ButtBidet

Note from me: this article is a plain text summary of a this peer reviewed study.

Article text below

The prevalence of long COVID symptoms among adult patients was found to be relatively high 2 years following index COVID-19 infection, with female sex, obesity, and severity of initial infection identified as predictors for the emergence of common symptom clusters. These study findings were published in the Journal of Infection.

Researchers conducted a follow-up survey of patients who participated in a population-based, longitudinal, observational study of Long COVID symptom prevalence that was conducted in southwestern Germany in 2021. The researchers aimed to describe the symptom burden and associated impairment of long COVID 2 years after index SARS-CoV-2 infection. All patients who completed the survey initially tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 between 6 and 12 months prior to study enrollment. The follow-up survey included questions about COVID-19 reinfection, vaccination history, general health and working capacity, and health-related quality of life (HRQOL). A Poisson regression model was employed for statistical analysis.

A total of 6635 patients completed the follow-up survey, of whom the mean [SD] age was 45.8 [13.4] years, and 60.9% were women. The median time between index SARS-CoV-2 infection and the first survey was 8.7 months, and the median time to the follow-up survey was 23.9 months. In regard to index infections, 76.3% of patients reported mild disease severity, 3.7% required hospital admission, and 0.9% required intensive care unit admission. Nearly half (47.5%) of the population experienced at least 1 secondary COVID-19 infection, and 86.8% had received multiple COVID-19 vaccine doses. [A] considerable portion of symptoms newly emerged, of which only few could be attributed to reported SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.

Overall, 29.9% of patients met criteria for long COVID at the time of the first survey, which increased to 31.2% at the follow-up survey. Of patients who reported long COVID symptoms on the first survey, 8.8% recovered by the follow-up survey, but 10.2% reported emerging long COVID symptoms.

Predictors of emerging long COVID included female sex, lower education level, index infection severity, smoking, obesity, and underlying comorbidities. The researchers noted no association between COVID-19 reinfection and emerging long COVID.

At the individual symptom level, only 9 of 30 symptoms assessed for the study showed a net decrease in reported frequency between the first survey and follow-up survey:

Altered taste (from 17.9% to 12.2%);
Altered smell (from 23.2% to 15.8%);
Shortness of breath (from 32.1% to 29.6%);
Chronic fatigue (from 28.1% to 26.3%); and,
Rapid physical exhaustion (from 37.7% to 35.1%).

In contrast, there was a net increase in the reported frequency of cough (from 13.3% to 24.0%) and sore throat (from 8.6% to 19.7%) over the same period.

The researchers noted that the frequency of some common symptom clusters, including fatigue, neurocognitive impairment, and chest symptoms, remained relatively stable from the first survey to the follow-up survey.

Positive predictors for the emergence of any long COVID symptom cluster were female sex (relative risk [RR] range, 1.25-1.62) and treatment required (proxy for disease severity) for the acute index infection (RR range,1.47-1.83). Positive and negative predictors for the emergence of most symptom clusters included obesity and higher education level, respectively. The only significant positive predictor for the emergence of chest symptoms was secondary COVID-19 infection.

Further analysis indicated smell and taste disorders had the highest probability (59%) of resolution within the 2 years following the index infection. In patients affected by multiple symptom clusters, the resolution of 1 symptom cluster increased the likelihood of further resolution. Patients who reported sleep disorders or symptoms of anxiety or depression exhibited the highest risk for the emergence of any symptom cluster, whereas those who reported smell and taste disorders exhibited the lowest risk.

Limitations of this study include the lack of data on infections other than COVID-19, the relatively low completion rate for the follow-up survey (61.4%), and the lack of generalizability to older and younger populations due to the focus on working-aged adults.

According to the researchers, “[A] considerable portion of symptoms newly emerged, of which only few could be attributed to reported SARS-CoV-2 reinfection.”

Me in the 2020s: woke is ruining everything! cancel culture! what's with all the pronouns!?! masks are the the number one threat to freedom!

Also my wife is 20.

My good friend is really cool. He's basically a super nerd scientist guy. Despite having a ton of knowledge, he's humble af, I've known him for years before I knew how high his educational qualifications go.

My friend just married someone with a nice job and a bougie family. I'm happy for my friend, I couldn't give a fuck if all her convos revolve around past holidays, resorts, and pricey drinks. My friend is happy and and he feels secure with this woman, and I'm glad that things are going well for him.

My friend and his wife keep trying to organise double dates. I guess it feels natural, to bring us into the wider family. But what happens is that the men and women separate and have their own conversations. My gf finds this woman boring af, bragging about all the countries she's traveled and nice places she's been isn't really interesting. I wonder if posh people are so used to talking to service workers and underlings who are required by their job to please them, that they have no idea how fucking boring they are.

link

I'm as progressive a drumpf hater as they come. I feel for all those be oppressed by the new presidency. But I was talking to someone from .ml today. Just because I rent out several properties, they called me a land-leach and hoped that a Maoist revolution would sweep my income away. This is intolerable.

Fellow no kings brethren, what is to be done about the auth left????

They don't, btw.

The war in Afghanistan was a good thing. My business got so many orders that it allowed me to retire early.

Article text below

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins have expressed interest in letting H5N1 outbreaks spread unchecked through U.S. poultry farms. Health experts warn it could lead to a new pandemic.

High-ranking federal officials have suggested that bird flu virus should be left to "rip" through poultry farms across the U.S. — but experts warn that this hands-off approach could hasten the beginning of a new pandemic

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services, and Brooke Rollins, secretary of Agriculture, have floated the notion that instead of culling birds infected with the highly pathogenic H5N1 virus, farmers should let it spread through flocks. The idea is that by doing this, farmers can "identify the birds, and preserve the birds, that are immune to it," Kennedy told Fox News on March 11.

Now, a perspective piece authored by a group of virologists, veterinarians and health security experts argues that the plan would not only be ineffective, but could also increase the risk of the virus spilling over into humans and sparking a new pandemic. The researchers published their arguments July 3 in the journal Science.

"Essentially, the longer you allow a virus that has shown to be effective in infecting multiple hosts survive in an environment, the greater the chance you give it to spread, to mutate, and to try its luck at adaptation," perspective first-author Erin Sorrell, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told Live Science. "Worse case scenario, the virus adapts and expands its host range to become transmissible in humans … Now we have a pandemic." Bird flu in the U.S.

H5N1 is a subtype of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), a type of bird flu that can cause severe disease and death in poultry and other birds. Since the virus began spreading widely among U.S. birds in January 2022, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has reported that more than 174 million birds across all 50 states have been infected with the disease. The virus’s transmission among wild aquatic birds, commercial poultry and backyard, hobbyist flocks, has led to massive culls in farms and sent egg prices skyrocketing.

The virus typically transmits among wild birds and poultry, but it's known to have also infected more than 48 mammal species, including foxes, skunks, raccoons, seals and polar bears. It has also spread to dairy cattle, causing outbreaks in more than 1,000 herds across 17 U.S. states, according to current estimates.

Isolated human cases have been reported amid the ongoing outbreak in animals, primarily among farm workers, according to the CDC, although the agency states that the current health risk to the general public remains low. This is because, while the disease can spread among different animals, it currently can't be passed from human to human. Federal plans

Rollins recently issued updates about the U.S. government's plan to combat the infection's spread and lower egg prices. The five-pronged strategy denotes $500 million to improve farm biosecurity, $400 million in financial aid to farmers and $100 million for vaccine research. The government is also exploring ways to slash regulations and increase temporary import options for eggs.

Current regulations state that when infections are detected among commercial poultry, farmers must cull the affected flocks to contain the disease's spread, for which they are financially compensated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Yet suggestions made by officials for more radical ways to manage bird flu have left experts concerned. In May, Kennedy and Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, voiced their support for the owners of a Canadian ostrich farm whose 398 birds faced a cull following confirmed cases of H5N1 bird flu in December 2024 and January this year.

"We believe significant scientific knowledge may be garnered from following the ostriches in a controlled environment," Kennedy wrote in a letter posted to the social platform X and addressed to the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, which had ordered the cull. Kennedy suggested that the ostriches may have already acquired some "downstream immunity" to the virus, and Oz offered to relocate the birds to his Florida ranch for further study.

Sorrel told Live Science that these statements imply "there is still an expectation that those in the Trump administration, at least on the human health side, believe this approach has merit."

But Sorrel and her report collaborators disagree.

Allowing widespread infection of commercial flocks would kill billions of birds, drive poultry and egg prices up, as well as destabilize local economies and global trade through import restrictions imposed on U.S. products, the authors wrote. Simultaneously, it could also foster reservoirs of H5N1, increasing the virus' odds of making the leap to humans — and gaining the ability for human-to-human infection.

"Rapid culling of [H5N1] positive flocks is central to containment of the virus on a farm," Sorrel said. "Poultry infected with H5 shed a tremendous amount of virus. If effective controls designed to mitigate the quantity of viral shedding and known transmission pathways are removed, the exposure risk for other animals and humans on site and on neighboring farms will increase, and the opportunity for H5 to evolve to be a more effective poultry pathogen increases."

