We’re now at 40 new cases per 100K population per day. That’s up 20% in the past seven days. No clue whether or not that’s the start of a trend, but it’s definitely different from the past seven weeks.
Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts: Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 7/15/2022, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.” The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html
Still no end in sight for rising hospitalizations. The most recent number from the CDC is 5850 new hospitalizations a day, up another hundred from yesterday. So, we are slowly closing in on 6000 per day. I still have no way to reconcile that rising hospitalization number with the flat case and death count.
Long Covid Study
You (probably don’t) recall that I reviewed what evidence there was regarding “long COVID” and decided that it just wasn’t a threat worth worrying about. That’s Post #1524, Finally cracking the numbers on the supposedly vast number of long COVID cases, Posted on May 31, 2022.
I don’t doubt that long COVID exists. Heck, long flu is known to exist. What I doubt is that serious long COVID is extremely common, as many studies (and associated screaming headlines) have implied.
It’s nowhere near as common or commonly serious as implied because a) the overwhelming majority of those with long COVID only report vague non-life-threatening symptoms (fatigue, anxiety), b) there’s typically no control group, so you don’t know what fraction of just-everybody-on-the-street would report the same thing, and c) upon examination, some key studies actually turn out not to be studies of individuals with COVID, but studies of individuals who ended up hospitalized for COVID.
That makes the preliminary results from a new CDC study kind of interesting.
I say “new”, because I just stumbled across it on the CDC COVID data tracker. It has actually being going on for more than a year and a half now. I strongly suspect that the reason I haven’t heard about it before is that it isn’t showing some huge-and-spectacular prevalence of long COVID.
This is a prospective study funded by CDC, taking individuals who had COVID-19 symptoms, got tested for COVID, and then either did or didn’t test positive. The CDC then tracks the presence of serious symptoms for months afterwards, contrasting the rate of such symptoms among those with and (presumably) without COVID-19.
You can find the CDC writeup on this CDC web page, along with links to all the detail.
But here’s my quick takeaway. Look at the two charts below, and focus on the orange bars. That’s the fraction of individuals who still have some type of symptom (within each group of symptoms) one year after they either did or didn’t have COVID-19.
Source: Adapted from CDC COVID data tracker.
So, top graph or bottom graph? Which group is the one that had COVID? Which group is the one that didn’t have COVID?
At the minimum, it’s damned hard to guess, isn’t it? This, by itself, tells you that tales of common and severe long COVID are nonsense. Long COVID surely exists, but it’s not the omnipresent menace that has been pushed by the popular press. If it were, the COVID chart would clearly show higher rates of symptoms one year out.
In fact, for a truly randomly chosen individual — the only criterion here is that they felt sick enough to ask for a test — it’s hard to tell the rate of long-term symptoms in the COVID population from the rate of symptoms in a population that didn’t have COVID.
The only visual clue above is the blue bars — the rate of symptoms at the time they asked for a test. The COVID population is the one with the extra-long blue bars. They did, in fact, on average, feel worse at time of testing than did the population that turned out not to have COVID.
I’m sticking with my earlier conclusion. I’m just not going to worry about long COVID. I worry (maybe) about getting a case so severe I’d get hospitalized. Which, in and of itself, would greatly increase my odds of some long-term symptoms.
But just your garden-variety infection, not requiring medical intervention? I just don’t think the odds of having debilitating symptoms, from that, are high enough to add materially to my overall risk from COVID.
