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 | | The New York Times |
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 | | Diabetes and Covid are colliding in a public health disaster.Charity Rachelle for The New York Times |
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Covid's terrible toll on people with diabetes |
After older people and nursing home residents, no other group seems to have been hit harder by Covid than people with diabetes. They account for a staggering 30 to 40 percent of all U.S. Covid deaths, several studies suggest. |
Diabetes patients who are hospitalized with Covid spend more time in intensive care, are likelier to be intubated and are less likely to survive, our colleague Andrew Jacobs reports. One study found that 20 percent of such patients died within a month of admission. |
Diabetes is a chronic disease that hobbles the ability to regulate blood sugar and inexorably wreaks havoc on circulation, kidney function and vital organs. |
Though researchers are still trying to understand the dynamics between diabetes and Covid, most agree on one thing: Uncontrolled diabetes impairs the immune system and decreases a patient's ability to withstand a coronavirus infection. |
Diabetics often struggle with hypertension, obesity and other medical issues, which can fuel chronic inflammation inside the body. That triggers the release of cytokines, tiny proteins that regulate the body's immune response to infection or injury. |
Covid, it turns out, can also provoke an uncontrolled release of cytokines, and the resulting "cytokine storm" can wreak havoc on vital organs. |
Like the pandemic, which has had an outsize toll on communities of color, the burden of diabetes falls more heavily on Latino and Black Americans, highlighting systemic failures in health care that have also made the coronavirus far deadlier for the poor. |
"It's not that diabetes itself makes Covid inherently worse but rather uncontrolled diabetes, which is really a proxy for other markers of disadvantage," said Nadia Islam, a medical sociologist at NYU Langone Health. |
About 1.5 million Americans are diagnosed with diabetes each year, according to the C.D.C., and roughly 96 million, about one in three adults, are at high risk for developing the disease. The disease claims 100,000 lives annually but draws less funding or notice than illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. |
Experts say addressing the nation's diabetes crisis will require well-funded public education campaigns that drive home the importance of exercise and healthy eating. That would require seismic changes to a food system geared to cheap, processed food. |
"The only way to move the needle is to reform a system that prioritizes cures and new drugs over prevention," said Dr. Sudip Bajpeyi, a researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso. |
 | | Residents lining up last weekend for coronavirus tests outside a Shanghai hospital.Aly Song/Reuters |
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Shanghai's child separations |
Recent photos and video shared online show a series of hospital cribs, each holding several young children, with some of them crying. The cribs appear to be in the hallway of the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Center. |
The images and video could not be independently verified, but the health center acknowledged that they were real and did not deny that parents with Covid were being separated from their children. |
In Shanghai, anyone who tests positive for the coronavirus must isolate in a hospital or designated facility. One woman, Lucy Zhu, 39, was separated from her 2-year-old daughter last week. In a phone interview with The Times, she called the situation "totally inhumane." |
On Tuesday, she said, her daughter was transferred to a clinical center in Jinshan, and Zhu was told she could not accompany her. From then until Saturday morning, she could not to establish direct contact with her daughter. Although officials said her daughter was fine, they offered no proof. |
"The doctor sent me a video at noon today," Zhu said on Saturday. "In the whole room, there was only one nurse, but I saw around 10 minors." |
The fury and concern of parents is the latest in a series of crises faced by Shanghai officials, who have instituted an enormous rolling lockdown. |
Residents have complained that they have little warning about neighborhood lockdowns. Panic shopping has emptied grocery store shelves, and people with life-threatening conditions have posted calls for help online when they have not been able to reach hospitals. |
How has your mental health changed? |
After more than two years of illness, upheaval and loss, many of us are being asked to return to something resembling our prepandemic lives. Offices are filling up, masks are coming off and more governments and organizations are making plans to "live with" the virus. |
And yet many of us are trying to adapt to the new normal with emotional and mental scars that didn't exist before the pandemic — or were exacerbated by the events of the last few years. The push toward restoring the status quo may make these wounds more painful and a return to "normal" more challenging. |
So as we move into the next phase of the pandemic, we're asking readers: How has the pandemic changed your mental health? If you'd like to share your story, you can fill out this form here. We may use your response in an upcoming newsletter. |
What else we're following |
We all got vaccinated except for my mom. During the Omicron surge, we all got sick but were able to fight the infection. Unfortunately, my mom, who just turned 64 in January, got infected and did not survive. The virus destroyed her lungs. She spent one month in the hospital and it was a nightmare. We couldn't see her, doctors didn't give us a straight answer, it was horrible. During that month she spent three weeks intubated and we never saw her alive again, just unconscious from the medications and breathing through a machine. May her light continue to shine bright in her journey to Mictlan. — Denise Ramirez, Union City, N.J. |
Let us know how you're dealing with the pandemic. Send us a response here, and we may feature it in an upcoming newsletter. |
| Phaedra Brown compiled photos for this briefing |
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