Tue, 10 Sep 2024 12:56:19 +1000
Andrew Pam <xanni [at] glasswings.com.au>
<https://fortune.com/well/article/long-covid-cost-1-trillion-treatment-cure/>
"For months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to
forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that
is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into
overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for
some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over
and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the
Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System
and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if
emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply
this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top
researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an
estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely
conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to
1% of the global economy.
Moreover, the risk of a person being hit with long COVID rises with repeated
infections of the virus itself, and recent COVID activity has experts watching
closely. As review co-author Eric Topol noted in a recent blog post, the
current COVID incursion is ramping up quickly, with one modeler estimating
900,000 new infections per day in the U.S. alone.
“The new significant wave,” Topol said via X. “It’s hard to believe the we are
well into our fifth year of this virus and not taking the requisite steps to
gain control.”"
Via Violet Blue’s Pandemic Roundup: August 15, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-110132360
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
"For months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to
forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that
is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into
overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for
some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over
and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the
Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System
and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if
emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply
this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top
researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an
estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely
conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to
1% of the global economy.
Moreover, the risk of a person being hit with long COVID rises with repeated
infections of the virus itself, and recent COVID activity has experts watching
closely. As review co-author Eric Topol noted in a recent blog post, the
current COVID incursion is ramping up quickly, with one modeler estimating
900,000 new infections per day in the U.S. alone.
“The new significant wave,” Topol said via X. “It’s hard to believe the we are
well into our fifth year of this virus and not taking the requisite steps to
gain control.”"
Via Violet Blue’s Pandemic Roundup: August 15, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-110132360
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
