Becker's Clinical Quality & Infection Control

30 PATIENT SAFETY AND OUTCOMES Lingering symptoms go away after getting vaccinated, some COVID-19 long-haulers say By Erica Carbajal R esearchers have yet another area to explore when it comes to COVID-19: Why some people experiencing long-haul COVID-19 say their symptoms disappeared aer getting vaccinated, e Washington Post reported March 16. Just over one day after getting her second dose of COVID-19 vaccine, Arianna Eisenberg, who experienced fatigue, insomnia, brian fog and muscle pain for eight months, said her lingering symptoms were gone. "I really felt back to myself, to a way that I didn't think was possible when I was really sick," Ms. Eisenberg, a 34-year-old therapist in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, told the Post. Survivor Corps, an online group of people with long COVID-19 symptoms, conducted an informal member survey that showed 216 people felt no different aer vaccination, while 171 said their conditions improved and 63 said they felt worse. Little research has been officially published on the subject, the Post reported. "e only thing that we can safely assume is that an unknown proportion of people who acquire SARS-CoV-2 have long-term symptoms," Steven Deeks, MD, an infectious disease specialist at UC San Francisco, told the Post. "We know the questions. We have no answers. Hard stop." Researchers suspect symptoms subsiding aer vaccination could be due to a number of reasons, though deeper investigation is still needed. e placebo effect could be one sim- ple explanation. Another theory suggests the COVID-19 vaccine could be prompting the immune system to rid the body of any virus it's still harboring, similar to what happens with varicella zoster, the virus responsible for chickenpox and shingles. e CDC recom- mends people be vaccinated against it in their 50s because in some cases, it can remain in the body's nervous system for years. e Post cited a blog post written by Akiko Iwasaki, PhD, an immunologist at New Haven, Conn.-based Yale School of Medi- cine, which outlines a number of potential explanations for how vaccines may improve lingering COVID-19 symptoms, including a proposal that vaccines boost T-cells and subsequently eliminate a viral reservoir. n Researchers find link between COVID-19, Type A blood By Mackenzie Bean T he SARS-CoV-2 virus may more easily bind to the airway cells of people with Type A blood, according to a study published March 3 in Blood Advances. Researchers at Atlanta-based Emory University School of Medicine and Boston-based Harvard Medical School an- alyzed how a protein on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus interacted with respiratory and red blood cells from Type A, B and O blood. The protein, called receptor binding domain, is respon- sible for attaching to host cells, which plants the seeds for an infection. Researchers found the RBD protein "exhibited high pref- erence" for Type A antigens found on respiratory cells in laboratory settings. The protein did not readily bind to red blood cell antigens. The findings offer the first physical link between COVID-19 and Type A blood, according to Live Sci- ence. However, researchers said it's still unclear wheth- er this binding pattern could mean the virus is able to enter and infect airway cells more easily in people with Type A blood. n Not all COVID 'long-haulers' are adults By Mackenzie Bean A dults are not the only ones at risk of developing pro- longed symptoms linked to COVID-19. Early research shows cases of "long COVID" are rare among children, but are increasing as they return to in-person learning, sports and other activities, The Washington Post reported March 18. The publication cited several small surveys and studies that show children are developing such health issues as fatigue, headache and heart palpitations that last for weeks or months. Children with mild or severe cases have developed the long- term problems, along with those who had no symptoms at all during their active infection, according to the report. While formal data on the topic is still incomplete, Britain's Office for National Statistics in February released figures that showed about 13 percent of children under 11 who contract COVID-19 still had at least one symptom after five weeks. This figure jumped to 15 percent for children ages 12-16. "One of the most difficult things about caring for these pa- tients is they have a lot of questions about short- and long- term effects, about what to expect," Dongngan Truong, MD, a pediatric cardiologist at Intermountain Primary Children's Hospital in Salt Lake City, told the Post. "And right now, we don't know what to expect." n

• Cover