#*coronavirus

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Targeting the epipharynx to disrupt the residual triggers of COVID-19 in patients with long COVID

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on the world, resulting in a dramatic loss of human lives. While the situation is now largely un

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if the president -- someone who has top tier medical care and a very carefully vetted calendar where exposure to randos is controlled for and minimized -- is getting covid can we like maybe talk about how covid isn't a seasonal illness and it hasn't gone away and maybe people should wear masks in public as a general rule instead of a weird exception

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Boss of US firm given £4bn in UK Covid contracts accused of squandering millions on jets and properties

Exclusive: Rishi Sunak’s team helped fast-track deal with firm founded by Charles Huang, who says contracts generated $2bn profit

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Covid Taught Us a Lot. The CDC Now Wants Us to Forget It.

The agency reportedly plans to tell people with Covid and other infections to isolate based on symptoms. Researchers say symptoms aren’t a g

While public appetite for Covid news is low, experts say the stakes for communicating about respiratory illnesses are deceptively high. An ongoing bird flu outbreak and a small but deadly swine flu outbreak in Colombia this year have public health experts worried that another flu pandemic is all but assured in coming years. As government officials downplayed Covid, flu, and other deadly viruses in recent years—shortening Covid isolation times and lifting restrictions—misinformation about measles, another respiratory illness, has proliferated. A massive measles outbreak is currently roiling Europe, and Florida has now reported multiple cases at a single school. State officials who rose to prominence by opposing Covid measures said the 200 unvaccinated students who had been exposed did not need to quarantine.

Then there is the threat of more novel viruses; dangerous new coronaviruses have emerged every seven to nine years in the past two decades, which means we may be soon see another. In the meantime, Covid is still hospitalizing and killing people even with current guidelines; it could get worse when people are urged to move more freely while contagious.

In theory, we should be better equipped than ever before to counter these threats. “Covid has elevated the amount of access and information and awareness that we have [of] seasonal respiratory viruses,” said Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Covid taught us that these respiratory viruses can be airborne, that asymptomatic people can still infect others, and that the time it takes to stop shedding the virus can vary widely; we also learned what we can do to lessen these challenges.

The CDC has yet to make the proposed changes public—or even confirm the Post’s report. When I contacted the agency for comment on this piece, a spokesperson responded that there are “no updates to COVID guidelines to announce at this time,” and the agency “will continue to make decisions based on the best evidence and science to keep communities healthy and safe.” But the guidelines outlined by the Post’s three sources would run counter to the available research on Covid and other respiratory illnesses—presumably in order to satisfy economic and political interests. The consequences both for contagion and public trust, should the agency follow through on these plans, could be severe.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/06/commercial-real-estate-crisis-empty-offices/674310/

“I’m about to cancel all my Zoom meetings.” It was May 2021, and Jamie Dimon had had enough. The JPMorgan Chase CEO expected that “sometime in September, October,” the company’s office would “look just like it did before.” Two years later, his company is slashing its Manhattan footprint by a fifth.

Post-pandemic, kids are back in school, retirees are back on cruise ships, and physical stores are doing better than expected. But offices are struggling perhaps more than most casual observers realize, and the consequences for landlords, banks, municipal governments, and even individual portfolios will be far-reaching. In some cases, they will be catastrophic. But this crisis, like all crises, also represents an opportunity to reconsider many of our assumptions about work and cities.

During the first three months of 2023, U.S. office vacancy topped 20 percent for the first time in decades. In San Francisco, Dallas, and Houston, vacancy rates are as high as 25 percent. These figures understate the severity of the crisis because they only cover spaces that are no longer leased. Most office leases were signed before the pandemic and have yet to come up for renewal. Actual office use points to a further decrease in demand. Attendance in the 10 largest business districts is still below 50 percent of its pre-COVID level, as white-collar employees spend an estimated 28 percent of their workdays at home. (x)

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The knowns — and known unknowns — of long Covid, explained

Long Covid isn’t as much of a mystery as it used to be.

Three years since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in the US, the syndrome known as “long Covid” remains one of its chief mysteries.

Those mysteries include what the syndrome even is. The long-term fatigue and brain fog some people report after recovering from an acute infection are the symptoms most commonly associated with long Covid, but more than 200 distinct symptoms have been reported. The novel coronavirus may also change people’s cardiovascular systems permanently in ways that could lead to long-term health problems, even strokes and heart attacks. Is it all long Covid?

There are other elusive questions: How frequently do people get long Covid? Who is at the highest risk of developing it? And what is causing these long-term symptoms in the first place?

The remaining uncertainties can mask the scientific progress of the past few years. Scientists have a better idea of how long Covid works, and why it might cause a wide array of seemingly unconnected symptoms.

