#covid in india

[atavist]

Two women promised they would see the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time once they were together. They had no idea how long that would take—bureaucracy, bigotry, and the pandemic stood in their way.

“Love, Interrupted,” Atavist issue no. 154, is now live:

Now 1,100 miles apart, the two women texted and called each other incessantly. Shree wanted more. She knew that Ashwini was on the cusp of an arranged marriage, which had already cost Shree one relationship. “I like you,” she told Ashwini after a few weeks. “But if it’s a no, that’s fine. We should stop talking right now.”

Ashwini wasn’t sure what to do. She knew the risks she faced: Walking away from an arranged marriage would almost certainly require coming out to her parents, and once her orientation was no longer a secret, who knew what kind of condemnation or rejection she might face—personal, professional, or otherwise? Plus, she would have to learn to accept herself for who she was. The alternative, however, was a life without Shree.

A few days after Ashwini’s 30th birthday, she video-called Shree. Looking at Shree’s face, she knew that she was ready to make the leap. Ashwini asked Shree to be her girlfriend.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)

31/10/2024

[fadingfoxwasteland]

Takeaways from the sentencing hearing of Donald Trump

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[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

Another great reason to keep masking: We don't even have a good treatment for long covid yet, and many doctors know simply nothing about the condition.

Global efforts to understand and manage long Covid post-pandemic, with varied symptoms and limited treatment guidelines worldwide

Doctors in India are grappling to diagnose and treat unexplained and persistent symptoms of long Covid patients due to limited guidelines, whereas researchers have flagged inadequate studies on the condition.

With the World Health Organization declaring an end to COVID-19 as a global health emergency in May last year, focused efforts are underway around the world to estimate the burden of long Covid among the population.

The condition refers to the set of lingering symptoms affecting varied body parts and persisting well beyond the acute Covid infection period, including cough, muscle and joint pain, fatigue, brain fog and difficulty in focusing. The viral disease is caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

While studies have suggested that about a third of those moderately or severely infected are likely to suffer from long Covid, region-wise though, incidence could vary.

A study by researchers, including those from Harvard Medical School, U.S., estimated that 31% of the once-infected people in North America, 44% in Europe, and 51% in Asia, have long Covid, which is “challenging the healthcare system, but there are limited guidelines for its treatment”. It was published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases in September.

In India, however, studies on long Covid are few and far between.

One such study by Maulana Azad Medical College in New Delhi, conducted from May 2022 to March 2023 on 553 patients who had recovered from Covid, found that about 45% had lingering symptoms, persistent fatigue and dry cough being the most common.

“There is limited exploratory research on the long Covid syndrome with scarce data on long-term outcomes,” the authors wrote in the study published in the journal Cureus in May this year.

Understanding the long-term effects of the virus is important for developing management strategies, optimising healthcare delivery, and providing support to recovered Covid patients in the community, they said.

Dr Rajesh Sagar, Professor of Psychiatry, All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, said, “Looking at the current state of long Covid studies in India, it is too premature to say that we understand the condition well enough to know how to diagnose or treat it.”

Animesh Samanta, assistant professor at School of Natural Sciences in Shiv Nadar University, Greater Noida, said, “While studies in India highlight the growing recognition of neurological complications in long Covid patients, more focused research on neuroinflammation is needed.”

Doctors, too, have reported a rise in patients complaining of symptoms that they did not have pre-Covid. “People who never had asthma in the past, post-Covid, with every viral infection, they get a long cough, shortness of breath and wheezing, which require the use of inhalers or nebuliser,” senior consultant Dr. Neetu Jain, who runs a post-Covid care clinic at Pushpawati Singhania Hospital and Research Institute, New Delhi, said.

Dr. Arun Garg, chairman, Neurology and Neurosciences, Medanta-The Medicity, Gurugram, said that he was noticing a spike in stroke cases among young patients not suffering from known risk factors such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity.

“Similarly, we are seeing more cases of encephalopathy (swelling of the brain) without reason and having a confused state of mind following one or two days of fever. Their MRI scans show no changes. These patients have increased significantly after Covid,” he said.

In the absence of medical guidelines to diagnose long Covid, doctors are having to resort to broad, non-specific tests and questionnaires to gauge a patient’s ‘quality of life’.

Studies have shown that the fatigue experienced in long Covid is similar to that in cancer patients, with a quality of life similar to patients of Parkinson’s disease.

“We really do not have any test to diagnose long Covid, even though it is definitely a clinical diagnosis. We diagnose long Covid for people who had at least moderate to severe infection, following which they could never regain the quality-of-life pre-Covid. Checking for inflammatory markers like C-reactive proteins (CRP) can support the diagnosis,” Dr. Jain said.

“Other than routine blood tests that measure inflammation, we do antibody tests to look for direct markers. In many of these patients, we are finding rare antibodies which are very new to us and were not there pre-Covid,” Dr. Garg said.

Inflammation persisting despite recovery from acute Covid infection is thought to lie at the heart of long Covid. However, tests to measure this specific immune response are lacking, even as researchers have been working in this direction worldwide.

One such effort comes from Shiv Nadar University, where a team led by Mr. Samanta has developed a fluorescent probe capable of detecting inflammation in brain cells that can arise due to Covid infection.

