Long COVID
This paper from Austria found that Epstein-Barr Virus antibody or DNA levels did not seem to be any different in Long COVID patients than controls (people who had had COVID-19 infections but did not get Long COVID). They also did not find markers of inflammation from viral infections in the Long COVID patients.
This paper from USA did not find any signs of elevated neuroinflammation in cerebral-spinal fluid from Long COVID patients who reported neurologic symptoms.
This article reports on this study (good bits paywalled) from Italy that says that after three years, there was no difference in taste/smell dysfunction between people who had had Long COVID and people who had had COVID-19 but not Long COVID.
Pathology
Good news! This paper from Taiwain says that drinking coffee lowers your risk of COVID-19 by about 10%!
So why don’t kids get severe COVID-19 very often? This paper from USA says they found that young kids generate antibodies in their noses that last for up to 300 days! And while they get lots of inflammatory response in their noses, their blood stays relatively free of all those inflammatory agents.
This paper from Australia says that anti-aging drugs are therapeutic against COVID-19.
Treatments
This paper from USA found that hospitalization rates were much lower in patients who gargled and did nasal rinses with salt water (~20%) than the controls (~60%). There wasn’t much difference between results for high salinity and low salinity gargling/rinsing solutions.
60% seems like a really high hospitalization percentage, but the study was done from 2020 through 2022, so maybe a lot of people were unvaccinated? (Sorry, the paper was thin on details.)
This paper from USA says that COVID rebound happens much more often (21% of the time) when people take Paxlovid than when they do not (1.8% of the time). This is in direct contradiction to other studies, and the study size was small, so I’m not sure how much we should heed it, but it’s worth paying attention.
This paper says that there was no difference in COVID-19 recovery time for non-hospitalized adult patients who took fluvoxamine (a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor)and who took placebo. 🙁
This is particularly interesting because of a recent paper which found that Long COVID patients were low in seratonin (which an SSRI should have helped). Now, this was looking at COVID-19 recovery, not Long COVID, but I had been hoping that the mechanisms might be similar.
Testing
Nucleic Acid Amplification Tests (NAAT) are PCR-quality but give results as fast as a rapid test. There were never any for sale (that I knew of, at least) in Canada, but I did get some Lucira brand NAAT tests in the US before they went out of business.
Pfizer bought Lucira, and I heard that they were going to start selling the tests again, but I couldn’t find any place that was selling them. However, this site is selling some with expiry of 11 Jan 2024 for a reduced rate. (They are still expensive, but slightly less so. I expect they will get cheaper and cheaper as 11 Jan 2024 approaches.)
Some even more expensive ones are available in Canada from Cue. You have to buy a reader for CAD$314, and then each test is ~CAD$80. It’s a bit cheaper in bulk, but again, they are not cheap. (But then, neither are commercial PCR tests.)
Vaccines
This paper from Singapore found that the vaccine effectiveness of an mRNA vax against infection was 41.5% in babies whose mothers were vaccinated while they were pregnant.
This preprint from USA found that people who got their flu vax and COVID-19 vax at the same time had higher IgG antibodies than those who got the vaxes on different days.