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jimmy m
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02 Jun 2022, 4:26 pm

So if this pandemic was actual triggered by man, followed by a massive cover up, then what is next. I don't know but I see the possibility for a repeat performance. As a result from a personal perspective, I see the possibility for a repeat (a completely new strain). As a result, there is a need for action on my part. I have purchased 100 N95 masks. They are available now and the price is reasonable. So I ordered 10 boxes of 10 each (at a discount price) of Moldex 4200 masks from Uline. The price is reasonable. They arrived today, 20 minutes ago. Since each individual mask can be used for around a solid month (if properly sterilized using UVC after each use), this represents a full coverage for myself and my family FOR COME WHAT MAY.

Back in the beginning of 2021, they placed me in a COVID ward of a major hospital in the middle of a COVID surge and I actually lived to tell the tail. Unless I am mistaken, I had my wife smuggle in a small filtration system (a type of special air purifier) with a UVC attachment into my room and I ran it 24/7 without the hospital staff even realizing it was there. [UV air purifiers are designed to use short-wave ultraviolet light (UV-C light) to inactivate airborne pathogens and microorganisms like mold, bacteria and viruses.] People were dying to the left of me and people were dying to the right of me. Others were surviving as vegetables.


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02 Jun 2022, 6:12 pm

jimmy m wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Reported COVID-19 infection levels nearly 6 times higher than last Memorial Day


Actually, this may be a good thing. The current strain of COVID is more infectious but at the same time it is becoming less deadly. So eventually everyone will either get COVID or get vaccinated for it and have some immunity. They may still get the disease but it will be less of a killer and destroyer. Then the world will return to a state of normal.

Yeah, but will they still get debilitating long covid as has not been uncommon with mild cases?

Even if Long Covid fears turn out to be unfounded 2019 is not coming back. In-person jobs are never coming back the way it was.

There are roughly two classes of people now. Those who are mentally done with COVID and have been for a long time now. They are not masking and not social distancing anymore. The others are going to have remenent hypervigilance not just for COVID but for things like the flu. Just look at the panic over a few cases of monkeypox.


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jimmy m
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03 Jun 2022, 9:56 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
jimmy m wrote:
ASPartOfMe wrote:
Reported COVID-19 infection levels nearly 6 times higher than last Memorial Day


Actually, this may be a good thing. The current strain of COVID is more infectious but at the same time it is becoming less deadly. So eventually everyone will either get COVID or get vaccinated for it and have some immunity. They may still get the disease but it will be less of a killer and destroyer. Then the world will return to a state of normal.

Yeah, but will they still get debilitating long covid as has not been uncommon with mild cases?

Even if Long Covid fears turn out to be unfounded 2019 is not coming back. In-person jobs are never coming back the way it was.

There are roughly two classes of people now. Those who are mentally done with COVID and have been for a long time now. They are not masking and not social distancing anymore. The others are going to have remenent hypervigilance not just for COVID but for things like the flu. Just look at the panic over a few cases of monkeypox.


I live in Indiana. Wearing masks is an option. Most people in Indiana do not wear masks anymore. The people that are vulnerable are the aged population (such as myself) or those with preexisting conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, etc. In that population the vast majority of people have either been vaccinated or have gotten COVID. So the threat in the U.S. for COVID is essential not a serious problem. [I spoke to one younger 30 year old woman. She got COVID twice and so have most of their relatives. They survived. As a result they have a type of built in immunity. It didn't stop her from getting it again, but the damage she received was minimal.) If there is a problem it is with the younger population (generally those between 30 and 60 who have not yet been vaccinated. They are still vulnerable. [There is still the group of elderly who got COVID and survived barely hanging on in very damaged states in hospitals or nursing homes. Many of these face death on a daily basis many months after getting the disease.]


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03 Jun 2022, 10:08 am

Looks like the British government are intent on bringing back restrictions and the Covid pass later this year. They are advertising a job vacancy for "Deputy Director, Delivery Lead Covid Pass"
https://www.civilservicejobs.service.go ... de=1791653

"You will be a passionate advocate of future-proof technologies and will work with service management and policy colleagues to deliver the Covid Pass Programme, a key strategic priority for DHSC and Her Majesty’s Government (HMG). This is a high profile, complex programme which interacts with other departments, Devolved Administrations and public and private sector stakeholders."

