It is incredibly frustrating to see people using low death rates from COVID-19 in younger age groups to argue that we can relax all restrictions as long as we protect the elderly without putting forward CONCRETE PROPOSALS about how to do that 1/n
2/n I agree that protecting the elderly will probably reduce the overall death burden. I am a co-author on a study that demonstrates this exact point!
3/n The problem is, what we've seen from around the world is that it is REALLY HARD to protect elderly people while relaxing all restrictions because (unsurprisingly) they are a part of society too
4/n Most of the proposals are limited to some vague hand-waving about aged care, but we demonstrated that even relatively young people were at a pretty high risk from COVID-19
5/n If we really want to reduce the death rate from COVID-19, it's not as important if really large numbers of 20 year olds get infected (although this is still obviously not ideal!) but even a relatively small % of 60 year olds drives up deaths substantially
6/n People who are pushing for re-opening everything on the basis of "protect older populations" should first describe how we can prevent people aged 60+ from having risky contact with the rest of society
7/n Because if the last 6 months have shown us anything, it's that stopping older people from getting COVID-19 is REALLY NOT EASY
Saying "protect the elderly" doesn't cut it
8/n And, of course, this is ignoring any impacts aside from death
If there are substantial chronic impacts in the younger population - a definite possibility - then the situation gets even more complicated
9/n I've written about potential long-term impacts even for young people, they are a real worry and potentially enormously problematic even if the death rate is low theguardian.com/world/commenti…
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The final large published trial on ivermectin for COVID-19, PRINCIPLE, is now out. Main findings:
1. Clinically unimportant (~1-2day reduction) in time to resolution of symptoms. 2. No benefit for hospitalization/death.
Now, you may be asking "why does anyone care at all any more about ivermectin for COVID?" to which I would respond "yes"
We already knew pretty much everything this study shows. That being said, always good to have more data!
The study is here:
For me, the main finding is pretty simple - ivermectin didn't impact the likelihood of people going to hospital or dying from COVID-19. This has now been shown in every high-quality study out there.pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38431155/
What's particularly interesting is a finding that the authors don't really discuss in their conclusion. These results appear to show that gender affirming care is associated with a reduction in suicide risk 1/n
2/n The paper is a retrospective cohort study that compares young adults and some teens who were referred for gender related services in Finland with a cohort that was matched using age and sex. The median age in the study was 19, so the majority of the population are adults.
3/n The study is very limited. The authors had access to the Finnish registries which include a wide range of data, but chose to only correct their cohorts for age, sex, and number of psychiatric appointments prior to their inclusion in the cohort.
These headlines have to be some of the most ridiculous I've seen in a while
The study tested 18 different PFAS in a tiny sample of 176 people. Of those, one had a barely significant association with thyroid cancer
This is genuinely just not news at all
Here's the study. I'm somewhat surprised it even got published if I'm honest. A tiny case-control study, they looked at 88 people with thyroid cancer and 88 controls thelancet.com/journals/ebiom…
Here are the main results. There was a single measured PFAS which had a 'significant' association with the cancer, the others just look a bit like noise to me
A new study has gone viral for purportedly showing that running therapy had similar efficacy to medication for depression
Which is weird, because a) it's not a very good study and b) seems not to show that at all 1/n
2/n The study is here. The authors describe it as a "partially randomized patient preference design", which is a wildly misleading term. In practice, this is simply a cohort study, where ~90% of the patients self-selected into their preferred treatment sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
3/n This is a big problem, because it means that there are likely confounding factors between the two groups (i.e. who is likely to choose running therapy over meds?). Instead of a useful, randomized trial, this is a very small (n=141) non-randomized paper
The study showed that COVID-19 had, if anything, very few long-term issues for children! As a new father, I find this data very reassuring regarding #LongCovid in kids 1/n
2/n The study is here, it's a retrospective cohort comparing children aged 0-14 who had COVID-19 to a matched control using a database of primary care visits in Italy onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ap…
3/ The authors found that there was an increased risk of a range of diagnoses for the kids with COVID-19 after their acute disease, including things like runny noses, anxiety/depression, diarrhoea, etc
This study has recently gone viral, with people saying that it shows that nearly 20% of highly vaccinated people get Long COVID
I don't think it's reasonable to draw these conclusions based on this research. Let's talk about bias 1/n
2/n The study is here. It is a survey of people who tested positive to COVID-19 in Western Australia from July-Aug 2022 medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
3/n This immediately gives us our first source of bias
We KNOW that most cases of COVID-19 were missed at this point in the pandemic, so we're only getting the sample of those people who were sick enough to go and get tested