Update – 27/01/2022
January 27, 2022
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As of the latest update by the Greek authorities, the total number of confirmed Covid-19 diagnosed cases in Greece 1,848,223. 115 new deaths were reported raising the total number to 22,970. The number of patients treated in intensive care units is currently 646. 17,960 new cases were announced yesterday in Greece. 5,037 of the new cases were found in the Attica region and 2,005 new cases in the Thessaloniki region.
A Cypriot District court rejected a petition by 64 people to strike down as unconstitutional government regulations requiring Covid-19 vaccination certificates to enter indoor and outdoor venues, the Attorney-General’s office said on Tuesday.
In a statement, the court accepted the Attorney-General’s argument that a relevant Health Ministry decree aims to protect the island nation’s entire population, which is the “state’s highest duty.”
The court added that it is “not reasonable or possible” to put the lives of the whole population at risk because of a small group of citizens that doesn’t wish to abide by the decree.
The judge who rendered the decision said the petition doesn’t exclusively concern the protection of the petitioners’ rights but also directly affects the rights of all citizens to prevent delays in tracing Covid-19 cases and close contacts that would result in the “uncontrolled spread” of the virus.
“In the event the petition is granted, the danger lurks that the disease could go unchecked, resulting in adverse consequences on public health,” the judge said.
The judge said prevailing conditions mandate the measures which are recommended by international organizations as well as the group of health experts that advises the government.
The measures have been enacted for the medium term and conditions are appraised continually so that disproportionate measures are avoided.
According to official statistics, nearly 46,500 Covid-19 cases have been confirmed in Cyprus between Jan. 4 and January 17, bringing the infection rate to 5,235 per 100,000 people.
In the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north of the ethnically split country, the Covid-19 infection rate on Monday stood at 1.55%.
It is one of many mysteries about long Covid: Who is more prone to developing it? Are some people more likely than others to experience physical, neurological or cognitive symptoms than can emerge, or linger for, months after their coronavirus infections have cleared?
Now, a team of researchers who followed more than 200 patients for two to three months after their Covid diagnoses report that they have identified biological factors that might help predict if a person will develop long Covid.
The study, published Tuesday by the journal Cell, found four factors that could be identified early in a person’s coronavirus infection that appeared to correlate with increased risk of having lasting symptoms weeks later.
The researchers said they had found that there was an association between these factors and long Covid (which goes by the medical name post acute sequelae of Covid-19, or PASC) whether the initial infection was serious or mild. They said that the findings might suggest
ways to prevent or treat some cases of long Covid, including the possibility of giving people antiviral medications soon after an infection has been diagnosed.
“It’s the first real solid attempt to come up with some biologic mechanisms for long Covid,” said Dr Steven Deeks, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.
He and other experts, along with the study authors, cautioned that the findings were exploratory and would need to be verified by considerably more research.
Still, Deeks said, “They’ve identified these four major factors. Each is biologically plausible, consistent with theories that other people are pursuing, and importantly, each is actionable. If these pathways get confirmed, we as clinicians can actually design interventions to make people better. That is the take-home message.”
One of the four factors researchers identified is the level of coronavirus RNA in the blood early in the infection, an indicator of viral load. Another is the presence of certain autoantibodies – antibodies that mistakenly attack tissues in the body as they do in conditions like lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. A third factor is the reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus, a virus that infects most people, often when they are young, and then usually becomes dormant.
The final factor is having Type 2 diabetes, although the researchers and other experts said that in studies involving larger numbers of patients, it might turn out that diabetes is only one of several medical conditions that increase the risk of long Covid.
“I think this research stresses the importance of doing measurements early in the disease course to figure out how to treat patients, even if we don’t really know how we’re going to use all that information yet,” said Jim Heath, principal investigator of the study and president of the Institute for Systems Biology, a nonprofit biomedical research organization in Seattle.
“Once you can measure something, then you may be able to start doing something about it,” Heath said, adding: “We did this analysis because we know patients will go to physicians and they’ll say that they’re tired all the time or whatever, and the physician just tells them to get more sleep. That’s not very helpful. So, we wanted to actually have a way to quantify and say that there’s actually something wrong with these patients.”
In more detail, the 17,960 new cases detected per Regional Unit:
