COVID-19

Long COVID

This paper from Italy (2024-07-15) reports that children with Long COVID have elevated levels of P-selectin compared to controls. P-selectin is a protein in cells which call other players in the immune system to help counter an infection.

This preprint from USA (2024-07-25) reports that they can tell Irritable Bowel Syndrome from gastrointestinal Long COVID by looking at which genes are up-regulated or down-regulated. They also found SARS-CoV-2 in GI tract biopsies. Patients who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in the duodenum were more likely to have nausea/vomiting than those who tested negative; those who had SARS-CoV-2 in the colon were more likely to have bloody stool than those who did not.

COVID-Related Excess Deaths and Sickness

This paper from China (2024-07-27) reports that college students who got COVID-19 had worse cardiovascular health later. They tested worse on a number of metrics for at least three months post-infection, though most of the metrics got better over time. Blood pressure, however, didn’t get better, and looks like it kept getting worse:

Pathology

This paper (2024-07-28) reports that autopsy studies of rodents show that SARS-CoV-2 gets into the nervous system of rodents before it gets into their blood, and that it doesn’t need ACE2 to enter cells. (They say that the virions got into the cells of mice without human ACE2 receptors via the neuropilin-1 receptor.)

This makes it sound like neurological involvement is common, not unusual. 😬

This paper (2024-07-29) reports that two bat coronaviruses — very close relatives of COVID-19 — are less transmissible in hamsters and less deadly in mice than COVID-19. They also found that those bat viruses don’t infect human nasal cells or mouse upper airways. It makes me wonder if that is why nasal sprays and sinus irrigation is so helpful.

This paper from UK (2024-07-29) reports that healthy living lowers your COVID-19 risks. People who had 6-10 of ten healthy living practices had a 36% lower risk of Long COVID at a mean of 210 days than people with 0-4 healthy living practices. The people with 6-10 healthy practices also had a 41% lower chance of post-COVID all-cause death and 22% lower chance of post-COVID all-cause hospitalization.

The healthy living practices were:

not smoking,
drinking alcohol less than four times per week,
not being overweight (BMI < 30 kg/m2),
engaging in physical activity (at least 150 min of moderate or 75 min of vigorous physical activity per week),
not spending too much time sitting (< 4 h per day),
getting good sleep (7–9 h per day),
eating fruits and vegetables ( ≥ 400 g/day),
eating some oily fish ( ≥ 1 portion/week),
eating less red meat ( ≤ 4 portions/week), and
eating less processed meat ( ≤ 4 portion week).

This paper from Sweden (2024-07-19) reports that people in the ICU got more infections if they had COVID-19 than if they had influenza. People with COVID-19 in the ICU had three times the risk of getting an infection than people with influenza. For COVID-19 patients, getting corticosteroid treatment increased their risk of getting an infection; I don’t know if corticosteroid treatment is more common in COVID-19 patients than in influenza patients.

This paper from Brazil reports (2024-07-19) reports that schizophrenia and COVID-19 boost some of the same processes, but in slightly different ways. Both seem to boost brain aging, but via different processes. Schizophrenia mucks with amino acid metabolism; COVID-19 mucks with carbohydrate metabolism. Both muck with neurotransmitters, but in different ways.

Mitigation Measures

Good randomized clinical trials on masking are hard to do, but this study from Norway (2024-05-29) did it, and found that people who were asked to wear a surgical face mask in public places for 14 days were 29% less likely to report symptoms consistent with a respiratory infection than those who were asked to not wear a mask in public. MASKS WORK!

(Note that the study instructions did not mention work or home: it only asked people to mask/not mask in public places. I expect that even fewer of the maskers would have gotten sick if they masked at work and home. I also expect that not all of the people who were asked to mask actually did so, so again that would have depressed the reported effectiveness.)

This paper from USA (2024-07-26) reports that mask mandates and vaccination requirements work. The authors compared excess death rates in states with more stringent masking/vaccination measures to those with less stringent mitigation measures, and found that if all states had used mask/vax mitigations which were as stringent as the top ten most mask/vax stringent states, 10-21% fewer people would have died in the USA. They also found that school closures were not much help.

This paper from Australia (2024-07-15) reports that doing pretty much any kind of mitigations in hospitals is cost-effective. They modelled mitigations based on published data on effectivenes, and found that staff always masking with N95s coupled with RATs-on-admission-for-everyone was the most cost-effective mitigation.

“dynamic” mitigation means basically “only when COVID-19 is suspected”; blue is costs, red is savings

H5N1

Transmission

As of 29 July, the USDA Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza dashboard reports that 172 herds have tested positive.

There have been soothing words said that cow-to-cow transmission was most likely via milk, either by ingesting (e.g. the barn cats) or from milk residue in shared milking machines. However, this paper from USA (2024-07-25) reports that they found various animals infected with H5N1 clade B3.13 (the same clade infecting cows), including a raccoon, on the infected farms. I seriously doubt that the raccoon was getting milked by the same machine that milked the cows. To be fair, I don’t know if wild birds carry B3.13 or not, so I don’t know how reasonable it is to think that the raccoon got sick from wild birds. However, if birds can carry the virus easily, then that’s a way that the virus could transmit from dairy to dairy. 🙁

This paper found that virus was found in the nose and urine of cows, especially asymptomatic cows — who did not test positive in their milk. A lower percentage of symptomatic cows, for some reason, had positive tests for virus in their noses and urine. And, the study says that it sure looks like apparently healthy cows in one state infected a herd in another state where they were transported. So just testing symptomatic cows, or just testing milk, is not going to find the virus.

I also had the impression that the infection was pretty mild in cows, but this paper says that the death rate in infected cows was twice the baseline rate, at least in two of the infected herds.

Here and here are two lay articles about the research paper.

This article from USA (2024-07-25) reports that nine humans have tested positive for H5N1 B3.13 — the variant of bird flu that the US cattle have gotten infected with. The workers were culling poultry from two egg-laying flocks that had gotten H5N1 (I think it was transmitted via cattle, not wild birds, but don’t see mention of the source in this article). Apparently it was beastly hot in the barn (yay climate change) and PPE is hot, so they might not have been super diligent about keeping their PPE on… All of the cases appear to be mild, fortunately.

This article also mentioned that the current number of infected dairy herds in Colorado is now 51. That’s a huge percentage of Colorado herds.

Testing

This press release (2024-07-22) from the Colorado Department of Agriculture admits that their previous testing wasn’t good enough. Going forward, dairies in Colorado will have mandatory testing every week of samples from dairy’s bulk milk tanks. From testing weakly to weekly testing.

This article (2024-07-19) reports that wastewater testing spotted H5N1 in Arkansas, a state which has not reported any infected cattle. This doesn’t necessarily mean there is an outbreak: it could have been something like someone washing their jacket of where a wild bird hit them with their bodily waste stream.