Covid, along with other viral infections such as RSV, Influenza, Adenovirus and other Coronaviruses, continue to cause a lot of illness and misery. Although the numbers of infections of RSV and the flu remain fairly stable, the Covid situation is worsening once again.
In the last 2 weeks, rates of Covid related death, hospitalization and ICU admission have increased. Excluding China, from which data is not reliable, worldwide deaths have risen to 2700 a day, the highest it’s been since over a year ago. In the US there are now 580 daily deaths a day accounting for 22% of the total worldwide deaths. This is a significant rise from the average of ~420 we had for many months. Furthermore, hospitalizations are up by 17% and ICU admissions are up 15%.
Currently, the dominant variant nationwide is BQ.1.1 (34% of cases) followed by XBB.1.5 (28% of cases). Both are much more infectious than the original form, which is all but gone now, and both cause less severe disease. But as I have said many times, a small percentage of a large number is still a large number. I continue to see many patients in the office with back to back infections, some of which involve COVID but mostly, these remain undiagnosed run-of-the-mill viral infections. Nonetheless, people are having significant symptoms. I’m also seeing long-term post Covid symptoms. Ringing in the ears, persistent congestion, coughing… I also see a lot of alteration in taste. The loss of smell is much preferable to the phantom smell of rotting flesh or the cardboard taste people have with everything they eat. This is now thought to be a central (brain) alteration in smell and taste perception. Not much to offer these patients other than some smell exercises and supplementation with Alpha Lipoic Acid, Vitamin D3 and Omega 3 fatty acids, and these have limited benefit.
Covid 19 is not “just a cold”.
The situation in China remains, at least on paper according to “official” reports, not particularly significant. But this is a lie. There is a disaster going on over there. All outside independent information suggests the opposite. Hospitals are full. People are dying at home, with families not being able to dispose of bodies for up to a week. Even satellite imagery shows parking congestion around morgues along with new such facilities being constructed to deal with all the dying patients. Beijing morgues are incinerating 4x more bodies than normal. There are reports of “scalpers” selling tickets for hundreds of dollars for spots in the waiting line to cremate loved ones at overrun morgues. People are waiting in lines outside for days. The estimates are that about 19,000 Chinese people are dying a day from Covid a day, far greater than previous worldwide peaks of 14,000 and the US peak of 3300 deaths a day. It does seem to be tapering off, at least in the big cities, but the small villages are just getting affected now. And China has a LOT of small villages.
As I mentioned in the previous blog, the Chinese government has a very strict definition of what constitutes a death secondary to SARS-CoV-2. To count as a Covid-death, patients must die in a hospital from a strictly respiratory cause and test positive for Covid. It does not count any other cause of death and we know how this virus can affect the heart, kidneys and even the brain. Deaths which occur outside of the hospital are also not counted!
It’s a cauldron for brewing a nasty variant! It’s inevitable. Travel restrictions will not help us, especially with the upcoming lunar Chinese New Year, which is widely celebrated with the most massive human migration of any event on the planet. Over 2 billion trips are estimated to occur in the upcoming 10-14 days!
Despite all the illness out there, people back here continue to behave as if nothing is going on. Virtually no masking and minimal distancing. It’s a bit nuts. Either we adapt and change how we live (continued appropriate masking, distancing, vaccination…) or the viruses will force us to adapt when we get sick. Pay now, or pay more later.
VACCINES
Recent studies CLEARLY show that the bivalent vaccine booster dramatically reduces severity of Covid disease and minimizes risks of hospitalization and death. I have seen too many people who skipped the last booster and subsequently got pretty sick. It is also still not too late to get your Flu vaccine. The season stretches well into April.
COVID MYTHS
There was a recent newspaper piece about how vaccination may be driving virus variant development. This is a complete myth. What causes mutation is replication. The more the virus spreads and reproduces, the more it mutates. In addition, the longer and the more a virus divides, meaning the sicker someone is and the longer they are sick, the greater the risk of mutation. Vaccine reduces risks of infection as well as duration of disease. Vaccine REDUCES mutations. It doesn’t cause them. It’s completely ridiculous. This kind of misinformation is horrible, reprehensible and dangerous. But people believe it.
The other crazy rumors have to do with the vaccine contributing to Buffalo Bill’s player Damar Hamlin’s cardiac event on the football field as well as the death of the reporter Grant Wahl during the FIFA world cup. Wahl’s tragic death was from a ruptured aortic aneurysm. Rare and in most cases unsurvivable, but not Covid or vaccination. Hamlin plays an extremely violent sport which causes traumatic brain injury in 100% of the players. Don;t let your kids play football!!! Cardiac arrest after the kind of hit he suffered is well known to occur. This has occurred on the baseball and soccer fields as well. It wasn’t Covid and the vaccine did not weaken his heart making him more susceptible. More ridiculousness.
PLANT BASED NUTRITION (aka a healthy vegan diet – Coke and Oreos are vegan but clearly not healthy)
It was nice to finally see some mainstream press praising the benefits of plant-based diets. Click here for a link to one such piece from CNN. The original JAMA article is here. What they reported was that people who consumed plant-based diets had a 20% lower chance of premature death while living with significantly less chronic disease simultaneously. Although they have a hard time bringing themselves to say that a strictly whole food plant-based diet is the healthiest, they at least acknowledge that cutting back on animal products and increasing fruits and vegetables is the path to the longest and more importantly, healthiest life. All of these healthiest diets also eliminate added sugar and severely limit processed foods. Some reports also acknowledged the Blue Zones, areas in the world where people are known to live the longest, with life expectancies 10 years or more than the rest of the world, while living with virtually no dementia, heart disease or other chronic conditions. 4 of the 5 established Blue Zones do consume animal products, but it constitutes less than 5% of their calories. Another way of looking at that is that maybe 1 meal a week contained animal products. Never cow’s milk. Mostly fish or the family goat. The Blue Zone with the overall best outcomes however was strictly vegan and is actually in Loma Linda, California.
I came across a very interesting physician/nutritional scientist named Gil Carvhalo, MD, PhD. He is a research scientist at USC and UCLA. He has a YouTube channel named “Nutrition Made Simple”. There, he discusses various nutritional topics such as the dangers (and lack thereof) of seed oils as well as how dietary cholesterol affects blood cholesterol (spoiler: it does). He is vegan but acknowledges that a small amount of non factory farmed animal products are necessarily bad for you. He recently had a couple of videos where he interviewed world renowned paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Peter Ungar who specializes in evolutionary nutrition. His research lab has published hundreds of articles about what and how our ancestors ate. He dispelled various popular beliefs like ones suggesting that we ate mostly or exclusively meat with little carbohydrates, as is promoted in the Paleo or Meat-only diets. He dismissed a strictly vegan ancestral diet as well. The most important take-away from these videos is that human beings are the most adaptable creatures on the planet. We can survive living anywhere, eating pretty much anything. We ate what was available and what would allow us to survive. That meant we ate everything.
That having been said, gathering and consuming plants was a heck of a lot easier and safer than hunting other animals, most of which wanted to eat us also. Fossil records suggest that we ate grains as far back as 200,000 years ago or more, not when the agricultural revolution began 10,000 years ago. He also highlighted the fact that until the last 150 or so years, humans ate strictly unprocessed, seasonal and local foods rather than hyper processed, sugar and fat laden man-made foods.
Nutrition aside, there are a few other very important reasons to shift to a mostly plant-based diet. Climate change and ethics.
You have to have your head pretty far up your butt not to appreciate that our climate is changing, unless of course you also believe the Earth is flat and that Democrats drink babies blood. I don’t think that anyone affected by the California floods doubts the existence and impact of climate change. And the animal agricultural industry is the single greatest contributor to global warming. According to some reports, as much as 86% of it. You can deny it until you are blue in the face, but it’s a fact and unless we cut back, allowing land to re-wild which will absorb CO2 and decrease the number of ruminants, primarily cows, which produce massive amounts of methane which is a 28x more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, our planet’s future is bleak. Of course we need to develop clean energy and cut back on burning non-renewable fossil fuels and recycle and stop buying plastic…. also, but all these measures will not save us unless we massively cut back eating meat and consuming dairy.
From an ethical perspective, the number of land and aquatic animals we torture and kill annually is mind boggling. 10 billion land animals are slaughtered each year in the US alone. 99% of them are raised on factory farms enduring all kinds of abuses. An additional 47 billion aquatic animals are killed each year. Americans consume 1 million chickens every hour! These animals live miserable lives and there is no such thing as “humane” slaughter. Killing is killing. No animal wants to die. It’s hypocritical to be outraged by cultures which raise dogs and cats for consumption, but think nothing of raising pigs and cows for the same thing. It’s hypocritical to imprison someone who abuses a dog, but do nothing to a pig farmer who can legally kill a piglet by slamming its head into the concrete or a chicken farmer who puts live baby chicks into a macerator because they are the wrong sex.
Enough rambling and soap boxing.
What we need in this world is more compassion. Not just for ourselves and our loved ones, but everyone and everything around us. Everything is connected and we are all in this together.
Please continue to be careful out there and please get your bivalent Covid booster.
Despite the denials, proper masking also makes a huge difference. But it has to be proper masking. Wear a good mask, preferably N95 or KN95, and wear it properly.
Please work on your health. In addition to some pretty sick people I’ve seen recently, I have also seen a few who have taken some real control of their health, one having lost over 140 pounds and who was able to stop a few medications! You can do it. It just takes work and consistency.
I’m off for a week. Hitting the Mexican sun. It’s a very safe place.
Stay Safe and Be Well
AC