The probe measures nitric oxide levels in brain cells, especially in human microglia cells, where increased NO levels are linked to the SARS-CoV-2 infection. Microglia are immune cells in the brain that fight disease and help maintain brain health.

Lysosomes within microglia, which help clear foreign disease-causing agents like the SARS-CoV-2 virus, produce nitric oxide as part of an immune response to infection. The probe detects nitric oxide produced in lysosomes in response to infection and thereby allows for a measurement of inflammation levels.

This examination method can provide “qualitative information on infection status”, said Mr. Samanta, corresponding author on the study published in the journal Analytical Chemistry in American Chemical Society.

He explained that patients with pre-existing conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease or multiple sclerosis (an autoimmune disorder) could exhibit prolonged neuroinflammation and loss of brain cells following Covid infection.

While the probe has shown efficacy in cell cultures, animal studies would need to be done, before testing it in humans, Mr. Samanta said.

Looking at the World Health Organization International Clinical Trials Registry Platform, the study by Harvard Medical School had found that 587 clinical studies were conducted on long Covid, of which about 53% (312) were testing potential treatments.

Most of these were found to be conducted in the U.S. (58), followed by India (55) and Spain (20). The trials looked at interventions including physical exercise, psychotherapy, and pharmacological ones such as paxlovid and fluvoxamine.

However, “to date, only 11 of these 312 studies have published their results that were not confirmative,” the researchers wrote.

The team called for studies to look into sleep disorders which were rarely included in the registered clinical studies. Further, interventions targeting the biological processes responsible for long Covid are needed but currently lacking, they said.

[nancykhemchandani]

Latest COVID-19 Developments: India's JN-1 Variant Insights

Explore insights into COVID-19, rising cases in India, and the JN-1 variant. Stay informed on preventive measures and vaccination for a healthier future.

[newsalert247]

Savinho and Haaland find answers to Manchester City’s problems at Leicester

[indizombie]

Since early 2020, when India sealed its borders at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, scarcely any Chinese tourists have entered the country. Four years later, even as travel restrictions on visitors from elsewhere in the world have been lifted, the Indian government has not yet reinstated tourist visas for Chinese nationals. The exclusion only goes one way: China issued around a hundred and eighty thousand visas to Indians in 2023…

Joshua Yang, ‘Vacation’s end’, Caravan

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What is White Lung Syndrome?

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[defencecapital]

Indian Navy as a net security guarantor in the South Asian region

By N. C. Bipindra With the changing sea line of communication and the economy’s eastward shift, maritime security has become one of the most substantial economic and human security pillars. Since the 2004 tsunami, the Indian Navy has consistently proven itself as the first responder to any crisis in the Indian Ocean region, showcasing its readiness and reliability in such…

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Dont be racist, homophobic, transphobic

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Tenet (2020, Christopher Nolan)

21/11/2024

[reasonsforhope]

India was able to save more than 3.4 million lives by undertaking a nationwide Covid-19 vaccination campaign at an unprecedented scale, according to a Stanford University report.

The campaign also yielded a positive economic impact by preventing a loss of $18.3 billion, the working paper by Stanford University and Institute for Competitiveness titled 'Healing the Economy: Estimating the Economic Impact on India's Vaccination and Related Issues' released by Union health minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Friday suggested.

According to the Stanford report, the direct and total impact of vaccination varied from about $ 1.03 billion to $ 2.58 billion if minimum wages are considered within the age distribution category.

“The same, however, varied from about $3.49 billion to $ 8.7 billion if GDP per person employed (constant) is considered. The cumulative lifetime earnings of the lives saved through vaccination (in the working age group) rolled up to $ 21.5 billion. Moreover, since vaccination also saved the lives of the elderly, this indirectly helped prevent the health infrastructure from getting overwhelmed and thereby allowing for a more judicious use of the existing health infrastructure,” the report suggested.

Mandaviya said much before Covid-19 was declared a public health emergency by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in January 2020, processes and structures to focus dedicatedly on various facets of the pandemic management were put in place...

The Stanford working paper refers to a Lancet modelling study which estimated that in India around 3.4 million deaths were prevented by vaccination in the year 2021, an estimate based on officially reported deaths in India.

The paper also highlighted the impact of the lockdown and referred to the health ministry’s statistical analysis that the Covid-19 tally could have reached about two lakh (0.2 million) without lockdown by April 11, 2020.

Due to lockdown measures, the actual cases only went up to about 7,500 by April 11, 2020, making a case for the lockdown stronger."

-via Times of India, 2/25/23

[evermoredeluxe]

it literally makes me so sad that my best friend lives in not just another country, but another continent. like i used to go over to her house every day and now i haven’t seen her in almost 2 years

[whatshappeningintheworlds-blog]

Politico notes that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen talked about the possible dangers of TikTok during a debate this evening in Maastricht with the front-runners for the EU's 2024 election. Considering the example set by the US, where TikTok faces a national ban unless sold by its parent firm, ByteDance, she did not rule out an EU ban.

Von von Leyen emphasized the apparent risks by pointing out that the European Commission was the first global organization to forbid TikTok on business phones. "We know exactly the danger of TikTok," she continued.

The EU is presently looking into the app for potential legal violations, including a program that gives users gift cards in exchange for watching videos, which might be against EU laws prohibiting features that make apps more addictive for young users.