New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
The recent COVID-19 news
Q: What’s going on with COVID-19 these days? Half of the news sounds good, half bad.
Gene W., Annapolis, Maryland A: The past two years have been a tutorial in how science evolves and how “doing the best we can, until we learn more” can cause a lot of confusion. Fortunately, we know a whole lot more now about COVID-19 than we did even a year ago.
Fact 1: Vaccinations and boosters work. Looking at information on 192,000 people from January 2021 to April
2022, researchers found that monthly COVID-19-associated hospitalizations were 3.5 to 17.7 times higher in unvaccinated people than vaccinated people (with or without boosters). From January to April 2022, when the Omicron variant was the major troublemaker, hospitalization rates were 10.5 times higher in unvaccinated people and
2.5 times higher in vaccinated persons with no booster, than in vaccinated and boosted folks.
Fact 2: Asymptomatic COVID-19 may be common. A small study (210 participants) in JAMA Open Network found that 56% of people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the winter Omicron surge didn’t know they had the virus. That’s why if you have the sniffles or a sore throat you should be tested. You can easily spread the virus unknowingly.
Fact 3: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says long COVID-19 affects 20% of those infected. A study in The Lancet looked at almost 1.3 million health records and found that even two years after infection, folks are at increased risk for dementia, psychotic disorders and epilepsy or seizures. Another study found that 329 days after infection, 57% of folks with no history of heart disease who got mild COVID-19 ended up with inflammation-related heart problems.
Fact 4: There’s good news: Israeli researchers found that two antibodies isolated from the immune system of recovered COVID-19 patients are effective in neutralizing the Omicron strain 92% and 84% of the time and the Delta strain, 90% and 97%. If long COVID-19 becomes less of an issue, this antibody may make repeated booster vaccinations unnecessary.