Staff Reports
Last Call — A prime-time read of what’s going down in Florida politics.
First Shot
For most, COVID-19 symptoms last a matter of days or weeks. However, about 10%-30% of diagnoses result in Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, or “Long COVID” for the jargon averse.
Long COVID, as the name portends, describes the people who suffer from the symptoms of COVID-19 months after the disease would have run its course in the average patient.
Thus far, it has been difficult to visualize the number of Americans who are dealing with Long COVID, but the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation on Tuesday launched a new dashboard that uses data from Johns Hopkins University CSSE COVID-19 data and the U.S. census to show how many Americans are estimated to be experiencing Long COVID symptoms by state, county and nationally.
Using a 30% occurrence rate, the dashboard estimates 11.1 million Americans suffer from Long COVID, including 909,475 Floridians. A 10% rate — the bottom end estimate from two studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association — there are 303,155 Floridians with Long COVID.
“Our dashboard is an important tool to help estimate and assess the growing population of people with Long COVID and help hospitals, clinics and health care professionals across the country prepare and plan for their care,” said Steven Flanagan, a physician at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine and vice president of AAPM&R.
AAPM&R’s dashboard follows up on the organization’s repeated calls for a national plan to address the needs of the millions of Americans who are suffering from Long COVID.
“We need to better understand how many people have Long COVID and where those populations are located to ensure we have the appropriate resources and infrastructure to support them. Our call for a national plan emphasizes the need for research to advance the medical understanding of Long COVID, equitable access to care for patients, and resources to build necessary infrastructure,” Flanagan said.
“Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that we, as a country, help Long COVID patients reach their highest levels of recovery, and this dashboard demonstrates the urgent need for a plan.”
Evening Reads
“Vaccines are changing how the coronavirus evolves” via Katherine J. Wu of The Atlantic
“Costa Ricans live longer than us. What’s the secret?” The New Yorker
“Telling conservatives it’s a shot to ‘restore our freedoms’: How online ads are promoting coronavirus vaccination” via Jeremy B. Merrill and Drew Harwell of The Washington Post
“A lesson for Joe Biden: How JFK went up in the polls after the Bay of Pigs” The New Republic
“Behind the Florida condo collapse: Rampant corner-cutting” via Konrad Putzier, Scott Calvert and Rachael Levy of The Wall Street Journal
“Caught in the crossfire over COVID-19’s origins” via Roni Caryn Rabin of The New York Times
“The death of the job” via Anna North of Vox
“The dumbest argument against vaccine passports” via Jordan Weissmann of Slate
“Can Democrats move forward a voting rights bill by making a moral case for it?” via Alex Samuels of FiveThirtyEight
“Florida hospital workers: Exasperated by the unvaccinated” via Cindy Krischer Goodman of the Orlando Sentinel
“Exodus: A story in photographs depicts mass migration upending lives across Latin America” via Nicoló Filippo Rosso of The Washington Post
Quote of the Day
“I would like to publicly offer a sincere apology to the residents of Florida Senate District 37, including former Sen. José Javier Rodríguez, to the people of Miami-Dade County, the state of Florida and anyone else that was affected by my actions.” — former SD 37 candidate Alex Rodriguez, pleading guilty for his role in the ‘ghost’ candidate scheme.
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