I Am Done With Coronamonomania, Part 9

Still interesting research turning up out there.

Now this is a really important study.  I tried early on to get people to think carefully about what it means to be exposed to a virus, to be infected by the virus and to become sick due to the virus.  These are not all the same thing, and the differences in how people react to exposure and infection are important to understand.  This human challenge study did wonderful work in trying to help explain that.  16 young, healthy, unvaxed adults with no antibodies to CV-19 were innoculated nasally with a dose of the original strain of CV-19.  Gene expression patterns following the introduction of the virus were tracked along with changes in immune cell populations.  Six of the subjects had a sustained infection, with mild symptoms, three had what appeared to be a transient infection–some minor indication of the virus’ presence which cleared quickly.  The remaining seven, while clearly exposed, did not appear to have any “infection”.  All subjects had a similar initial immune response.  Those who essentially were uninfected had a stronger interferon type 1 response in the nasal tissues.  Those with sustained infections had a delayed response of this biochemical.  Only a sustained infection activated T cells and B cells–which produce antibodies.   A certain form of mRNA was also present at higher levels in people who resisted infection.  Studies like this can show us how we might actually prevent infection or at least sustained infection.  And they can help with modeling by allowing us to estimate what parts of the entire population have what level of susceptibility to infection.  (Nature Article)

A number of people actually contracted CV-19 during a hospital stay.  The authorities were not forthcoming with this information, particularly because it was likely that a lot of the serious CV-19 disease was among this group, which obviously probably had generally worse overall health.  In this study, researchers found that people who were hospitalized when they got CV-19 had much higher risk of ending up in the ICU, having a longer hospital stay and dying.  Those who had pre-Omicron CV-19 strains had somewhat worse outcomes than those with Omicron.  (Annals Study)

Believe it or not, designing and executing a research study isn’t a cut and dried exercise.  There are a lot of different choices for design and statistical analysis.  Who is included in a study can make a lot of difference.  So people do analyses on the impact of those choices and what might be the impact of alternative choices.  This study examined the use of “test-negative” designs for vaccine effectiveness research.  I would note at the start, that this design assumes that everyone who got tested had some symptom that led to the test, which certainly wasn’t the case for CV-19.  Basically, you compare the vax status of people who tested negative versus positive.  If the vax is effective, more people who tested negative should have been vaxed.  I am dubious about the use of this design during the epidemic because the studies didn’t often capture prior infection status, but the real problem is that often people had to get tested, people tested when they were in contact with someone who had been infected, and so on.  The idea that testing only occurred due to symptoms is a bad assumption.  (JAMA Article)

One of the really dumb things that was done during the epidemic was to send patients with CV-19 to skilled nursing facilities or even lower-level nursing facilities.  So of course, in these settings with very vulnerable patient populations, these CV-19 patients then contributed to spread within the facility, serious disease and deaths.  This study validates the obvious–putting those CV-19 patients into a facility led to more cases and more deaths than occurred in facilities which did not allow or have CV-19 patient admissions.  (JAMA Article)

Here is an interesting study from China looking at the presence of CV-19 in the Huanan Seafood Market, which appears to be ground central for the emergence of CV-19.  In early 2020, after the market was closed, samples were collected both from the environment at the market, and from samples of left-over animals.  About 8% of environmental samples had CV-19 present, but none of the animal samples did.  You can’t really conclude too much about the origin of the virus from this, as the Wuhan lab is quite close to the market, and it is as possible that it was inadvertantly transmitted from someone at the lab, or escaped, as it is that it came from an animal brought to the market.  (Nature Article)

I still think long CV-19 is mostly mythical and for sure believe that there are no more lingering health effects from a CV-19 infection than there are from other serious illnesses.  This study looked at the rate of long-term impacts during different CV-19 strain periods.  The Veterans’ Affairs population was used for the study, so not representative of the population as a whole.  During the pre-Delta strain period, the rate of such effects was 10.42 per 100 infectees, during Delta it was 9.51 and 7.76 during the Omicron strain dominance.  Supposedly vaxed persons had much lower rates of long-term effects than did unvaxed ones, but I am somewhat dubious of this finding because once again, there was no effort to separate the effects of vax and prior infection.  (NEJM Article)

Another study from the VA looks at the three-year outcomes of having longer-term CV-19 health effects.  For non-hospitalized CV-19 patients the risk of serious consequences disappeared after a year.  For hospitalized patients, there was still a higher risk in the third year, although these were obviously less healthy persons to begin with.    (NM Article)

Should have been obvious to everyone that the efforts put in place to suppress the spread of CV-19 were not only futile but would cause massive harm in several ways.  But, fed by the official terror campaign, 95% plus of the population panicked and went along.  Here is another study supposedly showing a harm, namely that social distancing requirements may have led to an increase in neonatal mortality, but not infant mortality.  I am a little dubious but I have no doubt that keeping people apart caused all kinds of mental and physical health harms.  (JAMA Study)