But — and this is more important than it might seem — we know what we don’t know. We have a stronger sense of what the most important unanswered questions are and where there is genuine debate among even the experts about this bedeviling condition.

The highly charged public discourse over long Covid can be overwhelming. There is a plethora of research being released at all times, some of it well-vetted, but some of it not. If you or someone you love has long Covid — or you’re worried that you might get it — it can be hard to get even basic answers.

One of the clearest takeaways of the past three years is this: Long Covid does not look the same in every patient.

”I think that consensus exists at this point to say, there is no one underlying cause of long Covid,” said David Putrino, who is leading research efforts at Mount Sinai. “Because there are many types of long Covid.”

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The NIH has poured $1 billion into long Covid research — with little to show for it

The federal government has burned through more than $1 billion to study long Covid, and there's basically nothing to show for it.

The federal government has burned through more than $1 billion to study long Covid, an effort to help the millions of Americans who experience brain fog, fatigue, and other symptoms after recovering from a coronavirus infection.

There’s basically nothing to show for it.

The National Institutes of Health hasn’t signed up a single patient to test any potential treatments — despite a clear mandate from Congress to study them. And the few trials it is planning have already drawn a firestorm of criticism, especially one intervention that experts and advocates say may actually make some patients’ long Covid symptoms worse.

Instead, the NIH spent the majority of its money on broader, observational research that won’t directly bring relief to patients. But it still hasn’t published any findings from the patients who joined that study, almost two years after it started.

There’s no sense of urgency to do more or to speed things up, either. The agency isn’t asking Congress for any more funding for long Covid research, and STAT and MuckRock obtained documents showing the NIH refuses to use its own money to change course.

“So far, I don’t think we’ve gotten anything for a billion dollars,” said Ezekiel Emanuel, a physician, vice provost for global initiatives, and co-director of the Healthcare Transformation Institute at the University of Pennsylvania. “That is just unacceptable, and it’s a serious dysfunction.”

Eric Topol, the founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, said he expected the NIH would have launched many large-scale trials by now, and that testing treatments should have been an urgent priority when Congress first gave the agency money in late 2020.

“I don’t know that they’ve contributed anything except more confusion,” Topol said.

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Long COVID Now Looks like a Neurological Disease, Helping Doctors to Focus Treatments

The causes of long COVID, which disables millions, may come together in the brain and nervous system

Tara Ghormley has always been an overachiever. She finished at the top of her class in high school, graduated summa cum laude from college and earned top honors in veterinary school. She went on to complete a rigorous training program and build a successful career as a veterinary internal medicine specialist. But in March 2020 she got infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus—just the 24th case in the small, coastal central California town she lived in at the time, near the site of an early outbreak in the COVID pandemic. “I could have done without being first at this,” she says.

Almost three years after apparently clearing the virus from her body, Ghormley is still suffering. She gets exhausted quickly, her heartbeat suddenly races, and she goes through periods where she can't concentrate or think clearly. Ghormley and her husband, who have relocated to a Los Angeles suburb, once spent their free time visiting their “happiest place on Earth”—Disneyland—but her health prevented that for more than a year. She still spends most of her days off resting in the dark or going to her many doctors' appointments. Her early infection and ongoing symptoms make her one of the first people in the country with “long COVID,” a condition where symptoms persist for at least three months after the infection and can last for years. The syndrome is known by medical professionals as postacute sequelae of COVID-19, or PASC.

People with long COVID have symptoms such as pain, extreme fatigue and “brain fog,” or difficulty concentrating or remembering things. As of February 2022, the syndrome was estimated to affect about 16 million adults in the U.S. and had forced between two million and four million Americans out of the workforce, many of whom have yet to return. Long COVID often arises in otherwise healthy young people, and it can follow even a mild initial infection. The risk appears at least slightly higher in people who were hospitalized for COVID and in older adults (who end up in the hospital more often). Women and those at socioeconomic disadvantage also face higher risk, as do people who smoke, are obese, or have any of an array of health conditions, particularly autoimmune disease. Vaccination appears to reduce the danger but does not entirely prevent long COVID.

The most common, persistent and disabling symptoms of long COVID are neurological. Some are easily recognized as brain- or nerve-related: many people experience cognitive dysfunction in the form of difficulty with memory, attention, sleep and mood. Others may seem rooted more in the body than the brain, such as pain and postexertional malaise (PEM), a kind of “energy crash” that people experience after even mild exercise. But those, too, result from nerve dysfunction, often in the autonomic nervous system, which directs our bodies to breathe and digest food and generally runs our organs on autopilot. This so-called dysautonomia can lead to dizziness, a racing heart, high or low blood pressure, and gut disturbances, sometimes leaving people unable to work or even function independently.