I'm someone who actually has some form of long-covid or perhaps just damage from the virus. March 12th will be the one year mark for me.
I was a mild case, stayed home for 2 days, right back on my feet after that. 32M, no health issues. Symptoms just lingered and lingered. They would go away then come back days later. Mainly sinus pressure and dizziness. Then 4 months on I started getting intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Cardiologist noted some abnormalities but was not concerned. Put me on beta blockers. Fast forward to today and I still have shortness of breath, some cardiac symptoms, and random pains in my left arm and back. It really eats into my quality of life, but I am thankful I don't have it as bad as many others.
I keep tabs on the long haul community to see if researchers have figured anything out/others found anything that helps. So far there really isn't much. I'll note that there are a surprising number of people who aren't aware they are long hauling (they "recovered" and then months later developed issues - not making the connection until stumbling upon another long hauler) and that people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling. I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or what, but people want (need?) to hear "I fully recovered" when they ask how you are doing. I don't tell anyone except those close to me about it, it's completely not worth the debate they are going to want to have about the validity of my symptoms. It's pretty common in the LH community to not be publicly upfront about it because of this. There are plenty of people who know me, know I got sick, and will relay that I fully recovered.
I tested positive for Covid late March last year. I was moderately sick for 2 weeks, chest pains, tight chest, loss of smell etc, also had a weird rash on my shins (mini blood blisters). Any way I thought I was better, I had a bout of small relapses and general fatigue through April then come mid May, I basically had a huge relapse in symptoms, admitted to hospital with Myocarditis (heart inflammation caused by my immune response to the virus), highly elevated troponin levels (indicators of cardiac damage) - which meant bed rest for 3 months. One other weird symptom I had that was confirmed by MRI, was the V5 nerve on my cheek had its Myelin protein sheath stripped/damaged by my immune response/covid which has caused me facial pain (Neuralgia) for most of the past year. According to the Neurologist I saw this is uncommon in Covid, but happens to MS patients and more commonly post other viruses.
Anyway I am much better now and barely have any symptoms now with the exception of getting tired much more easily. I wouldnt wish this disease on anyone. I hope your symptoms improve. I also have told basically no one except my immediate family about my symptoms as its not worth the pain of discussion!
My dad was in the hospital with Covid for 3 weeks 1 completely unresponsive last March 2020 from the NYC strain.
Everyone in my family (5 people) developed primary symptoms but me (33 years old). I had a very strange course of leg/muscle pain, scratchy throat the first month then chest/arm pain for another month with GI issues the next. My 3 year old niece who had beaten the primary symptoms relapsed with a fever end of September and right around that time I started getting neurological issues where I was dizzy and had a burning cheek and buzzing/tingling fingers/toes with mild muscle twitching in my face.
6 months later I’m much better but still grappling with dizzyness and nerve pain in my cheek which sounds similar to you.
I’m convinced my immune system is going nuts from exposure to Covid and I fear I may have developed a more long term auto immune issue.
Probably time I take these symptoms to a neurologist.
Did the Dr prescribe you anything for your myelin damage?
> But no, if you can stop the thing that's destroying the myelin while it's happening, sure, but as far as I'm aware once the damage is done it's done
Yes, as you allude to, once the original cause is removed, peripheral nerves do typically heal in most people, however slowly. There's emerging evidence that central nerves heal as well.
I can attest to this personally, since I've have a neurological condition that causes axonal damage. Each "attack" I've had (a decade apart), it's left me with foot drop, hand drop, loss of sensation in my feet and hands, and severe nerve pain. The second time, I've also developed facial and pelvic neuralgia, including trigeminal neuralgia.
But I did slowly heal after the first attack. I regained full motor functions within 2 years, and slowly regained sensation in the years after that. Even the nerve pain got better until the second attack. Now starting to slowly heal once again.
According to my neurologist, and also a specialist neurologist he sent me to, people typically do slowly heal to some extent if they have proper nutrition unless the original cause is still present (which it would be in RR MS).
> people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling
Definitely, and true of any poorly understood illness. A common response when people hear about suffering without a simple explanation is fear and rejection. It reminds them of their mortality, it breaks their just-world hypothesis, and it forces them to be burdened with the knowledge that people suffer and we don't know why because the world is vastly more complex than we understand.
Many people would rather reject people's suffering than live with these feelings.
> people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling.
This is largely because the self-identified "long COVID" community on FB groups etc. (as opposed to the scientific community studying the phenomenon) is behaving very similarly to the "chronic Lyme" groups that flourished just before COVID. Many of those people truly felt distress and, indeed, one shouldn’t deny their symptoms. However, any link between those symptoms and Lyme disease was extremely questionable, to put it mildly. The same holds now with COVID, and many of the "long COVID" self-reporters were never even formally diagnosed positive for the virus in the first place.
Read a little up on the history of the medical community underdiagnosing or ignoring autoimmune diseases because they are harder to confirm. Those autoimmune diseases are very real and given the history of underdiagnosing diseases that are harder to track, we should take seriously the reports of symptoms by people as more than hypochondria.
Yeah, we need to believe autoimmune / long COVID sufferers first.
There's a parallel here with default assumptions of sexual assault / harassment being against the victim because of the existence of some claims that were clearly manufactured.
(And not entirely surprisingly the victims of autoimmune diseases tend to be disproportionately women, so there's more than just a superficial similarity here)
> Many of those people truly felt distress and, indeed, one shouldn’t deny their symptoms.
This is really important. The placebo effect is very powerful, and placebo-induced symptoms are absolutely real symptoms. They just aren't caused by what you think they are.
(I'm not saying that "long COVID" is or isn't placebo-induced, merely that such a conversation is separate from whether it's "real".)
> the self-identified "long COVID" community on FB groups etc. (as opposed to the scientific community studying the phenomenon) is behaving very similarly to the "chronic Lyme" groups that flourished just before COVID.
I somehow doubt the common animosity is being driven by social media groups and "Lyme disease self-identifying hysteria". It seems vastly more likely it's more about suppressing any concerns the costs might be greater than zero for those who don't die after infection.
Often, tough to diagnose or difficult to treat symptoms are uncomfortable truths for public officials. 9-11 responders are a good example.
And before 9/11 responders there was gulf-war syndrome (which never was PTSD since that group of soldiers reported much lower incidence of PTSD compared to others that fought in wars).
I guess at this point it's easy enough to get an antigen test to see if you had it, but I'm sure a great many people who got Covid last summer didn't get a positive test. A lot of places the official advice was not to bother so long as symptoms were manageable at home.
As far as the relation to COVID is concerned, I would look into the symptom severity of untreated chronic Lyme as opposed to treated.
Psychosomatism may be an issue — but consider also that the neurological mechanisms governing it may themselves be degraded through the course of such infections.
Isn't it possible that covid can trigger autoimmune conditions though? For years doctor's denied the existence of conditions like Crohn's disease and fibromyalgia as just hypochondria
Exactly. It's best just to lie and say I'm 100% recovered. Just did it last weekend at my dad's 60th bday party.
My one year is also coming up soon, and I still get mild symptoms like the "hot skin" and bulging veins but otherwise I'm better than 99% of people on /r/covidlonghaulers.
I'm tired of explaining it. I'm tired of everyone's advice. In the rare event I'm doing something social during this pandemic I just try to forget about it and not think about my relapses. LongCovid f-ing sucks.
