NopeâŠ
I completely agree. I can see giving human healthcare providers control and overriding some functions, but hospitals have pharmacists for a reason.
Itâs not clear from the article, but Iâm wondering how a nurse in a hospital can access meds that are not even requested by a doctor for a particular patient? Especially this particular medicine. It seems extremely problematic.
Cross post
The data hasnât all been made public yet, but the companyâs statement that it âworksâ in babies doesnât tell the whole story. Per NPR, what data is available includes the following:
So not huge efficacy numbers.
That isnât a good as I was hoping
But given the roulette of long COVID, any protection is good
Germany, 24th of March 2022. A new record.
Mask mandates in most places will end on April 2nd.
No time to trsnslay, please try deepl or gtranslate until I can provide the translation for this interview:
So⊠people who need to think hard to work complain more often of Long COVID, so letâs put the psychiatrists on the job to talk them through it? âManual labourers complain lessâ⊠so it must in the white-collar brain? Howsabout manual labourers get paid less so canât afford to complain about âbrain fogâ and probably get by a bit better on muscle memory than, say, a computer programmer might.
This article pissed me off.
There is no doubt a bit of a psychiatric element to it all, however I have to set that against the work by Bettina Hohbergerâs group at Erlangen, where they seem to have found some credible biological markers for Long COVID, a plausible mechanism that can be measured physically in red blood cells, and trialed a possible cure thatâs been 100% effective so far.
But sure, if it gets you psychiatrists the hours, lets get those brain fogged computer programmers back at work on the flight control systems for your airliners⊠/s
wow⊠I had to tone that down⊠
At this point, I think everyone has some phycological impact. Stress and social isolation has taken itâs toll on every person. Some have additional grief, as loved ones have died, and enormous levels of stress and hopelessness based on their professions. But to say long COVID is entirely, or even mostly, psychological?! I mean, WDKS but we do know something and weâve seen viral-induced long term consequences with other diseases. We canât just say âitâs all in their head! Nothing we can do except some head shrinking!â
ETA to be clear, I am agreeing with your frustration on this issue!
Rio will offer the fourth dose of COVID-19 vaccine to all the elderlies over 80 years old this week.
Let me put a slightly more benign spin on that. It is well known that elite athletes are much more aware of coordination and strength, and pick up on some forms of neurological disorders much earlier than others, because those tiny initial alterations throw them off much more than an average weekend warrior. (As an example, i would imagine a high wire walker would notice a slight alteration in balance long before I would, for obvious reasons.) Folks who are dependent on rapid, precise mental processes are likely more sensitive to slight impairments or alterations in function than some who are not. While economic factors are very probably a factor as well, as they always are, there is something to folks noticing changes in functions that they use daily and expect a certain degree of precision, when that stops being the case.
Lou Gehrig is possibly the most famous example of this. In the 1938 season he was still an excellent athlete by any objective standards but he and his fans were closely looking at his statistics and could see a clear decline that indicated that something was up.
He ended up getting diagnosed with ALS while he was still healthy enough to play a few more games, which is really remarkable given the state of medicine in 1939. My father in law had ALS too, and even with modern diagnostic techniques he was much further along in physical decline before the doctors were sure that that was what he had. (The diagnosis for that disease is indirect and largely a matter of ruling out all other possibilities.)
Oh for sure⊠I learned a lesson the hard way one day in grad school: I went back to coding a quite difficult problem after a very unusual beer at lunch. Next day, I was glad Iâd been using revision control because I had to throw out the entire afternoonâs work.
What annoyed me in the article was more the emphasis on psychiatric over physiological treatment for Long COVID. Having dealt with attempts to fix physiological problems with pure psychological (including CBT/âdog trainerâ) approaches Iâm quite ready to throw a hard glare and raised eyebrow in the direction of practitioners who advocate it. I freely acknowledge thereâs some personal contempt at playâŠ
Good historical context.
Airborne or not, we have known a great deal about what causes Covid fatalities since the earliest days of the pandemic. Being Black or Latino in America put you at greater risk of dying, and being Native American was most deadly of all. Race was not the only nonmedical condition comorbid with severe Covid. So was not having insurance, not having attended college, being poor, and simply living in a state that allowed its eviction ban to expire. The inequalities that float through our lives like a noxious mist have proved as murderous as the virus itself. But which public health official dares discuss the pandemic in the context of racial and economic violence? The Biden administration, even more definitively than Trumpâs, has abandoned all interventions save vaccination, which itself has been cast in moralizing terms. (For Americans, that is. The rest of the world is on its own.) Responsibility for survival once again falls on each of us. As CDC director Rochelle Walensky put it on Twitter, âYour health is in your hands.â
Months have passed since the WHO and CDC conceded that Covid spreads via aerosols. But the broader implications of airborne transmission have been effectively kept at bay. An airborne pandemic demands a more comprehensive response than providing HVAC filters and N95 masks for all, or updating building codes to improve air flow, not that anyone is doing that. It means letting the collectivity back in, allowing our relationship to place, and to each other, back into our understanding of health and disease. Perhaps first of all, it means accepting that we were sick long before Covid hit. Our recovery, if it is not to be just another illness, will have to begin with the acknowledgment that our destinies are shared, like the air we have no choice but to breathe.
As a personal example, my brain fog from cancer treatment was so bad that I had to stop going to meetings (this was before the pandemic) so as not to expose how mentally compromised I was. I chose to switch ongoing medications to something slightly less effective because I literally couldnât work â all brain work, no brawn â anymore.
I think it is encouraging that we are now recognizing that mental damage is as big a medical concern as physical damage. Unfortunately, weâre recognizing that within the context of a pandemic that causes damage to every part of a humanâs brain and body, to varying degrees.