Note "Contract type: Permanent"



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03 Jun 2022, 1:19 pm

jimmy m wrote:
The people that are vulnerable are the aged population (such as myself) or those with preexisting conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.

Actually, they've been doing studies, and they still can't figure out who's vulnerable or not.

Obviously there are some who are going to be more likely to die from the acute COVID, but they can't figure out why some people wind up severely crippled with Long Covid, and others don't even notice the damage they've suffered. All they've really been able to put together is that, like most auto-immune disorders, women are much more likely to suffer than men (it's a ratio of about 80:20).

They think they've found blood markers that might give a hint, but you can't really expect everyone to go out and get their blood tested, and decide if they need to isolate themselves or not.


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jimmy m
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04 Jun 2022, 7:58 am

The COVID-19 epidemic as a biological disaster has already affected all communities around the world and has created a public health emergency. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), from the beginning of the pandemic to January 21, 2022, there have been almost 340,543,962 confirmed cases and 5,570,163 deaths reported throughout the world.

In the U.S. the age of the individual is a major factor in the death rates. Nearly two-thirds of the people who died during the omicron surge were 75 and older. (For the most part, these senior citizens have been vaccinated at this point, but they still face a greater vulnerability to dying. I am now 73 years old and death is a natural affect of aging.)

Experts say they are not surprised that vaccinated seniors are making up a greater share of the dead, even as vaccine holdouts died far more often than the vaccinated during the omicron surge, according to the CDC. As more people are infected with the virus, the more people it will kill, including a greater number who are vaccinated but among the most vulnerable.

Even though the death rates for the vaccinated elderly and immunocompromised are low, their losses numbered in the thousands when cases exploded, leaving behind blindsided families. But experts say the rising number of vaccinated people dying should not cause panic in those who got shots, the vast majority of whom will survive infections.

(So in other words, many people especially elderly people in the U.S. have been vaccinated and have a fair bit of immunity, but they still can get the virus and die. That is because we are old folks and our bodies are beginning to fall apart piece by piece, cell by cell and our immune system is decayed and not what it use to be when we were younger. That is a function of OLD AGE.)


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05 Jun 2022, 9:09 am

Women, people with high cholesterol have higher risk for long COVID, according to 23andMe

Unfortunately, the "other side" is twisting this the other way.

Factoids like "Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with long COVID." and "People who had depression or anxiety before testing positive for COVID-19 have a higher risk of a long COVID diagnosis." only further their opinion that the disease is all in our heads :roll:


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05 Jun 2022, 10:18 am

SabbraCadabra wrote:
Women, people with high cholesterol have higher risk for long COVID, according to 23andMe

Unfortunately, the "other side" is twisting this the other way.

Factoids like "Women are twice as likely to be diagnosed with long COVID." and "People who had depression or anxiety before testing positive for COVID-19 have a higher risk of a long COVID diagnosis." only further their opinion that the disease is all in our heads :roll:

Long Covid is inconvenient to the popular narrative that the pandemic is over, it is endemic now “just like the flu”, time to celebrate getting back to normal.

This is enabling people who dismiss people who still want mitigation measures as hypochondriacs. The non Covid/Vaccine denier Commentary Magazine podcast jumped on this study. Unfortunately the combination that mental problems do increase your chances of both getting psychically ill and making the illness you do have worse and that so much is still unknown about Long Covid gives fodder to these people.

These people can not accept victory and leave us be. It is like they think this is a horror movie and like Freddie or Jason coming back from the dead COVID hawks are going to swoop down and reimpose 2020 style lockdowns. That is not going to happen no matter how bad future variants are. At most in a few blue locales mask mandates might come back. Look at this thread, it is of interest to only a few die hards.

Chronic post disease problems are far from unique. Long COVID is unique in how many people with mild disease get it and the variety of symptoms.

The good news is that finally Long COVID is being taken seriously by the medical industry, but there is such a long way to go.


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06 Jun 2022, 8:48 pm

New York Times Daily Briefing

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Beijing relaxes Covid measures as fears of another outbreak linger.
Beijing residents eagerly indulged in a privilege that they had not enjoyed in weeks: dining inside a restaurant.