About two years ago I had a pretty bad viral infection. Doctor said they weren't really sure what it was at the time, advised to keep hydrated, well rested, etc and to come back if things got really bad. I ended up in A+E a couple of times where I thought I was having a heart attack, Apple Watch had my heart rate at over 200 when I was just laying in bed. All they could find in tests were that might white blood cell count was really high.
The main illness lasted about 4 weeks I think, maybe a little longer to really be 'back on my feet' but I was in bed for most of the 4 weeks, and I lost about 30lbs over the whole time where I had zero appetite. But to be completely honest I don't think I ever fully recovered. Even now my fitness level must only be about 50% of what it was before, I feel like I aged about 10 years in the course of a month or so. I'm still on beta blockers, had a bunch of tests on my heart and all the cardiologist can suggest is that it might go away in a couple of years. But for now I get palpitations and general dizzy sick feeling at least once a fortnight and it stays around for a few days at a time.
It's so strange to think about what a difference there is before and after. I was just getting ready for a holiday with some friends to Octoberfest before I got ill, but the idea of being able to go out like that for four days is insane, there's no way I could do it. That and I had to quit drinking alcohol completely as it seems to really exacerbate the heart issues.
I've read quite a lot of people talk about post-viral issues, and I wonder if the long COVID stuff is going to turn out to be something quite similar. Would be nice to have more research being done to see if they can help at all, as it can be quite hard now to get a doctor to take it seriously. I get the impression from a conversation with my doctor that the reason they were more willing to do tests for me was that I had no history with going to the doctor before that unless I had some sort of physical injury, like a broken shoulder.
I think we maybe living with more than the economic damage for quite sometime after this is all said and done. Can only hope for the best for people that are dealing with it longer term.
Were you able to get tested? For some reason I’ve gotten the impression that a disproportionate number of long-haulers got sick in March or April and never had a confirmed test. I’m not sure whether that points to a change in the virus or a psychosomatic component to being infected with an unknown virus at the beginning of the pandemic.
I could not get tested in March. I tested positive for antibodies in August. I live right outside NYC, which based on April antibody testing, likely had 250,000 to 500,0000 cases/day for about a 3 week period from late Feb into March. This was when the media was still debating about whether or not the virus was a big deal and Trump was saying just a few people were sick.
My wife and I got sick in early March 2020 and she coughed until July. We were never able to get a positive test, as they weren’t available unless you went to the hospital. I also had a negative antibody test. She started coughing again last month. It’s possible it’s not COVID but it seems very strange she’d develop this chronic cough right after a global respiratory disease pandemic sweeps the world.
I don't know where you live, if you even live in the US, but that is a travesty that you weren't able to access quick testing. In the Bay Area, I get free testing through Project Baseline. My family has alternated getting tested once every 2 weeks, since our assumption is that if one of us gets COVID, then all of us gets COVID. Collectively we have been tested around 15 times,including children, and it's a breeze to get here.
But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.
Just as an aside, it's not necessarily the case that all your family would get infected if one of you does... in studies the proportion of family members who get infected is between 10-50%: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
My wife got infected around 10 days ago (PCR confirmed last Wednesday, now seemingly recovered and testing negative) and while I exhibited some very mild cold symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, a single high temperature reading) it never went beyond that (so far, knock on wood) and I tested negative when tested at the same time...
Good point about the flu. I also had some flu symptoms around that time and always tested negative on antibody tests.
> The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
You're arguing that it's a travesty and a crime that the US didn't have something which no country in the world had, or even came close to. That probably wasn't even remotely feasible based on what other countries achieved and the fact that there was limited manufacturing capacity for pretty much everything that would be required to do so.
The frustrating thing is, it's not even surprising that you think that. For nakedly partisan reasons, the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts, warping perceptions of how everyone else was doing in the process. It worked too - they got the guy voted out of office at the cost of massively misinforming everyone about the biggest crisis facing the world, not only in their own country but elsewhere in the Western world too.
> the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts
My grandfather died a few days after getting the "vaccine" (which isn't really a vaccine because it doesn't stop getting the illness or transmitting it). So did a bunch of other old guys he knew.
It could be caused by stress & anxiety, especially if the cardiologist is not concerned. I think all these lockdowns, travel restrictions and social distancing are not improving our psychiatric health either.
It's not like that. There is definitely something damaged or some wires crossed. Stress and anxiety make it worse, but it's still there all the time regardless.
Full deep breaths cause all kinds of aches to shoot around my torso and laughing is outright painful. The skin on my hands shriveled so much they look like 60 yr old hands. I have head aches all the time, whereas before I never got them. At anytime I can feel my heartbeat throughout my body, especially in my hands and neck. My feet get so cold now I feel like i could get frostbite in a 70F room. Hard exertion quickly brings me to a point where I almost faint. I get dizzy periods usually for at least a few hours a day.
Also this year was hardly stressful/anxiety inducing for me, at least on the day to day level. Other periods of my life were orders of magnitude worse with typical stress/anxiety symptoms. Nothing like this.
Hard exertion quickly brings me to a point where I almost faint.
This is a (side-)effect of the beta blockers, I suspect. They actively block your heart from exerting itself, which you would need for sustained physical activity.
Beta-blockers are useful as a protective measure after heart surgery, but you can't build up your physique while on them.
Stress and anxiety often results with real physical symptoms, like high blood pressure and it does make your skin go as you described. My main giveaway was when you mentioned cardiovascular symptoms, but your cardiologist was not concerned. And then there's the feedback loop, where the stress from the symptoms causes more stress.
Unless you're an actual physician with expertise in this area and have access to their medical records, please stop trying to invalidate their pain and experiences and explain things away.
This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it and part of why we still know so little about the long-term consequences of it all.
We've come a long way where just discussing alternative ways of looking at things are assumed to be "invalidating someones pain". bouncycastle never said the pain is not real or that Itsdijital is wrong in any way. They simply stated that there are other common sources that causes similar pain as well.
> This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it
If you bring something up in order to discuss it, and someone talks about it in a way you don't prefer and therefore you stop talking about it, a healthy response would be to not bring it up in the first place or reply to it in a friendly manner. We cannot decide how others treat us but we can decide how we respond to how others treat us. It's your choice to either keep quiet or be fine talking about it, you can't have both at the same time.
It's definitely why I don't discuss this with people, and goes back to the general hostility towards long covid. It's not worth the energy trying to convince them otherwise.
I have had anxiety my whole life. I've gone through times so stressful I was hallucinating. It's not that.
I hope people can see from reading this thread why it's easier to just say "I fully recovered".
I had a bout of "health anxiety" that I suspect had a strong biological component - maybe post viral syndrome, maybe some gut dysbiosis, autoimmune component, I don't really know.
Anyways I kept going to the doctor and all of my tests were normal / not bad enough to raise any major red flags so it got diagnosed as anxiety / psychosomatic.
In cases like this it seems like you can either find an online community that's dealing with a set of symptoms or accept that "it's all in your head." For the former, if you have the money, their set of friendly doctors who may be willing to pursue off label treatments. For me, I ended up sort of falling into the latter camp (though as I said, I do think something biological was happening). Diet, exercise, CBT, and time ended up helping the most.
Exactly. I have no doubt that the pain and symptoms are very real, not dismissing them.
Also, I understand that there is some stigma with mental health too.. so I am not surprised that I'm getting strong reactions as soon as it's mentioned.
Well, I'm sorry if I ruffled up some feathers. But I think all angles of the issue need to be considered, and probably the best way to deal with this is to be open to the possibility.
As someone who has suffered through anxiety issues and now have some form of long covid I can see how you would make that link but frankly for me it's not there.
The lockdown is not stressing me, if anything I'm the happiest I've ever been (no commute, more time with my wife, ...), but when I go on my daily walk the struggle can be very real when it wasn't a year ago: shortness of bress, tightness in chest when going uphill. Not every day, but some days it's just there with seemingly little to trigger it.
I also use to cycle about 150km/week, I can barely last 20 min on the bike now. Even during my worst period of anxiety cycling was not an issue, if anything it always made me feel better.
Anecdotal for sure but I'm not sure stress/anxiety is a factor of significance
It absolutely reads like anxiety to me (except for the dermatological issues).
Feeling short of breath (short of an emergency) can cause headaches, dizziness and random pain as a consequence of breathing too much. Left arm goes numb when there's too much tension in the left shoulder. Palpitations can also be related to excessive tension in the upper body, as can the circulation issues.
It doesn't need acute stress for that, just a steady accumulation.
I hope it's not disrespectful, but this is the most common explanation, although it doesn't usually get this bad.
I think another effect we could be seeing is costochondritis, a pain/soreness which is known to be caused by viral infection and the stress of this year is potentially making worse.
It's good that the vast majority of people make full recoveries but 2% of the US is still over 6 million people.
I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.
The biggest improvement you can make is to stop feeling your cat dry food. They're often a large % fibrous plant matter, which ferments, causing much of the smell. If you're up for making homemade cat food, rather than canned, that makes their poop smell even less. The other thing you can do is make a litterbox like this:
- 30 gallon plastic bin (look for one with flat sides, not a "heavy duty" model with ridges along the side -- if your cat is a side-pee-er, this will be difficult to clean).
- Cut a hole in the side with a utility (aka x-acto) knife, 9 inches from the bottom.
- Fill with 3.5-4 inches of unscented, clumping litter. I've tried Dr Elsey's and World's Best, and prefer the former, which I found clumps better; I believe other clay-based litters are equivalent to it.
- Buy a litter-lifter, it's the best scoop, hands down. After I tried it the first time, I actually placed a bulk order (25 scoops) so that I have a guaranteed lifetime supply (and for gifts), because I never want to use another scoop.
- Clean the litter box at least once per day. I know this sounds like a lot, but it's actually not -- with the scoop above, it takes me ~10 seconds per "item" (pee ball or poop cluster) you scoop out (unless your cat is a side-pee-er), plus maybe 30s moving the litter around to find the items and even out the litter at the end. (I've timed this; in total it's around 1 minute if I scoop once per day).
I installed a cpu fan and some dryer vent hose to exhaust the catbox air to the outside. That worked pretty well except in summer green bottle flies would climb up the vent to get at the poos. Later a fox ate the cat. I think this was unrelated to the venting system, but it did eliminate the smell issue.
Note that's 2% of people who become infected, not 2% of the entire population (unless you're assuming everyone will get infected?). We're trending toward 10-12% of the US population getting infected before vaccines roll out more widely, so that would be somewhere in the realm of 0.25% of the total population potentially suffering long-term effects.
> We're trending toward 10-12% of the US population getting infected
How can you possibly believe this, given the seroprevelance data? Every indication is that more than twice this number (some surveys suggesting substantially more even than that) were already infected a few months ago.
The seroprevelance data claimed that ~10-20% of the population was already infected, back in March of 2020.
Given that effectively nobody was dying from COVID prior to March, and the three giant waves of exponential growth that followed, I have severe doubts about the accuracy of these tests. I have a feeling that if those same tests were ran back in 2018, they would have said the same thing.
> The seroprevelance data claimed that ~10-20% of the population was already infected, back in March of 2020.
That's not quite true. The surveys in that time frame were mostly < 10%. The > 10% surveys came months later.
However, it's certainly possible that these are false positives (particularly the wastewater studies).
However I'm not sure that this particular observation is a good basis for that conclusion. It takes a substantial mass of cases to produce excess population-level mortality, which is what gets our attention.
Since we weren't testing for cases prior to March 2020, we really don't know how many people died while infected with the virus. Now of course we count nearly every such case meticulously.
If people were dying en masse from the virus before March, and we just weren't testing for it, those people and their doctors were either following the most amazing quarantine procedures, somehow preventing it's spread through the general population... Or, more likely, they did not have COVID, and just had the flu.
It's possible that it was fairly widespread, and some people were dying (and perhaps being reported to ILInet, etc), but not enough to cause a notable increase in population-level mortality for anybody to notice.
There is ongoing conjecture on this point all over expert circles.
1. We know if the virus is widespread and killing people, regardless of whether we test them, because mortality rates go up way above the baseline, and hospitals fill up with people unable to breathe.
2. Mortality rates were not above the baseline prior to March.
3. We know that the virus spreads like wildfire when no quarantine measures are taken. No quarantine measures were taken at any point prior to March.
4. The growth in known cases and above-baseline mortality closely matches, starting in March.
It's impossible for there to have been a significant presence of the virus in the United States at the start of 2020, as claimed by seroprevalence data, because within a matter of weeks it would have infected a large enough percentage of the population to be clearly visible in the above-baseline mortality rates, and hospitalization rates. A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital, or the morgue when they are unable to breathe. In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
Either the seroprevalence data is wrong, or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
When your measurements claim an invisible, inaudible, imperceptible phenomena that has no physical influence on any other object, the prudent scientific conclusion is that your measurements are broken.
> It's impossible for there to have been a significant presence of the virus in the United States at the start of 2020, as claimed by seroprevalence data, because within a matter of weeks it would have infected a large enough percentage of the population to be clearly visible in the above-baseline mortality rates, and hospitalization rates.
This is only true if we presume that it was equally spread across risk strata. But it's also possible that it didn't make its way from younger travelers into the higher risk stratum in sufficient measure to start causing significant mortality for weeks.
> A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital
This is simply false, unless your definition of 'large' is a fraction of a percent.
> In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
This is true of a lockdown world as well; in fact lockdowns don't appear to be negatively correlated with population-level mortality at all, spare a very few examples, all of which are island nations which have also maintained various travel bans and similar measures. But in the USA and mainland Europe, lockdown states have fared quite horribly. I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
I don't see any reason to believe that widespread presence of the virus would have been noticed as anything but an uptick in ILInet (which of course we did see) until it got into long-term care homes and other places with high concentrations of at-risk populations.
> Either the seroprevalence data is wrong
Again, this is possible; I'm not saying it's not. But it has been reproduced over 20 times now, with different tests, some of which appear to have a perfect record of selectivity and also good record of sensitivity.
> or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
In the vast majority of the population, the virus isn't particularly lethal. That's really the discussion here - whether it might have spread more widely through the lower-risk strata prior to widespread infections among the vulnerable.
> This is only true if we presume that it was equally spread across risk strata. But it's also possible that it didn't make its way from younger travelers into the higher risk stratum in sufficient measure to start causing significant mortality for weeks.
