Paxlovid, the only foreign Covid-19 medicine approved in China, can be purchased for about $320 from hospitals or online clinics through prescriptions. But many people have reported difficulty in getting the drug through official channels, as residents across the country rush to stock up on medicines for their vulnerable family members.
…
On Chinese social platforms, including Weibo, WeChat, and Xiaohongshu, traders sell Paxlovid at as high as $2,200, with some claiming they would ship from the U.S. In nearby regions like South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, pharmacies are running out of cold and flu medicines as people ship them to their contacts in China.
8 Likes
13 Likes
Johnson is part of a disturbing trend of 25-to-34-year-old men and women experiencing severe, and sometimes fatal, liver damage related to their drinking. A 2018 study reported that between 2009 and 2016, deaths attributed to alcohol-related cirrhosis — scarring of the organ that can lead to its failure over time — had been consistently rising, with the sharpest increase among those in that age group.
The pandemic made it worse. Between 2017 and 2020, deaths from alcohol-associated liver disease continued to rise, with an acceleration during the the first year of the coronavirus, according to a report published in March 2022 in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
Again, there was a sharp rise among young adults, 25 to 34 years old, especially among women.
Death rates rose each year for both genders. While there were still more men dying than women, the annual mortality rate was rising faster in women (37%) than men (29%), according to the report, which pulled data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
This thing is taking a horrible toll.
18 Likes
Where are you seeing an increase in deaths? For the past month or so there have been about 400-500 deaths per day in the US, which is obviously horrible but still about the same as what we had in October or November.
If you’re saying that the ratio between deaths and confirmed cases is up, I’m sure that’s true. But we’re doing a lot less Covid testing these days so I think the case count is severely underreported right now.
(Edit to add: I guess you’re referring to Japan, where it’s gotten bad lately)
3 Likes
Maybe Jesse was talking about Japan?
6 Likes
Right. I didn’t scroll far enough back in the conversation to see that relevant information. And the per-capita death rate in Japan is way higher than it was a few months ago, and about 4x what it is in the US right now.
5 Likes
Working in a massive convention hall, right now bare floors with lots of vehicles dropping things off, large cranes unloading things, carpet layers, etc…
Lots of people working together.
Today’s wtf… Some guy blows his nose on the floor, not off to the side where no one could see, just right on the floor where people were working.
I also saw this story today.
11 Likes
15 Likes
13 Likes
Interesting. Certainly matches what we are seeing here. Good to see more research being done on Loong Covid, and not just writing it off as psychogenic.
14 Likes
11 Likes
It’s not clear to me from the article that the four sub-types necessarily have four different underlying causes. 
1 Like
The paper did not speculate on causation. And, in fact, using AI as a sorting machine may not pan out in the long run. But the fact that LC is being recognized as a thing worthy of study is very encouraging to me.
12 Likes
10 Likes
I guess Moderna had to follow Pfizer, but damn…
15 Likes
Business publications have been speculating about the cost of boosters and pan-vaccines (once they are tested, approved, and produced). What worries me is the past emphasis on treatments over cures in for-profit healthcare. We’ll see if that changes now.
13 Likes
“I believe we should stop trying to prevent all symptomatic infections in healthy, young people by boosting them with vaccines containing mRNA from strains that might disappear a few months later.”
Because symptomatic young people wandering around are no danger to the rest of the population.
7 Likes
For what it’s worth I have a great deal of respect for Dr Paul Offit and his perspective on this issue. He’s dedicated his life to the cause of effective children’s vaccine programs and education, co-developed a vaccine, wrote a couple books on the topic, is director of the Vaccine Education Center at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and as a result was for many years one of the top boogeymen hounded by anti-vaxxers.
This leaves me wondering how they finally wore him down. Upthread are stories about all kinds of childhood diseases that were under control or nearly eliminated until attitudes about COVID tipped some parents into being anti-vaxx in general. From the beginning, the false narrative that children weren’t at risk has haunted many families to this day. Advice like this is why my relatives with school age children are going back to home-schooling. Too bad the press is on board with promoting the minority opinion as breaking news.
12 Likes
Well if you listen to him in interviews I really don’t think the anti-vax folks did wear him down. He’s been very consistent over the course of this pandemic on his position on covid vaccinations: that the initial vaccination is prudent for everyone, including children, but that, in his opinion, there’s not sufficient existing evidence or data that boosting children or low-risk young people for every new variant that comes out is necessary. He’s said from early on that the primary purpose and goal of these vaccinations is to prevent severe outcomes, not to prevent all infections, and always felt that public health officials using language like “breakthrough infections” for Covid was a big mistake because it led to unrealistic expectations on what these vaccines were capable of doing and caused backlash among the public when people subsequently pointed to so-called “failure” of the vaccine. He feels that that failure in messaging was a big factor in affecting the attitude of parents towards vaccines in general, and he’s certainly in a position to know.
