Coronavirus is most deadly if you are older and male – new data reveal the risks
nature.com
nature.com
https://austingwalters.com/u-s-covid19-less-tests-more-death...
I think that's a better metric because it puts it in perspective. If you're 30, a 50% increased risk of death is still very very low. But if you're 80+ that risk is pretty substantial.
Note: this is basically extrapolating the New York and New Jersey numbers, which is assumed had the highest COVID19 penetration in the U.S.
It's obviously not exact, so it's hard to tell whether this is just a case of coincidence and squinting to find a pattern in the noise. But still, I think there's potentially something deep going on that may tell us more about what mediates Covid lethality.
I think it would be closer to doubling everyone's mortality risk only in the zero mitigation scenario.
That’s a poor measure for a number of reasons. Not least of which is we’re getting a lot better at treating Covid medically.
Very few peer reviewed treatments have been socialized. Most evidence is that things “show promise” then end up being less effective after actual analysis.
It’s interesting that you see it this way. Personally if someone said to me I have a 50% increased chance of death, I’d really struggle to make a proper risk assessment. Maybe it’s just hard to talk probabilities about ones own mortality
It's a classic tabloid shock headline to write "XXX will increase your risk of cancer by 10 times!" (when your base risk of cancer is low).
So whenever I see a statistic phrased like you did, I assume it's bullshit.
The second (and further) years would support or disprove that assumption. My guess is disprove.
E.g., a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox is out for the season due to a heart condition brought on by COVID-19, prognosis unknown. [1]
You don't get any healthier than a professional athlete for a top major sport, and although this guy likely will not die, he is off the field in in danger of losing his career.
And yes, I know several 80, and even 100-year olds that are a lot more sharp and physically active than many 40 year olds. Age is not the mere number you think it is. Genetics and decades of healthy/unhealthy choices create massive variations in healthspan and lifespan - you simply do not know that your "typical" 80-year-old has a near expiration date - (s)he could have decades of healthy, happy life ahead.
[1] https://www.si.com/mlb/2020/08/01/eduardo-rodriguez-red-sox-...
Sure, plenty of hale and healthy 80 year olds. Also, a majority of 80 year old Covid patients survive. Are they likely to be the same cohort? That's what I would bet on.
QALY stands for Quality-Adjusted Life Years. That includes long-term impairment of life function, in the definition.
And you're spot-on, we don't even have preliminary data on that, yet. If it were a really big and obvious effect, like 20% of all patients suffer a 20% downward adjustment that will never get better, I wager we'd have a preprint to that effect.
It's a terrible thing for those affected, of course it is. But how many? How badly? We just don't know yet.
But the initial reports of both serious effects to blood, circulatory, lung, organ, and peripheral & central nervous system are real cause for concern, as are teh sufficient numbers of extended illnesses, enough that it already has a name - "Covid long haulers", and support forums.
From my own small sample of people I personally know, I can tell you about twenty reports of complete recovery, and one long hauler.
Is that typical? We agree that it will be years before we know with any certainty. I'm pointing out the dog that isn't barking.
Also worth pointing out: a family friend in her 80s never recovered from a bout of pneumonia, suffering a reduced quality of life until her death about a year later. Severe illnesses do this sometimes, that's known. Is Covid more likely to? Not known.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1... [2] https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-poverty/covid-19/#:~:tex....
So I don't think anyone can determine their risk from this article. It is much higher or lower depending on whether or not you have co-morbidities.
I don't think the "obesity is really worse than COVID" thought process takes into account how much worse the pair are than either one individually.
Since then I have kicked out the emotional terrorist, taken up several disciplines of biking, and my gym opened back up. I am still fighting my weight, but I can see how directly my overeating is tied to stressful events at work, how it gets worse when I can't get out riding often, etc.
It has inspired me to accelerate my plans to quit IT as a career since that's my current major source of stress.
Careers are interesting... who wouldn't be stressed with a car in your rear!
Stress is addictive, it's a choice to be stressed, it's a choice to take things seriously, it's a choice to deny, deflect, and downright lie to yourself and make up stories and make excuses, it's a choice to grab that piece of food, it's a choice to not put it down, and it's a choice to swallow it after "properly" (uh oh here comes the stories) masticating every bite into a fine mash by chewing 30 times or more, 30 choices to spit out that food.
Take it easy on yourself, it takes time and focus to sustain enough attention to mold the body into a vision you have for yourself... If you constantly spike that vision with mind poisons known as "problems" or "management", how much awareness do you actually have left to put that doughnut down, let alone be in a state of mind to chose something your much rather be doing than dreaming about tossing Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and other gross elements in the form of a doughnut into your divine cosmic cauldron?
Your overeating is tied to your choice, simple as that, you are addicted to stress, and you choose the medicine of overeating to mitiGATE and relieve that stress... there's other methods, but with all of them you will still lean into the addictive nature that is systemic to the OG stress addiction. Fighting this, fighting anything is almost always a fire vs fire fight, you want something to remain, resolve?
Give it space... that means allowing it to be, allowing yourself to just be, that is just being yourself, not being the stories you make up about yourself that serve to distract and put you in a mood of self-sabotage and self-annihilatory behavior to persist in the upkeep and to be quite frank, the hard work of doing all of that heavy psychological work and mind games to maintain--part of the way you can motivate persistence is to dualistically and ritualistically swap victimization/villinilization, or in other words you keep moving the goal posts away from you because you really enjoy all of it--You realize that all of it the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly... it's all love, and it is precisely this resistance to this love that perpetuates it, the stress, the manifestation of everything you want and do not want.
Dream the dream you want to be in, not the dream you don't, or better yet leave it and give it space as you go explore the unknown.
You got this star wars kid!
---
This is totally tangential, but I've been forced onto a low-/no-fat diet (fewer than 30g a day) due to a health problem of indeterminate cause (thankfully, COVID was ruled out completely)—of which acute necrotizing pancreatitis was one of the outcomes— which puts me in the place where I'm eating a lot more carbs to make up my caloric requirements than I was when I was in the gym every day.
I'm losing stubborn fat I couldn't drop previously like crazy. That said, I loved cooking and food is not exciting now. But I didn't realize how many calories I may have been missing in my counts due to added olive oil here and there, etc etc.
I know keto/low-carb diets are all the craze right now, and the faddy low-fat diets of the 80s/90s had glaring problems, but it might be worth reassessment given the current circumstances.
My current situation, to sum it up is:
• working from home, at a desk 4-5 days a week
• go for a walk most days, but not every day (I should be doing more, but bouts of pain have interrupted forming better habits)
• no weights — I'd like to reintroduce this to prevent further muscle loss after years of so much hard work, but again—been warned against this for now
• under 30g of fat in my diet a day — doesn't matter if it's "good" or "bad" fat. Just total volume. This means I have to select food options I used to think were awful. If I want cheese I have to pick the cheaper, non-fat options like store-brand plastic-like slices. A lot of chicken and turkey cold cuts. Low-fat bread and bagels (I used to avoid bagels like the plague)—nothing with seeds or nuts. Hardly any oils. No butter, no margarine, no nut butters or spreads. I can have small amounts of low-fat cream cheese.
I previously lost a great deal of weight suddenly due to the inability to eat properly for two weeks, and being taken off solid foods for several days entirely.
In June 2020 I was up to 225 from 198lbs. From mid-June to early July I went from 225 to around 205 (I suspect mostly muscle loss since I was still flabby). Since returning to solid food and the new, unwanted diet I have gone from that 205 down to 186 today. Some of that loss may be due to other health factors as the rate is probably a bit high for healthy, but a large part is due to a much more calorie-restricted diet. It's actually a lot harder to read my caloric requirements without those fats and things I actually want to eat...
This is a prime case of YMMV, and my diet is a bit extreme, but I was in exactly the same case as you prior to the emergence of my health problem and am on a diet I would never have considered otherwise. Also—my heart has been in great shape so I don't know how this would hurt someone with heart issues—I probably get a lot of salt, but my needs for electrolytes recently probably also buffer that a bit.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/07/obesity-is-co...
The other thing about COVID, though, is that I don't even need to know the person who I can catch it from.
[1] If your obese parents raised you, it's quite likely you'll be obese. If you and your extended family fell into poverty, and your cousins became obese, it's quite likely you will become obese, too. But subtract direct role models, direct sources of your habits, changes to your economic status, and the fact that as time goes on, you get older (And older people tend to be more obese), geographic effects (The rust belt started becoming depressed and poor over the years, which lead to obesity)... And what sort of effect is left?
I had Asthma as a kid but COVID has triggered it back on again. I'm now a lot more sensitive to pollution.
"Male" not so much.
As was the weird underrepresentation of smokers among the infected. Which persisted through at least New York, there were several papers about it, but I haven't seen anything on the subject since.
Age-specific mortality and immunity patterns of SARS-CoV-2 infection in 45 countries
https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.24.20180851
Infection fatality rate is <0.1% below age 50 and then trends up rapidly from from there.
> Although fatality estimates are important for understanding the risk of viral spread to people in different age groups, they don’t tell the full story of the toll COVID-19 takes, says Kilpatrick. “There is a fascination with death, but COVID-19 appears to cause a substantial amount of long-term illness,” he adds.
I've been very surprised by how little attention the media gives to the damage that covid does to people, but here's a few articles:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jul/13/heart-scans-...
https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertglatter/2020/08/17/covid-...
It makes me wonder what's going to happen in a few years from now in the countries that haven't controlled covid well. Will there be a huge demand for new types of medical treatments to help covid survivors?
It wasn't too bad but it lasted three weeks and I still have periodic shortness of breath and fatigue and my doctor has no clue what to do. I hope it's not permanent.
Death is definitely not the only bad outcome.
I'm 44 now and one thing I've learned the hard way is that injuries DO NOT reverse themselves. You recover 90% but the remaining 10% is just lost forever.
human body: i can produce a fully functioning human being in 9 months, complete with a skeleton, brain, digestive track, the whole 9 yards!
person: great, when will my ankle start feeling better?
human body: a full year and it will never be the same
Unfortunately our bodies follow this same principle.
From nature stand point. Have kids in late teens, by mid 30s the cycle is already starting again. Repairing body beyond 30s is a luxury.
I’ve lived in areas where girls are all on 4th kid by 24. Men’s ages all over the place
Moved to “nicer” areas where 35-45 is first kid for woman. The man is at least 10 years older.
We have good friends in each side
Very different perspectives in each group.
Men aren't having kids until they're 45-55 then? That seems extreme -- how do they find the energy to deal with young kids at that age?
I was able to get a nasal swab test done in June when community wide testing finally opened up in my area, but it came out negative. The whole thing has been so frustrating to deal with because I don't know and may not ever know if this was for sure Covid related.
I went into the hospital for a week for severe asthma, has coughing spells for a year and my lungs haven’t been right since. It’s not as bad and I can do some level of resistance exercise, but I never fully recovered.
I’m paranoid about getting Covid. I know how terrifying it is not to be able to breathe and how irritating it is not to be able to do slight strenuous day to day activities without giving out of breathe for a couple of years afterward.
I was exposed twice to high mold spore environment; it was an enclosed space on a neglected boat. I still feel it two years later.
Could do it just for curiosity perhaps :)
In Seattle, at least, you can just go get a free test in a drive thru with almost 0 hassle and no cost. This is the way it should be -- as accessible as possible and free. Otherwise you'll have infected folks skipping testing.
Antibody is a blood test for (potentially) detecting past infection. Its public health benefits are lower and is usually not offered in a drive-through format. But it is available free with prescription, besides being included in blood donations.
Are these long term covid cases showing objective complaints? Are the lungs still damaged when imaged? Or are we relying on subjective complaints? I know there have been a few documented cases of myocarditis which is clearly objective in nature, but that’s all I have seen.
But I can feel a distinct difference and the shortness of breath always comes with the fatigue. It's too early to have any proper long term studies, but I think SARS gave lung damage to quite a few of the patients that lasted a long time [1].
One of my mutuals on Twitter is a highly active young woman, who does things like spend time in Thailand to train Muay Thai. She's been doing what she can to recover, but it's been slow going.
Covid long-haulers are a real thing, that much I'm convinced of. How prevalent it is, is an open question.
Also get a pulse oximeter and ask your doctor for one of those lung function devices aka an incentive spirometer (you breathe into them). Get a normal pulse ox when you feel ok and when you have shortness of breath, take your pulse ox again.
There is also evidence of chronic fatigue syndrome caused by covid.
Specifically because the data doesn’t exist yet so they have a coping mechanism shunning all discussion of possibilities
That's how data is collected to have a data-driven conclusion.
The media coverage and social media narrative is very doom laden and fearful, so there are no shortage of places to discuss that.
Whilst the people highlighting the 99.9% survival rate unless you are very old or sick and questioning whether nuking your economy is worth it have a very socially unacceptable view.
It’s been a strange and isolating experience for me to hold a minority socially unacceptable view throughout this whole thing. I feel for minority groups much more nowadays having experienced it.
are you referring to these as the same thing? like "minority group opinions" as literary synonyms
or
are you empathizing with power/race minority because you once held a less popular view?
its not really clear here.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/06/covid-19-...
