I’m going to try marking snippets with “AGAIN:” if it’s more evidence of something that we already knew, like that COVID-19 infections increase your risk of autoimmune disorders.

COVID-19

COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death

It looks like one of the ways that COVID-19 kills people that doesn’t get listed as a COVID-19 death is car crashes. This paper (2024-10-08) reports that the COVID-19 case rate in an area is strongly associated with the rate of car crashes. They also found that vaccination wasn’t helpful.

NB: The abstract was a little confusing, and the full paper hasn’t been published yet, but I will get a copy when it is, so there might be another snippet on that study in future blog postings.

AGAIN: This paper from USA (2024-10-14) reports that diabetes risk in children increases after COVID-19. This study of pediatric patients found that, compared to non-COVID respiratory patients, kids who got COVID-19 had elevated risks of getting a diagnosis of type two diabetes in the months which followed:

Group	+Risk at 1 mo.	+Risk at 3 mo.	+Risk at 6 mo.
all kids	+55%	+48%	+58%
obese or overweight	+107%	+100%	+127%
hospitalized	+210%	+174%	+162%

Increased risk of T2 diabetes after a COVID-19 infection, compared to other respiratory infections

Long COVID

This paper from UK (2024-10-07) reports that severe COVID-19 causes damage to the brainstem, which can lead to shortness of breath, fatigue, and anxiety.

This paper from Canada (2024-09-30) reports that diagnosing Long COVID is hard, and could result in overdiagnosis. They found that one-third of emergency department patients who tested positive for COVID-19 had symptoms three months later which were consistent with Long COVID. Unfortunately, one-fifth of the people who tested negative for COVID-19 (and who reported no subsequent symptomatic illness), also had symptoms three months later which were consistent with Long COVID.

This paper from Denmark (2024-10-07) reports that in a large survey, people were about twice as likely to report post-exertional malaise 2 to 12 months after a positive COVID-19 test than as people who had negative tests. (Most people had been vaccinated with at least two doses, and the testing period was between April 2021 and February 2023.)

Participants who had been hospitalized with COVID-19 were 23% more likely to report fatigue than people who tested negative.

Vaccines

⭐ This paper from USA (2024-10-08) reports that having been vaccinated is better than having been infected. The authors compared people who had been vaccinated-then-infected with people who were never-vaccinated-twice-infected. For the most recent infection (#2 for the unvaccinated, #1 for the vaccinated), the two groups got sick at approximately the same rate, but the people who had never been vaccinated were 56% more likely to get hospitalized as the ones who had been vaccinated.

AGAIN: This paper from Sweden (2024-10-04) reports that vaccines elevate the risk temporarily for some minor cardiovascular things, but reduce the risk long-term for more dangerous things.

The risk of extrasystoles (early heartbeats) and transient ischaemic attack went up by about 20% and 13%, respectively, temporarily after vaccination, and the risk of myopericarditis went up by about 50% temporarily after mRNA vaccination.

However, the risk of serious events — dysrhythmias, heart failure, myocardial infarction, and stroke — went down by 20-30%.

Pathology

AGAIN: This paper (2024-10-09) with data from early in the pandemic in UK reports that COVID-19 is bad for the heart. The risk of a major cardiac event (MACE) — myocardial infarction, stroke, and all-cause mortality — was about twice as high for at least the next 1000 days in people who had COVID-19 than those who did not. If the patients were hospitalized with COVID-19, then their risk went up by 3.85 times.

⭐ They also noticed that blood type mattered. People with A, B, or AB type blood had 65% higher risk than people who had type O blood.

Testing

This article (2024-09-29) says that Health Canada is no longer buying rapid tests en masse. I was not able to figure out what BC’s policy was going to be — is the Province going to buy rapid tests for everyone? — but I did find this press release (2024-10-09) from Ontario which says that in Ontario, you’ll only be eligible for RATs (or PCRs, or Paxlovid) if you are in one of several vulnerable groups. Ontario is not BC, but this shows a precedent.

This page on HealthLinkBC about testing was updated on 9 October, and it still says that RATs are free at pharmacies. That’s encouraging, at least.

This paper from USA (2024-09-30) found that an online survey of home rapid test results tracked well with wastewater and with official numbers — until January 2022. After January 2022, the official numbers didn’t correlate with wastewater or survey results. Basically, the official numbers turned into trash, while the survey of home rapid test results was pretty good.

The paper also estimated that there were 54 million infections which didn’t make it into the official numbers in 2022. Coupled with data on official case counts, that says that 184M people in the USA got COVID-19 in 2022, or 54% of the US population. 😬

H5N1

This article (2024-10-09) reports that California has been aggressively looking for H5N1-infected herds (go California!), and has discovered FORTY-ONE infected herds since my last General blog post. They are up to 96 herds as of 9 Oct, which is significantly more than any other state. (Many other states, however, are not working as hard to identify infected herds!)

This press release (2024-10-14) says that California has now found six people with confirmed H5N1 with an additional five possible cases. The press release says that all the humans’ symptoms have been mild, including conjunctivitis.

This article (2024-10-10) (now slightly out of date) reports there have now been 18 humans in the US who have tested positive for bird flu, all but one of which worked with or near dairy herds.