- A new report found that Long COVID may cost OECD international economies over $135 billion per year over the next decade. And even this number may be an undercount, the authors stated. The study covers 38 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Authors of the report stated that disability supports for people with Long COVID are key and that prevention of the disease is paramount. Still, they failed to mention any prevention efforts beyond vaccination, ignoring masking and clean air infrastructure. “The virus continues, and will continue, to weigh on societies and economies for years to come,” one of the study’s coordinators told the Financial Times.
- Long COVID is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, a new study in The Lancet found. Conducted in Sweden, the study included the electronic healthcare records of 1.2 million people and found that nearly 1% had a diagnosis for the disease. Still, the authors acknowledge this may be a significant undercount. The researchers did not include people who had been hospitalized with COVID-19. They found that women with Long COVID diagnoses were about twice as likely to have cardiac problems — including arrhythmias, heart failure, and coronary artery disease — as women in the control group. The rate of these heart diseases for men with Long COVID was about 1.3 times higher than men in the control group.
- A small study identified persistent immune dysregulation and coagulation in people with post-vaccine syndrome (PVS) from COVID-19 vaccines. The study, published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology, compared the blood of 14 people with PVS to 16 healthy controls. They found “protein-level changes linked to persistent inflammation, coagulopathy [issues with blood clotting], and contributing to immune dysregulation.” The authors concluded that some of the alterations overlapped with Long COVID, but that specific proteins may provide molecular differences between PVS and Long COVID.