The Chinese capital relaxed pandemic rules at midnight on Monday, including a ban on dining in, after a partial lockdown that lasted more than a month. Although the closures were not as strict as in Shanghai, the authorities in Beijing had suspended some public transportation, forced some people to quarantine, and enforced work-from-home in much of the city.

Yet even as schools and offices are opening in waves and public transportation is being restored, other measures remained in place to prevent the spread of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the virus. Everyone must wear a mask, have their temperature check, and take P.C.R. tests for everyday activities like riding the subway or going to work.

The measures underscore the commitment of Chinese authorities to stamp out the virus completely, despite curbing economic growth and fueling anger among citizens. The steps have triggered limited and small protests. Still, some cities plan to carry out regular mass testing even in the absence of a local outbreak.

On Saturday, Liu Xiaofeng, deputy head of Beijing’s municipal disease prevention and control center, said at a news conference that the city’s overall epidemic situation was improving. But he warned that “decisive measures” were necessary to avoid a resurgence of cases.

The authorities said there were six confirmed cases on Sunday in Beijing and 86 reported across the country, down from over 29,000 new daily infections at the height of this year’s outbreak in mid-April. The majority of the cases during the peak were in Shanghai.

It is unclear how long the relief may last, with cases re-emerging in Shanghai as it struggles to reopen after two months of harsh lockdown. On Sunday, the city reported three local community infections, prompting health officials to send a warning to its 25 million residents.

“The risk of epidemic rebound still exists,” Wu Jinglei, Shanghai’s health commissioner, told a Sunday news briefing. “We cannot relax yet, but must be highly vigilant.”


Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. transportation secretary, tests positive for the coronavirus
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Monday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, the latest member of President Biden’s cabinet to be infected.

Mr. Buttigieg added that he was experiencing mild symptoms.

“I plan to work remotely while isolating according to C.D.C. guidelines, and look forward to when I can safely return to the office and the road,” he wrote on Twitter, referring to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Mr. Buttigieg was not considered a close contact of Mr. Biden, a White House spokesman said on Monday.

The Department of Transportation said on Monday that Mr. Buttigieg, 40, has been vaccinated and boosted


The latest virus wave shows signs of abating in the Northeast
The latest coronavirus wave that has affected most of the United States is showing signs of improvement in the Northeast.

More than 29,000 people are hospitalized with Covid-19 across the country, an increase of 16 percent over the past two weeks, and more than 3,000 of those patients are in intensive care.

But in northeastern states, hospitalizations have been declining. In Vermont, numbers have dropped by more than 40 percent over the past two weeks. They declined over 20 percent in Massachusetts and roughly 10 percent in Maine, Connecticut and New York.

Every other region is seeing a rise in hospitalizations, particularly so in the southern states of Alabama and Louisiana, where hospitalizations have risen by at least 70 percent.

Hospitalizations tend to be a more reliable indicator than caseloads, which could be significantly undercounted as Americans turn more to at-home tests that go unreported to county health officials. Case counts may also have been affected by reporting delays over the Memorial Day weekend.


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jimmy m
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09 Jun 2022, 7:35 am

A couple new variants of the Omicron variant have materialized. These are called BA.4 and BA.5. The bottom line on these variants are:

“How analogous is that for us?” he said. “I think it’s possible that we could see another wave” fueled by BA.4 and BA.5. But, if the United States follows South Africa’s example — which is not a guarantee — the wave might be more modest than previous surges and cause less pronounced increases in hospitalizations and deaths.

Source: Two new versions of Omicron are gaining ground in the U.S., according to C.D.C. estimates.


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09 Jun 2022, 3:09 pm

From Yahoo!, attributed to the AP: "WHO: COVID origins unclear but lab leak theory needs study"


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10 Jun 2022, 8:38 am

China on Friday attacked the theory that the coronavirus pandemic may have originated as a leak from a Chinese laboratory as a politically motivated lie, after the World Health Organization recommended in its strongest terms yet that a deeper probe is needed into whether a lab accident may be to blame.

He (Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian) also reiterated calls for an investigation into “highly suspicious laboratories such as Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina" in the United States where China has suggested, without evidence, that the U.S. was developing the coronavirus as a bioweapon.

(This is really beginning to sound like a HE SAID, SHE SAID debate. I wonder what the odds are that both were involved. ONE MASSIVE COVERUP that lead to the death of 6.5 million people worldwide and counting.)

The WHO's stance in a report released Thursday is a sharp reversal of the U.N. health agency’s initial assessment of the pandemic’s origins. It comes after many critics accused WHO of being too quick to dismiss or underplay a lab-leak theory that put Chinese officials on the defensive.

China was accused of responding slowly and covering up the extent of the outbreak, before it locked down the entire city of Wuhan and surrounding areas in the first of a series of draconian measures labeled “zero-COVID” which continue today as much of the rest of the world is opening up again.

Source: China calls COVID 'lab leak' theory a lie after WHO report

China was also accused of leading a disinformation campaign, suggesting the virus was detected elsewhere before the Wuhan outbreak and putting forward other theories aimed at diverting attention from China.


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10 Jun 2022, 9:39 am

The Lab-Leak Theory Is Looking Stronger by the Day. Here’s What We Know.

And back in 2012, Dr. Anthony Fauci wrote an article in the American Society for Microbiology, in which he argued in support of gain-of-function research. And now here’s how he argued it. He wrote:

“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic? Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario — however remote — should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?

Scientists working in this field might say — as indeed I have said — that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature, and the need to stay ahead of such a threat is a primary reason for performing an experiment that might appear to be risky.

Within the research community, many have expressed concern that important research progress could come to a halt just because of the fear that someone, somewhere, might attempt to replicate these experiments sloppily. This is a valid concern,” he wrote.

In some ways this reminds me of having the fox guarding the henhouse.

No Wonder Everything Turned Out Wrong.


If there’s a fox in the henhouse, you’ve got problems brewing. You see, in that one idiom, people are aware that someone has been put in a position where he can then exploit the situation to his own benefit. And what’s more, it’s not that the opportunity is there, waiting to be acted upon, it’s more likely than not that the person in charge absolutely will exploit the situation.


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10 Jun 2022, 7:02 pm

According to the National Intelligence Council

Closest Known Relatives of SARS-CoV-2, as of August 2021

As of August, the closest known whole genome match to SARS-CoV-2 -- around 96 percent identical -- is RaTG13, a coronavirus collected from a bat in 2013 by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), according to academic literature.

Source: COVID-19 ORIGINS


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13 Jun 2022, 1:37 pm

A Negative COVID Test Has Never Been So Meaningless

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In early May, 27-year-old Hayley Furmaniuk felt tired and a bit congested, but after rapid-testing negative for the coronavirus two days in a row, she dined indoors with friends. The next morning, her symptoms worsened. Knowing her parents were driving in for Mother’s Day, she tested again—and saw a very bright positive. Which meant three not-so-great things: She needed to cancel with her parents; she had likely exposed her friends; a test had apparently taken three days to register what her vaccinated body had already figured out.

Tests are not and never have been perfect, but since around the rise of Omicron, the problem of delayed positivity has gained some prominence. In recent months, many people have logged strings of negatives—three, four, even five or more days in a row—early in their COVID-symptom course. “I think it’s become more common,” says Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

No one can yet say how common these early negatives are, or who’s most at risk. But if SARS-CoV-2 is rewriting the early-infection playbook, “that makes it really scary,” says Susan Butler-Wu, a clinical microbiologist at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. “You can’t test and get a negative and actually know you’re negative.” Misleading negatives could hasten the spread of the virus; they could delay treatments premised on a positive test result. They also buck the current COVID dogma: Test as soon as you feel sick. The few days around the start of symptoms are supposed to be when the virus inside you is most detectable and transmissible; we built an entire edifice of testing and isolation on that foundation.

Experts aren’t sure why delayed positives are happening; it’s likely that population immunity, viral mutations, and human behavior all have some role. Regardless, the virus is “acting differently from a symptom perspective for sure,” says Emily Martin, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan.

Right now, experts are operating in a vacuum of evidence: “I don’t even know of any data that systematically evaluates this,” says Yonatan Grad, who’s studying the viral dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 at Harvard’s School of Public Health.

First, the immunity hypothesis, the most popular idea floated by the experts I spoke with. Perhaps symptoms are preceding test positivity, less because the virus is peaking late and more because illness is arriving early thanks to the lightning-fast reflexes of people’s primed immune systems.

