COVID 19 News Update

The newly updated COVID-19 vaccine currently is in pharmacies and in clinics nationwide. The CDC officially recommends the updated COVID-19 vaccines for everyone over the age of 6 months. The vaccines are available without cost to nearly everyone at pharmacies and clinics nationwide. However, private insurance plans can set the approved locations for their plan members.

When it comes to COVID-19, age matters. “We know that this virus is most likely to cause severe illness in the oldest people, with people over age 75 accounting for nearly half of all COVID-19 hospitalizations since last fall, and at least 44,000 deaths of people over age 65 directly due to COVID-19 last year,” said Dr. Preeti Malani, an infectious disease expert at Michigan Medicine, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The three vaccine manufacturers (Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax) have tailored the vaccines to help the body’s immune system fight off currently circulating strains of the virus that causes COVID-19. The annual updates aim to accomplish the same goal as the tailoring of the annual flu shot to reflect mutations in the influenza virus. Both viruses mutate regularly as they travel from person to person around the world each year.

Studies show that everyone living in an institutional setting such as nursing homes and long-term care, needs to be proactive when it comes to COVID-19. Dr. Malani says it’s especially important to ensure that older adults living in these and other settings get the new COVID-19 vaccine. She said 19% of all COVID-19-related hospitalizations are among adults over age 65 who reside in a nursing home.

“As the pandemic continues, we need to ensure that our most vulnerable have the best and most up-to-date protection they can get, which means getting all the doses recommended for them,” said Dr. Malani. “In fact, people who have a health condition or take a medication that compromises their immune system can get an additional dose or doses of the new updated vaccine two months after they get their first dose.”

Included in this group are adults being treated for cancer, those with a history of a blood cancer, those who have gotten an organ or bone marrow transplant, and those taking high-dose steroids for any condition. This recommendation is also for those taking medicines that can affect the immune system, such as injected drugs for autoimmune conditions including rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, and Crohn’s disease.

COVID-19 and Life Expectancy

The World Health Organization (WHO) reported this past May that the COVID-19 pandemic reversed the trend of steady gain in life expectancy at birth and healthy life expectancy at birth (HALE). The pandemic wiped out nearly a decade of progress in improving life expectancy within just two years. Between 2019 and 2021, global life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years to 71.4 years (back to the level of 2012). Similarly, global healthy life expectancy dropped by 1.5 years to 61.9 years in 2021 (back to the level of 2012).

The 2024 report also highlights how the effects have been felt unequally across the world. The WHO regions for the Americas and South-East Asia were hit hardest, with life expectancy dropping by approximately 3 years and healthy life expectancy by 2.5 years between 2019 and 2021. In contrast, the Western Pacific Region was minimally affected during the first two years of the pandemic, with losses of less than 0.1 years in life expectancy and 0.2 years in healthy life expectancy.

COVID-19 rapidly emerged as a leading cause of death, ranking as the third highest cause of mortality globally in 2020 and the second in 2021. Nearly 13 million lives were lost during this period. The latest estimates reveal that except in the African and Western Pacific regions, COVID-19 was among the top five causes of deaths, notably becoming the leading cause of death in the Americas for both years.

Long COVID and Diabetes

Adults who use the prescription drug metformin to treat their type 2 diabetes may have a lower risk of developing long COVID or dying after a COVID-19 infection than adults with diabetes who take other anti-diabetes medications, according to a large study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The findings, published in the journal Diabetes Care, are based on health data from millions of patients and could have broader implications for use of metformin in long COVID prevention generally.

A study in 2023 showed that treatment with metformin, commonly used to help control blood sugar, reduced the risk of long COVID by as much as 40% in nearly 1,300 U.S. adults who were overweight or obese. In this group, most of the participants did not have diabetes. To see if the drug had a similar effect in people with diabetes, researchers examined electronic health record data for nearly 38 million Americans from two large U.S. databases.

The researchers compared health records from 75,996 adults taking metformin for their type 2 diabetes to 13,336 records from patients who were not taking metformin but were using other types of diabetes medicines. Researchers were specifically looking at how many patients either died or were diagnosed with long COVID within six months after infection. They found that patients taking metformin had a 13% to 21% lower incidence of long COVID or death than those in the non-metformin group.

Scientists are not clear how metformin may prevent long COVID, but they speculate the possibility of several mechanisms that reduce inflammation, decrease viral levels, and suppress the formation of disease-related proteins. Long COVID is marked by a wide range of symptoms, including chronic fatigue, brain fog, and chest pain. It can vary from person to person and can last for weeks, months, or years after infection from SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. While rates of new cases have decreased since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, millions of people are still living with it.

John Schieszer is an award-winning national journalist and radio and podcast broadcaster of The Medical Minute. He can be reached at medicalminutes@gmail.com