More COVID-19 News

It's time to post links to more news about COVID-19. No, the pandemic is not over, the virus keeps mutating in new and unpleasant ways, and cases are increasing after a lull. In my region, cases have tripled in about four weeks.

I'm starting with two posts from Eric Topol's Ground Truths newsletter. 

The Virus is Learning New Tricks and We Humans Keep Falling Behind. "This week the CDC genomic surveillance showed continued rise of the EG.5.1 variant with near doubling over the past couple of weeks, showing significant growth advantage compared to its prevailing XBB variant precursors (such as XBB.1.5, XBB.1.16, XBB.1.9). "

Long Covid: Mitochondria, the Big Miss, and Hope. "This week there was news on Long Covid in two very different directions—emergence of strong data to support mitochondrial dysfunction as the basis for the condition in some people—and learning how the $1.15 billion allocation to the NIH RECOVER initiative has largely been wasted. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review this news and offer a plan to get clinical trials testing treatments into high gear."

SARS-CoV-2 Neutralizing Antibodies Following a Second BA.5 Bivalent Booster. "Our results suggest that a second dose of the BA.5 bivalent booster is not sufficient to broaden antibody responses and to overcome immunological imprinting. A monovalent vaccine targeting only the spike of the recently dominant SARS-CoV-2 may mitigate the back boosting associated with the original antigenic sin."

Multimodal Molecular Imaging Reveals Tissue-Based T Cell Activation and Viral RNA Persistence for Up to 2 Years Following COVID-19. "We identified cellular SARS-CoV-2 RNA in rectosigmoid lamina propria tissue in all these participants, ranging from 158 to 676 days following initial COVID-19 illness, suggesting that tissue viral persistence could be associated with long-term immunological perturbations."

No, Covid can never, ever be 'just a cold.' Here's why. "But if we keep pretending covid is something that it isn't, we're going to end up in ever-deeper trouble as a society." This article makes the best case I've seen for continuing to take precautions against COVID-19. 

Covid Complexities. "The official data on deaths are now lagging by a full year, so while death numbers may look low (about 1500 per year based on the most recent week) the correct numbers will be much higher. Given what we know of the disease, there is no universe in which hospitalizations behave as they have while deaths drop by a factor of ten."