When the pandemic began, infections happened exclusively in people who’d never encountered the coronavirus before; illness took several days to manifest, as the virus churned itself into a frenzy and the immune system struggled to catch up. “Once people are vaccinated, though, their immune systems kick in right away,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago. (Prior infection, too, could have an impact.) If the body makes fast work of the invader, some people may never end up testing positive, especially on antigen tests. (PCRs are generally more sensitive.) Others may see positives a few days after symptoms start, as the virus briefly gains a foothold.

SARS-CoV-2 traits, too, could be flipping the sickness script, which brings us to thevirus hypothesis. Any member of the Omicron cohort is “just a different beast,” says Ryan McNamara, a virologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. It struggles to penetrate deep into the lower airway, and may not accumulate to the densities that Delta did in the nose, which could make false negatives more likely. A couple of studies have also found that Omicron may, in some people, be detected in the mouth or throat before the nostrils.

This variant seems to more often prompt sneezier, head-cold-esque symptoms than those that came before it, and less often causes loss of taste and smell. And, on average, people infected in recent surges have been showing symptoms three days after exposure, far faster than the incubation period of five or six days that was the norm in the pandemic’s early days. But those patterns could be attributable to either the peculiarities of the Omicron clan, or how much more immune the average Omicron host is.

Symptoms and test accuracy are also both subject to human bias. People can’t always remember when they started feeling sick. And user error can muddle diagnostics. “Are people really doing 15 seconds in each nostril, and really scrubbing each time?” Landon said. Even super-sensitive tests will miss the virus some of the time. A good portion of the specimens taken from sick people in medical settings “come back negative for everything, Martin told me.

Coinfections are also possible: People who feel sick and test positive “late” may have actually caught something else first, only to develop COVID later on. “There are easily five to eight other viruses circulating right now,” says Melissa Miller, a clinical microbiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It’s also allergy season in much of the U.S.

Without more data, it’s hard to know how to best address early negatives.

But based on the stories emerging, the issue doesn’t really seem rare. “I think I’ve had maybe 20 friends in the last five weeks” catch the virus, Jesse Chen, a vaccinated 27-year-old in New York, told me; most of them experienced delayed positivity, including Chen herself.

If this is happening more, then “you cannot trust a negative rapid test at the beginning of illness,” Landon told me.

Until experts know more, several researchers recommended that people test with caution. Positives are still reliable, Landon told me. But people who are symptomatic and recently exposed might have good reason to be skeptical of negatives. “If you’re turning symptomatic, assume you’re infectious,” Grad told me—with something, even if it turns out not to be SARS-CoV-2. “People forget that, baked into all the recommendations, is that as soon as you turn symptomatic, you’re supposed to be behaving differently,” Martin told me. “A negative test shouldn’t be a pass to go out.”

Landon also raised concerns about the implications of early negatives for the duration of isolation. In January, the CDC cut recommended COVID isolation time in half, saying that people could stop sequestering themselves after just five days, counting out from when their symptoms started, as long as they masked for the five days following. The agency justified its decision by noting that a majority of people were no longer infectious by that point—but used data that almost entirely predated the Omicron surge.

Based on the evidence that’s emerged since, “five days is ridiculous optimism,” said Landon, who recently ran a study showing that a large fraction of people continue to test positive after their fifth isolation day, raising the possibility that they’re still shedding the virus in gobs. Rebecca Ennen, a vaccinated 39-year-old in D.C., didn’t even get her first positive result until Day Six of her illness, as her symptoms were on their way out. “It was just bizarre,” she told me. “I was on the mend.” So Ennen continued cloistering for another five days, until she finally tested negative again.

But such a mindset hardly seems sustainable, especially for people who are frequently exposed to respiratory microbes, including parents of very young kids, or who have bad allergies, or who don’t have rapid tests to spare.

Butler-Wu, the USC clinical microbiologist, recently advised a friend who had received more than half a dozen negative test results—antigen and PCR—that her respiratory illness probably wasn’t COVID. The friend ended up visiting Butler-Wu, only to test positive shortly thereafter. “That really shook me,” Butler-Wu told me. “It flew in the face of everything I knew from before.” It was a reminder, she said, that the pandemic is still serving up plot twists. “I do this professionally,” she said, “and I still made the wrong call.”


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14 Jun 2022, 2:07 am

Why So Many Long COVID Patients Are Reporting Suicidal Thoughts

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ast year, Diana Berrent—the founder of Survivor Corps, a Long COVID support group—asked the group’s members if they’d ever had thoughts of suicide since developing Long COVID. About 18% of people who responded said they had, a number much higher than the 4% of the general U.S. adult population that has experienced recent suicidal thoughts.

A few weeks ago, Berrent posed the same question to current members of her group. This time, of the nearly 200 people who responded, 45% said they’d contemplated suicide.

While her poll was small and informal, the results point to a serious problem. “People are suffering in a way that I don’t think the general public understands,” Berrent says. “Not only are people mourning the life that they thought they were going to have, they are in excruciating pain with no answers.”

The statistics around Long COVID and mental health are striking. A report published in eClinical Medicine last year found that about 88% of Long COVID patients experienced some form of mood or emotional issue during the first seven months of their illnesses. Another study, published in BMC Psychiatry in April, found that people with post-COVID conditions were about twice as likely to develop mental health issues including depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder as people without them. COVID-19 survivors were also almost 50% more likely to experience suicidal ideation than people who hadn’t had the virus, according to a study published in February in the BMJ.

Understanding the link between Long COVID, suicide, and mental health issues is more complicated than it might seem. While some people do develop depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues after their diagnoses, others are suffering from physical symptoms that have psychological side effects or that are mistaken for mental health problems, experts say.

The virus that causes COVID-19 has well-documented effects on the brain, which can potentially result in psychiatric and neurologic symptoms, says Dr. Wes Ely, who treats Long COVID patients at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. “We’ve been collecting brains of some patients who didn’t survive Long COVID,” he says. “We’re seeing inflammation and ongoing cellular abnormalities in these brains.”

Those changes to the brain can have profound effects, possibly including suicidal thinking and behavior. “There is a high probability that symptoms of psychiatric, neurological and physical illnesses, as well as inflammatory damage to the brain in individuals with post-COVID syndrome, increase suicidal ideation and behavior in this patient population,” reads a January 2021 article in QJM: An International Journal of Medicine.

Long COVID can also be incredibly painful, and research has linked chronic physical pain to an increased risk of suicide. More than 40% of Long COVID patients experience moderate-to-severe sleep disturbances, according to recent research, and insomnia has been linked to suicidal thinking and behavior.

Since speaking out about his wife’s death, Güthe has heard from numerous families with similar experiences. Recently, he says, he’s noticed a grim change. “I used to get contacted by people on social media who were suicidal,” he says. “Now I’m getting reports of suicides. I had three in the last week.”

During that time, there’s been little tangible progress for long-haulers. Doctors still don’t understand much about the condition or how to treat it. “You’ve got people now who have been suffering with Long COVID for almost two years,” Güthe says.

Part of the problem is that in the U.S., illnesses are typically considered either physical or mental, but not both, says Abigail Hardin, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Rush University who works with seriously ill patients, including those with Long COVID. “In reality, all of these things are actually very bidirectional,” she says. “Everything is integrated.”

In part because the medical system often fails to accommodate that complexity, many chronic-disease patients are misdiagnosed or assigned labels that don’t capture the full reality of their conditions.

Teia Pearson faced disbelief from doctors and loved ones after developing Long COVID following a March 2020 case of COVID-19. “The doctor’s calling you crazy. Your family and friends are…treating you like you’re crazy. That really messes with your head,” she says.

many depression screening questionnaires ask if the individual struggles to get out of bed in the morning, but fail to distinguish between feeling unable to get up and being physically unable to get up. “Until we have a depression scale and an anxiety scale for people who are physically disabled…people with physical disabilities will continue to be misinterpreted as depressive or anxious even when they are not,” Seltzer says.

“So much of what we’re seeing with COVID and the fallout of it is not related to individual providers,” she says. “A lot of it is very structural. This is an opportunity for the country to grow and fix some of the systemic issues that have been under the surface of U.S. medicine.”



Long Covid is a ‘national crisis.’ So why are grants taking so long to get?
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David Putrino, a neurophysiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, labored through his holiday last Christmas to write a grant application for urgently needed Long Covid research. With colleagues, he hoped to tap into $1.15 billion in funding that Congress granted the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2020, as Long Covid emerged as a major public health problem. NIH had solicited grant applications in December 2021, just weeks before their January due date. The agency said it planned to issue decisions by late March.

But as of today, Putrino was still waiting to hear whether NIH will fund his effort to discover whether microclots might be a meaningful diagnostic biomarker for many types of Long Covid. “Maybe they should hire people who are dedicated to accelerating these programs,” says Putrino, who specializes in rehabilitation medicine. “[Long Covid] is a national crisis. This does not deserve to be somebody’s second or third job. What we need from the NIH right now is their full attention.”

Putrino’s is not the lone complaint about NIH’s management of Long Covid research—an initiative dubbed RECOVER, for Researching COVID to Enhance Recovery. RECOVER’s flagship, an observational study of up to 40,000 people, has come under fire from patient advocates and some scientists who say it lacks transparency and is moving far too slowly—a ponderous battleship when a fleet of hydroplanes are what’s needed. As of 6 June, the study had signed up 3712 adults, or 21% of its adult enrollment target of 17,680. Among children, numbers are even lower: Ninety-eight children are participants in a study aiming to enroll 19,500 of them.

Critics note that other countries have been more nimble. By July 2021, the United Kingdom had funded 15 Long Covid research projects aimed at diagnosis and treatment. In contrast, a recent independent review published by the Rockefeller Foundation found that, as of February, NIH had funded just eight of 200 Long Covid trials listed in the U.S. ClinicalTrials.gov database.

NIH acknowledges the critiques and says it has already “obligated or committed” the $1.15 billion, slated to be spent over 4 years. But the scope of the project prevents it from sprinting, Walter Koroshetz, director of NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and a co-chair of the RECOVER initiative, implied in a talk to a panel of advisers to the NIH director on 9 June. “You can’t believe what a big lift this has been,” he told the advisers. RECOVER “is engineered to really not leave any stone unturned … for what could be causing this trouble.”

RECOVER’s longitudinal study aims to discover the biological roots of Long Covid and describe its prevalence, risk factors, and symptoms. It will also include clinical trials of treatments and preventives, which it hopes to launch by fall.

“Everybody is working as fast as possible but this is a monster of a study,” says immunologist Janko Nikolich-Žugich of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, a principal investigator for a RECOVER arm in Arizona. “It has been a nightmare to both put together and to run … in part because Long Covid comes in so many flavors.”

NIH 1 year ago awarded New York University’s (NYU’s) Grossman School of Medicine a huge chunk—$448 million—of its Long Covid funding to run the longitudinal study, through subawards to more than 24 institutions. NYU declined to make RECOVER investigators available for interviews or respond to written questions about the study.

Meanwhile, extramural scientists not involved in RECOVER are finding other ways to fund research, because NIH has put out few additional requests for Long Covid work


Trudeau tests positive for coronavirus days after meeting Biden
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday that he had tested positive for the coronavirus for a second time, days after meeting with President Biden and several other world leaders at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles.

I’ll be following public health guidelines and isolating,” Trudeau said in a tweet. “I feel okay, but that’s because I got my shots. So, if you haven’t, get vaccinated — and if you can, get boosted.”


The prime minister arrived in Los Angeles on June 7 after a visit to Colorado Springs with his defense minister to participate in a briefing from members of the North American Aerospace Defense Command. He returned to Canada on Saturday.

Trudeau held a bilateral meeting with Biden on Thursday, at which they discussed irregular migration, insecurity in Haiti and the war in Ukraine, according to a Canadian readout. The readout said Biden pledged to visit Canada in the coming months.

White House spokesman Kevin Munoz said Biden is not a close contact of Trudeau as defined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trudeau met with several other U.S. officials during the trip, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), as well as the leaders of Argentina, Jamaica, Barbados and the Dominican Republic. Chilean President Gabriel Boric met with Trudeau in Ottawa on June 6.

Trudeau also met with Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, and General Motors President Shilpan Amin.

Trudeau also tested positive in January. He said he was fully vaccinated and received a third dose of a vaccine that month. Asked about his hoarse voice at a news conference in Los Angeles on Friday, he said he’d been at “hard work” over the past several days.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman