Coronavirus Chronicles — The Ups and Downs of “Move More”

Pat Hartman January 12, 2021 No Comments

Does exercise achieve weight loss? Belief in the doctrine of “move more” comes and goes, and it is interesting to follow the progress of the idea through time, and through individuals who have very strong convictions based on personal experience.

Because of the current pandemic, all kinds of things are getting twisted. With fitness-related businesses closed, even people who fervently believe in exercise are often unable to do the things they need to do for their bodies. Or maybe they set up a home gym, and make so much noise it creates misery for the people in six neighboring apartments, who can’t escape because the libraries are closed. So are the coffee shops, but it doesn’t matter anyway because they are too broke to hang out. Or maybe sick.

A very small proportion of COVID-19 victims are hospitalized. Most suffer at home, with inadequate resources. The last thing they need is track-and-field activities going on upstairs. Another demographic is in trouble, too — people who have finally decided to get serious about taking care of themselves. Unfortunately, they came to that realization at a point in history where it is very hard to transform good intentions into action.

History of exercise beliefs

Anyway, in mid-2013, a belief was current that exercisers are wasting their time because they just get hungrier and eat extra. In response, journalist Liz Neporent declared the proposition “Exercise won’t help you lose weight” to be a myth, and here is why. She consulted James Hill, of the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center, who is discriminating about the studies he references. This quotation is relevant:

In the first place, many studies don’t use a high enough dose of exercise to promote weight loss. And secondly, exercisers do tend to compensate by eating more, but not enough to make up for all of the calories they burn up in exercise. They still create a negative energy balance…

Hill administers the National Weight Control Registry, which “tracks the health habits of thousands of people who have lost an average of 60 pounds and kept it off for at least two years.” What do most of those subjects have in common? More than 90% reported exercising for at least an hour per day.

It is not just about the basic energy in – energy out equation. Lack of exercise, says Hill, leaves a body vulnerable to metabolic defects, which make weight loss more difficult, and thus indirectly causes obesity, in addition to being generally bad for health.

Another aspect to consider

In the same approximate time frame, media celebrity Dr. Oz got in trouble for something he had done a couple of years before. On his popular TV show, he touted the green coffee extract as a “magic weight loss cure for every body type.” Now, that is what we call a sweeping generalization! Specifically, this product was said to reduce body fat by 16% in only 22 weeks, achieving a 17-pound weight loss.

Eventually, Dr. Oz was called before the Senate to explain himself to a consumer protection subcommittee. Apparently, he did not profit from recommending the substance, but in the eye of Chairperson Sen. Claire McCaskill, giving people false hope in a miracle cure was even more objectionable than making money from the product would be.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “6 Weight Loss Myths Debunked,” ABCNews.go.com, 07/02/13
Source: “Dr. Oz Grilled In Congress, Admits Weight Loss Products He Touts Don’t Pass ‘Scientific Muster’,” HuffPost.com, 06/17/14
Image by Frankie Leon/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — 5 Pounds, 20 Times

Pat Hartman January 11, 2021 2 Comments

Alasdair Wilkins, has not, as far as we know, been a victim of COVID-19. But his life experience might prove very helpful to people who have gained unwanted pounds due to being cooped up and unable to get enough exercise to use up the calories they have taken in.

Over the course of a year, Wilkins lost 100 pounds, and the mental attitude he allowed himself to be guided by could be just what others need, because experience has shown that he does know what he is talking about. The authors of a diatribe.org article about Wilkins wrote,

We often hear, “Eat less, move more” as the core advice for weight loss. Unfortunately, that makes the behavior change sound so much easier than it is.

Wilkins addresses diverse topics, many of them of interest to parents. What should parents do, who want to be truly supportive, rather than performative? He says:

Let the person losing weight set the terms of engagement.

What does this mean, in real-life terms? An old joke asks, “How many psychologists does it take to change a lightbulb?” The answer is, “Only one, but the lightbulb has to really want to change.”

The same thought may be expressed in other ways. Most people, if they stop to think about it, can spot examples in their own lives. If someone says, “I plan to lose 10 pounds by June 1st,” there is nothing to be gained by prodding the aspiring weight-loser to more lofty heights of ambition. “Why not dream big, and go for 20 pounds?” or any remark of that type, will not add any needed element to the dialogue.

The first rule of self-help is that the subject has to buy into it. If a friend or relative can simply validate a positive statement of intent, without adding to it, judging, or “helping,” that would be a good thing. People who wish to help a person escape from obesity also have a second guideline. The team that wrote about Wilkins also noted the most useful bit of information about him:

He found what worked for him.

What worked for him was baby steps. He just wanted to feel better, and banished thoughts of end-goal numbers from his mind. He avoided thinking about the total poundage he needed to lose, saying, “I did lose 100 lbs, but I think it’s more correct to say I lost 5 lbs 20 times over.” He said:

I was lucky that I hit upon the right strategy pretty quickly, but I think it was really powerful to build a positive, sustainable experience rather than think about weight or goals from the outset… The takeaway from my experience is not “people should do what I did,” unless what we’re defining what I did as “finding what worked for me.”

Wilkins’s “move more” activity was one hour per day on an uphill treadmill, while watching movies. What about the “eat less” component? Wilkins says,

In terms of organizing my approach and building a sustainable routine, diet was something that happened incidentally along the way. Exercise was what I focused my attention on and where I drew a lot more strength and sense of accomplishment.

He also emphasizes that nobody should suffer from the delusion that they will “get over” obesity:

Obesity is a lifelong condition, and my weight is something I’ll be working to maintain probably for the rest of my life.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How Did Alasdair Wilkins Lose 100 lbs in a Year?,” Diatribe.org, 10/5/15
Image by Marcu Ioachim/public domain

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Eat Less, Move More Dilemma

Pat Hartman January 8, 2021 No Comments

These are troubled times. In many parts of the USA, hunger is a problem. Other segments of the population are able to get plenty to eat, and then proceed to eat plenty of it. For people who always found it difficult to “eat less,” life is more problematic than ever. The “move more” part of the old equation is also disrupted.

A previous Childhood Obesity News post mentioned Alasdair Wilkins, who published a book about the massive weight loss he achieved by setting a treadmill to “uphill.” He walked on it one hour per day while watching movies. The arguments against the evil of “screen time” seldom mention such a positive use, and what is more, a use that could easily be adapted for the benefit of children who are interested in burning off some caloric energy.

But even in the best of times, it is unlikely that a child would have a setup like that at home, or even accessible anywhere in the neighborhood or at school. The lack of every kind of activity-promoting facility, at this juncture of history, is very unfortunate. Experts continue to point out that obesity and COVID-19 are quite compatible and friendly to each other’s interests. The precautions that the public is asked to take, like staying home and closing gyms, and not going to school, are all inimical to the “move more” imperative. There is no way that kids can get enough fat-burning movement into their lives.

Do we really need to move more?

In the past decade, the reputation of exercise has risen and fallen, especially with regard to the school system. First of all, there is, as journalist Kevin Vaughan phrased it, “the philosophical question of who is responsible for making sure kids lead healthy lives — parents or schools?” In any adequate society, the answer, of course, should be “both.” Schools have been blamed for not trying harder. But then, a report like this one comes along.

Several years ago, British journalist Francesca Infante published a quotation from John Ashton, professor and highly placed government health official, who said,

One of the things we should be doing is really strictly prohibiting cars stopping outside school to drop kids off but having drop-off points, if at all, a few hundred yards away so at least the children get to walk a quarter of a mile each day form the dropping off point… [I]t would make a difference.

This modest proposal was regarded by many in the United Kingdom as intolerably radical. Meanwhile, in the USA, Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move program was gaining traction. Also in the USA, an increasing number of researchers suggested that maybe exercise doesn’t even help to achieve weight loss.

Childhood Obesity News will take a closer look at how the “move more” concept has been both amplified and scorned over the past few years. The painful irony is that, no matter how many people may have become exercise believers, almost everyone is currently deprived of the opportunity to get the exercise they want.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “How Did Alasdair Wilkins Lose 100 lbs in a Year?,” Diatribe.org, 10/5/15
Source: “School Exercise: Watered-down 2011 law lacks impact,” CenterForHealthJournalism.org, 06/24/13
Source: “‘Ban school run and make pupils walk,” DailyMail.co.uk, 07/02/13
Image by Ronald Saunders/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — No Exemption for Minors

Pat Hartman January 7, 2021 No Comments

Obesity and the disease that took over the world are both bad for kids, and Childhood Obesity News has explored many of the ways in which COVID-19 and obesity work together to achieve a synergistic result that promotes success for both of them.

One of the most fantastic aspects of the current moment is the lingering belief that children and young people can neither contract nor spread COVID-19. Based on emotions and preconceptions, families make decisions, governments make policies, and kids sicken and even die because the grownups didn’t do their homework.

If you are a grownup, the sad fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is that you just might catch the disease from the children and/or adolescents of your own household. As journalist Zachary Mack phrased it,

[R]ecent studies indicate that not only are children and young adults loaded with the virus while often asymptomatic, they are also responsible for passing the disease along to more at-risk segments of the population, including older relatives.

Here from the CDC itself is a report, a collaboration of at least 20 credentialed authors, on an appalling instance of contagion during July and August. Relatives from five different households gathered for a three-week reunion. The 13-year-old “index patient” picked up the virus in June. She did not feel sick or have any symptoms but was nevertheless tested four days after the exposure, presumably to be “cleared” for the upcoming family get-together.

Having received a negative test result, she traveled to the destination and stayed with more than a dozen other relatives in one large house. In residence for varying lengths of time, they acted “old normal” — in other words, no masks or distancing. Eleven people ended up with COVID-19. Six other relatives slept elsewhere and visited the main house a couple of times, remaining outside to socialize at the recommended distance. Even though they were not masked either, they escaped unscathed.

Just to reinforce an already uncomfortable concept, Mary Van Beusekom wrote in early December about a study published by the journal Pediatrics. Researchers looked at children in two states, finding that they were “just as likely as adults to become infected with COVID-19 within their households.”

In one-fifth of the subjects’ homes, the virus was spread by kids. People are easily taken off guard because the young often have no detectable symptoms. This is not to say they have no symptoms, but children seem to be always catching something, and coughing or wiping their noses. We are used to it.

There is a troubling passage, concerning the number of child cases that show up in the official national statistics. It seems that the ratio of cases between children and adults has been vastly misunderstood. The authors say,

In contrast to the 8.3% of cases reported among children in the United States, 35% of household cases in our study population were in children, most of whom were identified because we tested all household contacts regardless of symptoms.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “This Is Who’s Most Likely to Give You Coronavirus, CDC Says,” BestLifeOnline.com, 10/07/20
Source: “Adolescent with COVID-19 as the Source of an Outbreak at a 3-Week Family Gathering,” CDC.gov, 10/09/20
Source: “Study: Kids, adults equally susceptible to in-home COVID-19 spread,” UMN.edu, 12/03/20
Image by Dennis Jarvis/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — How SARS-CoV-2 Lives Long and Prospers

Pat Hartman January 6, 2021 No Comments

There is a lot going on. People want instructions. “Do this, this, and this.” Often, they will. But science changes. Every now and then, researchers have to say, “Our best knowledge used to be Theory A, and we acted upon it. We made policy, and people cooperated, and conditions improved. Now, more work has been done, and it looks like Theory B is even better. So our advice has changed.”

For some reason, people seem unable to tolerate making such a change. They feel betrayed and hurt, and want to pout, “No fair! You told us Theory A, and we did what you said, and now you want us to do something else! You are a bunch of hypocrites!” — and so on. At any point in history, human nature contains a certain irreducible amount of stubborn ignorance, and the present time and place are no exceptions. So now, it looks like the task is to change human nature — which brings up a whole new set of challenges.

Avoidance

Many people are very interested in knowing how to avoid contracting COVID-19. For instance, if a live virus lands on a surface, how long does it live? Lately, some sources have led the public to believe that we don’t need to worry too much about what is called fomite transmission. In other words, picking it up from countertops, doorknobs, trashcan lids, etc. But those reassurances might be overly optimistic.

A certain contingent of researchers put a lot of work into answering a whole set of meaningful questions, and they reported back in quite a lot of detail. One example of their results:

With initial viral loads broadly equivalent to the highest titres excreted by infectious patients, viable virus was isolated for up to 28 days at 20°C from common surfaces such as glass, stainless steel and both paper and polymer banknotes.

Conclusion: These findings demonstrate SARS-CoV-2 can remain infectious for significantly longer time periods than generally considered possible.

Well, 20° Centigrade equals 68° Fahrenheit, about a normal home temperature in the USA. And these scientists found that a virus capable of invading a human body and endlessly reproducing itself can live for almost a month on stainless steel, like your kitchen sink, or banknotes, like the money in your wallet. And then, there is the sobering news that the virus can survive on human skin for an average of 11 hours. In public places, it’s crazy. Beware of “touchscreens on mobile phones, bank ATMs, airport check-in kiosks and supermarket self-serve kiosks.”

Also in October, the Centers for Disease Control issued new guidance, spelled out by journalist Zachary Mack:

The previous definition of “close contact” meant spending 15 “consecutive minutes” within six feet of someone who’s infected with the coronavirus. Now, it has been changed to include anyone who has spent a total of 15 minutes over a 24-hour period with an infected person, according to the CDC’s statement.

Just in case that didn’t register, Mack rephrases slightly, to emphasize that “spending 15 minutes with someone infected with the virus over the course of a day is considered a ‘close contact’ and can be long enough for you to catch COVID from them.”

Here is another chilling fact: Although the body of a vaccinated person may well resist COVID-19, nobody knows yet whether that person can still transmit the virus to others. Common sense would dictate that if they just picked it up from an ATM touchscreen, and the two of you shake hands, those tiny invisible organisms could quite probably be passed along.

Currently, America is going through the excruciating process of wondering where the vaccine is, and how to decide who gets it. When airing our opinions about that, we might want to remember this: Apparently, for “herd immunity” to be achieved, the entire herd must be included. As writer Tara Haelle points out,

An estimated 10.5 million-12 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S., and we can’t stop the pandemic without vaccinating them as well. Requiring identification or placing vaccination clinics close to government buildings may create barriers to this population…

… Which of course gives the virus yet more encouragement to live long and prosper.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The effect of temperature on persistence of SARS-CoV-2 on common surfaces,” BiomedCentral.com, 10/07/20
Source: “The CDC Now Says You Can Catch COVID From Someone in Exactly This Long,” BestLifeOnline.com, 10/21/20
Source: “Can Someone Who Gets Vaccinated Against Covid-19 Still Transmit the Disease?,” Medium.com, 12/16/20
Source: “Every Covid-19 Vaccine Question You’ll Ever Have, Answered,” Medium.com, 12/10/20
Image by Baker County Tourism/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — COVID-19 Not As Ageist As Believed

Pat Hartman January 5, 2021 No Comments

“Ohio State study: 30% of student athletes have heart damage linked to COVID-19” is a news story title which, due to editorial sloppiness or whatever, is inaccurate. As it turns out, 30% of athletes do not have COVID-19-related heart damage. The study concerned only Ohio State University athletes who tested positive. There were 26 of them, about one-third of whom had cellular heart damage, and another 15% “showed signs of heart inflammation caused by a condition known as myocarditis.”

Those findings, without exaggeration, are bad enough to cause alarm. Young people do catch the virus, and some suffer permanent damage, and we’re not just talking about an increased risk of becoming obese. Myocarditis is a sudden-death type of thing, even for the young and super-fit. Heart damage is no joke, and it seems to be a trend. Researchers decided to take a close look at these kids because:

Recent studies have raised concerns of myocardial inflammation after recovery from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), even in asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic patients.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Severe cardiac damage is rare but has occurred, even in young, healthy people.”

We have mentioned that there is still debate over the basic nature of the disease — is it respiratory, or circulatory? Turns out, when it comes to this type of damage, that mystery is secondary. If the heart is attacked directly, or suffers from lack of oxygen because the lungs were attacked, either way it’s a big problem for the heart.

This applies to little kids, also — like the case described by journalist Austin Williams — of a two-month-old baby with a COVID-19 diagnosis who “experienced a myocardial injury as well as a type of heart failure most commonly seen in adults.” This child, fortunately, seems to have recovered normal heart function.

Counting not inclusive

In October, Robert Roy Britt, who specializes in writing about the virus, summarized the current thinking of hundreds of infectious disease experts from many parts of the world, and boiled it down into “10 Signs the Pandemic Is About to Get Much Worse.” Most obviously, a tremendous number of people are already infected. Another serious problem is that the number of reported cases may not be anywhere near the actual number of cases, since many infected individuals never realize they have it.

A lot of people would show up positive if they were tested, but in very many places, getting a test is not that easy — and then there is the whole mess of complications about false negatives results, and so on. At any rate, when cases are reported, the only officially recognized ones are those verified by testing.

The bottom line

People who have not been tested, and/or do not have symptoms, can still infect others; and for reasons not yet understood, some of the people who never get sick themselves have the mysterious power to be “superspreaders.”

And, since around Memorial Day, “Young people are being infected at unprecedented rates.” Sure, the virus started out by most noticeably picking off the elderly and feeble. But it’s not going anywhere and has plenty of time to harvest any and every age group. It goes after obese people, including kids, more zealously than it does healthy-weight people. It takes healthy-weight people — including kids — and weakens and immobilizes them, creating excellent conditions for the accumulation of fat. With regard to age, the virus does not discriminate. It will take anybody.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Ohio State study: 30% of student athletes have heart damage linked to COVID-19,” Fox6Now, 12/30/10
Source: “10 Signs the Pandemic Is About to Get Much Worse,” Medium.com, 10/19/20
Image by Quinn Dombrowski/CC BY-SA 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Particular Case of Older Kids

Pat Hartman January 4, 2021 No Comments

Members of the West Virginia National Guard’s Task Force Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Response Enterprise sanitize workspaces for the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission.

The public gets very irritated when experts seemingly contradict each other, and especially when an expert gives advice that does not precisely match up with his or her previous advice. At the beginning of September, when college students returned to their campuses, it quickly became obvious that the SARS-CoV-2 organism meant to have a say in the matter. As NBC’s Erika Edwards noted,

Thousands of cases have been reported nationwide, forcing universities to switch to virtual classes and either quarantine or, in some cases, send students back home whether or not they’re sick. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, is urging colleges: If at all possible, do not send students home.

What were the schools supposed to do? Hold thousands of young adults under indefinite house arrest? But Dr. Fauci made the excellent point that returning all these young people to the cities and towns they came from would be an excellent way to spread the disease even more lavishly. Since jails and prisons had become death-traps, similar discussions transpired over the idea of letting non-violent offenders out of institutions early, especially those who had not even yet been sentenced.

But where would they go? Out into the community, and in far too many cases, into the homeless community, which already has enough problems. The same argument applies to family members who cannot restrain themselves from traveling all over the country for holiday gatherings. Even with the most beneficent intentions, and hearts full of love, what is to stop them from carrying the virus to every hitherto uninfected corner of the world?

No certainty

In mid-September, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a piece authored by three doctors, that summed up the state of affairs as currently understood. Although most infected people do not infect others, those who do are likely to do a mighty good job of it. Part of the problem is that often, people are honestly and earnestly unaware that they carry the virus.

But this stark sentence throws cold water on innocence: “Infectiousness peaks around a day before symptom onset.” In other words, a person who feels perfectly well can quite efficiently spread the infection before experiencing the first cough, fever, or headache. And this doesn’t even consider the people who are perfectly capable of bringing COVID-19 into the lives of others, despite never developing symptoms themselves.

In regard to college campuses, efforts toward containment have inspired harsh criticisms, inspiring such headlines as, “How Covid-19 Turned College Campuses Into Surveillance Machines.”

Amrita Khalid describes PathCheck GPS+, the contact-tracing smartphone application created at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and an already-existing system called Appearance Search; and the BioButton, which inspired students complaints of privacy violation. The writer then adds,

There’s no indication that all this surveillance is helpful for the purposes of slowing the spread of Covid-19. Syracuse University is a campus with over 1,100 security cameras. But as the editorial board of the Daily Orange noted, this did nothing to stop a group of over 100 freshmen from holding a party in the middle of campus, only a few hundred feet from the school’s public safety office.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 at colleges: Fauci warns not to send students home,” NBCNews.com, 09/03/20
Source: “Transmission of SARS-CoV-2: A Review of Viral, Host, and Environmental Factors,” ACPJournals.org, 09/17/20
Source: “How Covid-19 Turned College Campuses Into Surveillance Machines,” Medium.com, 10/20/20
Image by West Virginia National Guard/CC BY 2.0

Happy New Year!

Pat Hartman January 1, 2021 No Comments

Happy New Year!

Oh, what a year it’s been.

Have a great 2021!

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Light of Distant Stars

Pat Hartman December 31, 2020 No Comments

Obviously, one of the big problems with SARS-CoV-2 is, so many aspects of the organism and its behavior remain shrouded in mystery. In The Atlantic, writer Ed Yong quotes Beth Redbird, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, whose many interests include group interactions and survey methodology. Redbird specifies a very important fact that people don’t seem to grasp:

[T]hings look fine until right before they’re very not-fine.

This two-minute animated video illustrates the principle. There is a moment when the observer realizes that indeed, the trajectory has suddenly headed in the direction of not-fine. (The hosting platform will likely suggest several similar short works framing the concept in slightly different ways, perhaps more comprehensible to other viewers.)

The bottom line is, the orgy of multiplication pictured by all the filmmakers is very similar to how a virus acts. It has one job: to reproduce, and it does so with unparalleled ferocity and determination. This should not be so difficult to understand, but as Yong notes, “Exponential growth is counterintuitive.” He adds,

It’s also because the coronavirus spreads quickly but is slow to reveal itself: It can take a month for infections to lead to symptoms, for symptoms to warrant tests and hospitalizations, and for enough sick people to produce a noticeable spike. Pandemic data are like the light of distant stars, recording past events instead of present ones.

In this era of instantaneous global communication, it is grotesque that so many people have not yet gotten the word: Yes, children can both catch and transmit COVID-19.

Megan E. Doherty wrote,

[E]xperts say, there is evidence that children aged 10 and older are able to transmit SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, at rates similar to adults, and a recent study found that children can carry high levels of the virus in their noses and throats.

From Maryland, medical anthropologist and epidemiologist Janelle Menard says,

For pediatric Covid-19, we don’t even know yet what we don’t know.

Menard works with the Covkid Project, which tracks infection rates among American children. As we have discussed, there is a tendency to divide COVID-19 patients of all ages into two bundles: sick enough to need hospitalization, or home and well. In reality, there is a vast middle ground of people who are still miserable and unable to resume normal life activities, and nobody is quite sure why, although there are two main theories.

They might still have the virus, or the immune system might be throwing up a delayed over-response. Doherty explains what medical science is currently trying to figure out:

[…] whether the virus lingers in people’s bodies, or whether lasting symptoms could be a result of an overactive immune response, organ damage, problems with gut bacteria, or even previously latent viruses reactivating.

Nobody seems sure how to declare for certain that any given person is not contagious. There are even speculations that the virus can “hide out” in various organs, undetectably, and then later make a dramatic comeback. We won’t go deeply into this but here is one reference for anybody who is interested.

Doherty also quotes confused Johns Hopkins researcher, Amesh Akalja, who says:

I don’t think this is the result of the persistence of the pathogen, because you clearly see the viral load go down, and that their body’s immune system is not behaving as though there’s a pathogen present.

Then, she quotes Columbia’s Daniel Griffin, also an infectious disease specialist:

The notion that people aren’t infectious after a certain time period is grounded in very small sample sizes. Now we’re taking an observation of a few dozen individuals and applying it to billions of people. If we’re wrong, it’s a huge problem.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral,” TheAtlantic.com, 09/09/20
Source: “The Legend of the Chessboard,” YouTube.com, 01/11/11
Source: “When Children’s Covid-19 Symptoms Won’t Go Away,” Undark.org, 09/02/20
Image by NASA/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — No Youth Pass, Continued

Pat Hartman December 30, 2020 No Comments

As the pandemic drags on and worsens, it becomes increasingly apparent that all our original beliefs about children and young people were dangerously inaccurate. The virus makes no exceptions for minors. They can catch it, they can spread it, and they can die from it. When people act as if that were not so, disaster happens.

