Immunity — the body’s ability to defend itself against pathogens, here SARS-CoV2 — can be conferred by vaccination, infection or a combination of the two. The vaccine acts in two ways on the spread of the virus. It prevents people from contracting the virus, but also, in the event of infection, from spreading to those […]
COVID-19 has killed almost 7 million people around the world. Thankfully, the availability of vaccines and the increase in population immunity means that the virus is no longer the threat it once was to most people. With the expiration of the United States’ official Public Health Emergency in May, most Americans have largely returned to […]
A multi-institutional consortium of researchers led by a team at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the COVID-19 International Research Team (COV-IRT) has found that the genes of the mitochondria, the energy producers of our cells, can be negatively impacted by the virus, leading to dysfunction in multiple organs beyond the lungs. Mitochondria are found […]
Long COVID can persist for at least a year after the acute illness has passed, or appear months later, according to the most comprehensive look yet at how symptoms play out over a year. The multicenter study, a collaboration between UC San Francisco, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and seven other sites, […]
UK researchers have found that people with longer-term COVID-19 symptoms including brain fog showed reduced performance in tasks testing different mental processes up to two years after infection with the virus. Researchers from King’s College London looked at whether infection with COVID-19 affected performance in two rounds of online cognitive testing that took place in […]
When COVID-19 began spreading across the globe in early 2020, physicians knew that the virus primarily infected cells in the respiratory tract. But as the case numbers began to grow, physicians were surprised to see that many patients were also developing injuries to their kidneys. The issue came to Samira Musah’s attention when she attended […]
Muscle soreness and achy joints are common symptoms among COVID-19 patients. But for some people, symptoms are more severe, long lasting and even bizarre, including rheumatoid arthritis flares, autoimmune myositis or “COVID toes.” A new Northwestern Medicine study has, for the first time, confirmed and illustrated the causes of these symptoms through radiological imaging. “We’ve […]
Researchers examined data on people over 18 years of age who were hospitalized with COVID-19 in 107 registry-participating hospitals across the nation between January 2020 to March 2021. Smoking status was self-reported and people were classified as smoking if they reported currently using either traditional, combustible cigarettes or e-cigarette products, with no distinction between the […]
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors tried a variety of medications to determine what was helpful to prevent the deaths caused by a virus which humans had no natural immunity against. It was reported that using dexamethasone, a common steroid, prevented deaths in patients who had severe COVID-19 and were on ventilators […]
A new study led by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) brings into sharper focus the structural details of the COVID-19 virus, revealing an elliptical shape that “breathes,” or changes shape, as it moves in the body. “Understanding the SARS-COV-2 virus envelope should allow us to model the actual process of the virus attaching to the cell […]