circulating SARS-CoV-2 variants. At the time, the CDC recommended that immunocompromised individuals receive the latest COVID booster (if they had not already), wear a well-fitting high-quality mask in public, maintain distance in crowded areas, and improve indoor ventilation.

Pemivibart is administered at a dose of 4,500 mg over a 60-minute infusion, with repeat dosing every 3 months recommended if ongoing protection is needed.

FDA cautioned that anaphylaxis occurred in 0.6% of clinical trial participants who received pemivibart. Therefore, patients should be monitored for 2 hours after the infusion is finished, and pemivibart should be administered in settings where health providers have immediate access to medications to reverse severe allergic reactions and can alert EMS if necessary.

Other potential side effects noted in the labeling include infusion-related reactions, fatigue, nausea, and headache.

Ian Ingram is Managing Editor at MedPage Today and helps cover oncology for the site.

Excerpt from:

New Monoclonal Authorized to Prevent COVID in Immunocompromised People - Medpage Today

Opinion

While the long-term risk from a current infection is 10 times less than it was in 2020-21, a lot of people are still suffering after getting Covid early in the pandemic

Fri 22 Mar 2024 19.00 EDT

Long Covid is one of the most controversial topics remaining about the pandemic. Depending on who you ask, it is either a real and current threat to the health of the globe, or a relatively minor issue that we should pay little attention to in the future. It is hard to weigh in on the topic without passionate advocates taking issue with the things that you say, which is true of quite a lot of the conversations we have had over the course of the pandemic.

A recent study from Queensland has injected further discord into this already complicated space. The press release about the study says that, in a large observational study, people who had tested positive for Covid-19 when the Omicron variant was spreading were no more likely to report ongoing symptoms or serious problems in their daily life than either people who tested negative or those who tested positive for influenza. This follows similar previous work by the same team showing almost identical results. According to Dr John Gerrard, one of the authors of the paper and Queenslands chief health officer, the findings call into question the entire conceptualisation of long Covid, arguing that it may be time to stop using terms like long Covid.

This has caused a number of articles arguing that long Covid is causing unnecessary fear, because of little difference between long-term symptoms caused by Covid-19 and other common viral infections.

The first issue here is that its hard to know what to make of the research. The results being reported are an early news release about a presentation that is going to happen at the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases in April. In other words, we have no idea how robust this paper is, nor how useful the data may be. The fact that there are so many news stories about this unpublished, unpresented finding is itself something of a problem.

However, the reports on these findings are consistent with a range of other papers that have been published on Covid-19 in the last few years. We know that the risk of long Covid is strongly related to how severe initial infections are. In 2020, when Covid-19 was many times more problematic than flu, long Covid was fairly common, but after successful vaccination campaigns, effective new medications and wide-scale infection, the risk from a Covid-19 infection has gone down substantially. The risk of getting long Covid from an infection is now somewhere around 10times less common than it was in 2020. Given the decrease in severity of Covid-19, its not unlikely that rates of long-lasting symptoms are similar between Covid-19 and influenza in 2024. As Ive been saying for years, much of this comes down to how we define long Covid, and how we know which long-term symptoms are actually caused by Covid-19.

In other words, you could reasonably argue that Dr Gerrard is correct. The problem, however, is that a lot of people were infected in 2020 and 2021, before we had vaccines and treatments to reduce the severity of the disease. There is no question that a large group of people are still suffering serious problems from their initial Covid-19 infection, many of them years after first getting sick. Australia doesnt have a national estimate of how many, but data from the UK suggests that about 0.5% of the country might fall into this group. While its not a big percentage, that is still a lot of people a similar rate in Australia would mean about 100,000 Aussies suffering similarly. These people have been left largely without hope, because we still dont really know why they have long Covid, and have no effective interventions to treat their disease.

And herein lies the problem with long Covid discussions. There are two separate conversations going on at the same time. We can talk about the future, which seems a bit brighter long Covid rates are down drastically, and people who get infected with Covid-19 now are about as likely to experience serious, long-lasting issues as people who got the flu in 2019. But we also have to acknowledge the large number of people seriously injured by Covid-19 in the early stages of the pandemic who may never recover their health.

There may be nothing unique about long Covid in the future even without this new report the evidence is strong that Covid-19 is now quite similar in risk to influenza per infection and perhaps we should start talking more about post-viral conditions as a category rather than focusing on those symptoms caused by Covid-19 alone. But if we do, it is important that we do not leave behind the numerous people suffering seemingly endless problems caused by Covid-19 years ago.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz is an epidemiologist working in chronic disease in Sydneys west, with a particular focus on the social determinants that control our health

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Long Covid may be nothing unique in the future but its effects today are still very real - The Guardian

The great conservative thinker William F. Buckley in 1963 wrotethat he would rather "live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University." Buckley recognized the great "brainpower" among the university's faculty, but feared the "intellectual arrogance that is a distinguishing characteristic of the university which refuses to accept any common premise."

I thought of that oft-quoted line four years after the COVID-19 panic. It was a very real public health threat, so much so that it enabled Americans to transfer wide-ranging and largely unchecked powersto the experts. For two years, it was exactly as if Buckley's fears came true and we were ruled by the type of people found in the faculty lounge.

