Coronavirus Daily News Brief – June 5: Long Covid May Be More Devastating Than We Had Ever Imagined, One Person Dead from Bird Flu

An Austrian Airlines A320 retrojet
Good afternoon. This is Jonathan Spira, director of research at the Center for Long Covid Research, reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on its 1,547th day.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Starting today, given that the H5N1 virus poses a grave risk to humans if contracted because it is a highly pathogenic strain, we will include news related to the avian flu in the same sections where we cover SARS-CoV-2 news.  While at the present time, the total number of cases of humans infected with H5N1 is low – the figure is currently 463 – more than half of these resulted in death. —B.A.
In news we cover today , a new report finds that Long Covid appears to be far more serious than most people had thought, one man is dead from a strain of bird flu rarely found in humans, and an FDA external advisory panel announced the strain of Covid that this year’s fall vaccines will target.
TODAY IN THE FIRST YEAR OF COVID HISTORY
On June 5, 2020, American Airlines, which also announced that a number of senior executives would be leaving the airline amidst cutbacks occasioned by the novel  coronavirus pandemic, said it planned to reopen ten of its Admirals Club lounges at airports across the country. The airline also said it would delay the restart of some international flights.
Austrian Airlines, which plans to restart a number of flights on June 15, announced Thursday that it will begin to offer long-haul flights starting on July 1. The first long-haul flight to operate will be from Vienna to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Finally, the number of coronavirus cases across the globe stood at 6.75 million, and the death toll was at 394,688.In the United States and its territories, the number of confirmed cases stood at 1.93 million, while the death toll was at 110,434.
LONG COVID
A new report from t he National Academies said Long Covid could involve up to 200 symptoms and make it difficult for people to work and exist for months or years. The organization issued a 265-page report that recognizes the seriousness and persistence of the condition for millions of Americans.
“Long Covid can impact people across the life span, from children to older adults, as well as across sex, gender, racial, ethnic and other demographic groups,” the report read, concluding that “Long Covid is associated with a wide range of new or worsening health conditions and encompasses more than 200 symptoms involving nearly every organ system.”
Using data from 2022 the report said that nearly 18 million adults and nearly one million children in the United States have had or currently have long Covid at some point. The group believes that approximately 8.9 million adults and 362,000 children currently suffer from the condition.
UNITED STATES
The fall Covid vaccine will target the JN.1 subvariant. A panel of external advisors to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration unanimously voted to have the agency tell vaccine makers to prepare a formula that targets this subvariant, which was dominant in February, even though newer sublineages such as KP.2 and KP.3 are now dominant.
The committee was asked to vote on the question, “For the 2024-2025 Formula of COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S., does the committee recommend a monovalent JN.1-lineage vaccine composition?” All 16 members voted “yes.”
A strain of avian flu that had n ot previously detected in humans took the life of a person in Mexico, the World Health Organization said Wednesday.  This was the first confirmed human case of H5N2, which differs from the strain currently infecting cattle. The deceased was  a 59-year-old male with no previous exposure to poultry or other animals. He died on April 28.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green’s verbal attacks aimed at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the 83-year-old former director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease who served under seven presidents, were not, in fact, based on science.
The young lady’s (as the chairman of the committee kept referring to Greene) notion that social distancing was not based on any science is simply not accurate. Indeed, science tells us that the risk of contracting SARS-CoV-2 from an infected person drops the farther one is from that person. This is because the concentration of the virus gets diluted by the surrounding air. With larger droplets from coughs or sneezes which fall to the ground fairly quickly, 6’ of social distancing viewed by experts as a reasonable benchmark that would allow people to avoid exposure.
Dr. Deborah Birx said that, from the very beginning of the pandemic, U.S. health officials knew that, due to China’s lack of transparency, the country would never find out if Covid originated in a lab or from an animal spillover.
“…we didn‘t know, and we knew we would never know,” Birx said in an interview on CNN on Tuesday. “I mean, we knew with SARS that China was not transparent. We knew with the second SARS, China was not transparent, so we were not going to get an answer. But that shouldn‘t have held us back 4 1/2 years later from both ensuring that we protect against lab leaks and we protect that public.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious disease who spent five decades in government service, testified on Monday before the House of Representative’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, Fauci stated that, while he has an open mind as to whether the coronavirus originated in a lab or nature, the viruses used in research funded in China by the National Institutes of Health were too distance to have evolved into SARS-CoV-2.
“I feel the more likely explanation is a spillover from an animal reservoir,” he said. But absent definitive evidence one way or another, “we have to keep an open mind.”
OTHER HEALTHCARE NEWS
An experimental HIV vaccine developed at Duke University triggered an elusive type of broadly neutralizing antibody in a small group of people enrolled in a 2019 clinical trial. The findings were recently published in the journal Cell.  Since it was first identified in 1983, HIV has infected over 85 million people and caused some 40 million deaths worldwide.
A new study coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison will hopefully convinces at least some aficionados of unpasteurized milk to switch to a safer choice. Researchers there found that mice which drank raw milk from cows with H5N1 experienced systemic infections that riddled their organs.
PANDEMIC STATISTICS
CURRENT U.S. COVID STATISTICS AT A GLANCE
In the United States, in the week ending May 25, 2024, the test positivity rate was, based on data released on May 31 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was 4.2%, and the trend in test positivity is +0.8% in the most recent week. Meanwhile, the percentage of emergency department visits that were diagnosed as SARS-CoV-2 was 0.4%, and the trend in emergency department visits is +5.1%.
The number of people admitted to hospital in the United States due to SARS-CoV-2 was no longer being reported as of the end of May. Meanwhile, the percentage of deaths due to SARS-CoV-2 was 0.6%, a figure that remains unchanged over the past two weeks.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
Some 70.6% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine at press time, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information.  So far, 13.58 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 5,244 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 32.8% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the beginning of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, 2023, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines in any significant number
Finally, as of April 14, 2024, only Turkmenistan in Central Asia is only state that has not reported any cases of SARS-CoV-2 infections whatsoever, although it is strongly suspected that the virus is present there. Meanwhile, the last territory in the world to have its first ever SARS-CoV-2 infection was Tokelau, a dependency of New Zealand that reported its first five cases on December 21, 2022.
Where Has All the Data Gone?
We regret to inform that, as of April 15, 2024, the Global Daily Statistics data in the Coronavirus Daily News Brief are no longer being updated. Over the past 15 months, as more politicians and governments sought to place SARS-CoV-2 in the rear-view mirror, pandemic data reporting sputtered out and we are now at the point where it is simply not feasible to provide statistically valid case data on a global scale.
We are developing potential new and authoritative sources that we will present once they have been properly vetted, so stay tuned to this space. In the meantime, our Long Covid and pandemic coverage will remain much the same.
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Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this issue.
The Coronavirus Daily News Brief is a publication of the Center for Long Covid Research. www.longcov.org
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