The Oldest Man posted:

A lot of organ damage from viral infections is persistent inflammation, which could subside (at least somewhat) if the virus is wiped out and provide symptom relief. Good study.

https://fortune.com/well/2023/10/10/cvs-pharmacist-walkout-caused-by-pandemic-burnout-covid-booster-demand-xbb15-omicron/ posted:

CVS CEO says pharmacist burnout led to a walkout: ‘We are at the same level of demand as we were in 2021’ for COVID shots

Pandemic burnout and “unprecedented demand” for updated COVID-19 boosters led to the recent walkout of CVS pharmacists in the Kansas City area, CEO Karen Lynch said Monday.
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It was just one of the latest examples nationwide of workers fed up and taking action. But unlike employees in recent strikes at automakers or in Hollywood, the pharmacists weren’t demanding raises or more vacation—they simply wanted more colleagues to help them.

CVS rival Walgreens is also experiencing pharmacy staff walkouts, which began Monday and were planned to last through Wednesday. Increasing demands, like administering COVID vaccines, with insufficient staff is making it impossible to do their jobs and could put customer safety in jeopardy, employees told CNN.
(..)

Petey posted:

hi, sorry, is there a better way to find novavax boosters than the https://www.vaccines.gov/ site, which is currently not showing any anywhere (but maybe that will be fixed by end of week?)

Steve Yun posted:

Novavax has launched their own vaccine finder, no idea if it’s any better:

https://us.novavaxcovidvaccine.com/find-a-vaccine

Pingui posted:

quote:

‘We are at the same level of demand as we were in 2021’ for COVID shots

quote:

“unprecedented demand” for updated COVID-19 boosters

The Ghoul posted:

There's a surprising amount of pushback in the replies.

Diamonds On MY Fish posted:

With how obsessed this thread is with CO2 levels, I don't think any kind of venting is pointless!

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/not-little-adults-experts-say-long-covid-undercounted-misdiagnosed-kids posted:

Research on long COVID in children is limited, and reported prevalences range widely, from less than 1% to 70%. And while it's a relatively new condition in an evolving field, experts say it could be better defined and measured through well-designed longitudinal studies that take children's unique presentations into account.

"I think it's largely because we're trying to apply adult framework to pediatric problems, and as a result, a lot of things are missed," David Putrino, PhD, director of rehabilitation innovation for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York, told CIDRAP News.

"I think what we need are detailed longitudinal studies where we really take the time to characterize what long COVID looks like in a pediatric population," he said. "That has not been done. What has been done is 'let's treat them just like little adults,' which is always a pitfall in pediatrics."

No consensus on prevalence
In 2022, a systematic review of 22 studies involving children identified a long-COVID prevalence range of 1.6% to 70%, while a study from Germany from the same year that analyzed long-COVID among 157,000 COVID-19 patients suggested that kids were at the same relative risk as adults (30% vs 33%, respectively).

In July 2023, a systematic review of 31 studies published in 2022 involving 15,000 children concluded that 16% of children had persistent symptoms 3 months after infection. Another systematic review from that period found that 1.3% of US children ever had long COVID and that 0.5% currently had it in 2022.

Different symptoms, limited vocabulary
Ziyad Al-Aly, MD, clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis and chief of research at the VA St. Louis Health Care System, told CIDRAP News that many children likely aren't diagnosed as having long COVID because they don't recognize or have the vocabulary to report their symptoms.

"Kids don't come home and say, 'Mom, I have postexertional malaise, I have brain fog,'" he said. "What happens is that they start doing poorly in school, and parents find out weeks and weeks later."

Hannah Davis, cofounder of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, a group of long-COVID patients who are also researchers, said recognition can be particularly difficult in younger, preverbal children.

"Generally, long COVID research in children has been lacking compared with long COVID research in adults," she said. "A very sad thing to me is that I, and the other folks with long COVID as adults, we had this whole life where we understood what it meant to be healthy and active and not have these symptoms, and children don't necessarily, so you see it manifest in different forms."

Indeed, many long-COVID symptoms are subtle and can be misattributed to other conditions, such as anxiety. And unlike the fatigue, brain fog, and postexertional malaise that adults most often report, Putrino said the most common presentation of long COVID in children seen at Mount Sinai's pediatric rehabilitation center is recurrent stomachaches.

"Often, it's not initially thought of as long COVID," he said. "It's just 3 months after a COVID infection, your child's complaining of a tummyache."

Problematic designs, false assumptions
The studies done thus far on long COVID in children have been limited by small sample size, reliance on parental survey rather than interviews, lack of controls, short duration, poor design, and false assumptions about children's viral loads and antibody responses, experts say.

For example, a study published in September in JAMA Pediatrics reported an incidence of long COVID in children aged 8 to 13 years from August 2020 to March 2021 of only 1 of 271 (0.4%). The problem is that they included no data or the symptom questionnaires they asked parents to complete, Putrino said.

There are nonspecific symptoms that kids won't know to report to adults and that parents don't recognize as related to COVID-19. For example, while it may be easier to spot postexertional malaise in older adolescents, "We expect kids to have energy fluctuations," he said. "We expect kids to run themselves ragged and then crash."

The researchers also characterized children as not having long COVID if they had remitting and relapsing symptoms. "We're dealing with a condition where symptoms will wane and wax, and so to exclude kids that had persistent symptoms but then the symptoms went away but then came back as not having long COVID is actually against the clinical case definition of long COVID put forth by both the World Health Organization and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]," Putrino said.

He added that this is one reason why the scientific community is struggling to come up with a good-faith understanding of the rate of long COVID in kids: "Given the quality of the work done so far, I don't think there's any good faith basis for government agencies, educational institutions, or medical institutions to say that your risk of long COVID is very low if you're a child."

Finding true-negative controls getting more difficult
In general, long COVID research has also been hindered by high rates of false-negative COVID-19 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests and a lack of recognition of the uneven generation of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (seroconversion) across different demographics, Davis said. "PCRs require a high viral load, and children generally have significantly lower viral loads than adults, and so they just don't get picked up on the PCRs." [ed. I am a bit puzzled by this; I think it should say RAT and not PCR]

Similarly, serologic COVID-19 studies can suffer a lack of recognition that about a third of people don't produce antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, Davis said. "Children make them at a lower rate than adults and lose them at a much higher rate," she said.

And finding true COVID-negative control patients today is more difficult than it was when the pandemic first began. "In March 2020, we had zero immunity," Al-Aly said. "But guess what? It's not that novel anymore."

Other factors that could contribute to the broad spread in long-COVID incidence is the evolution of SARS-CoV-2 variants and their attendant differences, as well as the introduction of COVID-19 vaccines and uptake. "If you did a study on kids who got infected in March 2020 versus today, it's not really comparable," he said.

Toward better studies
To avoid including potentially false-negative people in a control group, Davis said controlled studies could use a prepandemic cohort or electronic health record data rather than a contemporary one.

Otherwise, "you have all these research groups thinking they can do PCR-negative controls, and that ends up putting a ton of people who got COVID into this control group," she said. "So really you're comparing people who had COVID with slightly higher viral loads with people who had COVID with slightly lower viral loads."

Putrino called for studies that follow children from, ideally, before COVID-19 infection, during infection, and then long term.

"Given the intricacy of identifying long COVID in kids, I also strongly recommend that a lot of this work be done with one-on-one interviews, having conversations rather than telling busy parents to check off symptoms on a list," he said. "The other piece that needs to be done is detailed biological profiling of kids who are having persistent symptoms."

In the meantime, he urged vigilance. "My advice leads to infection prevention," he said. "It's really easy to clean air, it's really easy to put HEPA [high-efficiency particulate air] filters in classrooms, it's really easy to use UV [ultraviolet] lights."

Pingui posted:

"My advice leads to infection prevention," he said. "It's really easy to clean air, it's really easy to put HEPA [high-efficiency particulate air] filters in classrooms, it's really easy to use UV [ultraviolet] lights."

Bruce Hussein Daddy posted:

I'm trying to understand how this makes money?

Bruce Hussein Daddy posted:

I'm trying to understand how this makes money?

Petey posted:

hi, sorry, is there a better way to find novavax boosters than the https://www.vaccines.gov/ site, which is currently not showing any anywhere (but maybe that will be fixed by end of week?)

The Ghoul posted:

GDQ has updated their COVID policy to basically be worthless. https://gamesdonequick.com/covid

https://x.com/GamesDoneQuick/status/1711841460444959046?s=20

There's a surprising amount of pushback in the replies.

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

Do we even have updated death numbers anymore? seems like everyone stopped updating them a year and a half ago

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us

This says 1.127m deaths which was essentially where the trackers were a year and a half ago

Pingui posted:

The issues with kid PASC rates mentioned in this piece, are and have always been, a major concern to me. I think I've mentioned it a few times over the threads, if not explicitly in regards to children, certainly in regards to the adult research. Either way the caveats mentioned here are important to keep in mind when reading any PASC research. Great article, brought here in full due to the subject matter.
"Not 'little adults': Experts say long COVID undercounted, misdiagnosed in kids"

quote:

"PCRs require a high viral load, and children generally have significantly lower viral loads than adults, and so they just don't get picked up on the PCRs."

Pingui posted:

It is a design that makes sense if you don't have any other biomarker beyond organ damage, because with organ damage you need very substantial effects to not wind up with an under powered study showing no statistically significant effect. It isn't difficult to imagine an ongoing infection being wiped out and further damage gets curbed, while damage already sustained is permanent or only marginally healed. I subsequently think they would have been much better off testing the effect of Paxlovid on (admittedly very newly discovered) biomarkers indicating said inflammation, instead of using the consequences thereof as biomarker.

I think your framing is implicitly demonstrating the issue, with your parenthesis highlighting a potential low grade effect and your mentioned aim being symptom relief. They aren't "just" looking for symptom relief, they are looking for hard objective data of effect (or the group would be different) and that effect needs to be profound to be statistically significant with a relatively small cohort of 400, presumably with disparate forms of long COVID (or alternatively running the risk of a particular form not responding).

Pittsburgh Fentanyl Cloud posted:

https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/country/us

This says 1.127m deaths which was essentially where the trackers were a year and a half ago

Thoguh posted:

5G trip report. I did it at a CVS in a target so it wouldn’t just be sick people and stale air but lol they had me go in to a tiny room with no ventilation to get jabbed by a maskless tech. Another win for being the first person of the day, I guess, so there hadn’t been a bunch of other people in that room recently. Would have preferred to be a Moth Man right now but Pfizer was available so Pfizer it is.

Thoguh posted:

Yesterday Somebody in the I/P thread posted about how ‘We accepted 7 million deaths worldwide from COVID’ and I lol’d

Bruce Hussein Daddy posted:

I'm trying to understand how this makes money?

The Oldest Man posted:

I think casting a wide net is a way better idea since I don't think anyone has done that with pax which is, to be honest, crazy.
(..)

Pingui posted:

silicone thrills posted:

Might need to give in and go to urgent care because due to some stomach problems i cant seem to eat much or keep much food in me and im so drat tired and dont want to risk getting covid.

poo poo sucks so bad.

Also the absolute dread of hospital bills.