Calgarypuck Forums - The Unofficial Calgary Flames Fan Community - View Single Post - Coronavirus All Purpose Thread: moving on?

opendoor · 03-04-2022, 10:22 AM

I'll be shocked if we actually shift into a long-term endemic phase, but I'll be very pleasantly surprised if we do. I think a lot of the stability we're seeing right now is because of recent vaccinations, and people are definitely not going to keep getting vaccinated at the rates we've seen.

It'll really come down to how quickly protection against severe disease wanes and/or what new variants we see. If the vulnerable can consistently and repeatedly get vaccinated, that would go a long way to mitigating the impact. But if 60+ year olds and medically vulnerable people get complacent, we could certainly have issues again.

I'm also concerned about the long-term health impacts of people repeatedly being infected. I just read about a study that looked at ~150K people who tested positive for COVID and survived it, and compared them to ~5M people in the same time period who didn't have COVID and also compared them to ~5M people from medical records from 2017 (i.e. pre-COVID). The increase in cardiovascular disorders in the COVID positive group compared to the control groups is pretty startling; for every 100K people at the 12-month mark after an infection, the COVID positive group saw an additional:

-2,350 cases of major cardiovascular events (stroke, heart attack, cardiovascular related death)
-1,200 cases of heart failure
-400 strokes
-4,500 overall incidents of cardiovascular disorders

And those are additional cases over what you'd normally expect, not total. There are a few caveats; the sample was mostly older people, so those numbers aren't going to scale to the whole population, and there was a correlation between severity and the increased 12-month risk (so vaccines should mitigate that somewhat). But even in non-hospitalized cases, there was a marked increase (something like 30-40% higher) in the 12-month risk of cardiovascular disorders after infection.

03-04-2022, 10:22 AM	#4
opendoor Franchise Player Join Date: Apr 2007 Exp:	I'll be shocked if we actually shift into a long-term endemic phase, but I'll be very pleasantly surprised if we do. I think a lot of the stability we're seeing right now is because of recent vaccinations, and people are definitely not going to keep getting vaccinated at the rates we've seen. It'll really come down to how quickly protection against severe disease wanes and/or what new variants we see. If the vulnerable can consistently and repeatedly get vaccinated, that would go a long way to mitigating the impact. But if 60+ year olds and medically vulnerable people get complacent, we could certainly have issues again. I'm also concerned about the long-term health impacts of people repeatedly being infected. I just read about a study that looked at ~150K people who tested positive for COVID and survived it, and compared them to ~5M people in the same time period who didn't have COVID and also compared them to ~5M people from medical records from 2017 (i.e. pre-COVID). The increase in cardiovascular disorders in the COVID positive group compared to the control groups is pretty startling; for every 100K people at the 12-month mark after an infection, the COVID positive group saw an additional: -2,350 cases of major cardiovascular events (stroke, heart attack, cardiovascular related death) -1,200 cases of heart failure -400 strokes -4,500 overall incidents of cardiovascular disorders And those are additional cases over what you'd normally expect, not total. There are a few caveats; the sample was mostly older people, so those numbers aren't going to scale to the whole population, and there was a correlation between severity and the increased 12-month risk (so vaccines should mitigate that somewhat). But even in non-hospitalized cases, there was a marked increase (something like 30-40% higher) in the 12-month risk of cardiovascular disorders after infection.