Internet Janitor posted:

willroc7 posted:

Does anyone have a link handy to a summary of the most up to date findings for long covid treatments? I haven't been able to follow the thread in a while and I don't see anything in the past few pages. I found out yesterday a neighbor of mine is suffering from it (likely from an asymptomatic infection) and I'd like to help out, if i could. Thanks in advance all. Stay safe.

Internet Janitor posted:

NeonPunk posted:

We have the tools

https://twitter.com/RE_MarketWatch/status/1777161605790249412

captainbananas posted:

update on estimated death count of covid from noted left-wing rag The Economist, brought to you by S-tier nominative determinism twitter poster Dr. Dick Zoutman:

https://twitter.com/DickZoutman/status/1753147638755561636

tl;dr is an estimate of ~ 28.5M dead worldwide (95% CI 18.5, 35.2), or ~ 4x the official count. and an estimated 1.4M dead in the US (95% CI 1.3, 1.5).

It's as prone to error from bad data/inputs as any other attempt, but they do show their work w/r/t methodology and modeling, and you can grab the data and the model(s) off of GitHub.

Nothus posted:

Opening the toolbox to find only MAID

Gunshow Poophole posted:

Well it's more prone to being Published October 25, 2022?

Easily 40m and 1.75m now by their methodology alone.

Internet Janitor posted:

Bruce Hussein Daddy posted:

Computer ... Show me 4 bad takes as succinctly as possible

https://twitter.com/TomatoesGrilled/status/1777325518817312792

Phlag posted:

"Updated on April 8th"
Their updated data is through the end of January 2024.

Crazypoops posted:

and fire this summer

Nocturtle posted:

The confidence intervals in that Economist article on COVID death toll estimates are way too large for China at least. China's overall disease burden was likely very similar to Australia's/New Zealand's, given they largely eliminated community spread until the large majority of the population was vaccinated (then stopped for surprisingly similar reasons):

The main estimates are in fact close but the confidence intervals suggest China's death toll could have been double Australia's which is not realistic IMO.

NeonPunk posted:

Why not? China has the 38x total population of Australia. Having double the death rate of Australia make sense to me

Gunshow Poophole posted:

why would the population size influence the rate in your analysis

NeonPunk posted:

The more people there are, there will be more people with Covid. The more people with Covid, the more deaths you will have.

Bruce Hussein Daddy posted:

Computer ... Show me 4 bad takes as succinctly as possible

https://twitter.com/TomatoesGrilled/status/1777325518817312792

NeonPunk posted:

The more people there are, there will be more people with Covid. The more people with Covid, the more deaths you will have.

Gunshow Poophole posted:

It's a rate

Gunshow Poophole posted:

To be clear, nocturtle is talking about a RATE which is a deaths per 100k population figure, the nominal size of the population is irrelevant

Oracle posted:

I believe China has a huge proportion of elderly in its population compared to Australia and for whatever reason a lot of them refused the vaccine and cultural norms (respecting your elders) prevented forcing the issue.

www.cidrap.umn.edu posted:

Recommendations that people with long COVID, or post-COVID condition (PCC), should avoid vigorous exercise are probably too strict, according to a new study published in JAMA Network Open from researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

Many long-COVID patients are told to avoid activities that exacerbate symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and pain, and many report exercise intolerance, or a "flare" in symptoms following exercise. 

The study was based on 31 patients with PCC but no other diagnoses. They were matched with healthy controls and monitored while performing three different training sessions of high-intensity interval training (HIIT), moderate-intensity continuous training, and strength training in a randomized order a few weeks apart. 

Seventy-seven percent of the participants with long COVID were women, and the average age was 46.6 years.

Participants were asked to rate symptoms at baseline, immediately after exercise, and 48 hours after exercise. The researchers also gave participants blood tests, heart ultrasound, spirometry for lung function, muscle strength tests, neurophysiologic tests, and muscle biopsies within 2 days of the exercise tests.

### No difference in fatigue levels 

Surprisingly, there were no differences in the two groups on self-ratings of fatigue. Patients with PCC had greater exacerbation of muscle pain after HIIT, however.

"What we can generally see is that the post-COVID patients do just as well as the controls, even though they had more symptoms to begin with. By equally well, I mean that they did not worsen their symptoms or negatively affect their body during the 48 hours we observed them," said Andrea Tryfonos, PhD, first author of the study, in a press release from the Karolinska Institutet.

quote:

What we can generally see is that the post-COVID patients do just as well as the controls, even though they had more symptoms to begin with.

