2025-08-16 General

English-language health news this week has been swamped with political news from USA. It has not been fun to wade through articles on the CDC shooter, various politically-motivated firings of competent people, various notifications of programs being shut down, etc.

COVID-19

Vaccines

💉 I WAS MISINFORMED! Last week, I said that you couldn’t get COVID-19 vaccines in the USA, but an alert reader (thanks lkdc!) found an existence proof that you can get COVID-19 vaccinations in the USA right now. I confirmed that at least one CVS in Washington State has them.

Long COVID

😬 This paper from BC(!) (2025-07-28) reports that among BC school staff, 31.1% reported new-onset chronic conditions. Of the school staff, the rate of new-onset chronic conditions was:

  • 38.0% among those with test-confirmed infections;
  • 14.3% among people who thought they never had COVID-19 but whose blood tests said they did;
  • 18.1% among people whose blood said they never had COVID-19.

(This is despite the school staff having slightly better vaccination rates than community-matched blood donors.)

This article from BC (2025-08-12) reports that starting on 1 September, the size of all online group medical visits will be capped at 20 patients. That sounds good, but the BC Long COVID clinic — which is where a lot of the BC Long COVID care is done in group telehealth meetings — has 5,200 patients with 25 new patients per week and up to 50 people per call. Where are they going to get the staff to handle 2.5x times as many telehealth meetings?

Why is it so hard to tell how common Long COVID is? In part because nobody can agree what Long COVID is. This paper from USA (2025-08-12) took adults who had shown symptoms consistent with COVID-19, and used different five different papers’ definitions of Long COVID to classify the patients having Long COVID afterwards or not.

at time pointwith tightest definitionwith loosest definition
at 3 months32%42%
at 6 months15%22%

(NB: I’m surprised at how high even the minimum numbers are! )

Now, having reported on this paper, I want to issue a caution: the paper might be out of date. The papers that were cited were from 2021, 2022, and 2023. The authors on any of those five papers were from were overwhelmingly academics. It’s not bad to be an academic, but I think governmental and NGO institutions usually have better luck propagating standards than academics.

Since then, the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) worked on and published a definition (2024-07-31), and this article (2024-06-19) says that the US CDC accepted it. (I cannot confirm via the CDC web site because of the Trump administration’s vandalization of it.) I think I’ve seen more recent papers use the NASEM/US CDC definition of Long COVID.

⚡️ This paper from USA (2025-08-05) reports that the percentage of people surveyed with chronic pain went up 18% from 2019 to 2023. They found that Long COVID accounted for 13% of the increase (i.e. 13% of 18%).

This paper from USA (2025-08-12) reports — unsurprisingly — that the 27.1% of participants with current Long COVID (LC) have more work challenges than the 71.1% who never had LC or the 1.8% who recovered:

  • The percent of hours of work lost were:
    • 17.7% for participants with current LC;
    • 5.6% for participants who recovered from LC;
    • 3.2% for participants who never had LC.
  • Compared to the never-LC cohort, the current-LC cohort had:
    • a 7.24 times higher risk of having any work impairment than the never-LC cohort;
    • a 2.62 times higher odds of missing work;
    • a 11.82 times higher odds of experiencing work impairment
  • Compared to unvaccinated participants, vaccinated participants were only:
    • 71% as likely to have overall work impairment;
    • 66% as likely to have impairment while working;
    • 74% as likely to have impairment of non-work impairment.

🛌 This paper from China (2025-07-22) reports that med students who had COVID-19 infections had a significant number of sleep and cognitive problems. Compared to med students who did not have COVID-19 infections, ones who did had:

  • 83% higher chance of new-onset insomnia;
  • 2.2 times the rate of moderate-to-severe sleep disturbances;
  • 2.47 times the rate of decreased attention/memory;
  • 2.05 times the rate of breathlessness.

Good news though: exercising regularly dropped the risk of insomnia by 56%.

Transmission

This paper from USA (2025-08-11) reports that kids who had a rhinovirus infection in the previous 30 days were at 48% lower risk of a COVID-19 infection. Kids who caught COVID-19 anyways had virus loads that were 9x lower.

This does not surprise me. Any live attenuated virus vaccine will rev up the innate immune system a little bit for a little while. See my page on Non-Coronavirus Vaccines against COVID.) (You can think of a viral infection as a really, really badly attenuated virus vaccine.)

Testing

Wastewater

💩💧 From Jeff’s wastewater spreadsheet: