Senator Mattera welcomes session volunteer

Sen. Mario Mattera (R-St. James) recently welcomed Anthony Tarquinio to his Albany office as a session volunteer. A 2020 graduate of Smithtown High School East, Anthony is currently in his senior year of study at the University of Albany where he is majoring in homeland security and cybersecurity.

During his tenure with Mattera, Anthony will assist staff with legislative matters and constituent assistance to enhance the lives of the residents of the 2nd Senate District.

A member of the University of Albany’s ice hockey team, Anthony is on course to graduate this coming spring.

“I am very pleased to welcome Anthony to our staff and know that he will be a tremendous resource for the residents of our area,” Mattera said. “I thank him for taking the time to join our team for the Legislative Session and look forward to working with him over the next few months.” and the December holidays.

In a recent article in the journal Lancet, researchers conducted an extensive analysis of COVID reinfection rates.

The study dealt only with those people who had not had any vaccinations and addressed the effectiveness of natural immunity from preventing infections and from the worst symptoms of the disease.

Prior infections in general didn’t prevent people from getting reinfected, but it does “protect you from getting a really bad disease and dying,” Fries said.

Long COVID

Even with the number of people contracting COVID declining, the overall population of people battling symptoms of long COVID, which can still include anything from loss of smell and taste to chronic fatigue, continues to increase.

“There’s a plethora of symptoms of long COVID,” Fries said. “We’ll have to figure out how to classify this and hopefully come up with better therapy. Right now, we can only symptomatically treat these patients.”

Dr. Sritha Rajupet, director of the Stony Brook Medicine Post-COVID Clinic, explained in an email that some patients who have lost their sense of smell or have a distorted sense of taste have tried a process called a stellate ganglion block “after several case reports and early research have shown that it could be helpful.”

In such a procedure, doctors inject a local anesthetic on either side of the voice box into the neck. Rajupet said that “additional research and clinical trials still have to be performed.”

Newborns and COVID

As for children infected with COVID soon after birth, doctors suggested that the impact has been manageable.

“The great majority of young children who contract COVID do quite well and recover fully,” Dr. Susan Walker, pediatrician with Stony Brook Children’s Services, explained in an email. “The impact on their development from having actually experienced COVID illness is minimal.”

Children hospitalized with more significant illness from COVID might experience temporary developmental regression which is common in children hospitalized for any reason. The developmental impact seems more tied to social isolation.

“Children born during the pandemic spent their first years of life rarely seeing adults or children other than those in their immediate family,” Walker said. “The result is that many of these kids became excessively stranger anxious and timid around others.”

The lost social opportunities, the pediatrician said, resulted in delays in the personal/social domain of development. She added, “The good news is that kids are resilient and, in time, with appropriate social stimulation, [these children] should be able to regroup and catch up developmentally.”