Kennedy's proposal is also very unlikely to work the way he's claimed it would — the birds that provide eggs and meat on farms are descendants of separate breeding populations and do not breed themselves. So even if there were a population of resilient birds that survived H5N1 infection, that doesn't mean they're passing on their genetic traits to a subsequent generation.

What's more, the mortality rate of H5N1 is extremely high among common poultry, reaching 100% in domestic chickens. What experts propose

Instead of letting bird flu tear through farms, the scientists propose that government agencies should enhance surveillance of the virus' spread, along with improving data sharing and outbreak response measures shared between poultry producers, industry members and veterinarians. The USDA should not work alone on these measures, Sorrel said, as "interdisciplinary teams need to have the authority and means by which to activate at the state and federal levels."

Other experts agree with the team's suggestions, although they highlighted areas that need further discussion. Dr. Rocio Crespo, a poultry veterinarian at the North Carolina State University College of Veterinary Medicine, told Live Science that further details on potential vaccine strategies and biosecurity at farms should be explored.

But the USDA is now facing billions of dollars in federal funding cuts, and Crespo says that providing economic support to farmers facing outbreaks — alongside making investments to understand bird flu evolution, preventive measures and control methods — could become increasingly difficult.

"The current policies on poultry farms are effective at preventing spread to other farms," Crespo told Live Science. "However, the USDA's approach does not consider spill over and influences from other crop or animal agricultural activities."

"It appears we are continuing with the same strategies without sufficient improvement," she added. "Greater transparency and collaboration is crucial."

I’ve been sick for 11 days with COVID. Day 1-6 was fever, razor blade sore throat, fatigue etc… Symptoms improved after that but I still have fatigue, a nasty cough and congestion plus hoarse voice. Has anyone been sick this long?

I'm 9 days in and I think I will recover within a week. I still have some symptoms but I hope they will be gone in the coming week.

Hey all ive had long covid for 4.5 years.

since my reinfection, my bladder is giving me constant urgency.

I have lost my sense of taste due to having covid. Will I ever get it back

When I had COVID last year, I completely lost my sense of taste and smell. I literally couldn't taste or smell ANYTHING! It took about six months to start coming back!

I hope my heart doesn't do the add 20-60+bpm thing it did last time which had just finally started to subside a few months ago

First time with Covid-? Day 11 still testing positive and feeling worse

I was infected with Corona a month and a half ago. Its symptoms were severe: fever, fatigue, heartburn, excessive sleep, and loss of smell and taste. It lasted for more than two weeks. Recently, I have been feeling extremely exhausted, lack of sleep, and my depression and anxiety have worsened to an uncontrollable level. I feel tired and exhausted like I have never felt before in my life. In fact, it has reached the point of thinking about resigning from work.

Yes I was saying last week that libs were getting to me and I was wondering if people still get long covid in 2025. Granted research is always well behind the fact, but I'm sure that people are still getting long term symptoms.

I'm aware that "occasionally" is a relative term and there does exist some individuals that like to start arguments for clout or drama. If a friend is starting fights with you one or more times a week, they might be shitty, but if it's a few times a year, they might just be a good friend.

To give an example, I've certainly said something borderline bigoted over the years and had a friend mention it to me. Usually it's done tactfully, and usually I take it well, but sometimes it's not. Every single time I'm a bit sad and internally defensive. But that shit passes and I grow from the experience. Someone had to tell me because it wasn't explained to me on school. But imagine the alternative: having the same bad habits and slurs from when we were 12. I'm legitimately grateful for all the comments that have helped me grow today.

I also have this left wing guy friend who has great opinions on economic stuff but still has some bad social views from his upbringing. Randomly he'll ask me about some bullshit that's popped up in this life, and often times I need to mediate some drama he's having. Often I'll need to walk him out of his patriarchal thinking. Thankfully his wife and I are always on the same side, so it's easier than it would be if it's just a random guy. It's cool to see him grow. And honestly I'm not bragging because I had many of the same views back in the day.

I can't stress enough, I'm grateful that I'm not mentally the same person I was when I was a teenager. I'm shocked when I meet people from my childhood that are still dropping slurs and bad tropes like it was 1996. I just assume that all their relationships are like in the The Sopranos, because I can barely tolerate being around them.

I do feel that even the most debate bro leftist is still light years ahead of libs and chuds in this matter. I can drop 20 peer reviewed studies and draw a map and normies will not budge their opinion even the tiniest amounts. I don't feel like anyone here needs this advice.

You're also showing your anti-white racism. I WILL report you to the mods.