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CDC: Long Covid can kill [1]
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Date: 2022-12-14
The CDC released a Vital Statistics sheet at midnight, which was reported by many leading papers right as it was published. The CDC confirmed for the first time publicly that Long Covid can indeed be fatal, all on its own.
Also known as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, Long Covid has faced an uphill battle by some to even be recognized as a real phenomenon. Now, with the condition finally with its own ICD-10 code, health professionals have a paper trail where such data can later be aggregated and analyzed.
From the initial reports, it would appear that a small fraction of people who contract acute Covid and who then go on to suffer from Long Covid actually die from the latter, about three-tenths of one percent. For the Covid deniers who like to play with statistics, this will be a hard statistic to resist if they mean to minimize Covid’s impact. Yet, consider that three years ago, no one had ever died from this. As Dr. David Putrino of Mount Sinai Health System relayed to the New York Times:
This is an important thing to explore and study, but it shouldn’t be used as a proxy for saying, “Oh, well, long Covid isn’t that severe because look how few deaths there are.” We should not be measuring the damage that long Covid does by deaths alone.
The NYT article (free at the above link) went on to say:
The researchers looked at death certificates in every state and Washington, D.C., dated from Jan. 1, 2020 to June 30, 2022. They found 1,021,487 certificates that included a diagnostic code for Covid-19 as an underlying or contributing cause of death. Of those, 3,544 — or 0.3 percent of the total — listed long Covid or terms like post-Covid syndrome, chronic Covid or long-haul Covid.
The Washington Post added:
Almost 80 percent of the deaths occurred among non-Hispanic Whites. The death rate was highest — at 15 in every 100,000 people — among American Indian and Alaska Native people, and lowest among Asians.
The NYT article rounds that out: “[W]hile Black and Hispanic people had higher death rates from the initial coronavirus infection than non-Hispanic whites, those groups did not have higher death rates related to long Covid, the study found.”
But note that males are hit harder in terms of deaths both from the acute disease as well as from Long Covid, from what this initial peek at the statistics tells us. (Those living with Long Covid, however, are still more likely to be female. The implications of that will need to be teased out as research moves along.)
This article is a stub. I mean to dig more into the data presently, so I am not attempting to present an interpretation. My main goal for sharing this, besides alerting all to this confirmed possibility, is to share the link to the direct vital statistics sheet. All of the newspapers I checked last night failed to include a link; and the one that did sent me to a CDC placeholder page. So please avail yourself of the data, and take all the necessary precautions to protect yourself this season! It’s shaping up to be a rough one.
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