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Palantir's Plan to Decipher the Mysteries of Long Covid:
65 million people are still suffering from long Covid, the mysterious cocktail of symptoms that persist in some patients more than 12 weeks after an initial infection. Researchers are still working to understand this illness, but it's been slow progress so far.
This is because long Covid is not just a medical problem—it's also a data problem, says Indra Joshi, director of health, research, and artificial intelligence at Palantir, which specializes in analyzing big data.
Before the pandemic, US hospitals kept their data to themselves, Joshi told WIRED Health this March, making it difficult for policymakers and researchers to identify patterns of disease occurring across the country. That's why Palantir worked with the US medical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, to create what Joshi describes as one of the largest collections of Covid-19 health records in the world.
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative, aka N3C, is essentially a giant, collaborative database, enabling clinicians and researchers to study the deidentified data of people suffering from Covid-19 or related conditions. "If you're diagnosed with Covid now, your data goes into this enclave," says Joshi, explaining that N3C now includes 2.1 billion clinical observations. The data enclave also encourages clinicians to enter data in a standardized format, making it easy for their insights to be compared with data collected from other US hospitals.
By harmonizing all this data, the N3C acts as a collective pool of information that researchers can dip into to try to find consensus on the ongoing mysteries of long Covid: What exactly are the symptoms? What treatments are people receiving? And how are they responding to those treatments? Already the N3C data has helped better define the symptoms that make up long Covid. It has also revealed that Black and Hispanic Americans, in comparison to white patients, appear to experience more symptoms and health problems related to long Covid, but are less likely to be diagnosed.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday April 11, @05:14AM (6 children)
Well..you're not wrong. "less" is a general term. I would submit it's "incredibly less". Polio was basically eradicated in many countries due to the vaccine which works great. COVID vaccine? Not even in the same ballpark. Flu vaccine? Same.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday April 11, @05:50AM (5 children)
From here [npr.org]:
Covid vaccines don't need to be extremely effective. They just need to create a situation where the number of new infections for a given infection is on average significantly less than one for the price of modest side effects.
My take is that if we had aggressively near full vaccination, we could have eliminated covid throughout the developed world in a year. But a large population of people who refuse to vaccinate means that the disease will continue.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by coolgopher on Tuesday April 11, @06:42AM (2 children)
We didn't even need vaccines to get rid of it, we just needed to stop the spread everywhere for 2-3 weeks to starve it out. Here in Victoria, Australia we successfully eliminated covid from the entire state several times. Yes, the lockdowns sucked, but they were demonstrably effective. And I'd by far prefer another month stuck in lockdown than the years of covid waves we'll have instead.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 11, @12:59PM (1 child)
Completely agree. It was all a bit half-assed. But it seems to me it got into too many different countries early on to be contained. They weren't all able to contain it even if they'd been willing. Then you have to consider the possibility of it surviving in animal populations and passing back to humans again later.
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 3, Informative) by coolgopher on Wednesday April 12, @12:49AM
Yeah, which was all the more reason to jump on it early, and hard. If you wait to see how bad it actually is, you've squandered your best opportunity. Did we overdo it here in Melbourne, as the most locked down city in the world? Quite possibly, but it also did buy us the time to get 96+% of our population vaccinated, and spared some 60k lives on the recent estimate I saw.
(Score: 2) by Entropy on Tuesday April 11, @04:50PM (1 child)
The vast majority of folks I know that got COVID were vaccinated. It's easy to say their infections were less severe(1 was on a ventilator) than they would have been, but it's also pretty hard to prove. Over half of them spread COVID to other people during that period. COVID itself has gotten quite a bit less severe because lets face it: A disease that annihilates it's host is going to be worse at self-survival than one a bit more friendly.
A lot of the less severity of COVID is being credited to vaccines but again: I'm not convinced.
The other vaccines you mentioned in my opinion are vastly superior at suppressing the diseases they vaccinate against. In most cases those diseases are not running around rampant like the Flu, and COVID.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 11, @10:24PM
Wasn't the case over here. The first people to get covid were pre-vaccine and most of them got it through refusing [soylentnews.org] to follow the usual protective procedures. When vaccines came out in 2021, we did pretty well, but again most of the people who ended up catching it were unvaccinated and sloppy at best with those procedures. In 2022, I caught covid in the early summer from an unvaccinated person. That also was the first season that I saw a high number of covid infections as well as infections among vaccinated people.