Coronavirus in the United States - news and thoughts

If you get to a different conclusion based on all the data out there. We will just disagree.

It is clear that the vast majority of people that deal with severe Covid have comorbidities. And we know which ones are more concerning.

If you want to live in fear. By all means. But this disease is not dangerous to a young healthy person.

 

Here is a prevaccine study for you…

Comorbidity and its Impact on Patients with COVID-19

 

Wow, poster claims people who die have comorbidities. Who'd have thought? Now a link to verify poster's claim: "But an overweight vaccinated person is at more risk than a healthy unvaccinated person." Poster's previous link did not verify at all.
We'll wait. LOL

 

Yes…comorbidities are a much bigger concern than vaccination status. From the beginning when there were no vaccines to now as we continue to use vaccines designed for the ancestral variant. Comorbidities are the common theme among those with severe disease and outcomes.

 

Poster should note that vaccination status is not mentioned in this paper, thus does not verify poster's earlier claim. Also of note is the paper's conclusion:
"Therefore, patients with comorbidities should take all necessary precautions to avoid getting infected with SARS CoV-2, as they usually have the worst prognosis. These precautions include regular handwashing with soap and water or use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer, limiting person-to-person contact and practicing social distancing, wearing a face mask in public places, and overall limiting going to public areas at this time unless it is necessary. Hence, there is a need for a global public health campaign to raise awareness, on reducing the burden of these comorbidity illnesses causing deaths in COVID-19-infected patients."
The recommendation of wearing a face mask is contrary to the poser's claims of "virtue signaling" Priceless.

 

I know that all medical evidence indicates that the vaccine prevents infection in the majority of people who receive it (higher % effectiveness for kids and younger people) and it minimizes the symptoms and duration for those that it does not fully protect. That makes it a no brainer to get.

Extremely rare ..let's say that 10% (the low end of all published estimates) of child covid have long covid symptoms. As of 5/12. there have been 13.2 million documented cases of child covid. That equates out to over 1.3 million kids suffering from long covid symptoms..does that qualify as extremely rare to you?

Children and COVID-19: State-Level Data Report (aap.org)

State-level reports are the best publicly available and timely data on child COVID-19 cases in the United States. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association are collaborating to collect and share all publicly available data from states on child COVID-19 cases. The definition of “child” case is based on varying age ranges reported across states (see report Appendix for details and links to all data sources).

Reported COVID-19 cases among children spiked dramatically in 2022 during the Omicron variant winter surge, peaking at 1,150,000 cases reported in one week. For the week ending May 12th, more than 93,000 additional child COVID-19 cases were reported, an increase of about 76% from two weeks ago. This marks the fifth consecutive weekly increase in reported child cases.

Almost 13.2 million children have tested positive for COVID-19 since the onset of the pandemic according to available state reports; over 246,000 of these cases have been added in the past 4 weeks. Nearly 5.3 million reported cases have been added in 2022.

 

Vaccine hesitancy throughout history. I expect our resident data analysts would have been against small pox and polio vaccines as well back then. Good thing social media wasn't around when those vaccines came out.

 

Respondent should note that poster noted the study was prevaccine.

Comorbidities have been the major issue for those dealing with severe outcomes of Covid. Vaccinated or Unvaccinated.

 

You are peddling unnecessary fear.

I suggest you seek more information and not from places that give you confirmation bias.

 

Vaccine hesitancy is unfortunately already getting worse because of how public health pushed the Covid vaccine. Every single public health official who pushed for mandates of the Covid drugs should be fired for the damage they have done to vaccine hesitancy alone. The damage will be generational. And it did not need to happen.

 

like mayo clinic or american pediatric association or qanon?

the only poster here seeking info they want is you while ignoring info in your own articles that doesn't align with your preconceptions

 

Long Covid is rare (extremely rare in kids). The drugs do not stop you from getting Covid. Kids are already at almost no risk. You do know that one who says they have lost their sense of taste or smell for 4 weeks would be considered long Covid? Maybe that is a severe outcome that requires a new drug that does not prevent the potential outcome. But…

I get the feel you think kids and people are housed up in hospitals or their houses in large numbers dealing with severe long Covid. Maybe I am wrong. But that is the feel I get.