It may not have been equally spread across risk strata, but in a pre-lockdown world, even if you are in a low-risk group, you have social contact with people who are in high-risk groups, through public transit, grocery stores, services that you visit, relatives that you visit, hospital waiting rooms, urgent care waiting rooms, hospital wards where doctors don't wash their hands as frequently as they should, workplaces, and the list goes on.
Is it possible for a small group of people (low thousands) to have had the virus across the country, when the official count was in the tens and low hundreds? Absolutely! I can see this happening. It seems to fit with the pattern of infections flaring up all across the country at roughly the same time.
Was it possible for millions of people to have had the virus (which is what the sero data points to), for over two months, without getting other people sick in a manner that would show up on the statistics? That is an incredibly strong claim, with only one data point that supports it, and a lot of data points that oppose it.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the sero data was not a good predictor of the future in March of 2020. What has changed about it, that makes it a good predictor of the future in March of 2021?
> I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
If Florida had the population density of NYC, with people of all demographics sharing the same public transit infrastructure, sharing the same elevators, packing the same grocery stores, it would be a graveyard. You're ignoring all sorts of conflating factors, by pointing at two vastly different datasets, and concluding that because one had a lockdown, and the other one didn't, lockdowns don't work.
Counterpoint - Washington state has had lockdowns, and despite having a similar population density to Florida, has half the death rate of it. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, death rates are much higher in counties with lower compliance rates (Yakima versus Pierce, for example...)
Oh, and when lockdowns would get relaxed, three weeks later, like clockwork, infections and deaths would spike up.
It's an infectious airborne disease. The more people that carriers are in close quarters with, the faster it spreads. Reducing the number of people the average person is in contact with, healthy, or otherwise, reduces it's rate spread. I am not sure why this is still controversial in 2021.
> It's an infectious airborne disease. The more people that carriers are in close quarters with, the faster it spreads. Reducing the number of people the average person is in contact with, healthy, or otherwise, reduces it's rate spread. I am not sure why this is still controversial in 2021.
You're arguing with an imaginary friend. Nobody is making the points you are refuting.
The reason that lockdowns have so spectacularly failed isn't that there's some mystery about the nature of spread of respiratory pathogens; it's that lockdowns don't actually achieve any of the conditions that prevent spread except for people wealthy enough to have the means to isolate (and there's no reason to believe they'd refrain from isolating even in the absence of a state mandate).
Instead, lockdowns shift risk onto poor people ("essential workers") without regard to their level of risk. So, instead of a more acute spread occurring through the lower risk strata, we get a more acute spread occurring through the less affluent economic strata.
I don't have sufficient knowledge to concur with or refute your assertion that the sociological conditions of the high-risk stratum (ie, sharing public transit, etc) make the results of the dozens of seroprevalence surveys implausible. However, I do note that people who study these things for a living are saying that it is plausible.
We're at 30 million confirmed cases in the US! Over 115M worldwide! If "only" 2% of them develop something like long Covid, that's 600,000 Americans and over 2.3M people with long-term illness from this -- and those are only the confirmed cases which probably understate the prevalence by 2x-3x. How are people still so blasé about this pandemic?
How concerned were you about malaria, prior to this year? If the answer was "I didn't particularly think about it", then you have the answer for how people can be blasé about diseases that have a very high cost in human lives and suffering.
We're talking about different kinds of blasé though. Many people - me included - don't think a lot about malaria because they don't live in a malarial area and have the health and healthcare access to probably recover when travelling into them ). In fact, I gave so little thought to malaria even whilst in malarial areas that I didn't devote time to arguing malaria's long term effects were relatively rare and might be psychosomatic so not really worth the Gates Foundation bothering with, which is the specific kind of dismissive attitude towards the disease being called out here.
And by "case" you mean detected matter with PCR cycle counts undocumented at aggregate levels. But don't let science get in the way of emotional appeals.
Bizarre PCR truther claims aside, assign an IFR to the disease and work backwards from the 500k deaths we have.. then multiply that by 2% to understand how many people will have "Long Covid" and why it's crazy to play it down as overblown.
So if we do that, we get that about 4x as many people have "Long Covid" as die... I personally think dying would be rather more than 4x worse than getting "Long Covid", so if the 2% number is actually accurate that implies that the people who have been focusing on mortality as the main concern with this virus are largely right to do so.
That said, I have some doubts about the 2% number. Estimates vary widely from about 2% as the lowest plausible number I've seen to about 10% at the highest plausible number. If it's really 10% of infected people reporting long-term symptoms, that changes things a bit. Also note that pretty much all of the sources are preprints or otherwise not peer reviewed articles -- an actual rigorous investigation is very welcome here, and hopefully that is what the $1B from NIH will buy.
Uh, what? The WHO updated their guidelines a month and a half ago because PCR tests were being misused: Too many cycles and not taking symptoms into account was resulting in too many false positives.
You're literally repeating a discredited right wing conspiracy theory - WHO adjusts their guidance constantly and according to the WHO and virologists everywhere, these changes didn't meaningfully impact the number of positives since almost all positive results happen at far lower cycle counts.
The part that primarily caught my eye, which isn't what Reuters is attempting to debunk:
> Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
"clinical presentation" - in other words, the symptoms. This advice runs contrary to the entire past year, where a single positive test in an asymptomatic person has counted as a case. This alone is enough to inflate the numbers, without even taking PCR cycles into account.
And Reuters ends up just barely short of confirming the part about PCR cycles anyway:
> ”The WHO are saying that if the manufacturer has defined a value but you could if you chose to adjust that setting, please don’t - stick to what the manufacturer has stated because they have done the earlier work to determine the best value for that threshold,” Mackay said.
Labs using too high a threshold has been a concern for about half a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... (And note the numbers in this article, almost all in the range of 33-40 cycles - I recall on rare occasion seeing higher reported elsewhere, around 45 and 50 cycles)
2% or %5 -- these are hardly small numbers. Anything with stats like that, when applied to a whole group of people, is definitely not an overstatement.
Maybe. Maybe not. Post covid usually takes 6 months to develop and peak covid was less than a month ago in most parts of the US. Incidentally 6 months is a pretty standard time from trigger to autoimmune disease for things like givimg birth -> hashimotos or ???virus -> type 1 diabetes.
That figure includes patients with a pre-COVID history of mood/anxiety/psychotic disorders, substance misuse, and insomnia which recurred after COVID, and such patients appear to account for the majority of that figure.
And the authors do not claim that any of the sequelae were caused by COVID.
> The estimated incidence of neurological or psychiatric sequelae at 6 months was 33.6%, with 12.8% receiving their first such diagnosis [thus 20.8% pre-existing]
From table 1:
33.6% of patients had any sequelae
24% had psychiatric disorders (only 8.6% for the first time)
6.6% had substance misuse (only 1.9% for the first time)
5.4% had insomnia (only 2.5% for the first time).
No other condition was over 3%. (Numbers add up to more than 33.6% (12.8%) because some patients had multiple conditions.)
So it looks like almost 2/3rds of the figure was preexisting conditions.
> Because a strong causality claim like you're asking for is impossible without perfect randomized controls which would be unethical.
I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
Even with your focus on only new diagnoses it's still 6X higher than the figure you claim. Intuitively it would be odd if the people with pre-existing conditions were left untouched instead of making their conditions worse.
> I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
They propensity score match against people who had the flu during lockdown
The second link doesn't say the sample was hospitalized patients, it seems like it was patients in all conditions:
> The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, included patients from ages 18 to 86 in light, moderate and serious condition.
(I tried to find the actual study to see if they had a breakdown but couldn't find it)
And frankly I'd say a study which shows that 94% of COVID patients still had symptoms after 3 months and 5% had symptoms after 6 months is actually not super positive news.
Based on what are you making this determination? I have known people with fybromyalgia and chronic fatigue and it's outright cruel that a lot of people (including doctors) are telling them that it's only in their head.
Psychosomatic doesn't mean "only in their head". It's the opposite really, it accepting that the symptoms are real, but are being triggered or aggravated by something mental (stress, for example).
Based on our knowledge of how vaccines work there is no reason to think they would actually help after the active viral infection has cleared. But psychosomatic symptoms are extremely common.
Why? If someone is harboring a low grade infection because their immune system didn't rev up enough to clear the virus, getting a jab with something engineered to provoke your immune system could very well fix the issue.
Also, "placebo effect" is real. "Reversion to the mean" is also real.
There is no clinical evidence that those patients are harboring a low grade infection. If the virus was active and replicating then it would be detectible even at very low levels.
The way to prove a psychosomatic component would be to tell a group they had COVID, then give them a harmless drug that induces some mild but harmless symptoms.
Take the group off the drug and survey them in 30-90 days for long-COVID symptoms.
You could also play around with control groups, for example perhaps one control group is asked not to watch or read any news programming related to COVID. I think the results would be revealing.
Maybe, but you can't actually say that. "Psychosomatic" reduces to "Big Pharma is telling you your very real disease is in your head" from an optics standpoint.
Public interest in the putatively psychosomatic Morgellons disease spiked after Joni Mitchell said she had it. There was an outpouring of support for Mitchell, and criticism of Big Pharma, the government, and the media for not treating Morgellons with more gravity.
My dad "had" Morgellons. The disease itself isn't real, but the symptoms were very much a part of other issues he had. The problem with labeling things as psychosomatic is that it can cover up very real suffering brought about by other, related issues.
They all provoke the immune system to generate antibodies (and T cell responses and other responses) that recognize active infections, but those go into action only when that infection is actually recognized (which can be a false positive with disastrous results - see the 2015 science article about pandemrix)
They have no known mechanism of action when there are no recognized antigens. If they do, that’s new science, and applying Sagan’s Criterion: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Considering autoimmune disorders are barely understood at this point (and most have very little available in terms of treatment), it isn't such an extraordinary claim.
It's pretty much "were you on a ventilator or diagnosed with ARDS" and "are you over 80". There's long covid cases outside those criteria, but with superdosing Nicotinic Acid and 3-6 months almost all seem to resolve.
That "long Covid" percentage could just be the result of general poor health in a percentage of the population and any disease would have caused long-term symptoms to that particular group.
It's actually surprising that percentage is so small in America.
Would be interesting to cross-reference "long Covid" stats in America with other countries.
Maybe the real pandemic is how unhealthy Americans are.
There are a few UFC fighters who have had problem for months and are still not in fighting shape. It's not only unhealthy people. I have also read about relatively young people in Germany that have had problems since early last year.
The exceptions that prove the rule? I find it strange that whenever it is pointed out that maybe 40% of Americans being obese is a problem and that maybe we should focus more on prevention through health promotion, it is quickly swept under the rug and countered with "yeah but these athletes had bad cases of covid19" (as if being an athlete is the definition of health...).
We hear about the bad anecdotes most. My own personal anecdata - two people out of about 14 I knew with confirmed COVID died, one other was laid up in hospital for weeks, the rest were all fine, quarantined at home without bad symptoms beyond sensory impact, and recovered quickly. Most were fit/mildly overweight, some were obese, the hardest hit examples were both quite old with existing heart problems.
80% of the population is below the age of 55. A person in the below age 55 group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
That's not anecdotal.
Meanwhile when the eviction moratorium ends this month tens of thousands of people are about to be homeless.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are starting to show signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies so inequality increased.
The price we're about to pay for this is going to be significant.
It's probably going to be poor people and future generations that pay though. #yolo
Yeah, this last year amounted to an enormous wealth transfer. I know a lot of small business owners and am a business owner myself. I've done just fine through the pandemic mostly due to the industry I'm in (coffins - ha, kidding), but there are some observed lessons - keep your business records very up to date and handy, keep a savings account for unexpected expenses, treat business continuity planning (BC) with some respect.
When first round PPP money was available, the businesses that got it were those that could pull all their info together on a moments notice and jam out an application with supporting material quickly (like literally within hours of finding a bank taking apps) - P&L statements, tax returns, payroll reports, other vital records. I saw business owners who didn't have their stuff together miss out on first round funding because they just weren't able to pull that off quickly enough. It was a land grab and for some it was an early make-or-break moment.
Businesses that were set up from the beginning to treat their offices as "disposable" from a BC/DR perspective were a-okay switching to remote work. As in - if you were planning to be able to continue work if an asteroid hit your building, you were fine with the WFH shift. Mostly this meant very asset-light approach to infrastructure, cloud services, laptops, etc.
Restaurants that could drop ready cash (savings) on outdoor accommodations (tents, heaters, etc) were more likely to maintain a revenue stream, assuming they had land or city-granted street space to set that up.
That last point though - I've seen some businesses leverage political connections to get special permitting, wealthier business owners of course were better positioned innately. The lockdowns disproportionately impacted businesses - like the established and wealthy (read large chains, primarily) were in a far better spot, while the ones already struggling to survive (locally owned) were not.
One aspect of the devastation that may not be fully appreciated is that locally owned small businesses don't necessarily just "come back". Many business owners are of an age where they are hanging up their spurs rather than going through another round of creation and growth. It takes a special kind of person (e.g. highly risk tolerant) to step out of the corporate employment world and have a go on your own, and I think the market lost a sizable quantity of those people over the last year, along with the jobs they provided, who just aren't anxious to have another go at it again.
I see a lot of people talking about inflation concerns. I don't feel I know enough about that to predict one way or another. I do see the job market starting to bounce back a bit where I live, dining rooms starting to fill up again.
To some degree I'm going to miss the society the pandemic created - people walking their neighborhoods more, meeting their neighbors, generally being more patient with each other, empty middle seats on airlines, people less likely to sneeze on the vegetables at the grocery store, more attention to sanitation, less traffic. Ah well.
Steroids can also cause diabetes which is a primary risk factor for covid.
Muscles != Health or good immune system.
Do you really base your conclusions on a sample size as small as a couple of UFC fighters claiming they're sick? You should really improve your statistical reasoning.
If you want science and actual statistics..
You have more of a chance of dying of a car accident then of Covid if you're under the age of 55.
Under the age of 55 compromises 80% of the American population.
I've been very dismayed at the non-existent data between "dead" and "not dead". This has been guiding pretty much everyone's decisions, everybody's counterpoints on all parts of the political spectrum, and it is pretty annoying when you know that they aren't operating on the same information as you are.
Its just not as simple as "hm only 10% of 90 years olds are the ones dying in my municipality, I'll play along because nobody is inviting me out anyway", encephalitis lethargica had very debilitating side effects for decades afterwards.
Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery). What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is? Many of the same people consider themselves asymptomatic because they didn't get a hard dry cough.
