Very interesting This Week in Virology podcast this last weekend on Covid. Dr. Daniel Griffin and Dr. Vincent Racaniello were noting that the increase in Covid is anomalous compared with last year. Waste water viral activity, Griffin noted, was 'way past' last Summer's peak and looked like it was heading towards last Winter's peak. That's concerning because last Winter was a peak.
Racaniello noted that last year there was a December peak, a September peak, but this year it's a July peak. To which Griffin noted that we might not have hit the peak and it's rising earlier and above where it was last year.
His rationale for this? Flu as he said is a Winter virus. With Covid we've a pattern of surges and the activity never goes down. And as Racanello said the only pattern is Summer and Winter, and the consensus was it doesn't go away.
Anecdotally it's fair to say there's a lot of Covid about, a lot more Covid than was true three or four months. Actually it's not just anecdotally. Here in Ireland this has been evident since June and as noted previously yours truly caught it - thankfully a mild dose, thank you vaccine. Though a few not so lovely very minor infections afterwards presumably due to the immune system being lowered by the main infection. Yeah, the blepharitis, that was a real laugh.
They were also interesting discussion about research on recurrent infection with respect to this article here in Nature.
A troubling conclusion:
In a large patient cohort, we find that the severity of reinfection appears to be associated with the severity of initial infection and that Long COVID diagnoses appear to occur more often following initial infection than reinfection in the same epoch. Future research may build on these findings to better understand COVID-19 reinfections.
And in what they term a Plain Language Summary:
More than three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals are frequently reporting multiple COVID-19 infections. However, these reinfections remain poorly understood. Here, we investigate COVID-19 reinfections in a large electronic health record cohort of over 3 million patients. We use data summary techniques and statistical tests to characterize reinfections and their relationships with disease severity, biomarkers, and Long COVID. We find that individuals with severe initial infection are more likely to experience severe reinfection, that some protein levels are lower, leading to reinfection, and that a lower proportion of individuals are diagnosed with Long COVID following reinfection than initial infection. Our work highlights the prevalence and impact of reinfections and suggests the need for further research.
Is that due to underlying issues that weaken people so that first infection hits someone who is already in trouble and therefore they are already likely to wind up in worse straits further down the line? Interesting to re the point about Long COVID. Still, rather soberingly they made the point that these are general findings - that individuals may have a relatively mild first dose and then much worse doses subsequently. And of course general health no doubt has an impact too. Still, every bit of research helps.
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