A disaster which is currently breaking our system as providers leave (retire, change fields or dead) and are not replaced. This will echo for a very long time in the US medical arena.
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Same is happening in Europe, I think. In Germany, the #pflexit is trending every now and then on social media. The portmanteau is based on Pflege (Care), and you catch the drift. The whole system was overworked, understaffed, and underpaid, and the pandemic didnât make this line of work more attractive.
With doctors, IDK. Given the general social inflexibility of Germanophones and the investments everyone who holds a medical degree made, I doubt weâll see a higher percentage change professions. But still, there is another problem Germany, Austria and Switzerland must address: our population is aging. We have more need for both medical and care works by the year.
Switzerland buys itself medical and care staff from the neighborhood, and further abroad. Austria? IDK, my contacts from such professions there nowadays work in Basel, Berne, ZĂźrich. (Not kidding!) Germany? Well, we try to compete with Switzerland on some levels, but mainly in the care sector.
Anyway, this is derailing the original subject. Fact remains: the pandemic messed with the medical system, and thereâs clearly a subject for political intervention at hand. Otherwise, weâre as fucked as, sorry to say, the US.
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Watched yesterdayâs updated CDC panel discussion on vaccine-caused myocarditis. With their latest data and analysis itâs pretty dang evident that there is a real increase in myocarditis for certain demographic groups taking the mRNA vaccines, especially for young males in the days after taking the 2nd dose:
So there wasnât really any discussion in the meeting over whether the effect was ârealâ or not, that was pretty much accepted among panel members. They moved on to discuss the risk/benefit calculation for various groups, and I think this slide was probably the most relevant:
So, over a 120 day period they estimated that for every million 12-17 year old males that are vaccinated, they will prevent about 71.ICU admissions and 2 covid deaths, in exchange for causing somewhere around 56-69 myocarditis cases. Useful information! I would like to know what the assumed community rate of transmission was for those 120 days though. Not all 120-day periods are created equal in terms of covid risk.
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Also of note when processing this data is that the vast majority of these myocarditis cases are short lived and self limited, vs the 33% risk of myocarditis from the natural infection. We have seen 3 cases of postinfectious myocarditis in young people requiring cardiology referrals, vs 0 postvaccination incidents, so in a very limited dataset, we are seeing significantly more risk in not vaccinating vs. vaccinating.
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They actually did discuss covid-caused cases of myocarditis in their presentation, which are certainly real, but they didnât see anywhere near 33% of covid patients experiencing clinical cases of myocarditis. Whatâs your source for that statistic? They also said that the virus-caused cases of myocarditis tended to resolve themselves faster than typical non-covid related myocarditis cases, so thatâs good I guess.
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Do we have any explanation for why significantly more females than males in that age range would have contracted covid and yet the numbers completely reverse for the serious stuff: hospitalizations, ICU, and death?
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Males have had a higher mortality rate from covid since the beginning of the pandemic, but for whatever reason the gender disparity is especially pronounced in the younger cohorts. I heard a potential explanation early on regarding testosterone levels but I donât know how much thatâs panned out in subsequent studies.
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From the second citation:
More than 1 in 3 previously healthy college athletes recovering from COVID-19 infection showed imaging features of a resolving pericardial inflammation. Although subtle changes in myocardial structure and function were identified, no athlete showed specific imaging features to suggest an ongoing myocarditis.
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Right, that study was discussed but itâs very important to note that most of those cases were sub-clinical, and never would have been found without an MRI scan. So itâs not comparable to the vaccine-caused cases that met the working definition they were using for myocarditis cases in this discussion.
In order to do an apples-to-apples comparison to the numbers from that study of athletes youâd need to do an MRI of a randomized group of young people who had recently been vaccinated, whether or not they were exhibiting any adverse events. It would be great to see the results of such a study but to my knowledge nobody is planning to do that.
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Oh, there are a ton of uncontrolled variables here, not least is the fact that the population drawn on was top notch NCAA div 1 athletes, a group assumed to be in extremely good health prior. Itâs probably not representative of the population at large, just the best data we have currently. I suspect there will be more generalizable studies coming, but this is the best we have currently.
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Not exactly my point. Trying to generalize data generated from elite athletes to the general population is fraught with potential for errors. As I frequently say, WDKS, but we are learning. I worry about underestimating the impact of cardiac involvement in covid infections, and even more about overestimating the impact of vaccine related cardiac issues. Both are very real, the relative impact is clearly moreso from covid infection than vaccination, and the true impact will become clear with time. I may be overestimating the risk related to infection, but having seen the impact, I will accept that error.
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I donât think you can assume that COVID myocarditis is asymptomatic in comparison to vaccine-mediated myocarditis. The COVID acquired myocarditis symptoms can easily be masked by the other COVID symptoms. In other words, did I feel like shit because of COVID or did I feel like shit because of COVID + myocarditis?
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