It's no secret that American universities are dominated by progressives, who don't typically accept the "common premise" of limited governance. A core principle ofprogressivism, dating to its early 20th century roots, is the rule by experts. Disinterested parties would reform, protect, and re-engineer society based on their superior knowledge. Although adherents of this worldview speak in the name of the People, they don't actually trust individuals to manage their own lives.

Looking back, COVID-19 shows the nation's foundersrather than intellectual social engineershad it right. The founders created a system of checks and balances that made it hard for leaders to easily have their way. "A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions," wroteJames Madison. The pandemic stripped away those precautions, albeit (mostly) temporarily.

In fairness, the response to COVID by many ordinary Americans left much to be desired. Social media provided a megaphone forconspiracy theoriesand idiotic home remedies. Instead of acting responsibly by voluntarily embracing the best-known practices at the time, many Americans defied even the most sensible rules and acted out against store clerks and others. I was left disgusted by the edicts of our leaders and the behavior of many of my fellow citizens.

Nevertheless, the skeptics generally were correct. "The coronavirus shutdowns have created a dichotomy between those who tend to trust whatever the authorities sayand those who don't seem to trust any official information at all," I wrotein May 2020. "It's not even slightly conspiratorial, however, to question the forecasts, data and presuppositions of those officials who are driving these policies. They have shut down society, forced us to stay at home, driven businesses into bankruptcy, caused widespread misery, and suspended many civil liberties."

Yes, many of us told you so.

The experts and politicians touted the "science" even though that was really just a way of telling us to shut up and follow orders while they muddled their way through it. We've since learned that masks and plastic sneeze bars, lockdowns, school shutdowns, and the panoply of makeshift protections were, likely, of marginal value. Critics who questioned official death statistics were tarred as conspiratorialists. But even a 2023 Washington Post reportfound that officials seemed to be counting people who died "with" COVID rather than "from" it.

And don't get me started on how politicians reacted. Some of the initial emergency edicts were justifiable, but then governors realized they could ram through unrelated (or tangentially related) political priorities by invoking fear. One former Assembly member compiled a 123-pagelistof Gov. Gavin Newsom's COVID-related executive orders. The courts ultimately struck down a handful of them, but the governor certainly didn't let a good crisis go to waste.

The nation is still reeling from pandemic blowback. Inflation is soaring, sparked by supply chain disruptions and federal spending sprees that started with the shutdowns. Big cities such as San Francisco have hemorrhaged population as workers learned they no longer needed to commute into offices. Transit ridershipplummeted, sparking yet another funding crisis. Large segments of the public have become more dependent on government handouts. Municipal budgets are in shambles. Anti-eviction edicts further screwed up our rental markets.

Many downtowns, such as Sacramento, have yet to recover from the lockdowns, as shuttered businesseseach reflecting a personal tragedy for their ownersremain boarded up. And don't get me started on the impact on education, especially for the poor. There's a lost generation of students, victimized by school systems that couldn't master distance learningresulting dismal test scoresand soaring absentee rates. We saw unions resist school re-openings because their priorities are workers, not students. Even some experts nowresearchthe resulting psychological harms.

I'm not saying that COVID didn't require a reasonable response, but by listening solely to the equivalent of progressive academics and ignoring the concerns of Buckley's proverbial first 2,000 names in the phone book, our governmentfailedits people.

This column was first published in The Orange County Register.

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The Lesson of COVID-19: Don't Give Government More Power - Reason

New research indicates COVID-19 is making us dumber and leading to measurable cognitive decline.

The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that even a mild infection with the virus leads to a fall in intelligence and it is worse if you have long-COVID or are hospitalised.

Researchers at Imperial College London tested the cognitive ability of nearly 113,000 people who had previously had COVID-19. They found that those who had been infected had significant deficits in the ability to remember, reason and plan.

Lead author Dr Adam Hampshire said the group with the largest cognitive deficit was on average people who were in intensive care.

"They showed a difference of around about minus nine IQ points. People who have ongoing persistent symptoms, that is the ones who may have long COVID, they perform at about minus six IQ points and that's enough that it could have affected your daily function," he said.

Seven IQ points was equivalent to aging 10 years.

People who had been infected and no longer had symptoms also scored slightly lower than people who had never been infected, by the equivalent of three IQ points.

New Zealand epidemiologist, Professor Michael Baker, said those with COVID-19 have often talked about a feeling of brain fog.

"Some people describe it, yeah, as crippling brain fog and the fact that they do not feel that they can remember things very well or actually handle complex thought processes," he said.

Prof Baker said after four years we were seeing evidence mounting and the case getting stronger, not weaker, that this was a virus that affected the brain severely, along with being a vascular disease.

He said most people were affected because they've now had the virus.

"We're all getting, unfortunately, a little less intelligent at a whole population level. That is devastating not just for us as people but also in terms of productivity and many other things," Prof Baker said.

It could be brain damage that we can't get back with experts saying we will need to follow COVID-19 for many more years to know if there is any return to normal brain function, and warned that if you've had brain loss symptoms for more than a year then it's likely to be permanent.

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New research shows COVID-19 making us dumber with significant drops in IQ scores - Newshub