By Michael Merschel, American Heart Association News

In the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was full of questions.

Dr. Jeffrey Hsu recalls the fear of the unknown as he and other health professionals confronted a virus they didn’t understand, much less know how to treat.

“It was quite scary,” said Hsu, a cardiologist and an assistant professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “We were bracing ourselves for the worst.”

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Five years after the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, the questions have waned, at least among patients, said Dr. Won Lee, medical director of Boston Medical Center’s Home Care Program.

“I think a lot of people are fatigued by the news and the headlines that they have been receiving for many years,” said Lee, who is part of a medical team that helps homebound older adults.

COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, might not be as headline-grabbing as they once were. But even though deaths from the virus are far below their early 2021 peak of more than 25,000 a week in the United States, COVID-19, which is directly blamed for more than 1.2 million U.S. deaths since 2020, hasn’t gone away.

“We’re still seeing waves of infection with SARS-CoV-2 pop up, and we’re still seeing patients who do get severely ill,” Hsu said. “So that’s still happening. Definitely at a much smaller scale than it was before, but it’s still there.” So far this year, COVID-19 has been listed as the cause of death for 5,694 people in the United States, according to the latest numbers through Feb. 22 from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Here are answers to what doctors say are some of the most common questions they still get about COVID-19 – and a few questions they wish they were hearing more often.

Do I really need another vaccination?

It’s the most common question Lee gets from patients and families, and one Dr. Susan Fuchs, an attending physician in the emergency department at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, hears variations of.

Some people ask her, “Is a vaccine worth it?” The answer is yes, said Fuchs, who also is a professor of pediatrics at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago.

Fuchs acknowledged that the vaccines don’t stop every case – she’s been vaccinated and had COVID-19 twice herself. But vaccines protect against severe illness, hospitalization and death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which recommends vaccination for everybody 6 months or older.

Are COVID-19 vaccines safe?

Fuchs wishes more people would come to her with their worries about vaccine safety and side effects. Most people, she said, endure little more than a sore arm or a low-grade fever. Other common side effects include muscle pain, joint pain, fatigue, headache or chills.

“There are minor side effects with most vaccines,” Fuchs said. “But it’s better than getting the actual illness.”

The approved vaccines are still being monitored, she said. And “right now, we’re saying it’s a safe vaccine – no matter which one you get from whichever company.”

Who has the answers about boosters or other concerns?

Fuchs said that while people don’t ask about the emergence of different COVID-19 variants the way they once did, people can easily become confused about how often they need their vaccination updated.

Her advice: “Go to your family doctor.”

Lee said it’s easy for people to feel overwhelmed when there are “so many different sources coming at you all at once.” She regularly hears from patients or family members who have a concern they’ve heard from friends or at church or read online that they want to check with her. “I absolutely love and welcome those conversations,” she said.

Will I ever get better?

Most of the patients Hsu interacts with have long COVID, an assortment of symptoms that continue four weeks or more after the initial infection. People who have it ask him, “Is this going to shorten my life? Do people get better?”

Researchers don’t have all the answers to that, Hsu said. But large numbers of people – many of them previously young, active and healthy – “are now effectively disabled because of long COVID.”

Some people with long COVID – maybe a third – have gotten better, he said, but “I think the majority of people are still dealing with ongoing symptoms and are nowhere near back toward their baseline.”

Researchers are learning how the virus can persist in the body for years, Hsu said, and they’ve seen hints that abnormal blood clotting may be at the root of some problems.

He’s hopeful that treatments will be found, but at the moment, the answers about long COVID remind him of how doctors felt at the start of the pandemic. “We want to help, but we don’t have effective therapies to help just yet.”

He wishes more people were asking questions about how to limit the spread of the virus. People who have had a mild case of COVID-19 might not be as afraid of getting reinfected, Hsu said.

But risks of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and other conditions increase after an infection, he said. And each infection could become severe or lead to long COVID.

He emphasized how serious long COVID can be. Some of his patients are formerly high-energy, highly accomplished people who now are so drained that they can’t get out of bed to come to his clinic. “I can only see them virtually, and it’s just devastating.”

How can I protect myself and the people around me?

Like Hsu, Lee said she wished she heard this question more often.

“Even before COVID, this would come up with the flu shot,” Lee said. “Young, healthy people would say, ‘Well, you know, I don’t really get too sick from the flu. I don’t really have to worry about it.’ And my plea was always, ‘Well, think about your grandmother or your neighbor, or the person who you work with,’” or someone who cares for a child with a disability at home.

