Now let's look at, is my group the one with more neurocognitive issues or more fatigue?
Chief Long-Term COVID-19 Officer Speaks on Day 1625 of the Pandemic
When I first came up with the idea for the Coronavirus Morning Briefing (and later the Coronavirus Daily Briefing) in January 2020, everything about SARS-CoV-2 was new, fairly unfamiliar, and rarely could be presented to the public in a way that a high school student or even a college graduate could understand, let alone a PhD or physician.
I decided to combine what I write for several Accura Media Group publications, such as Traveler and Business Traveler, into a daily newsletter, a concise monitoring system with easy-to-understand statistics, available for an upfront three-month subscription. After all, this was still just a curiosity, not even an epidemic, let alone a pandemic, and it couldn’t last much longer… or could.
We are just a few months into the sixth year of the coronavirus pandemic, and much of the world is facing its worst summer wave of cases in this time. Everyone seems to know not one or two, but many people who have been infected with the coronavirus. While much of the world is viewing the pandemic only in the rearview mirror, high-quality face masks are becoming popular again.
In the history of this book, I mentioned that the epidemic is not over until the fat lady sings, a statement that is often understood to refer to the usually large opera soprano. Imagery from Wagner’s opera The Ring of the Nibelung and its final section, Ragnarok, particularly the farewell scene of the Valkyrie Brunhilde, which lasts about 20 minutes and leads directly to the finale of the entire Ring series, illustrates this point, because Ragnarok is about the end of the world, and the world does not really end until the fat lady sings.
Or, as Yogi Berra, one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, player-manager of the New York Mets and New York Yankees, and a man known for his misnomers, put it, “[I]It’s not over until the end.”
[Editor’s Note: Berra once both confirmed and denied his entire reputation, telling reporters “I really didn’t say everything I said.”
Nonetheless, there’s less overall to write about so that’s why the Long Covid Monitor cum Coronavirus Daily News Brief will be published weekly on Thursdays.
We will have the same features and writers you’ve come to love and we will include information about other viruses and conditions that are relevant to today. We will be scaling down out statistics, but that’s only because there are far fewer stats available than ever.
In news we cover today, new research looks at Long Covid in children 17 years of age and under, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration green lighted the 2024-2025 coronavirus vaccine, and Pfizer and BioNTech have encountered issues with their combo Covid-influenza jab.
LONG COVID
An NIH-funded study found that Long Covid affects adolescents differently than younger children. The study, published in the journal JAMA on August 21, 2024, found that U.S. youth have symptoms that differ and cluster into distinct presentations by age-group.
The Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER)-Pediatrics Group Authors conducted an observational study that looked at 5,376 children aged 6 to 17 years who tested positive or negative for SARS-CoV-2 at 60 U.S. healthcare and community settings in the period March 2022 to December 2023.
The youth were categorized into two age-groups – 6 to 11 and 12 to 17 years – and asked about the presence of 89 Long-Covid symptoms in nine domains. The median time between the first SARS-CoV-2 infection and the symptom survey was 506 days for younger children and 556 for adolescents.
In the younger group, pain and neurocognitive and gastrointestinal symptoms dominated the index, while abnormal smell or taste, pain, and fatigue were far more prominent in adolescents.
UNITED STATES
The Food and Drug Administration granted approval on Thursday for updated fall 2024 coronavirus vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that are designed to combat newer variants of the coronavirus.
“Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved and granted emergency use authorization for updated mRNA COVID-19 vaccines (2024-2025 formula) to include a monovalent component that corresponds to the Omicron variant KP.2 strain of SARS-CoV-2,” the agency said in a statement. “The mRNA Covid-19 vaccines have been updated with this formula to more closely target currently circulating variants and provide better protection against serious consequences of COVID-19, including hospitalization and death,” the FDA added, a sentiment echoed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Distribution of these vaccines is expected to commence within days, and doses should reach pharmacies around the country around Labor Day.
The FDA has yet to approve a protein-based vaccine from Novavax that targets a slightly different subvariant but its approval is expected shortly.
The Summer 2024 Covid wave continues unabated and that is likely to have been a key factor in why the FDA is releasing the latest vaccines a bit earlier than usual.
Last year, the agency gave the green light for the 2023–24 Covid jabs on September 11, close to the peak of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in that year’s summer wave. Meanwhile, the 2025 summer wave began noticeably earlier and, by some metrics, is peaking at much higher levels than in previous years.
Partners Pfizer and BioNTech disclosed within the past few days a setback in the development of a vaccine that protects against both influenza and SARS-CoV-2. The two failed to clear the Phase 3 clinical trial hurdle: The trial revealed that the immune response elicited by the combo shot against influenza B, a less common form of the flu virus, was weaker than those from the licensed flu shot
The news does, however, clear the field for Moderna, which is working on its own combo shot that it will launch in 2025.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
GLOBAL FIGURES AT A GLANCE
The number of coronavirus cases across the globe as of August 1, 2024 stands at 775,867,547, an increase of over 47,169 people in the prior 7 days, according to data compiled by KFF, a non-partisan health research organization.
The death toll stands at 7,057,145, an increase of 815 in the same period.
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending August 10, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on August 15 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 18.1%, an increase of 0.6 percentage points in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 2.5%, a decrease of 0.1 percentage points.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 is now 3.3 per 100,000 members of the population, up from 3.2.
Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 1.6, a figure that is up 0.3 percentage point since the prior week.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine at press time, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.58 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and the seven-day-average of the number of daily doses of vaccine administrated was
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Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this issue.
The Long Covid Monitor is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
If you have Long Covid and need to talk to someone, call the Long Covid Patient Peer Counseling Phone Line, or HOPELINE. The HOPELINE is our free, confidential support and information service.
☏ 844 LONGCOV (844 566-4268)
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
