Contents:
- Website
- COVID
- Spain
- Tuberculosis
- Systemic, Not Respiratory
- Economic Impacts
- The Olympics
- Studies
Website
The last few weeks have been insanely busy, culminating with my move yesterday to my home for the next two months. I haven’t been able to keep on top of emerging stories as a result.
The lack of data has been bad enough to contend with due to reduced CDC reporting. Now, they no longer report PCR positivity by state, but by region. I hope this changes, but I have my doubts.
I messaged the person who has been my source for variant data for visualizations. She indicated that she too has been phenomenally busy but will be updating, which is good news since I pull her data which I can use directly instead of from GISAID, which would be a lot more work given that I don’t have the IT kind of background to extract from what they use as a format.
Regardless, when it is available, I’ll start incorporating the variant data again. It’s a bit laborious since it requires setting up an entirely new template again and changing a number of variables to create it for each country or state. That will take most of a weekend.
I’ll cover H5N1 next week.
COVID
Spain – h/t @SamuelHurtadoBE, Head of Macroeconomic Modelling at Banco de España
“New data from the official Spanish health survey. The share of the population that has a chronic illness now stands 9.8 standard deviations above its prepandemic average. Hospitalizations, 5.9 standard deviations above its average. All age groups doing badly.” Full thread here.
Tuberculosis
This might be one of the more alarming data sets I’ve visualized since the start of the pandemic. The blue line represents new cases of TB per 100,000 population in the US. As you can see, it’s been trending down for many decades, except in the red area along that line. I will return to that.
The solid yellow line is the percentage change of new TB cases year over year. The dotted orange line represents the 5-year running average. We want these to stay below the black dotted line at zero, indicating few new cases.
Back to the red part of the line, as well as the area of the orange dotted line. Look at the dates that this happened. It was around the time that we recognized AIDS, which was a result of the immune system damage caused by HIV. One thing that is important to remember is that untreated HIV takes about 10-15 years to develop into AIDS. TB was considered a marker for AIDS at the time.
Now take a look at the orange dotted line in 2022. It looks like it will be crossing to a positive value for a second time since the 1960s. That strikes me as a very bad omen about the immune damage that is being driven by COVID.
Systemic, Not Respiratory
I still get surprised by how many people think that COVID is a respiratory disease. It’s not. It has acute respiratory symptoms but is a vascular disease. As such, it affects every organ system within the body. This is an excellent illustration comparing H1N1 influenza to COVID in rats.
Economic Impacts
At the very beginning of the pandemic, I remember all of the whining from people about the economic impact of what really were pretty half-hearted “lockdowns.” I tried to warn people that this was temporal discounting because the impacts of not having mitigations in place would be far more devastating. Some data out of Australia supports my case.
The Olympics
Do I really have to say it’s a global superspreader event? I fixed the logo today.
Studies
We found evidence of persistent T cell activation in a variety of tissues. In some individuals, this activity may persist for years after initial COVID-19 onset and be associated with systemic changes in immune activation as well as the presence of LC symptoms. Last, we found evidence of SARS-CoV-2persistence in gut tissue including potential ongoing viral transcriptional activity. Together, these observations suggest that even clinically mild SARS-CoV-2 infection could have long-term consequences for tissue-based immune homeostasis and potentially result in an active viral reservoir in deeper tissues.
We found evidence of SARS-CoV-2 persistence in gut tissue including potential ongoing viral transcriptional activity.” [676 days after infection there was evidence of the virus still replicating.]
LC is increasingly framed as having potential neurological underpinnings, it is possible that [our work suggests] T cell trafficking to CNS tissues with residual viral components.
Post-COVID-19 respiratory sequelae two years after hospitalization: an ambidirectional study (2024)
We evaluated the results in a transversal (18–24 months) and longitudinal (6–12 months vs 18–24 months) manner and found a persistent functional impairment with demonstrated restrictive pattern, as well as progressing CT abnormalities pointing to evolving fibrotic-like lesions and small airways involvement 18–24 months after hospital discharge…in our study, 20 (8%) of 237 patients with chest CT abnormalities in the 6-12-month follow-up, progressed to fibrotic lesions 18–24 months after hospital discharge.
This cohort study revealed that post-COVID-19 patients presenting persistent pulmonary involvement in previous follow-ups can evolve to late fibrosis-like lesions 18–24 months after hospital discharge.
The pooled analysis found no significant increase in the risk of myocarditis among vaccinated pilots compared to unvaccinated pilots (RR: 1.2, 95% CI: 0.8-1.8) (1). This suggests insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the association between COVID-19 vaccination and the risk of myocarditis in pilots. (Figure 3).
The data suggest that:
- The pooled analysis found no significant increase in the risk of myocarditis, a condition linked to SCD, among vaccinated pilots compared to unvaccinated pilots (RR: 1.2, 95% CI: 0.8-1.8) (1). This suggests that there is insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the association between COVID-19 vaccination and the risk of myocarditis in pilots.
- Pilots who had been infected with COVID-19 had a 1.8 times higher risk of SCD compared to those who had not been infected (RR: 1.8, 95% CI: 1.3-2.5)
