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Well, what are experts saying now regarding the state of the Covid-19 Pandemic? [1]

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Date: 2023-03-07

COVID-19 Across The World

So it appears the Kraken XBB.1.5 has not proven as fearsome as some have proclaimed. I suspected the danger of XBB.1.5 was being overblown by those who follow all the bad news with dread, and by those who like to make headlines. And due to my faith in the power of vaccination and especially in the power of ‘Hybrid Immunity’, I felt that for most of us, it was time to come out of our shell.

Hot off the press: The latest from the respected Eric Topol in his 'Ground Truths Substack'.

Link: A break from Covid waves and a breakthrough for preventing Long Covid

All indications from genomic surveillance of the virus , wastewater . and the clinical outcomes that are still being tracked (albeit more limited and less periodicity as time goes on), that we’ve (finally) entered an endemic phase. [bolding mine] There are no new SARS-CoV-2 variants that have yet cropped up with a growth advantage over XBB.1.5.

Moreover, the XBB.1.5 variant ascent to dominance was not associated with a surge of Covid hospitalizations or deaths in the United States or elsewhere in the world, which might have been predicted based on its properties of enhanced transmissibility and immune evasiveness compared with earlier versions of Omicron.

A Breakthrough for Prevention of Long Covid Until now the only way we knew that Long Covid could be prevented was to not get Covid. That’s still the case. But a new randomized, placebo-controlled trial of metformin has yielded exciting results—the first drug to be shown to help prevent Long Covid. Over a thousand people with mild-to-moderate Covid were randomly assigned to 2 weeks of metformin (500 mg pills, 1 on day 1, twice a day for 4 days, then 500 mg in AM and 1000 mg in PM for 9 days) or placebo. There was a 42% reduction of subsequent Long Covid as you can see by the event curve below, which corresponds to an absolute decrease of 4.3%, from 10.6% reduced to 6.3%. As I’ve written in the past, I don’t use the term “breakthrough” lightly. Besides Paxlovid, that I initially wrote about in 2021 here, and the new anti-obesity drugs here , I’m reluctant to go there. But to see such a pronounced benefit in the current randomized trial of metformin, in the context of it being so safe and low cost, I’d give it a breakthrough categorization. Another way to put it, that unless or until there are data to the contrary, if I got Covid, I’d take metformin for 2 weeks at the doses used in this trial.

To be fair, Eric Topol does express two points of concern. Read the article for more info.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/3/7/2156848/-Well-what-are-experts-saying-now-regarding-the-state-of-the-Covid-19-Pandemic

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