Think of the children

The number of kids being hospitalized with Covid-19 has jumped 30% in a week nationwide; most were unvaccinated.

=BUT=

If they have the omicron variant, at least, it tends to be less severe. (Although “It remains unclear to what degree the Omicron variant is responsible for rising hospitalizations.”)

=BUT=

About 1,200 kids a day are still in bad enough shape to end up in the hospital with Covid.

Getting paid for dispensing Covid antiviral pills

Strange but true: Some of you are expecting to be paid when you give patients those coming-soon Covid antiviral pills. (The pills will be given to you free, but you can still receive a “dispensing fee.”)

CMS has a two-page memo/guide that explains it.

We would call it “Getting Paid for Dispensing Covid Antiviral Pills,” but government writers are paid by the word, so it’s “Permissible Flexibilities Related to Oral Antiviral Drugs for Treatment of COVID-19 that May Receive U.S. Food and Drug Administration Emergency Use Authorization and are Procured by the U.S. Government.”

[Insert “Scarborough Fair” reference here]

Good news: A compound in both oregano and thyme seems to have anti-cancer properties. Even better, they (carvacrol, thymohydroquinone, and thymol) “also have antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and other properties beneficial to human health,” according to biochemists at Purdue.

The bad news: You need a lot of the herbs. A lot. Like, setting up a home distillery to extract the oil won’t even do it.

The eventual good news: Learning this means “we open a path to engineering plants with higher levels of [the compounds]” or simply finding an efficient way to synthesize them.

It’s certainly something

CDC (projecting an air of confidence and certainty): Omicron accounted for 73% of Covid-19 cases.

The press: Oooh, that’s scary!

CDC (mumbling quietly): Actually, that’s just a rough estimate because the U.S. doesn’t do a lot of genetic sequencing….”

The press: [Leaves room]

FDA: Forget bamlanivimab and etesevimab! Forget REGEN-COV! They don’t work against Omicron!

CDC: Oopsie! That 73%? Well, it was actually more like 23%. And this week it’s about 59%. There’s still a lot of Delta going around.

The People: What the heck?!

CDC: Well, we wanted to sound confident. We knew all along it was a guess. See, there are these things called ‘confidence intervals’—

The People: Oh, shut up.

CDC: But there’s good news! Now, um, you only have to isolate for five days if you test positive but don’t have symptoms!

Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams: No. No no no.

An underused Parkinson’s treatment?

Keep this in the back of your mind if you have patients with Parkinson’s: Taking dopamine agonists or dopamine reuptake inhibitors gives similar quality of life, according to British researchers.

That said, among those DRIs, patients seem to do better on MAO-B inhibitors, rather than COMT inhibitors.

Bottom line: “MAO-B inhibitors might be underused as adjuvant therapy for the treatment of people with Parkinson disease.”

Smoking news

Here’s an odd one: E-cigarettes seem to help certain people quit smoking? Which people? Heavy smokers who weren’t planning to quit. So if you know a smoker, slip ‘em some vapes once in a while, because….

… if they’re under 40 and quit, it can cut their chances of dying from cancer by 90 percent. (In general, Captain Obvious would point out, the younger you are when you quit, the better your odds.)

I actually thought this was a joke

But it’s not — it’s a real study in a respected journal. “Lower cognition was robustly associated with Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy.”

Erroneous social media reports might have complicated personal decision-making, leading to people with lower cognitive ability being vaccine-hesitant.