Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 196 COVID Update. This update take the form of a Q&A or FAQ, if you prefer. The highlights are:
- Rigorous studies of mask use to prevent contracting COVID are few, but the evidence strongly supports mask use for this respiratory virus.
- Folks who lose the sense of smell and/or taste can recover one or both over the course of three years. Taste usually return first.
- The vaccines available and recommended for my age cohort include: COVID, Flu, Pneumococcal Pneumonia, Shingles, Tetanus-Diphtheria-Acellular Pertusis (TDAP), and RSV. [I’ve had them all – at my request.]
- During the COVID pandemic, vaccination could have averted 18M US hospitalizations and perhaps a quarter million deaths. Sigh.
- It looks likely that there is a combined COVID-Influenza vaccine in our future.
- This Flus season looks pretty average – a billion cases worldwide and perhaps a million deaths. 🙁
- If you are going to be around family and friends this holiday (who isn’t?), ask attendees at gatherings to stay home if they are sick (coughing, sneezing, having fever or chills).
- If you haven’t had the most recent COVID vaccine, get it. Do not expect the original vaccine and its boosters to protect you against the most recent variants like JN.1
There are other nuggets of information in the video, but I wanted to hit the highlights for those who aren’t up to watching the whole video. On the matter of recovering taste and smell after losing them to COVID, let me say that the road back from a neurological injury is most often long and frustrating.
Two years after losing the sensation on the right side of my body after a small-vessel stroke, I think that I am still improving albeit at a snail’s pace. I am fortunate that my injury did not involve the senses of smell or taste since these, along with sight and hearing, are the senses that I most enjoy each day.