This post is shorter than normal because Life. And because I spent a lot of time on the Novavax post. Which the literal next day became irrelevant to Canadians, sigh.
Long COVID
This older case study (2022-02-07) reports that two women with Long COVID got back like 90% of their pre-Long COVID function by taking daily H1 antagonist antihistamines.
This shouldn’t be a surprise, but this paper from USA (2024-08-15) reports that people with Long COVID have a harder time financially than people who had different serious health issues. People with Long COVID had these higher risks of having trouble affording medical care compared to:
- epilepsy — 69% higher risk;
- dementia — 51% higher risk;
- cancer — 43% higher risk;
- respiratory conditions — 18% higher risk;
- cardiovascular conditions — 2% higher risk.
COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death
THANK you! This review paper (2024-07-02) explicitly calls for a recognition that classical Long COVID and higher risks of other problems after COVID-19 (what I call CREDS, COVID-Related Excess Sickness and Death) are both important, and that they ought to either both be called Long COVID, or there needs to be recognition and a name for what I call CREDS.
I went and took a look at Our World in Data’s excess deaths graph to see and was shocked to see that the current death rate in Canada (in purple) is almost 20% higher than the pre-pandemic death rate and was almost 30% higher earlier at the end of last year:
Yes, some of that is surely opioid overdoses, some is from deaths explicitly coded as COVID deaths (over 500/week in the US recently), but some is COVID-Related Excess Death and Sickness.
According to this article (2024-08-22), up to 70% of deaths due to COVID-19 (directly or indirectly) have not been counted in the COVID deaths.
This paper from USA (2024-08-13) found getting COVID-19 “aged” people by almost eleven years. They had studied cognitive abilities of a group of essential workers before the pandemic, and studied them again after the pandemic started. Adjusting for normal everyday age-related cognitive decline, the participants who had gotten COVID-19 infections had cognitive declines equivalent to 10.6 years of age-related decline, while the uninfected controls did not.
This paper from Korea (2024-07-29) reports that young adults who had gotten COVID-19 infections were about 3.5 times more likely to have hearing loss than controls — including types of loss which came from inner ear damage.
Treatments
This paper from USA (2024-08-12) reports that giving Paxlovid for eight days instead of five eliminates viral rebound in test tubes.
Vaccines
Dammit! It looks like Canada is not going to buy any Novavax this time around. Apparently they only used 0.5% of last time’s Novavax before it expired. 🙁 See the top of my (updated) Novavax post for details.
Meanwhile, the US FDA approved Pfizer and Moderna’s KP.2 vaccines. (The CDC used to have to rubber-stamp it, but they pre-emptively approved this round already, is my understanding.) I mention this mostly because Health Canada usually follows the USA pretty closely. And, if you can’t wait for Health Canada, you could run down to the US.
This older paper from UK (2023-06-16) reports that a Novavax booster did about the same or slightly better for adolescents than Pfizer booster. All of the kids got Pfizer as a first shot, but some got a Novavax second shot. Compared to kids who got Pfizer as a second dose, the ones who got Novavax for their second shot:
- were 89% less likely to get a breakout infection;
- had 43% higher antibody levels against BA.1 and BA.2 in their blood at 28 days after the booster;
- had 73% higher cellular immune (e.g. T-cells) responses in their blood at 14 days after the booster.
Pathology
This paper from USA (2024-05-14) reports that pre-Delta variants didn’t hit kids as hard as Delta and afterwards. (So much for the “diseases always get milder” theory! (Which, by the way, is very incorrect.))
The percentage of hospitalized children with positive COVID-19 tests who had various outcomes, grouped by variant, was as follows:
| Outcome | Pre-Delta | Delta | Omicron |
| symptomatic | 75.4% | 95.3% | 99.5% |
| intensive care | 18.8% | 39.5% | 22.9% |
| needed oxygen | 42% | 66.3% | 62.3% |
This paper from Canada (2024-06-05) found that lower levels of taurine corresponded to worse COVID-19 outcomes. Taurine is an amino acid which the human body synthesizes from other amino acids. Those precursors are mostly found in animal proteins and whole grains.
This paper from UK (2024-08-21) reports that the rate of mental health diagnoses rose in the four weeks after a COVID-19 infection, but that the risks were lower for vaccinated people. Compared to the baseline risk, the risk of depression and serious mental illness diagnoses in the four weeks after COVID-19 were:
| Diagnosis | pre-vaccination availability | unvaccinated | vaccinated |
| depression | +93% | +79% | +16% |
| severe mental illness | +49% | +45% | -9% |
This paper from Canada (2024-08-05) reports that people who had COVID-19 had different/lower brain MRI scores on several scales (that I don’t understand) than controls. These different/lower scores correlated with lower happiness.
This paper from USA (2024-08-22) reports on racial/gender differences in COVID-19 recovery. Among people who were COVID-positive:
- Black participants had better cognitive function, less fatigue, and more improvement at 3 months than white participants.
- At three months, women were worse off than men by most metrics: cognitive function, physical function, social participation, anxiety, fatigue, pain, and less improvement in fatigue.
- Non-cis participants were worse off at three months in all areas except for sleep disturbance and pain.
This paper from USA (2024-08-19) reports that women who had COVID-19 infections during pregnancy were 12% more likely to get gestational diabetes.
This paper from UK (2024-08-21) isn’t about COVID-19, it’s about inflammation in general. They found that kids who developed high and persistent markers of inflammation when they were young (~9 years old) were 4.6x times as likely to have psychotic disorders by age 24. I bring this up because COVID-19 is known to be capable of causing inflammation in the brain. 😬 What is that going to mean for all the kids catching COVID-19 right now? Are we going to be a society full of psychotics in 15 years?