I just don't get the impression that others are putting two and two together here.
> Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery).
Literally everything in this quote is speculation, or factually incorrect.
Covid-19 is not a "neurological disease" -- SARS-CoV2 is a virus that infects epithelial cells. Epithelial cells are not neural cells.
Blood clotting is observed in some patients, but the mechanism is unclear. Blood clotting is a common result of inflammation -- triggered by any disease.
It does not "strip blood of the ability to carry oxygen". This is simply wrong. Inflammation associated with SARS-CoV2 infection damages the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen.
The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage. Patients with severe inflammatory responses clearly do have some damage. It's not yet clear if the damage is due to the virus, or the response of the host's own immune system.
The claim that organ damage is caused by "worsened oxygen delivery" is speculation on speculation.
> What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is?
The loss of smell is believed to be due to infection of of supporting cells in the olfactory epithelium. Not the nerves.
Taste is lost because smell plays a huge role in the perception of taste.
"Loss of ability to think" is so vague as to be pointless to debate. Depression and anxiety are likely causes of the same symptom.
I have a blood clotting disease. Factor 5 Leiden. Basically destroyed my life once it activated.
I mostly had it under control with blood thinners. If I went off for a few days I would have issues, then a stroke. ( I hate side effects of Pradaxa)
Got covid. Sucked, but got over it.
However now I can’t miss any pills.
If I skip tonight’s, Tomorrow one side of my body will go numb. I get severe brain fog, Plus a host of other issues that take days to weeks to resolve.
Same crap as before covid, but I have no margin for error now.
Oh and now I piss blood, because blood thinners, yeah.
Clotting clearly does happen for a subset of patients. But it's wrong for the OP to claim that this is because the virus is doing something to the blood. That's a leap too far. Other infections cause similar sorts of issues -- sepsis, for example.
The distinction matters, because if the clotting is mediated by a runaway inflammatory response (e.g. an over-reaction of the innate immune system), it's inherently a problem that will affect a subset of people who are infected (for reasons we don't really understand). Whereas if the virus attacks some component of the blood, it would be expected to affect most people the same way.
But if we have a population of people who will experience this, wouldn’t that feed into the GP contention that no one is measuring the experience between alive and dead?
I completely buy the idea that all of these effects happen with other conditions, but if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
> wouldn’t that feed into the GP contention that no one is measuring the experience between alive and dead?
Well, no...there have been a lot of publications in this area. We hear about them all the time. Most of these publications are bad at the moment, but that's normal. It takes time for good research to be completed. It will happen.
> if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
Sure. I don't think anything I've written here implies otherwise.
This is fucking brutal. My ex-girlfriend had Polycythemia. I realise it's very different to what you're explaining here, but her symptoms when she didn't take her medication, or when she got hot, or did anything strenuous were very similar to what you listed.
In addition to pissing blood.
Is this a disease that you've always had? Came later in life?
If this is asking too much or prying to deep, don't answer my questions. I empathise as much I can with you, as much as I can.
2 parts. Genetic disorder factor 5 Leiden. Not aa problem until a few years ago.
Also have an Autoimmune disorder. Had it since I was a teen. Made worse by my teenage love of mountain dew.
It’s a risk factor for clotting, and probably contributes. It also causes inflammation and neuropathy. It was was annoying and a slow but growing problem.
Then I got exposed to a LOT of natural gas from a mega rental company house.
Well dormant gene for factor 5 activated and I my blood went crazy. Lots of clots. Autoimmune also went nuts and decided that nervous system and various organs needed to die in a most painful way possible.
Took a few years to get it under control..ish.
Covid has clearly made it worse.
Would you hire the developer that copy and pastes from StackOverflow without understanding the code or the developer who reads StackOverflow to come up with their own solution/conclusion?
In stead of a blithe comment, you could directly link evidence and instead you chose the less productive of two routes. It makes you look like an ass and doesn't contribute to the conversation.
You are wrong because it's not a claim. The pathophysiology of Covid is hard science. Gravity existing is not a claim either. No need to support either of those with ref's is because they are easily googleable. It's a waste of people's time.
Again, no sources to back up any of your claims. As Hitchens once famously claimed, "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."
That's interesting, thanks. But as you note, an in vitro study is still a long way from proof of claim -- just because something can happen does not mean that it does happen in actual people, and it certainly doesn't mean that it happens often. I would characterize this as evidence suggestive of a plausible mechanism.
One thing missing, for example, is why this doesn't appear to happen frequently. Most of the highly touted claims of cardiac involvement from summer 2020 have been debunked (e.g. in athletes).
> The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage.
The problem: assuming a (made up, just for the argument here) 0.1% rate of coronavirus cases that end up in long-covid / systematic organ failures, and you have 1k of infections, that's not many total cases. Assuming you have 116 millions of infected people however, suddenly even a 0.1% rate translates into hundreds of thousands of affected people. The actual rate is possibly in double-digit percentage area (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7533045/), so ... yeah.
This is why combatting infections is so important, not just because of mutation risk...
Thanks I agree, I was just looking up the other day whether “brain fog” was an accepted term and reached the same conclusion as you
For me, the poor leadership and lack of consensus is enough for me to avoid exposure. When everyone can articulate what you said, instead of the reductive things they do say, I’ll be more comfortable
But I’ll likely be vaccinated before then, which is just as fine for my risk analysis
On the taste/smell thing- people I know who've had that symptom say that it is qualitatively different from the loss of taste/smell you get with a bad cold. In particular, they also lost the ability to taste things like salt and sugar, which people with a cold can still taste. My understanding of this may be outdated, but I thought that tasting those wasn't an olfactory thing- am I wrong, or is the ability to taste salt and sugar dependent on different epithelial cells that are also damaged?
(Interestingly, these people did retain the ability to sense the 'heat' of chili peppers...)
Parent is correct about COVID attacking the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen. This has been known for a while. Many sources if you search. Here is one:
This is a paper that used a computer simulation method ("docking") of computer-generated protein structures to arrive at the conclusions you're citing. I did my PhD in this area. Docking methods are not anywhere near reliable enough to make this sort of claim.
This is little more than a story told with software.
One side is producing research papers and other sources. You are saying you have a PhD in this area so trust you.
I do not know you, I do not know if the PhD in question actually qualifies you to speak on the subject, and I do not know if it did that you would actually be fully up to date on the subject. I do not necessarily want to dismiss this out of hand as an appeal to authority, but as a layperson, you do not making a convincing argument when it boils down to "Listen to me, I have a PhD, trust me over these other people who have PhDs who are also publishing peer reviewed papers that disagree with me."
> One side is producing research papers and other sources. You are saying you have a PhD in this area so trust you.
That's not a paper. It's a pre-print. It isn't peer-reviewed. It isn't published. Literally anyone can push a document to a pre-print server.
I'm saying I have a PhD in this exact discipline, and this document isn't proof of what it claims. You certainly don't have to believe me, but saying "this is a paper, and therefore it is likely to be correct" is not a standard of evidence that exists.
> It is still at least showing some work beyond the "making claims with zero supporting evidence", which is what you are doing.
Really? OP knew exactly what was going on in this pre-print. Unlike you who took this for a published paper. Don't ask someone to show work when you yourself didn't read the summary.
Also the paper doesn't talk about the 'ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen', the attack is first and foremost reported to result in less hemoglobin being available. There is a difference here.
>Really? OP knew exactly what was going on in this pre-print. Unlike you who took this for a published paper. Don't ask someone to show work when you yourself didn't read the summary.
This is not the only reply from him in the thread going back to the top comment. There are other articles and papers posted, in response to his reply or backing the assertions of the original post he replied to, here and throughout the rest of the rest of the comment section. In none of his posts did he provide any response to them beyond his appeals to authority.
I had no desire to reply to multiple posts with the same general concern and instead picked a single one.
The top post should have included sources for their assertion. They did not. Others stepped in for them and did in the thread. Other threads include articles and sources for the same assertions. At that point, the burden of proof isn't on them - someone saying they're wrong needs to provide details on why that is not the case vs. just saying "I got a PhD in this so trust me."
I'm not saying "you should believe me because I have a PhD". That would be an appeal to authority.
I'm saying: I have deep expertise in this exact area, and based on my experience and knowledge and ability to read papers in this area, I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made.
You have no skill or experience in this area, and you choose to believe the paper instead of my assessment of the paper. That is certainly your right, but your basis for doing so is "it's a paper and I don't know who you are", which is self-evidently silly.
>I'm not saying "you should believe me because I have a PhD".
Yes, you fundamentally are.
>I have deep expertise in this exact area, and based on my experience and knowledge and ability to read papers in this area, I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made.
There is no functional difference between the here because you don't even provide an argument as to why this is.
What is the real difference between "I have deep expertise in this area and knowledge and experience" and "I have a PhD"? Is a PhD not a proxy for expertise, knowledge, and experience in a subject?
What is the difference between "believe me" and "I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made"? Are you not asking me to believe your conclusion based entirely on your authority? You have made no argument for me to evaluate.
One form is more verbose, but it is still 100% an appeal to authority.
It is one thing to state your credentials and then make an argument. It is another to state your credentials and a conclusion with no argument.
"We speculated that in COVID-19, beyond the classical pulmonary immune-inflammation view, the occurrence of an oxygen-deprived blood disease, with iron metabolism dysregulation, should be taken in consideration. "
The guy complaining here is simply wrong. He's backpedalling because he made an unscientific and unsupported statement that oxygen deprivation is caused only by inflammation. There is plenty of evidence of other mechanisms at play. Nitpicking them is fine, pretending they don't exist is foolish, which is what he is getting called out on.
To be fair, the OP mentioned "the ability of the blood to carry oxygen", not blood cells, which would be correct if the overall concentration of hemoglobin was lowered.
OP here. This is a great discussion and I'm glad this particular subthread chose not to dismiss it and instead chose to debate the progress of the research into it or lack thereof.
Would be even greater to get NIH to invest $1B into looking into it further.
6 months ago people would have retorted slightly differently, although they would have balked at the assertion they would have assumed that people already researched it and ruled it out, and therefore I would have been "fearmongering" because the scientists already researched it! now we can acknowledge that they haven't and needs to be peer reviewed.
so the goal post has moved, but I'm all for data being collected.
There's nothing wrong with publishing a computer model. But until it has been experimentally validated in humans then it's medically irrelevant. You're really reaching on this one.
The person you're responding to is understandably scared and is ignorantly propagating the sensationalism that the news has been hammering into our brains.
The news is not science..people need to realize.
It's a business and even the biggest news companies peddle sensationalism.
Even if only one person has some strange side effect like 'covid toes'...the news media can prey on humans emotional response which overrides statistical reasoning to lay claim that it's a possible Covid outcome.
And while it's not an outright lie...it's extremely disengenuous and very sensational. And they do it all the time.
We need to teach people statistical reasoning in school and we need to hold news agencies accountable for statistically irresponsible news.
I've relocated twice during this pandemic and have no qualms going out and making judgements for my personal probability of exposure.
"Scared and unable to derive statistics" is a large inaccurate stretch of the imagination, I'll make my own stretch of the imagination and say you were probably pasting this response a year ago on things that turned out to be real threats for 500k Americans that didn't even know they had a meaningful pre-existing condition.
We don't have statistics on who has the "inflammatory response" or any other side effect.
At the end of this month when the eviction moratorium ends, there's about to be tens of thousands of people relocating to the streets.
Apologies that you had to switch houses during this trying time. My heart goes out to you and your struggle.
80% of the population is under the age of 55. That age group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are showing signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies increasing inequality.
The price we're about to pay for this economically is going to be significant.
Poor people and future generations will probably have to pay it though. #yolo
I agree. The neurological aspect of things concerns me the most. How many diseases do we know that cause long term cognitive damage? Even if the cognitive loss was small at the individual level, given the number of people who were exposed, that would be pretty terrible at the level of long-term societal impact.
Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery). What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is?
Unless you can provide a source that proves loss of sense of smell is due to “blood clotting depriving oxygen and resulting in organ damage” your statement sounds like pure bunk.
Plus, severe influenza can result in similar organ damage so Covid is not unique in that aspect.
> Plus, severe influenza can result in similar organ damage so Covid is not unique in that aspect.
I used to work with somebody who was never the same after a bad case of flu in their 50s, so this kind of research—regardless of which virus—is very welcome.
well, yeah, high school buddy of mine, 50 yrs old, was never the same after a bad case of flu. He was never the same because he was dead. He got sick, then three days later, dead. Our whole class was in shock. But apparently, it's not as uncommon as people think.
Most people confuse the common cold and flu. Flu is a very serious disease that kills many including children. Common cold rarely has complications, and when it does it is almost only with the very frail and very old.
Agreed. My brother in law's dad got COVID. He had heart surgery before. They had him on blood thinners for some time and his doctor said that it was a very real possibility that it saved his life as he was already on something they would have probably prescribed to him.
He's in his 60s. Will he experience long term effects? Who knows.
I'm starting to get invited to meet in person for business and some are like "I get tested every week". And I just say sorry I don't make exceptions. I live with someone with a rare respiratory condition. A weekly test - what does that even tell me anyway? I know you're running your business and have employees coming in.
Everything is much easier with data. But when there is still so much to learn everyone weighs their risks differently.
Many of us here are extremely fortunate and can afford to pay for delivery and stay home.
So we need to understand that some people's perspective IS a real calculated risk tolerance.
If we can get data to understand long term effects, that will help with educating those that are really only weighing the risk of them dying.
right, yeah that doesn't tell you anything, it tells that person whether they need to quarantine for an additional week and is only useful if they hadn't seen anyone the prior 7 days.
I hear many quips like "I already had it last year" or still even people that think their one test once says they were negative and thats that.
The crazy thing, the crazy thing, is that these aren't even the people that don't understand thermodynamics and think seeing hot breath in front of a mask proves that masks offer no protection effective against covid aerosols.
I hear many quips like "I already had it last year"
Oh right. So we know for a FACT that you were exposed, and became a carrier and probably a spreader; maybe by bad luck and unfortunate circumstances, maybe by being a bloody idiot. But NOW you're even MORE blasé about it, because you feel invulnerable, so you're going to be engaging in MORE risky behaviour regarding an illness that we know people can have repeated bouts of ("catch" more than once). Thanks for letting me know, I guess. Video call it is.
> I'm starting to get invited to meet in person for business and some are like "I get tested every week". And I just say sorry I don't make exceptions.
Make a list now, so that you remember who the idiots are after everyone is vaccinated.
