Tag: long haulers

  • Featured sources, September 19

    • COVID Behaviors Dashboard from Johns Hopkins: John Hopkins University maintains one of the oldest and best-known COVID-19 dashboards of the pandemic. The team recently expanded its data offerings with a new dashboard focused on pandemic attitudes and practices around the world. This dashboard draws from surveys conducted in over 100 countries, in collaboration with the WHO; read more about it here.
    • COVID-19 K-12 School Testing Impact Estimator: What COVID-19 testing strategy would make the most sense for your local K-12 school? This dashboard, by the Rockefeller Foundation and Mathematica (the data research organization), is designed to help stakeholders find out. Simply plug in the school’s characteristics and COVID-19 safety goals, and the dashboard will tell you how different testing strategies may measure up.
    • Vaccine hesitancy roundup from the Journalist’s Resource: This resource page includes a wealth of data and insights on vaccine hesitancy in the U.S., drawing from a variety of surveys and research papers on the topic. As of early September, author Naseem Miller writes, the PubMed research database included over 750 studies on COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy, signifying growing academic interest in this topic.
    • Hospital challenges to public health reporting: A new report from the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology explores the challenges that non-government hospitals have faced in electronically exchanging information with public health agencies. One major finding: in both 2018 and 2019, half of all hospitals lacked the capacity for this data exchange. No wonder electronic reporting has been such a challenge during the pandemic.
    • NIH Long COVID initiative revs up: This isn’t an actual data source, more of an update: the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s RECOVER Initiative to study Long COVID awarded a major research grant this week. About $470 million goes to New York University’s Langone Medical Center, which will serve as a national hub for Long COVID research and award sub-grants to other institutions. The NIH’s RECOVER website currently reports that between 10% and 30% of people infected with the coronavirus will go on to develop Long COVID; hopefully research at NYU and elsewhere will lead to some more precise numbers.

  • Featured sources, August 22

    • State Guidance on School Reopenings, CRPE: The Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) is an education research organization focused on improving student outcomes. The organization has compiled and analyzed state guidance for school reopening in fall 2020, focusing on mask mandates and vaccination requirements. Read about their findings here.
    • Will Students Come Back?: July 2021 Parent Survey: The RAND Corporation, a survey company, has a new report out this week displaying parent attitudes towards fall reopening. According to the survey, as of July 2021, 89% of U.S. parents are planning to send their kids back to school in person. This number is higher for white (94%) and Asian (88%) parents than Black (82%) and Hispanic (83%) parents.
    • COVID Stimulus Watch: The policy resource center Good Jobs First has put together this extensive database of CARES Act funding recipients. You can search the database by federal agency, CARES Act program, business sector, company type, location, amount received, and whether the money has been refunded.
    • Body Politic’s Comprehensive Guide to Covering Long COVID: Writer and long COVID advocate Fiona Lowenstein has written this guide to covering the prolonged condition. The guide includes long COVID’s history, key terms, finding experts, telling patient stories, and more. Lowenstein shares key insights from the guide in this Center for Health Journalism article.
    • Update on Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker: After nine months of manual data updates, the team behind Bloomberg’s COVID-19 vaccine tracker is switching to automated data capture from the World Health Organization, Johns Hopkins, and other sources. Or, as health editor Drew Armstrong put it on Twitter: “We’re finally ready to let the robots take over.” Thank you, Bloomberg team, for your months of hard work!

  • Featured sources, July 18

    • COVID-19 resources by Evidence Aid: Evidence Aid is a U.K.-based nonprofit that provides evidence-based guidance for disaster response. The organization’s COVID-19 page includes plain-language research summaries about COVID-19 epidemiology, treatments, and more, available in several different languages.
    • Public Health England Technical Briefings on SARS-CoV-2 variants: While the CDC has not done the best job of providing data on variants and breakthrough cases, the U.K.’s public health agency is sequencing more cases than any other country—and providing detailed reports on the results of those efforts. These reports may be useful for anyone seeking to keep a close eye on Delta and other variants’ ability to beat our vaccines. (h/t Your Local Epidemiologist)
    • Excess mortality and COVID-19 deaths in 67 countries: Researchers from the University of Bologna (in Italy) analyzed the gaps between excess deaths and COVID-19 deaths in 67 countries, revealing the capacity of different national health systems to accurately identify COVID-19 cases. Their work was published this week in JAMA Network Open. (For more on excess deaths, see this CDD post about Peru.)
    • Characterizing long COVID in an international cohort: In another new paper, published this week in The Lancet, COVID-19 long-haulers from the Patient-Led Research Collaborative share the results of an international survey on long COVID-19. The findings indicate that the vast majority of long-haulers (over 90% of those surveyed) suffer from symptoms for at least 35 weeks.
    • COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance and Hesitancy in Low and Middle Income Countries: One more new paper, this one published in Nature: an international group of researchers analyzed vaccine acceptance across several low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the U.S., and Russia. They found much higher vaccine acceptance in LMICs (80%) compared to the U.S. (65%) and Russian (30%). The study data are available on GitHub.

