Special bonus post today!
Mental Health
I wasn’t sure if I should file this under Long COVID, Pathology, or Mitigation Measures, so I made a new category. This paper looked at a bunch of English-language studies and found that ER visits for girls attempting suicide went up 39% in the pandemic. (Boys didn’t change much.) Self-harm visits didn’t really change overall, but older children had slightly more self-harm and younger children slightly less. The rate for all mental health issues dropped by 19%. (All pediatric ER visits dropped by 32%, maybe because kids were spending more time in the safety of home? Maybe because people were avoiding hospitals?)
Vaccines
This paper from France says that people who were vaccinated were half as likely to get Long COVID (16.6% v 7.5%). This is broadly consistent with other studies.
Pathology
This article says that 6.0% of people hospitalized for COVID-19 had a clinically relevant bacterial pathogen, which gave a 2.3 times higher risk of death. 0.9% had infection with some other virus.
Long COVID
This article says that an Omicron infection is not likely to give you Long COVID. Be careful, though, because it’s survey-based, and there are some real dangers to surveys. (It’s also not peer-reviewed yet, but lots of the research I refer to is not peer reviewed yet.) I wouldn’t rip your mask off just yet.