25-50% of people in certain areas have gotten covid. A comparison to baseline is required. Having covid one day and developing seizures the next does not determine causation, as your prior is baseline.
I'm not sure what omissions you're talking about, or where you're looking for this stuff and not finding it. I recommend listening to the podcast This Week In Virology which is run by infectious disease experts (including some dual PhD MDs) and covers the bleeding edge of the research. A lot of people are out there doing their best to gather and synthesize the limited data we have right now.
If there were serious effects of Covid we’d have heard about it with multiple articles from the science community. All there is now is conjecture, opinion and anecdotes.
-- most cases are asymptomatic.
-- some asymptomatic cases have e.g. detectable heart and lung problems.
-- some people have long term consequences.
...these points are not mutually exclusive.
One of the quirks of this disease is that it does damage to the lungs and reduces oxygenation without any obvious external signs (see the reports from doctors of people texting when their blood oxygen levels were otherwise extraordinarily low) and there are now reports of people having lung damage when they otherwise did not present as sick.
So yes, it appears that it is possible to have long term damage even if it didn't seem that you were sick at first.
For example, here's a paper going over heart inflamation and the flu, going over data gathered in the last 100 years [0].
> During the Sheffield, England influenza epidemic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.
[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...
Sure, flu and COVID-19 can both have long-term effects on the body. But that's true of many disparate diseases. What matters for long-term care are the details that are specific to each disease.
At this point bringing up the flu in discussions of COVID-19 is basically a form of "what-aboutism".
You missed the entire point of their post - you shouldn’t believe something without evidence and there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2015432
This is a study of the lungs of people who died. Obviously more study is needed, but it's not unreasonable to infer that people who survive COVID-19 would experience symptoms that most flu patients do not.
> there is no evidence COVID is special wrt long term complications.
Since this coronavirus is novel, and COVID-19 is a new disease, of course there are not long-term studies yet. The lack of long-term data does not provide any support for (or against) the idea that its long-term impact is similar to the flu. So we have to look at what we do know so far, which is that it is different from the flu in many ways.
Except when one makes a claim, one needs evidence. The assumption is the status quo unless proven otherwise which by your own admission is not possible to do right now so quit the fearmongering.
It is impossible to establish evidence for long term complications of a novel virus that has been with us for less than a year.
> you shouldn’t believe something without evidence
This is an OK heuristic but absence of evidence is not sufficient to conclude falsification of the hypothesis, especially when faced with novel phenomena.
Exactly - there is no reason to believe it causes long term problems so fearmongering about it pointless and anti-scientific.
When faced with something novel, the right approach is to be cautious, for some optimal values of novel and cautious. If we were in a timeline where cigarettes or uranium toothpastes were as novel as sars-cov-2, we wouldn’t have established their long term effects yet either.
Not inherently but the problem is throwing out unscientific speculation without any evidence. This is often done with Covid because fear speculation attracts attention and get clicks/views.
People are hardwired to look for fear - so this sort of irresponsible speculation is dangerous because it spreads like wildfire.
This term (or the similar "scaremongering") gets thrown around an awful lot in discussions about the novel coronavirus and I don't think it's helpful.
For one thing, it's quite insulting to assume someone is deliberately exaggerating something for manipulation purposes. Please assume some good faith.
It's also a problem in that it doesn't advance the discussion in any way, because it can be applied to just about any topic where you don't like the argument.
Discussing dangers of possible long-term health effects of contracting COVID-19? Fearmongering. Raising concerns about climate change? Fearmongering. Studies that show a link between alcohol and heart disease? Fearmongering.
It's such a general-purpose accusation that it's meaningless in most contexts.
The problem is throwing out unscientific speculation with zero evidence - that is fearmongering. HN is held to a higher standard.
Obviously we can't just sit around for years and wait for evidence to appear. We'll have to move forward based on incomplete information, knowing that some of it will later prove to have been wrong.
Sure, novel is a sliding scale. But it has been novel enough for our immune systems, and that is sufficient reason to be cautious. Also its epidemiologic profile was sufficiently different that our knowledge with sars or mers didn’t help us being in a pandemic right now, which can’t be entirely explained with bad policy decisions.