According to the CDC, age is the strongest risk factor for severe COVID-19, and the risk grows higher the older someone gets. Other high-risk groups include people with underlying conditions such as heart disease, people on dialysis and those with suppressed immune systems.

Staying up to date with vaccinations is one important way to protect them, Hsu said.

“I’m not one who just blindly says everyone should get a vaccine,” he said. “I do understand everyone has their own approach to weighing the risks and benefits of the vaccine. My concern is that the risks of the vaccine are real but have been overstated by influential voices on social media.”

Beyond vaccines, Lee said that advice from the pandemic’s peak on limiting the spread of the virus holds up. “If you’re sick, stay home. If somebody is sick, don’t let them come visit you.”

She acknowledged the importance of staying socially connected, especially for older people. “I do want people to visit their older adults in their lives and spend time with them and pick up the phone and talk with them, because I think the flip side to people being too cautious or too scared about getting someone sick is the social isolation.”

But, she added, “I want them to do it safely, when everyone’s feeling good.”

COVID-19 and the flu are similar in that some people might dismiss them if they’ve had only mild cases in the past, Lee said. But both can be deadly. And even when they aren’t fatal, a case of either that requires hospitalization can have many unintended consequences, especially for older adults, sometimes leading to lasting disability.

“That’s something a lot of people don’t consider,” Lee said, “and it’s not something most people want to face.”

Fuchs said parents should not send their children back to school until they have been fever-free for 24 hours without medication. And she still wears a mask at work because she doesn’t want to spread COVID-19 from patient to patient.

Hsu’s recommendation is “if it’s clear that cases are rising, then it may be a good time to be more mindful about wearing a mask in public” and to make sure large gatherings are held either outdoors or in a well-ventilated area.

“I also think it’s really important to take care of ourselves and our bodies better,” Hsu said, with a healthy diet, regular exercise and medical checkups. “I do think that these measures can make us more resilient to an infection.”

Lee seconded Hsu’s advice for getting up to date with any routine health screenings that might have been delayed during the pandemic. That can be a good time to raise whatever COVID-19 concerns someone might have, she said.

“It’s stressful to try to make sense of all the things that you hear or read,” Lee said, but there’s an easy way to avoid that stress over health concerns. “Pick up the phone and make an appointment.”

American Heart Association News covers heart and brain health. Not all views expressed in this story reflect the official position of the American Heart Association. Copyright is owned or held by the American Heart Association, Inc., and all rights are reserved.

©2025 American Heart Association, Inc., distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

(Courtesy of the author)

Read Brave, the free annual citywide book club that brings communities together, hosts two events centered on Nnedi Okorafor’s young adult novel “Akata Witch,” which explores communities through Africanfuturism, a genre of African culture, story, and mythology.

Nnedi Okorafor (Courtesy of the author)

“Read Brave: The African Art of Healing — Past, Present and Future” is an immersive “Akata Witch”-inspired event that will transform the George Latimer Central Library into a celebration of Black and African Diaspora empowerment, in partnership with Oshun Center for Intercultural Healing. 2 p.m. Saturday, 90 W. Fourth St., St. Paul.

“Akata Witch” follows the story of an albino Nigerian-American teen struggling to find her place between her Nigerian roots and her American upbringing. When she discovers she belongs to a secret world of magic where your worst fault becomes your biggest strength, everything changes. She goes deep into Nigerian folklore, where she must master her hidden powers and join forces with other young magicians and shapeshifters to defeat a killer.

On March 26, Mayor Melvin Carter, author Okorafor and youth panelists present an evening of conversation plus music by musician, vocalist, composer and teaching artist Kashimana and artwork inspired by the book. 5:30 p.m., Rondo Community Library, 461 N. Dale St., St. Paul.

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It’s no secret that Donald Trump is obsessed with winning the Nobel Peace Prize, which is one reason why he’s pushing Ukraine and Russia so hard toward cease-fire negotiations.

The way the U.S. president is going about it won’t earn him any favor in Oslo, though, because so far he mainly seems to be coercing Ukraine to capitulate.

But Trump has another path to the Nobel, and the whole world, including his haters, should root for him: He could win it by lowering the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In his first term, Trump tried and failed to launch trilateral talks among the U.S., Russia and China about capping or even reducing nuclear weapons. (The U.S. and Russia each have more than 5,000 nukes, while China, in third place, has about 600 and is racing to pull even with the other two.)

Trump had already withdrawn from one arms-control treaty with Russia and then refused to renew the only remaining one, leaving the extension to his successor, Joe Biden. But even that agreement, called New START, expires next February.

At that point, and for the first time since the early Cold War, nothing will be in place to restrain the world’s major nuclear powers from a new arms race. In fact, several such races are already underway: China and North Korea are adding to their arsenals as fast as they can, and all nine countries with nukes are “modernizing” their weapons.

In the U.S. that means upgrading warheads as well as the bombers, submarines and missiles to deliver them — at a cost of $1.7 trillion over 30 years, or $75 billion a year this decade, although the costs and the timelines keep expanding with every estimate.

The risk of nuclear war is rising even faster than these numbers suggest, because countries are also tweaking the types of nukes they have and the strategies for using them. Russia in particular is building more “tactical” or “theater” weapons; it has an edge of about 10-to-1 over the U.S. in that category, which is not covered by New START. The U.S. is also considering giving these limited nukes a greater role again.

Tactical nukes are loosely defined as weapons that are meant as a last resort to prevent defeat in battle. (By contrast, strategic nukes are built to destroy an enemy’s homeland in retaliation for an incoming nuclear strike.) Tactical weapons can still pack several Hiroshimas in explosive power. But because they have lower “yields” than the strategic kind, they’re considered more usable. Even so, war games suggest that any use, no matter how limited, would immediately lead to uncontrollable escalation, and possibly Armageddon.

Add to these trends a recent pattern of reckless taboo-breaking. The leaders of Russia and North Korea keep rattling their atomic sabers. And members of Trump’s first administration want to resume testing live nuclear bombs. Once you factor in the risk of miscalculation by someone somewhere under pressure, or the imponderable role of artificial intelligence in nuclear decision-making, it becomes clear that the world is entering the greatest danger since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Trump, despite all the chaos he’s causing in international affairs, understands that peril. Moreover, his worldview, which is anathema to international law and multilateral organizations such as the United Nations, happens to be well-suited to nuclear realities.

When it comes to the geopolitics of warfare by fission, multilateralism and law (as embodied in the Non-Proliferation Treaty) are all but irrelevant. What matters is the strategic interplay of the great powers. In the nuclear domain, it really does make sense to think in “spheres of influence” — as the American, British and Soviet leaders did in Yalta near the end of World War II, when they carved up Europe for the sake of stability.

The problem, of course, is that each nuclear superpower has different and conflicting interests. Russia knows that it’s economically and militarily weaker than the U.S. and would lose a conventional war. So it values tactical nukes as a psychological deterrent and a last-ditch means to “escalate to deescalate” in its own favor.

China is the only nation that has an official policy of “no first use,” but it still wants parity with the U.S. to avoid being coerced, especially if it ever comes to blows over Taiwan. The U.S., meanwhile, is wondering whether it should keep matching only its strongest nuclear opponent, Russia, or needs numerical balance against Russia and China combined, lest these two gang up in a crisis.

And yet they all have one interest in common: preventing nuclear war, which, as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev memorably put it, “cannot be won and must never be fought.” Moreover, they can all accept the logic of their mutual “security dilemma,” in which anything one of them does forces the others to respond, in what threatens to become a spiral toward war.

Trump could start small, by suggesting that the U.S. and Russia informally stick to the caps in New START whether it lapses or not, pending a new arrangement. He could also press for resuming mutual inspections to build confidence.

Meanwhile, Trump and his counterparts, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Xi Jinping in China, need to agree on a format. Trump wants Yalta-like talks among this trio. Russia prefers talks among all five nations designated by the Non-Proliferation Treaty as legitimate nuclear powers, including France and the UK. Some day, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel (which has never officially declared its arsenal) must be brought in as well.

Either way, talks there must be, and Trump claims that Putin and Xi, whose autocratic style he admires, are open to the idea. “We’d like to see denuclearization,” he said, because that would be “an unbelievable thing for the planet.” The planet is not what usually takes priority in his America First worldview, but he would be right. If Trump succeeds, he deserves that Nobel Peace Prize, even if he might have to share it.

Andreas Kluth is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering U.S. diplomacy, national security and geopolitics. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of Handelsblatt Global and a writer for the Economist.

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All winter long I’ve been meaning to write about the little constellation Aries the Ram, and finally on this last weekend of winter I’m getting around to it. It’s a good thing because Aries is about to leave our nighttime sky as the Earth in its orbit around the sun turns away from that direction in space.

Right after evening twilight look for the distinctive little constellation in the low western sky around 8:30 when it’s finally dark enough. You can use the bright Pleiades star cluster that resembles a tiny version of the Little Dipper. Just to the lower right of the cluster look for two moderately bright stars right next to each other vertically aligned. Just below them and a little to the left is a third dimmer star. That’s it! That’s tiny Aries.

Aries (Mike Lynch)

Together, all three stars kind of, sort of resemble a ram’s horn. The actual constellation is larger than that little horn you see, but most of the rest of the stars of Aries are really faint. The two brighter stars of the horn are Hamal and Sheratan, and the dimmer star below them is Mesarthim. Hamal is a giant star in our Milky Way galaxy that dwarfs our sun with a diameter of at least 13 million miles. Our own sun’s diameter is less than a million miles. A trip to Hamal would require you to put about 65 light-years on your spaceship. In case you’re new to this column, just one light year equals nearly 6 trillion miles.

This is actually a good time of year to talk about Aries the Ram because it has a significant astronomical past. Aries used to be the background constellation the sun occupied when it crossed into the northern sky on the vernal equinox, otherwise known as the first day of spring. This year’s vernal equinox is very early this coming Thursday at 4:01 a.m. Because of the wobble in the Earth’s axis, called precession, the constellation Aries is no longer in the background during the equinox. It’s been replaced by the constellation Pisces the Fish.

So how did Aries the ram get in the night sky? What’s the story? Well like most constellation stories, or what I call celestial soap operas, it’s a sordid tale. Different cultures have different stories, but the one I like the most comes from Greek and Roman mythology. This old yarn is a story of heroism. Aries the ram was one of Zeus’ many pets. Being the king of the Greek gods, Zeus had many pets, but Aries was very special. He wasn’t your everyday ram. His coat was made of golden fleece, and he sported wings, allowing him to fly the friendly skies above Mount Olympus. There was no fencing in this magic ram! Zeus wasn’t exactly the type to be fenced in either. He wasn’t really a faithful follower of the sanctity of marriage and had many girlfriends, even after he married Hera, the queen of the gods.

Anyway, one lovely Mount Olympus afternoon Zeus and his favorite pet ram met several of Zeus’ secret girlfriends for a picnic in a hidden park close to the foot of Mount Olympus. It was quite a time for all concerned. Suddenly, out of the clear blue sky the voice of Helios, the god of the sun, rang out. He was trying desperately to get the attention of Zeus, wherever he was. From the reins of his sun chariot high above everything, Helios could see a group of small children a few miles away that were having a very unfriendly encounter with a really hungry lion.

What happened is that the kids slipped away from their mother at a nearby marketplace, and they became the No. 1 choice on the lion’s lunch menu that day. Helios couldn’t do anything himself because if he left the sun chariot, all you know what could break loose, and the sun could crash to Earth. So, the only thing Helios could do was shout his lungs out for some divine help from Zeus. Finally, the king of the gods heard the screams of Helios and took action. It wasn’t so much that he cared about the kids, but Zeus wanted to impress his posse of ladies. So Zeus pointed Aries in the right direction and sent him flying off on a rescue mission.

The lion was within seconds of reaching the children when, out of the blue, Aries swooped from the sky like a cruise missile. He scooped up the children on his back and flew them off to safety. Aries winged his way back to the local marketplace and reunited the kids with their greatly relieved mother.

For the rest of his life, Aries set out on missions of mercy and rescue. When Aries died, Zeus rewarded him for his bravery and placed his body into the heavens to become the constellation we see today. The little ram did a lot of good!

It has nothing to do with this nice but far-fetched tale of heroism, but again, the first day of spring is this Thursday. I’m guessing that ever since you were a wee lad or lassie, you’ve been told that on the first day of spring, the vernal equinox, that days and nights were equal in length. That’s just not true. Because of astronomical refraction, or the bending of the sun’s rays due to the Earth’s atmosphere, days are already longer than nights by this Friday. So when are days and nights equal? This Monday, on St. Patrick’s day! Yet another reason to celebrate that day!!

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

Starwatch programs

Friday, March 21, 8-10 p.m., North Oaks, at Chippewa Middle School. For more information and reservations, call 651-621-0020 or visit www.moundsviewschools.org/communityeducation.

Saturday, March 22, 7:45-10 p.m., Prior Lake. For information and location, call 952-447-9820 or visit www.priorlakemn.gov/government/departments/recreation/programs.

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