 

does BBC work for you? and these are old numbers, before Omicron really took off

How children are being affected by long Covid - BBC Future

This is backed up by the latest data from the UK's Office of National Statistics which found that the number of children under 16 with self-reported Long Covid of any duration 'increased from 77,000 in October 2021, to 119,000 in January 2022.
...................
But one of the major questions remains trying to figure out just how common long Covid is in children. Scientists at University College London recently unveiled the first standardised definition of the condition – symptoms which impact childrens’ physical, mental or social wellbeing and persist for a minimum of 12 weeks after initial Covid-19 testing. It is hoped that this will make it easier for researchers to study the disease course, its various outcomes, and understand precisely how many children are affected by it.

Last September, researchers at University College London and Public Health England unearthed some of the first concrete answers after surveying 3,065 11-to-17-year-olds who tested positive for Covid between January and March.

Somewhere between 2% and 14% of teenagers were found to still experience fatigue, shortness of breath and persistent headache, 15 weeks after reporting a positive PCR test, and at a higher rate than a control group who tested negative for the virus. Around the same time, the Israeli Health Ministry released a survey showing that 11.2% of children reported some symptoms of long Covid as part of their recovery, and 1.8-4.6% of them continued to experience symptoms six months later.

more recent studies, is WebMD compromised or do you trust their data?

Sickness Lingers in 1 in 4 Kids Who Got COVID With Symptoms (webmd.com)

Villapol and researchers from the U.S., Mexico, and Sweden pooled data from 21 previous studies done in Europe, Asia, Australia, and South America to estimate the how many patients under 18 got long COVID and identify the most common symptoms.

Among more than 80,000 children and adolescents with COVID-19, 25% got symptoms that lasted for at least 4 to 12 weeks or new persistent symptoms that appeared within 12 weeks. Long COVID appeared in more than 29% of the hospitalized patients. Children who had severe COVID-19, obesity, allergy-related diseases, or other long-term health conditions were more likely to get long COVID.

The most frequent problems were mood symptoms like anxiety and depression, followed by fatigue and sleep disorders. Other common symptoms were neuropsychiatric (headaches, changes in thinking skills, dizziness, balance problems), cardiorespiratory (a hard time breathing, congestion, exercise intolerance, chest pain and tightness, coughing, irregular heart rhythm), cognitive (reduced concentration, a hard time learning, confusion, memory loss), skin-related (too much sweating, itchiness, hair loss) and gastrointestinal (loss of appetite, belly pain, constipation, diarrhea, vomiting, and nausea).

When compared to kids without COVID-19, children who got the coronavirus were 10 times as likely to have a persistent loss of taste or smell, twice as likely to have long-lasting breathing problems, and twice as likely to have ongoing fever issues.

 

just one of hundred of thousands of stories, no comorbidities, young, with long lasting problems

Long Covid in Kids Has Effects That Last Beyond Hospital - Bloomberg


More cases will mean more long Covid, including pediatric long Covid. Estimates of the number of children who face long-term symptoms are far from precise, but they probably range from 5% to 10% of those infected with the virus, says Daniel Griffin, an infectious diseases expert at Columbia University who treats Covid patients and hosts a weekly podcast update on the disease. Even at the lower end of the estimates, that translates to more than a half-million children of the 13 million so far infected. (Studies of infected adults indicate that an estimated 10% to 30% may have long Covid.)

Up until last year, Lincoln, now 15, was a star forward on his middle school basketball team in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. So good, in fact, that high school coaches in the area were noticing his talent. In May, Lincoln’s parents moved the family to Copley, a small town west of Akron, so Lincoln could play on a team his parents believed would give him his best shot at success. “I’m going to brag on my kid a little bit,” says his father, Nate, who’s also sitting in the examination room. “He’s a stud basketball player.”

