COVID-19 News and Discussions

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raklian
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Ken_J wrote: Wed Sep 21, 2022 3:48 pm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 140850.htm
Older people who were infected with COVID-19 show a substantially higher risk -- as much as 50% to 80% higher than a control group -- of developing Alzheimer's disease within a year, according to a study of more than 6 million patients 65 and older.
Frightening.
To know is essentially the same as not knowing. The only thing that occurs is the rearrangement of atoms in your brain.
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wjfox
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The study used data from before vaccinations though.
weatheriscool
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RNA-editing tool a fast, sensitive test for COVID-19
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-rna-editi ... ovid-.html
by Rice University
An engineered CRISPR-based method that finds RNA from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, promises to make testing for that and other diseases fast and easy.

Collaborators at Rice University and the University of Connecticut further engineered the RNA-editing CRISPR-Cas13 system to boost their power for detecting minute amounts of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in biological samples without the time-consuming RNA extraction and amplification step necessary in gold-standard PCR testing.

The new platform was highly successful compared to PCR, finding 10 out of 11 positives and no false positives for the virus in tests on clinical samples directly from nasal swabs. The researchers showed their technique finds signs of SARS-CoV-2 in attomolar (10-18) concentrations.

The study led by chemical and biomolecular engineer Xue Sherry Gao at Rice's George R. Brown School of Engineering and postdoctoral researchers Jie Yang of Rice and Yang Song of Connecticut appears in Nature Chemical Biology.
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Canada drops coronavirus rules for travelers
Source: Washington Post

Traveling to Canada is about to get a lot easier. Starting Oct. 1, the country is dropping all coronavirus entry and travel restrictions. That means visitors will no longer be required to show proof of vaccination, get tested, submit health information through an official online site, report symptoms, isolate or quarantine, or wear a mask on planes or trains.

Rules for cruise travelers are also being lifted, meaning passengers won’t need to test negative before boarding a ship, be vaccinated or use the online public health reporting system. Public health authorities said several factors led to the end of pandemic-era rules, including high vaccination rates; low hospitalization and death rates; new vaccine boosters; and models that indicate the country has passed the peak of infections from the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.

“Since the start, our Government has taken the necessary steps to keep Canadians safe in the face of a global pandemic,” Marco Mendicino, minister of public safety, said in a statement. “COVID-19 border measures were always meant to be temporary and we are making adjustments based on the current situation because that’s what Canadians expect.”

The country stopped requiring vaccinated travelers to show proof of a negative test in April, but kept the vaccine mandate in place. Visitors could still be selected for testing upon arrival. Canada follows countries around the world that have ended border restrictions. In Europe, for example, destinations including France, Italy, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Germany dropped entry rules earlier this year. The United States still requires international tourists to be vaccinated.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2 ... gn=wp_main
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Big COVID-19 waves may be coming, new Omicron strains suggest

Emerging subvariants have hit on a combination of mutations that makes them more immune evasive than ever

27 Sep 20225:00 PM

Nearly 3 years into the pandemic, SARS-CoV-2 faces a formidable challenge: finding new ways around the immunity humans have built up through vaccines and countless infections. Worrisome new data show it is up to the challenge. Several new and highly immune-evasive strains of the virus have caught scientists’ attention in recent weeks; one or more may well cause big, new COVID-19 waves this fall and winter.

“We can say with certainty that something is coming. Probably multiple things are coming,” says Cornelius Roemer, who studies viral evolution at the University of Basel. Whether they will also lead to many hospitalizations and deaths is the big question.

“It’s not surprising that we’re seeing changes that yet again help the virus to evade immune responses,” says molecular epidemiologist Emma Hodcroft of the University of Bern, who notes that SARS-CoV-2 faces “the same challenge that things like the common cold and influenza face every year—how to make a comeback.”

The strains that look poised to drive the latest comeback are all subvariants of Omicron, which swept the globe over the past year. Several derived from BA.2, a strain that succeeded the initial BA.1 strain of Omicron but then was itself outcompeted in most places by BA.5, which has dominated in recent months. One of these, BA.2.75.2, seems to be spreading quickly in India, Singapore, and parts of Europe. Other new immune-evading strains have evolved from BA.5, including BQ.1.1, which has been spotted in multiple countries around the globe.

Despite their different origins, several of the new strains have chanced upon a similar combination of mutations to help scale the wall of immunity—a striking example of convergent evolution. They all have changes at half a dozen key points in the viral genome that influence how well neutralizing antibodies from vaccination or previous infection bind to the virus, says evolutionary biologist Jesse Bloom of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center.

https://www.science.org/content/article ... ns-suggest
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erowind
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How many "subvariants" of omicron need to mutate before a new variant is declared? Surely something that can escape established immunity and vaccines counts as a new variant?

(Here again another prime example of manufactured consent. Subvariants don't sound as scary.)
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She Says Her Passion is Teaching. Congress Called Her the Meatpacking Industry’s ‘go-to fixer.’
by Mindy Brashears
September 28, 2022

From the Introduction:
(Investigate Midwest) During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the meatpacking industry mobilized to keep plants open, even as its workers fell ill. It claimed a meat shortage was on the way, and it pushed for legal cover.

Other than Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, perhaps no other person was more central to the (U.S. Departement of Agirculture’s)…effort to keep plants operating than FSIS’s head, Mindy Brashears.

One Tyson Foods executive said, if its plants continued to face pressure to shut down, “we may need to get Mindy involved.” Brashears “hasn’t lost a battle for us,” another industry executive said in an internal email. In short, she was the meat industry’s “go-to fixer,” a Congressional subcommittee concluded in a May report.

Like other top USDA officials, Brashears has remained largely silent about the USDA’s efforts to keep meatpacking plants running. Through his current employer the University of Georgia System, Perdue has declined several opportunities to speak with Investigate Midwest about his time at the USDA.
But in exclusive interviews with Investigate Midwest, Brashears, 52, defended her actions.
Read more here: https://investigatemidwest.org/2022/09 ... to-fixer/
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caltrek
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Long COVID Is Still Raising More Questions Than Answers, Say Researchers
by Isabelle Tourne
October 2, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) Millions of people around the world are believed to suffer from long COVID yet little remains known about the condition – though research has recently proposed several theories for its cause.

Between 10 to 20 percent of people who contract coronavirus are estimated to have long COVID symptoms – most commonly fatigue, breathlessness, and a lack of mental clarity dubbed brain fog – months after recovering from the disease.

The US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) estimates that nearly 145 million people worldwide had at least one of those symptoms in 2020 and 2021.

In Europe alone, 17 million people had a long COVID symptom at least three months after infection during that time, according to IHME modeling for the World Health Organization (WHO) published earlier this month.

These millions "cannot continue to suffer in silence", WHO Europe director Hans Kluge said, calling for the world to act quickly to learn more about the condition.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/long-covi ... searchers
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COVID inquiry 'won't drag on for decades', bereaved families promised
Tuesday 4 October 2022

The head of the COVID inquiry has said one word - "loss" - sums up the pandemic, as she promised bereaved families the investigation into the UK's preparedness and response to the outbreak "would not drag on for decades".

Former Court of Appeal judge Baroness Heather Hallett said those who have suffered will be at the "heart" of the independent public inquiry, and pledged she would conduct a "thorough" and "fair" hearing.

Just before a minute's silence was held for those who lost their lives, she said: "There's one word that sums up the pandemic for so many, and that is the word 'loss'."

She opened the inquiry in London saying she was "determined" that it "would not drag on for decades", but insisted it would still be "as thorough as possible" and that the bereaved would be "properly consulted".

The inquiry would analyse how the pandemic unfolded - and would determine whether the "level of loss was inevitable or whether things could have been done better", she said.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-inquir ... d-12711834
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