Congress remains on the campaign trail with the November 8 election just nine days away.
The Federal Employees Benefits Open Season starts two weeks from tomorrow.
From the Omicron and siblings front, Fortune Well tells us about the Zoe Health Study, a study of Covid symptoms among five million people.
Getting vaccinated against COVID reduces your risk of severe illness, hospitalization, and death if you do catch the disease—but according to new research, it could also dictate which batch of the milder, more common symptoms of the virus you end up getting. It’s thought that a large proportion of cases are still asymptomatic.
In an update to the ongoing Zoe Health Study, which has collected data from almost 5 million participants since 2020, researchers said they had identified symptoms that had emerged in recent weeks, noting that they appeared to differ depending on vaccination status.
“Generally, we saw similar symptoms of COVID-19 being reported overall in the app by people who had and hadn’t been vaccinated,” the research team said in its update. “However, fewer symptoms were reported over a shorter period of time by those who had already had a jab, suggesting that they were falling less seriously ill and getting better more quickly.”
Precision Vaccinations informs us
As World Pneumonia Day approaches on November 12th, the ongoing effort to reduce fatalities from infectious diseases has never been more urgent.
Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that needlessly affects millions worldwide each year. Most of the people affected by pneumonia in the U.S. are adults.
Previous U.S. CDC data indicates 47,000 people died from pneumonia in the U.S. in 2020.
And that negative trend continues today.
According to the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Surveillance data available on October 27, 2022, 9.2% of infectious disease fatalities that occurred during week #42 were due to pneumonia, influenza, and/or COVID-19 (PIC).
Among the 2,128 PIC deaths reported last week, 1,164 listed pneumonia as an underlying or contributing cause of death on the death certificate, 949 had COVID-19, and 15 listed influenza.
Pneumonia always has been a killer. The FEHBlog’s Dad referred to the disease as “the old man’s friend.” He was not alone. A 2018 medical editorial explains
The term “old man’s friend” is often used when referring to pneumonia. Searching for it on Google yields 16,400 results in 0.33 s for this combination.
The term is attributed to William Osler, who in the first edition of his book The Principles and Practice of Medicine (1892) wrote:
In children and in healthy adults the outlook is good. In the debilitated, in drunkards and in the aged the chances are against recovery. So fatal is it in the latter class [i.e. the elderly] that it has been termed the natural end of the old man [1].
In the 9th edition, published after Osler himself already died (in 1919 from pneumonia at the age of 70 years [2]), this excerpt was rephrased as “.. . one may say that to die of pneumonia is almost the natural end of old people” [3]. But that was 100 years ago. Fortunately, a lot changed for the better in the century that followed.
Today, pneumonia still affects many ‘old’ men. Medical progress made since William Osler’s time has resulted in survival rate for hospitalized pneumonia that now sits above 90–95%. However, longer-term mortality is high. The reasons for this are still largely unknown. A hypothesis from the editors of Pneumonia? Perhaps chronic inflammation leading to silent progression of cardiac disease is an underlying mechanism.
In mental healthcare news, the Wall Street Journal reports
Mental-health screenings for kids are expanding across the country. But as more children are identified as needing assistance, families can face a tough time getting help from resources that are already stretched thin.
Startups [i.e., this site] are prescribing ketamine online to treat serious mental-health conditions, raising concern among psychiatrists about the safety of taking the mind-altering anesthetic without medical supervision, sometimes at high doses that raise risks of side effects.
The first story illustrates an issue for which telehealth is a solution, while the story shows why telehealth cannot replace in-person care.
In U.S. healthcare business news, Bloomberg relates
VillageMD, which is majority owned by Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., is exploring a deal to merge with Warburg Pincus-backed Summit Health, according to people familiar with the matter.
The acquisition by primary-care provider VillageMD of Summit, a health-care network and the parent of CityMD, would value the combined entity at between $5 billion to $10 billion, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public.
An agreement could be reached in the coming weeks, though talks could still fall apart, the people added. Representatives for VillageMD, Walgreens and Warburg Pincus declined to comment, while Summit Health didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.