  • Featured sources, July 4

    No new COVID-19 data sources caught my eye this week, so here are a couple of favorites from the archives.

    • Post-COVID Care Centers (featured on 5/2/21): Post-COVID Care Centers, or PCCCs, are clinics where long COVID patients can receive treatment. They’re staffed by a growing group of multidisciplinary doctors and medical researchers seeking to understand this prolonged condition. The long COVID advocacy network Survivor Corps has compiled this database of PCCCs by state; as of July 3, eight states still do not have any such centers.
    • The CoronaVirusFacts Alliance Database (featured on 8/2/20): Since the start of the pandemic, Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network has connected fact-checkers in over 70 countries working to correct COVID-19 misinformation. The results of these fact-checkers’ work are compiled in a database, which you can search by country, fact rating, and topic.
    • COVID-19 diverse sources (featured on 3/28/21): NPR journalists from the organization’s Source of the Week project have compiled this database of COVID-19 experts from diverse backgrounds. The database is divided into 13 major categories, including virology, disease origin, health policy, racial/ethnic health disparities, and more.

  • Featured sources, May 2

    • AHCJ resource on COVID-19 vaccine results: The Association for Health Care Journalists has added a section to its Medical Studies repository for studies on how well COVID-19 vaccines protect against infection. Tara Haelle, AHCJ’s medical core topic leader, compiled the studies; “The list is not necessarily exhaustive, but it includes the studies I was able to track down so far,” she writes in a blog post about this update.
    • Colleges requiring COVID-19 vaccinations (Chronicle): A growing number of colleges and universities are aiming to protect their students, professors, and staff by requiring COVID-19 vaccinations for those coming to campus next fall. The Chronicle of Higher Education has identified 190 such institutions as of April 30, and is continually updating its list. (Note: You need to sign up with a free account to view the page.)
    • Post-COVID Care Centers: Post-COVID Care Centers, or PCCCs, are clinics where long COVID patients can receive treatment. They’re staffed by a growing group of multidisciplinary doctors and medical researchers seeking to understand this prolonged condition. The long COVID advocacy network Survivor Corps has compiled this database of PCCCs by state; 17 out of 50 states don’t yet have any such centers. (H/t Chelsea Cirruzzo, who has a great Twitter thread covering the recent House Energy & Commerce health committee hearing on long COVID.)
    • Excess deaths in the U.S. (Kieran Healy): Kieran Healy, sociology professor at Duke University, recently updated his chart gallery on excess deaths in the U.S. during 2020, using CDC data. All states saw significantly higher death rates in 2020 compared to 2015-2019 (except for North Carolina, which has incomplete data due to reporting delays). New York City has the highest death rate by far at over 30%.

  • Featured sources, Jan. 17

    These sources, along with all sources from past issues, are listed here.

    • 6-month consequences of COVID-19 in patients discharged from hospital (Huang et al., The Lancet): I don’t usually feature scientific papers here, but this new study is important. It’s the biggest paper so far on COVID-19 long haulers, those patients who struggle with the disease for months after their diagnosis (or after not getting a diagnosis at all). This study followed about 1,700 patients over 6 months.
    • Global.health COVID-19 dataset: Global.health describes itself as a “global data repository and visualization platform that enables open access to real-time epidemiological anonymized line list data.” Its COVID-19 dataset—which promises information on 5 million anonymized cases—is not yet published, but is definitely a source to look out for.
    • COVID-19 survey of Medicare beneficiaries: This week, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services published results of a survey of Medicare beneficiaries, focused on their experiences with COVID-19. The data include American seniors’ perceptions of vaccines, perceptions of COVID-19 safety, care experiences, and more.