I'm no expert. But I am reticent to think that sars/mers and covid are going to have similar long term effects. Mostly due to the strange additional symptoms with covid that don't appear to happen with Sars/mers. Loss of taste and smell is one of them. Infected and inflamed extremeties is another. It seems as though covid is more adept at infecting other types of human tissue rather than just respiratory. Which on a micro level might be a rather small difference but could have very serious long term differences in outcomes.
This is a complete lack of understanding of scientific process and practices. People believe things without evidence all the time, gut feelings for example, and manage to be quite successful at them, I might add.
Stock markets. Startups. Scientific research into unknown categories. All these things require a sense of faith in what might be instead of blind trust in what has been "proven" (which is only to say a belief in a statistical model about a given thing).
Also, nobody said "woosh" so quoting it as if it was said is irrational.
Human society operates just fine with the risk of flu despite the high annual death toll. How much worse does another virus have to be in order to justify a qualitatively different approach? Is there a specific numeric threshold in terms of fatality rate or QALYs lost or severity of long-term effects?
Even with all the precautions, we've surpassed 175k deaths in the US. Imagine if we had been treating covid like the flu from the beginning?
A good example is my mother who is a teacher. School started this week, and they've been changing their local guidelines/procedures until, well, they continue to change every day still. It should be no surprise, because these are a bunch of county-level educational administrators trying to figure out how to respond to a once-in-a-century epidemiological/social/economic event with effectively zero guidance. It's improv but with people's lives at stake.
Why hasn't the federal government, with the immense resources and power that we entrust to it, stepped up and provided clear guidelines for opening schools and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines? If the answer is that it cannot be safe to open schools, then why have they not stepped up to provide clear guidelines for moving classes online and the funding necessary to implement those guidelines?
This is well beyond the point of being an enormous national security threat. Our government has both legal and moral authority to organize our society. This doesn't mean martial law or nationalization - simply publishing good, clear guidelines for every type of establishment and making available the funding necessary to implement those guidelines. Those guidelines ought to include clear risk assessments that these establishments and their patrons can evaluate for themselves to gauge their level of risk acceptance for re-opening, re-closing, patronizing, or choosing to stay away from.
Instead we have an entire executive branch hellbent on retaining its power, regardless of how sick, destitute, and morally broken its kingdom winds up becoming in the process. It's equal parts pathetic and despicable. Vote.
I'm not sure of Human societies operating 'just fine' with the risk of flu. We seem to operate just fine NOW because we make vaccines for the flu every year, and we have several years of experience in terms of Herd Immunity and Medical assistance.
We also do not have medical personnel dying in hundreds from flu every year as they catch it in line of service.
And the baseline of flu u refer to DID NOT HELP much with predicting or managing clots in almost every major organ when it comes to COVID. Sure, we have blood thinners etc. But when u hear from frontline workers in hospitals, the situation with clots is pretty dire. And this is a much bigger deal and the overlap with flu is very little, even in patients tht may seem to have recovered frm Covid. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/health/coronavirus-stroke...
Influenza also increases the risk of blood clots and ischemia. So SARS-CoV-2 is nothing new in that regard, although the effects appear to be more severe.
https://vascular.org/news-advocacy/jvs-report-swine-flu-and-...
And I provided some evidence for it.
I'm hoping people will not underestimate how serious Covid19 is by drawing parallels to THE NUMBER of yearly Flu fatalities, coz the number of flu fatalities are much less compared to what gets reported every year.
Thts what the SciAm link I provided talks about.
Societies operated WITH a lot of Caution and Precautions in place before the vaccines. They still operate with caution for flu DESPITE vaccines as they do not provide complete immunity.
Look at how people celebrate elimination of Wild polio in Africa! It came AFTER several decades of human suffering and wide ranging precautions.
And the level of caution changes depending on the local medical infrastructure, dynamics of the spread, demographics, and the specific knowledge we have about the disease in question.
I also claimed that WE HAVE SOME IDEA on how to deal with blood clotting wen it comes to Flu. Your link itself shows that out right "Emperic Anticoagulation decreases VTE"
But we are not there yet, when it comes to Covid19.
We have people dying from strokes AFTER they were thought to have recovered from Covid. And these aren't necessarily 'edge cases' that arise from the tail end of large numbers of patients during a pandemic.
These are most likely due to absence of knowledge,data and insights into managing a novel disease. Just read through the NYTimes article. It's very detailed and specific about how we are falling short NOW in dealing with strokes and clots.
Which most likely is also true when it comes to predicting and managing long-term effects due to Covid, as indicated by these experiences of Covid 'long haulers' https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/long-haul...
Quite a lot of people do not understand the extent of the differences, in part because of repeated comparisons to the flu from earlier in the pandemic--comparisons which we now know were based on incomplete early impressions of the new disease.
Yes there is significant overlap in symptoms--hence the early comparisons. There are also significant differences.
Are these differences enough to produce complications worse than the flu? There's not enough evidence yet to know. I'm not saying "we're sure COVID-19 will have worse complications than the flu." I'm saying we don't know either way, so it's irresponsible to cite flu studies to imply we're sure there won't be worse complications than the flu.
Taking into consideration of that which has gone before is the basis of progress and research.
> The way this novel coronavirus infects the body is different from influenza, and the symptoms of COVID-19 are different.
Everything is different from everything else.
> We really need to stop comparing it to the flu.
In other words, everybody needs to stop thinking in ways that don't support your viewpoint. People that try to solve this problem by looking at related problems should stop because 'reasons'.
I disagree, for two reasons:
1) Covid seems to be stronger and deadlier than any other influenza
2) Covid is spreading in the world IN ADDITION to any other influenza or cold or disease that we already had.
Therefore, there's a case to be made for many health care systems in hard-hit countries to be under heavy stress for several years to come.
"any other influenza" includes the 1918 pandemic. Which had a higher CFR, and that's before trying to account for QALYs: Covid is especially deadly to the old, in a nonlinear way, and Spanish Flu rather notoriously killed those in the prime of life.
Bird flu has an almost 50% CFR. We're lucky that, to date, strains aren't very infectious in humans.
"It's just a flu" is a really bad measure of how bad a disease is. Influenza is terrifying.
2) is almost tautologically true, but it's worth noting that the quarantine measures have been very effective at stopping the spread of other respiratory illnesses.
The excess mortality of Covid is visible, without trying to track deaths from it separately. The average victim is old enough that I wonder if it will remain visible if smoothed out over a five-year period.
We'll know eventually. "Heavy stress for years to come" from post-Covid syndrome is certainly possible; it's not the square upon which I'd lay my chips.
Correct, this has been my observation too. I see people attributing even a loss of smell to Covid, which is actually quite common to all respiratory illnesses.
The study this references turned out to be based on bogus data and bad statistics. The original authors since amended their data and don't back down from their conclusions, but they seem a bit unjustified (IMO, and the opinion of their critics).
Here's the tweetstorm (sorry) from the professor that initially called this out [1], the acknowledgement of the errors [2], and the tweetstorm (again, sorry) from that professor again pointing out that the corrected data shows "Covid survivors DO have thingies in their T1. But it is JUST AS COMMON in people with similar risk factors who have NOT had Covid. In other words, yes there are those funny thingies in the scan, but it is NOTHING TO DO WITH HAVING HAD COVID. It is because of the background risk factors" [3].
Here's a news article summing this all up nicely, if you prefer [4].
[1] https://twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1288246926392070145?...
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
[3] https://twitter.com/ProfDFrancis/status/1298524305945436161
[4] https://www.tctmd.com/news/message-unchanged-say-researchers...
> The researchers, who performed MRI scan of their hearts an average of 2 months after they first were diagnosed with Covid-19, uncovered some concerning findings: 78% of patients had ongoing heart abnormalities and 60 percent had myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Even more concerning was that the extent of myocarditis was not related to the severity of the initial illness or overall course of the illness.
This is so important. I'm so sick of people on either "side" faking data to prove their presuppositions on this.
I don’t think this research is carried out with ulterior motives. Scientists make mistakes, and are prone to biases whenever they have a hypothesis. The progression of repeated studies is the final arbiter of truth. Saying that long-term heart abnormalities would be faked to push an agenda is suggesting the existence of a conspiracy. Beyond the usual “publish or perish” drive, nobody stands to benefit from reporting results either way.
Plus, what am I to make of a researcher that doesn’t correct for the most basic confounding factors in their data. Are you seriously suggesting they never thought of that?
I'm equally worried about the long term mental health issues people will suffer due to loss of jobs, and the domino effects that come from it (divorce, default on their debts, etc). Suicide rates will go through the roof. I think the secondary effects will in size be a lot larger than the reported number of people who have died + those who suffer from long term health-damage. Then there are those who missed cancer treatments, or who don't want to risk going in for chemo because they're equally worried about infecting themselves by leaving the house.
Not exactly shocking news. The risk of dying from most diseases increases significantly with age.