But when Lincoln was handing out Halloween candy last year, he felt cold symptoms coming on. He lay down and drifted into an uneasy sleep. His dad says Lincoln’s fever spiked to 104F and his breathing became labored. Lincoln tried pushing through his basketball tryouts the following week but couldn’t keep up. After missing a few days of school, he forced himself back. But when he noticed blood in his urine, his parents took him to the emergency room. Doctors ran tests over the course of a two-day hospital stay, including a Covid antibody test. The results showed only that Lincoln had had the illness at some point.

He filed through a round of appointments with specialists in oncology, pulmonology, and rheumatology, but none of the doctors could pinpoint a specific reason for his extreme fatigue. He stopped going to school again in November and was barely able to get out of bed until mid-January. One doctor put him on a powerful and potentially dangerous immunosuppressive drug called methotrexate that helped him regain enough energy to resume classes. Another urged his parents to take him to see pediatric long-Covid experts at Rainbow Babies & Children’s hospital. It took more than a month to get an appointment.
.....................

Although children generally fare better with Covid than adults, many parents, lulled by flawed CDC guidance and a fire hose of online misinformation from self-appointed experts, have mistakenly assumed the virus poses no more risk to children than a common cold. Many pediatricians, too, have spent the pandemic unconvinced about the utility of testing sick kids for the virus. And only 28% of children age 5 to 11 had been given two doses of a Covid vaccine as of late April, according to the CDC. These factors help explain why pediatric hospitalizations reached a pandemic peak during omicron. Early research in adults has shown vaccines can help reduce the risk of long Covid if someone is infected with the virus. Deaths are rare, but that’s scant comfort to the parents of the 1,010 children with Covid who have died in the U.S. And even though that number is far surpassed by adult lives lost, Covid was still the fourth-leading cause of death in kids in January, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Peterson Center on Healthcare.

 

Wait. link to a paper to verify the false claim but now poster uses prevaccine as a disclaimer to his own link.. So it was a bogus verification?

No one disputes comorbidities. This is disputed: "But an overweight vaccinated person is at more risk than a healthy unvaccinated person."
From Healthline " In the United States, 6 out of 10 adults have a chronic disease that increases their risk of severe COVID-19. Also, 4 out of 10 people have two or more of these chronic conditions." In fact one might note that most people die from one or more.

 

Bad news

 

“Over the last two years, experts’ understanding of long Covid in children has deepened. Several peer-reviewed studies now include control groups consisting of children who did not have Covid-19 but who have lived through the same pandemic conditions — loneliness, interrupted schooling, anxiety, tensions at home, the loss of loved ones, and the like.

These studies indicate that long Covid in children is rare and, when it does occur, is short-lived. In one study, 97% of children ages 5 to 11 with Covid-19 recovered completely within four weeks. In the small group that had bothersome symptoms after four weeks (usually loss of smell or fatigue), most had fully recovered by eight weeks.”

Controlled studies ease worries of widespread long Covid in kids

We really need to stop peddling unnecessary fear. This was a real pandemic. It has been bungled and politicized from the beginning in how to deal with it.

***the Israeli study/survey linked in your article did not have a control group as a side note***

 

If you think a healthy unvaccinated person is at more risk than a vaccinated high risk person…

we are just going to disagree on what the story told by the data.

It appears you probably understand that there are a lot of high risk unvaccinated people just like there are a lot of high risk vaccinated people?

 

Use your number

3% of 13.2 million known cases. 400,000 kids with long covid. You and I have a different perspective on whether that is significant.
If you recognize that confirmed cases are only a portion of actual infections, then the 400k number goes up.

 

From your link

Vaccines have proven immensely effective against the virus, in children and teens as well as in adults. This is grounds for relief, and even celebration.