In physical testing, participants with long COVID  had a 21% lower peak volume of oxygen consumption at baseline (mean difference, −6.8 milliliters/kilogram/minute; 95% confidence interval, −10.7 to −2.9). Patients with long COVID also displayed less isometric knee-extension strength than healthy controls.

The authors said the lower aerobic capacity and lack of muscle strength compared with controls could be due to inactivity or their initial infection. However, 62% of those with long COVID in the study showed evidence of myopathy, which limits muscle tissue capacity. 

"This percentage is far too high to be explained by reduced activity alone. Therefore, we are currently analyzing the biopsies to see if we can explain the reason behind these muscle changes," Tryfonos said. 

In a commentary on the study, Peter Ladlow, PhD; Alexander Bennett, PhD; and Oliver O’Sullivan, MBChB; all United Kingdom-based researchers, said the findings are reassuring and should help guide clinicians treating post-COVID patients. 

"The ability of individuals with PCC to tolerate various exercise activities, particularly hard-intensity activities … without major escalation of symptoms, fatigue, or exercise capacity is important for advancing rehabilitation," they write.

mawarannahr posted:

i will still avoid vigorous exercise just in case I end up with long covid. got to be careful.
No need to avoid exercise with long-COVID diagnosis, researchers say

quote:

The authors said the lower aerobic capacity and lack of muscle strength compared with controls could be due to inactivity or their initial infection. However, 62% of those with long COVID in the study showed evidence of myopathy, which limits muscle tissue capacity.

"This percentage is far too high to be explained by reduced activity alone. Therefore, we are currently analyzing the biopsies to see if we can explain the reason behind these muscle changes," Tryfonos said.

In a commentary on the study, Peter Ladlow, PhD; Alexander Bennett, PhD; and Oliver O’Sullivan, MBChB; all United Kingdom-based researchers, said the findings are reassuring and should help guide clinicians treating post-COVID patients.

Franks Happy Place posted:

China used less effective domestic vaccines, rolled them out really slowly and poorly, and has America-tier healthcare coverage for people without money. It was so bad from a resource perspective, the government started actively promoting a TCM quack-science "cure" so hard that it became the go to remedy for most people.

I don't know what the exact multiplier for China's death rate over death rate in (say) Australia or Japan is, but I definitely buy the notion that it's higher.

mawarannahr posted:

i will still avoid vigorous exercise just in case I end up with long covid. got to be careful.
No need to avoid exercise with long-COVID diagnosis, researchers say

quote:

Surprisingly, there were no differences in the two groups on self-ratings of fatigue. Patients with PCC had greater exacerbation of muscle pain after HIIT, however.

"What we can generally see is that the post-COVID patients do just as well as the controls, even though they had more symptoms to begin with. By equally well, I mean that they did not worsen their symptoms or negatively affect their body during the 48 hours we observed them," said Andrea Tryfonos, PhD, first author of the study, in a press release from the Karolinska Institutet.

CGI Stardust posted:

uh

CGI Stardust posted:

uh

mawarannahr posted:

(..)
Surprisingly, there were no differences in the two groups on self-ratings of fatigue.
(..)

Nocturtle posted:

I read this a while ago and thought it was worthwhile but didn't like it enough to recommend it to others. It certainly has a lot of good content and effectively argues that criminalizing disease transmission is just another stick with which to beat the underclasses, same as the drug war. I think this point might be controversial even here. I didn't particularly enjoy their writing style and found the author took too long to make points, in part due to the very personal nature of the writing. For this reason I found Necropolis a much more interesting read.

"Pandemics: a very short introduction" is IMO also very good in part because it provides a broad and to the point overview of pandemics throughout history. Sometimes people talk about how we used to prioritize public health and that's wrong, public health has always been subservient to economic concerns and ruling class interests. The author points out that public health measures past and present tend to be dominated by technical interventions ie vaccines/antibiotics/killing insects, and the underlying social arrangements that lead to underclasses being most vulnerable to pandemics are rarely/never addressed. Also interesting to read people from over a century ago essentially arguing that cholera is mild and doesn't require any sort of mitigation.

edit: definitely agree these books are very helpful towards understanding the COVID pandemic and other perennial public health issues. Haven't read Health Communism but will look into it.

tuyop posted:

great review, I did check this book out briefly before going with Maladies of Empire, which was also good but less applicable to the thread.

in fiction, I think The Metamorphosis is a great thread book.

Pingui posted:

Well, that is certainly one way to interpret these results:


As a reminder this is VAS:


Skimming the study they are saying that there is (analogously, as the chart applies to pain and not fatigue) no difference in fatigue, because moving from "no hurt" to "hurts a little bit", is the same as moving from "moderate pain" to "very intense/severe pain" in points.