It's one study, and it isn't very long follow-up, just two or three months, but this is a very ugly result. German researchers did magnetic resonance imaging of the hearts of 100 people who had recovered from Covid-19. Two thirds of them had not been hospitalized. It turned out that 78% of them had abnormal results indicating inflammation of the heart muscle, and/or reduced cardiac functioning, regardless of the severity of their illness. They don't fully explain how the sample of patients was obtained but they describe them as "unselected," in other words they are assumed to be representative of all patients who have recovered from the disease. The median age was 49, by the way.
It's too soon to know what percentage of people may suffer permanent heart damage from this, but it's pretty clear that some will. Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez is out for the season due to myocarditis as a complication of Covid-19, and here we are talking about a young, healthy, world class athlete. Believe me, you want no part of this virus. It is not the flu, and no it is not just an inconvenience if you don't die from it. Read that again. It's 78% of people who had "recovered." The idea that it isn't worth the economic cost to control transmission looks pretty damn silly when you consider the economic cost of millions of people with heart failure, which is a pretty reasonable extrapolation from this.
When you consider that 5.5 million Americans have tested positive, and by the best estimates about 40% of them have had symptoms, if you figure that 78% of them will have experienced cardiomyopathy that's already 1.7 million people. I should tell you that my mother was diagnosed with heart failure after recovering so that's apparently one, at least. Most of them presumably don't know it, although an unknown but substantial number do report continuing symptoms of various kinds long after they tested negative.
It's for real, folks.
3 comments:
OMG.
So many people here are lax with the mask requirements. One person just returned from Sturgis, my supervisor is currently vacationing in Florida. The company does not require quarantine after travel.
And I was reading about the heat and drought in Iraq (and elsewhere) just this morning.
I predict a large decrease in the human population in the very near future, from a wide variety of causes.
The earth is trying to throw off the parasites.
Well, the heat and drought issue is definitely making parts of the planet uninhabitable. That has already been a major cause of displacement and the international migration crisis and yes, it's only going to get worse. However, nobody right now is predicting an actual decrease in the human population in the near future because people keep on having babies. However, there's no telling what another, worse plague might do.
Any new substance introduced into our bodies has unknown long term consequences. Remember Thalidomide and birth defects?
Well, this coronavirus is so new that 'novel' is part if its name. I'm sure that not knowing it's long term effects has been mentioned many times, but was seldom stressed. Maybe it should have been.
Done right this is a great rhetorical device. After all, one of the most effective lines in George W. Bush's tangle of lies used to justify invading Iraq after 9/11 was,
"Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof -- the smoking gun -- that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud."
Well, it could happen!
Post a Comment