Posts

On inflammation, machine learning and lung recovery after COVID-19

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Having your work published is always a great honor and satisfaction, even though your results are not so optimistic. If, by accident, you follow my blog for a while, you may have noticed a post concerning the CovILD project - an observation cohort study, I've been curating as a data scientist. Quite recently, we've managed to publish the follow-up quite prominently in eLife ( Sonnweber et al. ) and develop a toolbox which may help us to assess the risk of complicated recovery from COVID-19, at least when it comes to lung injury and functional deficits. Lung injury following COVID-19 tends to be chronic and symptom-independent As a reminder, at the onset of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic in Tyrol, a cohort of 145 patients was recruited, including those suffering from mild COVID-19 managed by home isolation and individuals requiring hospitalization, including mechanical oxygen supply and intensive care. The intention of the study was to establish a long-term observation collective to mo
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Fact check: is Omicron less dangerous than Delta?

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 I had a lot of ideas for the next post... I really wanted to have a look at another problem of humankind: climate change, wealth distribution or perhaps gender equity. There's so much interesting data beyond the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic! But: the new variant of our most popular pathogen dominated the news of the last four weeks, fueled people's fears and hopes at the same time and spoiled my plans. Yes, your right, that's the Omicron, coined a 'mild' or 'cold-like' coronavirus and expected to change the way we experience and manage the pandemic. Does it hold true? I had to crunch some data to convince myself... Omicron: no more than highly transmissible cold bug? I allow myself to skip an extended introduction on Omicron: it's omnipresent in media and European populations - the chances that you have already experienced an infection or experience one in the forthcoming four weeks are quite good. To sum up:  we're facing an extremely infectious pathogen, w
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Location: Innsbruck, Austria
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Fact check: does anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination work?

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 COVID-19 vaccines do not work against Delta   Our hospitals are full with vaccinated patients   I'd rather wait for an inactivated vaccine   Two third are vaccinated and there's a lockdown again...   I've got my jab and got CoV afterwards, what a junk (des isch a Klumpert)!   I wear a mask, keep my distance, go testing, why I should let me vaccinate with this poison?!   Heard on the street, playgrounds in Tyrol and seen in social media in Austria these days.     Daily incidences breach every record, breakthrough infections rate climbs toward 50%, the national health care is approaching a collapse, the surprised government seems to have no idea... Hey, but two-third Austrians are fully vaccinated, what went wrong? The politicians claimed: the pandemic is over, CoV is gonna be an individual medical problem, it is this a pandemic of unvaccinated.   This motivates me to write this post. Does the anti-SARS-CoV-2 vaccination works against the Delta virus paralyzing our hospitals
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Location: Innsbruck, Austria
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Pandemic, containment management or COVID-19: what is more dangerous for mental health?

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It's again a while since the last post and almost two years of pandemic. Sadly said, a misery which would have been already over, at least in the first world, provided a better vaccination readiness of the US and European societies and more courageous political decisions. Frankly speaking, none of us is the same kind of a woman or men as before the SARS-CoV-2 crisis. Besides the real threats to our somatic health, there's another facet of human well being less prominently addressed by media news and scientific publications: mental health. Fear, paranoid feeling of being locked up, overwhelming concerns about own and family health, household finances, kids without school, lost jobs... This all has been burdening us and now seems to be somehow over but not completely. Could we measure this impact on mental integrity? Could we find out the causes? Is there a way to identify people at risk of mental health deterioration early on and help them? The team of 'Health after COVID-19
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Location: Innsbruck, Austria
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'Mild-course', home-isolated: still a missing puzzle to understand the COVID-19 pandemic

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Since the last post (a while ago), many things happened: to the pandemic, which we can now effectively fight against, to the awakening world economy, the even warmer climate... But also to the blog author, who now pursuits a free-lance data scientist career ( https://www.daas.tirol/ ) - any time happy to crunch your exciting data! In the mean time, I spent days if not weeks with an extremely interesting project named simply ' Health after COVID-19 in Tyrol ', whose results, while still not 'properly' published, can be accessed as a preprint . Well, probably there's probably no single person who hasn't heard the term 'long COVID', either from media, friends or relatives - a phenomenon of symptom persistence long after the acute SARS-CoV2 infection ranging from an isolated smell disorder to debilitating shortness of breath making everyday life a hard struggle. Even though the condition follows the 'ebb and flow' pattern of broad public interest, th
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Location: Innsbruck, Austria
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