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#COVID19

98 posts80 participants13 posts today
Replied to Ducky 🇨🇦

Some highlights from @ducky 's weekly roundup at covidbc.webfoot.com/2025/03/28

SARS-CoV-2 can interact with / activate the CD147 receptor to get into lymphocytes (T-cells and B-cells). (sciencedirect.com/science/arti)

women are 13.4 times more likely to get Long COVID if they are 🤰pregnant than if they are 🚫🤰not, with the danger highest if they catch COVID-19 in the third trimester. (sciencedirect.com/science/arti)

the rate of cases of postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS) has gone up more than fourteen times compared to pre-pandemic (academic.oup.com/ehjqcco/advan)

covidbc.webfoot.com2025-03-28 General – Pandemics in British Columbia

I haven’t had a journal article accepted for publication in six years. Until today, by Studies in Graduate and Postdoctoral Education…

Celbis, O.; van de Laar, M.; Windsor, W. L.; Papatsiba, V.; Ofosu-Ampong, K.; Kurawa, G.; Sadat Bole, A.; Ani-Ampsonah, Mary; Xu, Linlin

Towards an ecological systems approach to doctoral student resilience: qualitative evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic.

I’ll share the open access version when it’s ready, but here’s the abstract:

Purpose
This study contributes to the growing body of literature documenting responses to short- and long-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on doctoral students. We examine support practices at different levels of the system in which doctoral students are embedded, drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model to better understand how these contribute to doctoral students’ degree of resilience under stress.

Design
Using paired online interviews, we explore the experiences of 21 doctoral students from 7 universities across Europe, Africa and Asia.

Findings
We find that support of supervisors at the microsystem level was a pivotal mediating factor in explaining to what extent the negative impacts of the pandemic were experienced by the doctoral students in our sample. At the same time, factors at the systemic level, such as weak infrastructure for online education, and limited incentives for supervisors to engage in additional mentoring beyond supervision, affected the repertoire of actions available to students at lower levels of the support system. In less resourced settings where systemic constraints were felt particularly strongly, students had to self-facilitate sources of resilience, resorting to peer and external mentors’ support at the mesosystem level of their environment.

#covid19 #pandemic #research #HigherEducation #PhD #postgraduate #resilience #Bronfenbrenner

An article I won't link is titled "Brain Fog Is Here to Stay"

Imagine saying since the huge increase in brain fog after 2020 includes folks with who haven't been diagnosed with Long COVID, the brain fog can't be because of previous COVID infections.

I can see the placards now: No causality without diagnosis!

The author has brain fog herself, and she's clearly in a tremendously challenging local situation as her article does communicate, so fine, but her editors still OK'ed and published an article based on a ridiculous premise.

Last year, a large study of adults in the U.K. found that 28 percent reported brain fog associated with “functional impairments,” and while it’s tempting to chalk that figure up to long COVID, the version of the disease that can last for months or years, the survey didn’t bear this out. Long COVID was just one predictor of brain fog, along with migraines, concussions, and being a middle-aged woman. So, if it isn’t only that, what is fogging up our thoughts?

There ARE other causes of brain fog. Folks with ME/CFS have heard of "fibro fog"; fighters know of "punch drunk", the list goes on. Cases from 2018 and earlier weren't Long COVID, though many cases do seem to be postviral conditions.

But this logic is awful and the fact that editors would print a piece that is completely based on a fallacy - well I guess I know not to trust The Cut as a publication.

I won't link to it, to not give false logic the traffic.