On the plus side, maybe I can go to North Dakota in 2021 and be able to outrun everyone my age.
I think they probably need a healthy control group because everything is kind of going to shit and uninfected people could also be getting worse on some of those (due to anxiety, stress, lack of activity, etc.)
See, this is why people should know about statistics. Are they really saying that months after the infection, you get this reported by people?
Fatigue (98%), muscle aches (88%), breathlessness (87%), and headaches (83%) were the most frequently reported symptoms. Ongoing cardiorespiratory (92%) and gastrointestinal (73%) symptoms were common, and 42% of individuals had ten or more symptoms.
Prevalence like that seems like something we should already understand broadly, even without the benefit of the study. The stuff I've seen is all anecdotal.
I don't know. It's pretty clear that getting Covid to "get over it" is a bad idea regardless of age and health.
This is still scary, but if I'm understanding it right, these are people who were still reporting symptoms months later, not a random pick of people who had symptomatic Covid. So the study group could be a small percentage of people who got sick. It seems to show that long Covid is objectively measurable, but not how common it is.
We're pulling our youngest from her intertown hockey team. Numbers are going up, reports of superspreading in rinks, and no one follows the regulations the hockey orgs agreed to. They were clearly bullshit policies* that were never going to be followed but were just set up so that governments would let hockey leagues play again. NH shut down leagues for two weeks, MA may decide to this week.
Her in-town team I am one of the coaches so I make all the kids wear masks the entire time. A couple kids pull it down but we're 90% or better compliance. I wear two masks when coaching, cloth over a microfiber.
*Masks required on benches and face offs but not during play, which is completely impractical because kids wear full shields or cages so how can you adjust a mask during play? So in reality almost no one except our kid wears masks any time during the game and they don't stay separated on the bench. The procedure for reporting violations is after the game you're supposed to contact the health department of the city where the rink is located, so all they can do is punish the rink which does nothing to make the teams follow the rules the next time.
Kiddie baseball should probably have a team batting mask, so they can spread covid the way they spread lice.
That doctor's behavior is mind-boggling. I'm livid from however many thousands of miles away that a medical professional would behave like that.
6: There was an article in The NY Times about interscholastic soccer, and they were all wearing masks. They complained that it wasn't even the same game.
For indoor sports, it is really bonkers to me when the policy is "Masks on until you're actually playing!!"
but if I'm understanding it right, these are people who were still reporting symptoms months later, not a random pick of people who had symptomatic Covid.
You're right, I missed that. So they are specifically studying long Covid patients. That's a relief.
I am starting to feel like every community has two interwoven groups: those wearing masks with the intent not to catch or spread Covid, and those going through the minimal motions performatively.
What I'm wondering is whether it's possible that these two groups actually have a barrier between them that's not that permeable, due to etiquette norms and situational selection bias. Or does the conscientious group suffer an outsized amount of collateral damage for living in a town with irresponsible people?
Is Covid just decimating the fast-and-loose group and not really affecting the conscientious group, and that when a city or state is exploding, it's just reflecting the relative ratios of the two groups?
I am sure that the answer is this:
- Wealthy fast-and-loose people are fine because they're insulated by etiquette.
- Poor and vulnerable conscientious people are not fine because they're collateral damage of the reckless community members.
Same as it ever was.
Isn't going through the motions effective regardless of why you do so? Pretty much everything works even though some people don't give a shit. It's just lucky that unlike other situations, for this it mostly matters how you behave when other people can see you.
Depends what going through the motions means, doesn't it? Wearing a mask over your mouth but not your nose is acknowledging that Covid precautions are a thing but not doing anything effective to stop them. And there's other categories of stuff like that.
I think there's a difference if people who are concerned don't go to places unnecessarily, but if you're both there and wearing a mask I don't see why it would be different. (In the long run, some kind of physical activity is necessary for kids, or at least that's how I figure it.)
16: I guess I would consider you to be going through the motions only if you covered mouth and nose.
Anyway, my point is that to be successful, you absolutely need assholes who are only wearing masks to avoid people thinking they are assholes to wear masks because they don't want to be publicly called an asshole.
I just had a plumber show up to work in the basement and he didn't have a mask but when he saw that I did he put one on. So there's also a "don't piss off the customer" level of compliance.
I'm guessing even a mask over just the mouth is better than nothing. A lot of transmission is talking or singing so covering just the mouth is a non-zero effect.
I was pretty grumpy to see mask compliance slipping at our (recently reopened) gym. Everyone was really good at first (like, three weeks ago), and now many are doing the nose or chinstrap thing. I complained.
It looks like there's some evidence that wearing a mask may not protect you from infection (much - I've seen varying studies), but it tends to be a milder infection (which makes scientific sense - lower infectious dose), so that's a good thing that will benefit the conscientious.
22 to 20. I feel like you could make a ten point system from coughing and shouting in closed spaces through singing all the way down to "wearing N95" and "nose covered" vs "nose uncovered" would be worth at most a point. Probably equivalent to "wearing a mask that fits tightly" vs. "wearing a mask that has gaps" (and all those blue and white surgical masks gap terribly on me). It looks bad and I judge those people but I doubt it makes much practical difference.
If someone was raised to wear a Still suit, they are only exhaling nasally, do that might make it worse.
Bene Gesserit training allows separation of viruses from the air flow by fine control of nose hair muscles.
5,13: I'm too lazy to really read the thing, but skimming it, I can't figure out n. That is n=201 for Covid cases, but the study itself seems to describe some subset of that 201. Does anyone know what the actual relevant n is? That is to say, the number of the 201 that are "young, low-risk ... with ongoing symptoms?"
I'm confused, and this* is far from my area of expertise.
*statistics, reading comprehension
One of the challenging things about the pandemic is the overlap between people who are interested in some semblance of normal life and people who are extremely cavalier (and currently contributing to our overflowing hospitals. Yes, in Utah, that happens at ~300 hospitalized COVID patients.)
I think Halloween, for example, could be reasonably safe were it managed by, say, my friends who would shoot candy down a tube and shepherd their kids to be six feet apart and wash hands and wear masks. Is it going to be safe when all the careful people opt out and leave it to QAnon Karens in a state that is in denial? No.
I do not think they selected their sample by any criteria except positive diagnosis of Covid, and that volunteers were "ambulatory." (Though they did exclude you if you had a fever ro couldn't get a MRI because of a pacemaker). There is no healthy control group, but also, this is not specifically a study of those with prolonged symptoms. Of course you might get self-selection by those that were feeling poorly. The authors seem a little vague or coy about how they recruited their volunteers. But "prospective study" means they enrolled them without having reason to think they would develop "long covid." That's my reading of it. Which takes it back to quite alarming.
On the long COVID thing: I'm not sure how surprising it is that a serious long-term infection takes a while to clear up. That is, I'm not sure this is unique to COVID vs just getting (deserved) attention. I had walking pneumonia as a teen with the 'ground glass' Xray and a fun morning where I stopped breathing briefly. I coughed for probably nine months afterward, and for years afterward "every cold went straight to my chest." Eventually -- years later-- that stopped happening, too. So... I don't know if COVID is doing something unique, or if in a small percentage of people who get really ill, it takes them a long time to kick it.
I have now skimmed the paper. It's a prospective study, but this is baseline. I'd like more details about recruitment, but I don't think this design is for getting at prevalence of long covid since it seems to be recruited from those seeking medical care. But it not limited to those with long covid.
What do the words "ongoing symptoms" quoted in the OP, mean? That was what I was relying on.
I missed that. I'm going back to only reading the abstract ever again.
I don't know why they say "ongoing" in the abstract, but if you look at the recruitment criteria, also registered here, the only criteria appear to be (1) 18+, (2) initially diagnosed with COVID, (3) discharged from the hospital for at least 7 days (most of the group were never hospitalized), (4) no currently active viral respiratory infection (or symptoms thereof), (5) no contraindications to MRI scans, and (6) "any other cause, including a significant underlying disease or disorder which, in the opinion of the investigator, may put the participant at risk by participating in the study or limit the participant's ability to participate."
And a lot of the discussion talks about looking at the "low-risk" population.
Mrs. Trump is apparently too sick still to travel for the campaign. Maybe she should enroll in a study.
39: It appears that you also had to show up at the clinic. Or at least they don't mention any outreach and advertising. That would limit how far you could generalize. Also, they did the analysis in R, which isn't technically a problem but they really should get SAS like regular people.
A couple weeks ago I saw this summary of research on long-term effects.
It referenced a study in Dublin (which sounds similar to the one referenced in the OP, but I don't think it's the same study) which found
Half of people in a study in Dublin still had fatigue 10 weeks after being infected with coronavirus. A third were physically unable to return to work.
Crucially, doctors found no link between the severity of the infection and fatigue.
The recruitment for that study didn't specifically select for people experiencing long-term symptoms, but was restricted to people who had reason to return to clinic 6 weeks after primary symptoms.
The current study was carried out in the post-COVID-19 review clinic at St James's Hospital (SJH), Dublin, Ireland. Participants were recruited from the post-COVID-19 outpatient clinic, which offers an outpatient appointment to all individuals with a positive SARS-CoV-2 nasopharyngeal swab PCR at our institution. Patients attending the outpatient clinic were invited to participate in the current study by a research physician. In order to be considered for inclusion in the current study, participation had to occur at least 6 weeks after either: (i) date of last acute COVID-19 symptoms (for outpatients) and (ii) date of discharge for those who were admitted during their acute COVID-19 illness.
The same summary also showed much lower numbers from self-reported data in a covid tracking app.
The Covid Symptom Tracker App - used by around four million people in the UK - found 12% of people still had symptoms after 30 days. Its latest, unpublished data, suggests as many as one in 50 (2%) of all people infected have long-Covid symptoms after 90 days.
21: I think it depends on what the mask is made of. (We need research and support for masks.). I would be so great to have masks that protected the wearer even other people were being assholes. Like, even when this pandemic is past, I would love it if there was a gator that was comfortable with n-95 or even p100 level of protection that I could put over my mouth and nose while riding the subway. I think that would cut down a lot on the circulation of colds and other viruses that we'll never bother to develop vaccines for.
Even if the gator was comfortable, I think it would scratch your face.
44: You know the kind I'm talking about.
There's no way to know what I know. Epistemology is tough.
21: But further to 21. The masks I bought came with pm 2.5 carbon filters to protect against air pollution. I thought I could get rid of them, but the mask doesn't feel right on without it. I was planning to insert a shop towel, but then I bought filti filters which are supposed to protect to .3 microns. The virus is smaller than that, but it should filter out some of the droplets, and with multiple layers I hope I get a greater effect. Anyway, I figure that it's better than a bandana.
One of my coworkers got a PD-100 Full Face Gas Mask & Organic Vapor Respirator. It seemed like overkill, but it protected against the wildfire smoke as well as COVID . . .
"Organic Vapor Respirator" sounds like a bong.
It looks like there's some evidence that wearing a mask may not protect you from infection (much - I've seen varying studies), but it tends to be a milder infection (which makes scientific sense - lower infectious dose), so that's a good thing that will benefit the conscientious.
I actually take great comfort from this.
This thread gave me a sore throat.
Anyway, my close family member's scare has passed with nobody infected yet.
Toddlers run fevers allot, but still one worries.
We ended up deciding not to get tested again (potential symptoms were almost certainly allergies) so we came out of quarantine today. Amadea's dad was having a hard time for a few days but he seems significantly better now.
He needs to be careful of long-term effects but I'm glad that he's getting better.
I also have gap issues with the surgical masks. I see a lot of healthcare workers on the subway who wear a cloth mask on top of the surgical mask, and I've started doing that when I take the subway, mainly because I've found that if you have the second mask on tight it closes the gaps in the edges of the first mask.
Re: the mask thing, some are better, of course, and good fit is better than bad fit, but the data coming in really seem to point at dramatic effects in all cases studied.
Summary: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/07/418181/one-more-reason-wear-mask-youll-get-less-sick-covid-19
Original paper:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-020-06067-8
54: Glad he's improving. Hope the trajectory continues.
That reminds me that today I saw a graph of covid in the Czech Republic that showed how much cases jumped when they dropped masks.
I'm kind of useless as a reference source.
Useless until I've got nothing to do but wait for the cake to finish. Here it was.
So here's a possibly dumb question that I have been trying but failing to find an answer to. If I wear a mask whenever I'm out in public, I'm more likely, if infected, to get a mild and/or asymptomatic infection. But when I'm at home, I don't wear a mask. So if I get infected, I'll probably still infect my housemates. Are my housemates also likely to have a mild/asymptomatic case?
That's an excellent point. I wouldn't think so. It's not like you have a weaker strain of the virus in you, it's that your body was just challenged by a lesser initial dose. But my guess would be that if you were in your infectious phase and stood around the kitchen chatting for 45 minutes, they'd get a much bigger initial exposure than you did.
Note: I know nothing.
But I'm good at making up theories that sound plausible to me.
Maybe if you have a weaker infection, you have less germs to spit out into the void with the soup? I suspect heebie is right though.
Honestly, I don't see how anybody in this house gets it without everybody in the house getting it.
Which is why I haven't been to bars even outdoors except twice.
43: I have a gaiter that I bought for running on bad air quality days. It had an N95 attached.
I have one for warmth. You can put it over your mouth and nose like a scarf, but I can't imagine it blocks much.
63: Basically, yes, but you'd reasonably expect their illnesses not to be severe. Low dose = high likelihood of asymptomatic infection, you never reach really high viral load. You infect people because you're unmasked, and they get sick but probably medium sick. Health care workers or people living with very sick patients tend to get a high dose and get very ill. I mean, this assumes it works like other infectious agents where you get dose-response, which it seems to.
This is basically what we're seeing in that transmission patterns aren't really being linked to shopping or being out in the world wearing a mask. They're being driven by gatherings of families and friends who aren't masked and are indoors as well as the standard transmission within households. I just checked out numbers, and they're going up fast. We had one last social event with planned in a few weeks with the only friends we've seen indoors since, er, last February, and I think we're going to have to cancel.
IIRC it was someone in here who recommended these: https://shop.respilon.com/r-shield/
I got one in May and, well, I'm still here!
That viral infections have a dose-response property really was news to me in all of this. I feel like my prior model was chickenpox or measles, which have always appeared to be more all-or-nothing.
My chicken pox was the worst of all my siblings. I thought it was because I was older, but maybe it's because I was the last to get it and thus was getting virus particles from constant contact with three infected siblings.
I got the first of two doses of shingles vaccine recently. Had to call in sick to work. Probably better than getting shingles, though.
Boston schools closing in-person instruction tomorrow.
I had a test and it was negative so I'm doing my part to drive down the positivity rate.
I think I'm still too young for the shingles vaccine.
76 You're probably not, I got it a couple of years ago and it was awful. I thought you could only get it over 60 but the doctor I went to told me her own daughter got it at 25.
The new rule is fifty, for that and the colon camera.
Same on dose-response, I'd had no idea that was a thing at all.
And I had shingles at 17.
I think I might wait past 50 to get the shingles shot, since I never had chicken pox. (I got vaccinated in my 20's and then again in my late 30's when I was found to have no antibodies.)
re: 71
How are they on blokes with larger necks? You are similar sized to me, I guess, and I find all -- as in I've never found one where this is not the case -- neck gaiters are like being strangled or like I am wearing a child's scarf.
It wasn't a bad case. The doc tried really hard to prescribe me painkillers, and I had to insist that I genuinely wasn't in pain. (There was a weird sensation, but not pain.) I had a set of little white scars where the blisters were for decades, though.
At first I was like 35£ is a lot of money. Then I looked up the exchange rate and thought that Brexit is really dropping the value of the pound. But then I decided that $45 is still a lot of money for a gaiter.
82: I haven't noticed any impact but perhaps I've lost all my NECK GAINZ. More seriously the fabric is stretchy and there is a lanyard around the top to pull it tight and create the seal.
71: It was SP who said his workplace was recommending them. I thought about buying one, but they were out of stock. We need more of these kinds of things. Andy Slavitt, Obama administration CMS person, has been hawking masks from a company called Living Guard on his podcast (gotta fund it somehow), but I have no idea how to evaluate if they are any better than others.
84: Moby, it's not pounds; it's Euros, but maybe $41.50 is still a lot of money for a gaiter.
Also, $1.30 is not a lot of money for a British pound. Anyway, thanks.
72, 73: I got chicken pox when I was 13 (after attending my first concert, The Outlaws and Blackfoot in Greensboro NC which, in retrospect, chicken pox was probably the least of what I could have conceivably contracted in that setting), and my medical records contain the verbatim words "godawful case of chicken pox". I looked like something from a zombie movie. Absolutely covered, and in places I didn't even know it could manifest. My brother caught it from me and had maybe 20-30 small red bumps on his chest at its peak.
I was 13 also, I got my symptoms while on our end of the year field trip for 8th grade, but I wasn't that bad.
86 et al.: I read that a lot of places that require masks won't accept gaiters as a mask substitute.
The conventional wisdom is that they are worse than masks, based on a Duke University study that compared various facial PPE items, including gaiters and masks. However, this NYT article says "Not so fast!", and quotes the authors of the study, who say their work was taken out of context. Gaiters are actually better than masks in some case.
This may of course not get you out of trouble if some anti-gaiter person hasn't read the NYT article...
92: That particular gaiter has something similar to a mask inside it which covers you face and mouth along with a nose clip.
The Living Guard is not a gaiter.
I had a really bad time today with a heavier-weight fabric mask and glasses fogging up. It caused me to start worrying about filtering vs. redirecting - it seems like the fabric was thick enough that air was just going above/to the side, rather than through it, as manifested in a lot of moisture on my lenses. But even a good non-N95 kind of mask is going to have some leakage that way, right? (I have broken the nose strip in two of my masks from metal fatigue already)
I wear these:
https://trakke.co.uk/collections/travel-accessories/products/face-mask
Partly because I was buying one of their bags -- it's hipster made in Scotland bike bag stuff -- and the shipping was free. They are really well made, and have a pocket for a filter. They are quite dense, though, so not as breathable as some. I find, though, that they are good for not steaming up glasses, and for getting a good seal around the nose area.
Further to 6- MA announces closure of all indoor hockey rinks effective 5pm tomorrow through at least November 7.
My son got in an outdoor soccer season, which I think is about as good as we could have hoped.