Study advises keeping Covid caution

Three years since it first emerged in China, Covid19 is now background noise as far as many Kiwis and other people around the world are concerned.

However, health experts are still wary there could be a variant twist to come, as scientists find out more about this virus that caused such global disruption.

The Ministry of Health estimates there have been about 1.8 million confirmed cases of the coronavirus in New Zealand. Reinfections are put at about 48,000. Research on the ongoing health impacts of Covid suggests people shouldn’t be complacent. Both infections and reinfections can cause long Covid.

Last week, a study based on information from about half a million United States veterans found that getting Covid more than once doubles the risk of death. The reinfected were three times more likely to be hospitalised than those who had caught the virus once. Repeat infections also boost the odds of problems with the brain, heart, and lungs.

Researchers from Washington University reported in Nature Medicine that the risk appeared to increase with each reinfection. They analysed health records of 443,000 people who had been through a confirmed infection and 41,000 people who were infected at least twice. The results suggest people should still stay aware of risks. People would be wise to keep a few masks handy and to check whether crowded places they want to go into are ventilated.

A New York Times feature also explored medical links to Covid and symptoms of depression — as opposed to general weariness of the pandemic.

People should also keep the situation here in perspective. Covid case-counts in New Zealand are well below the waves of March/April and July/August. Weekly data shows a fairly stable situation, although case numbers are up from September. Cases of Covid on visiting cruise ships attract outsized attention but are small additions to the country’s coronavirus soup.

Experts have argued that better monitoring of Omicron subvariants is needed. Covid-19 modeller Dr Dion O’Neale has said that a lack of surveillance data in the form of an infection prevalence survey, makes it harder to draw conclusions about Covid trends here.

Presently, there’s reason to be positive about the general direction, with subvariants of the Omicron lineage dominating this year, rather than a new variant of concern emerging. The World Health Organisation says the global number of new weekly cases fell by 15 per cent in the week to November 6, compared to the previous week, totaling 2.1 million. Deaths were down by 10 per cent to 9400.

Covid first emerged on a small scale in November 2019. Three years on, there have been 629 million confirmed cases and at least 6.5 million deaths.