Scientific studies take time to prepare, and it is not surprising that the freshest information is to be found in social media posts, which serve not only as informal news sources but as group therapy. A nurse writes about how her team spent an hour trying unsuccessfully to revive a five-year-old who caught COVID-19 because the parents could not give up Christmas dinner for one year. (She cusses a lot.)

Someone responds,

My niece works in pediatric critical care and has seen a lot of very ill (and dying) children since Thanksgiving.

Another worker asks not to be called a hero, because many people in her field are emotionally spent and “at the brink.” The catastrophic summer is part of the reason.

Statistics paint a grim picture

In September, journalist Sweta Gupta summarized the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Although proportionately fewer children than adults are hospitalized with COVID-19, when they are, it’s serious. They are admitted to the Intensive Care Unit at about the same rate as adults — one in three. Their median age is eight years, and the boy-girl ratio is almost even. Children under two years old tend to be admitted more than those in the higher age groups.

Megan E. Doherty wrote about kids who have supposedly recovered, but not really. Not unless we consider “exhaustion, sore throat, coughing, enlarged lymph nodes, painful limbs, insomnia, and mysterious splotchy skin” to comprise a perfect state of pediatric health. These symptoms can linger or suddenly show up, in addition to blurry vision, head pain, intermittent fevers, shortness of breath, nausea, fatigue, diarrhea, testicle pain, and bloated stomach.

From June until September, when this piece was published, the website Undark…

[…] has been in touch with 28 families who report that their children, while not seriously ill, are stuck in a kind of limbo state. Those kids range in age from 17 years down to just 9 months old.

These aren’t the children with extremely dangerous MIS-C, who can die even under the best hospital care. These children are back home, supposedly all better.

A study released in September confirmed that the virus threatens the lives of people of every age. An uncredited New York Times piece about COVID-19 patients says,

The study […] looked at young adults discharged from more than 400 hospitals in the United States between April 1 and June 30. Over all, just over one-third were obese, and one quarter extremely so. Roughly one in five had diabetes, and about one in seven had hypertension…

The research letter from Harvard found that among 3,222 young adults hospitalized with Covid-19, 88 died — about 2.7 percent. One in five required intensive care, and one in 10 needed a ventilator to assist with breathing.

Harvard’s Dr. Scott D. Solomon, the study’s senior author, told the press that while, as expected, those with chronic health problems are at greater risk, some young adults also are acutely ill for no apparent reason. In other words, the phrase “pre-existing condition” does not tell the whole story. In the same month, the Centers for Disease Control reported that 12- to 17-year olds are more likely to contract the virus than younger children are.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “COVID-19 Hospitalization Data From 14 States: 1 in 3 Youths Admitted to ICU,” September 8, 2020
Source: “When Children’s Covid-19 Symptoms Won’t Go Away,” Undark.org, 09/02/20
Source: “Covid-19 Live Updates: Virus Can Be Deadly for Young Adults, Too, Study Finds,” NYTimes.com, 09/10/20
Source: “If Your Child Is This Age, They’re More Likely to Get COVID, CDC Says,” BestLifeOnline.com, 09/29/20
Image by Donnie Ray Jones/CC BY 2.0

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Ups and Downs of “Move More”

History of exercise beliefs

Another aspect to consider

Coronavirus Chronicles — 5 Pounds, 20 Times

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Eat Less, Move More Dilemma

Do we really need to move more?

Coronavirus Chronicles — No Exemption for Minors

Coronavirus Chronicles — How SARS-CoV-2 Lives Long and Prospers

Avoidance

Coronavirus Chronicles — COVID-19 Not As Ageist As Believed

Counting not inclusive

The bottom line

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Particular Case of Older Kids

No certainty

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

Have a great 2021!

Coronavirus Chronicles — The Light of Distant Stars

Coronavirus Chronicles — No Youth Pass, Continued

Statistics paint a grim picture

Profiles: Kids Struggling with Weight

The Book

About Dr. Robert A. Pretlow

Presentations

Food & Health Resources