COVID reminders

 Now that COVID seems to be surging again, some timely reminders are in order:

• keep your vaccination status current. The vaccine won’t keep you from being infected, but it will most likely keep you out of the ED and the morgue;

• the outcome of COVID infection isn’t binary: death or survival. A third outcome is long COVID. Among the consequences of long COVID are pathological changes in blood pressure and heart function.

From the link:

“For up to a year after a case of COVID-19, people may be at increased risk of developing a new heart-related problem, anything from blood clots and irregular heartbeats to a heart attack –- even if they initially seem to recover just fine.

“Among the unknowns: Who’s most likely to experience these aftereffects? Are they reversible — or a warning sign of more heart disease later in life?

“Heart disease has long been the top killer in the nation and the world. But in the U.S., heart-related death rates had fallen to record lows in 2019, just before the pandemic struck.

“COVID-19 erased a decade of that progress, Cheng said.”

https://apnews.com/article/covid19-long-covid-heart-3dd8f26c663e96bffcc2980830626153?taid=64d52964e54c510001bc7eab&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter