Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 191 report on COVID and respiratory viruses. The highlights are:
- The number of COVID infections is increasing slightly in some Texas counties.
- COVID hospitalizations are flat.
- ER visits for COVID are flat to falling as visits for Flu and RSV rise slightly.
- A recent Canadian study shows that pregnant patients who receive COVID vaccine during pregnancy have babies with fewer COVID infections and complications for up to six months (this is not a new finding but confirms other studies of neonatal benefits of maternal COVID vaccination).
- Texas is lagging behind other states in COVID vaccine uptake.
- Kids infected with COVID shed virus for five and up to ten days.
- Long COVID hypotheses now include a role for the gut microbiome.
- The current Flu season is tracking along historical Flu season numbers now that people are shedding their masks and relaxing physical distancing.
- Some folks are still pitching Ivermectin for COVID despite all the clinical trials that show that it doesn’t work. Sigh.
With regards to Long COVID, there are a number of proposed mechanisms for this condition. Among them are: persistent SARS-CoV-2 virus in the body, inflammatory mechanisms, depletion of Serotonin, gut microbiome activity, and others that I can’t call up from memory.
Whenever we don’t understand an illness, it is common that scientists propose a variety of causal explanations for it. Most often, those explanations are based on some abnormal finding in individuals affected by the condition in question. In other words, these are educated guesses rather than random guesses. Eventually, one of more of these educated guesses leads to an actual understanding of the cause of the condition.
I expect that this will eventually happen with Long COVID albeit maybe not until it has become less relevant as COVID itself fades into distant memory (only to rear its head some years later).