I've already had to re-plan my reintroduction to retail after finding out a few of my preferred shops weren't obeying mask mandates, or in one case actively flouting them.
It will be easy to forget and put it all behind us. Don't. We're lucky to receive such useful side-channel data.
Retribution, vengeance and holding grudges isn't how we're going to build a stronger society. I think we all need to practice forgiving the people, no matter how awful they've been, are, or will be.
Don't get me wrong, I'm enraged at the lunacy of some. But I don't think we're going to be better off in aggregate by insisting on payback.
It doesn't have to be about retribution. It can also be a proxy for example for how seriously a restaurant is likely to take its food safety standards.
In a simplistic world, I agree as long as the response is proportional and the other actor is rational. My preferred strategy to deal with unwanted behaviour is usually 'swift proportional reprisal followed by forgiveness'. However I don't think you can apply this nilly-willy in the real world. There's a bunch of nuance at play, and the other actors are usually not very rational, and not every fight is worth the cost of fighting it. And also, none of this works if you don't _forgive_ the other side. "An eye for an eye" is a crap strategy.
Understanding the networks of information flows over social media will allow for easier reintroduction of accurate concepts, using similar looking quacks and new language for people who prefer to believe quacks over any reputable institution.
It can also be useful to get people to realize how consistently they are led on, as many of them forgot their prior theories and are just subscribed to random causes alongside their vegan, spiritual or political journey.
It has nothing to do with any of the things you listed, maybe you're projecting. It's not retribution to avoid someone, nor is it vengeful to shop somewhere else.
I have for years had a big list of people, companies, and other organizations I wish to actively avoid. The pandemic just gave me higher resolution on the "undefined" set of humans and organizations.
I already avoid racists, extreme partisans, assholes, anti-science types, people who are mean to waitstaff, people who don't read books, et c. Covid gave me a few more categories.
That hasn't been the case so far, and, in my experience, my overall quality of social interactions has gone up drastically since I adopted my current approach.
Perhaps there are false positives; I am willing to take that risk for the immense benefits so far.
I hope they can start to get to the bottom of some of the clotting issues. Just in my anecdotal circle of friends and acquaintances I know at least 3 sudden anueryisms or strokes post-covid infection--some months after recovery. These were healthy 30-somethings with no pre-existing conditions and none of them even had infection symptoms bad enough to warrant a hospital trip. If nothing else there needs to be a lot more awareness about recognizing the signs and symptoms of clot, stroke, or heart attacks.
In all fairness it's only been around a bit over a year (and MERS/SARS were rare enough to have limited data). The dead/non-dead distinction has been the top priority. And I don't think the data is non-existent, but on an educated guess I'd say the top minds have more been on developing treatments, vaccines, and generally reducing mortality and morbity - and the balance of research reflects it. Sadly there will be time to measure the long term consequences. For now what more can they do than tell everyone to socially distance and wear masks, and get vaccinated as soon as possible?
At first I was going to say that I wasn't arguing for anything, but really everyone has dropped the ball here.
The same places that did the tests had the infrastructure to follow up with people and could have been doing this 6 months ago, and that has nothing to do with the "top minds" at all.
That, alongside the failed, poorly implemented or nonexistent contact tracing methods have made getting this metadata much more difficult to do.
This will also flag long-term effects from other virii, as well.
One thing that Covid drove home is: "Infection with a virus can do a LOT of extra damage that we don't track very well."
There are lot of people who get diagnosed with "Lyme" (aka the modern equivalent to "hysteria" in many ways) who may very well just be "You had a bad cold/flu/other virus and your body took a lot of damage and now its going to take quite a while to clean up."
Modern medicine is amazing, but it has a gigantic blind spot around chronic conditions.
Do you have reason to believe that Lyme is not a real disease, despite a known bacteria and very distinct symptoms including red “target” marks? Or are you just referring to “long Lyme” (which is not well characterized, but has extremely high correlation with a prior real Lyme diagnosis?)
I fully believe that "Lyme disease" certainly exists.
I also believe that "Lyme disease" became a medical/medical insurance bucket for "We don't know what's wrong with you, and you're annoying enough that we can't just ignore you, but we don't want to spend any more time or money on you figuring out what is really wrong."
Anyone with CF, or who was thrown into the fibromyalgia bucket (its used by doctors for untreatable/intractable problems, and comes with a strong implication "its all in your mind") will welcome this, if (and its a big if) they are allowed to participate in the discovery and treatment process.
I'm not in either bucket, or a long-covid sufferer, I'm just observing post-viral has a huge amount of things in it, beyond covid, which might benefit from increased funding and eyeballs on the problem.
By "CF" do you mean cystic fibrosis, or did you actually mean "CFS" or "ME/CFS" (aka chronic fatigue syndrome)?
My wife has suffers from ME/CFS for years. She is pissed that the US government invests almost nothing in research for something that affects on the order of 1M [1] of its citizens. She certainly doesn't want people with long-covid to suffer, but she is cheering that perhaps this $1B investment will lead to research that also helps the understanding of ME/CFS.
TDLR
I am now convinced I've had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome for years but covid has seriously kicked it up a level making the symptoms worse.
I've suffered from chronic pain syndrome in my legs/hips for years, in fact since I was like 10 and has had a big affect on my life. As a result of chronic pain I've then mentally suffered as well, done CBT a few times as well. I've had countless sessions of physio and hydrotherapy.
Before covid was even a thing (Like 2-3 years) I've reported fatigue issues to my GP multiple times, I had IBS, concentration issues and chest pains. The GP's did ECGs and said I was fine. My rheumatology kicked me of the patient list, but got me physio and a sleep study (I have mild sleep apnea)
Jan 2020 I had the flu as well, my Father was the first one and did lose his taste and sense of smell.
Come April 2020 I was just getting out of breath walking in my garden and slight chest pains at the bottom of my lungs, the fatigue got worse. Doctor was like "You've not got symptoms of covid, but it could be covid, some of my colleagues have felt wiped out" Come June/July 2020 I took part in the NHS home antibody test and I had a faint line that indicated I had antibodies for covid-19, at this point things had gone back to normal for me.
Come December 2020, my concentration levels were the worst they've ever been. The brain fog was horrendous, I was now getting worse chest pains and feeling rather fed up with it. GP was doing nothing other than saying get a covid test. In the end I went to a walk in clinic and they thought I may have had clots on my lungs. Got sent to A&E (Yes sent to A&E during a pandemic, the worst place anyone can be) They came to the conclusion after looking at my medical record and symptoms I had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome. I now take fluoxetine in the morning alongside my amitriptyline in the evening (been on it for 10+ years), I'm doing a lot better but do have days where I've got no get up and go, it got worse in 2020 and I think covid made things worse. Also interestingly my mother ME, so do wonder if there is a genetic factor.
This is sorely needed. People are starting to get desperate - who knows how many outcomes could be improved with earlier medical diagnostics and intervention. We need clear guidelines to give those recovering a better chance of not slipping into the pit of a chronic illness.
I will say, as I've been trying to tout on every "long Covid" thread I come across - it seems that rest is crucial. Your best option, obviously, is to not get Covid in the first place. But if you do, after you've passed through the 2 week acute phase, rest like your life depends on it. Extremely light exercise only, take as much time off work as possible, and pay close attention to how your recovery is progressing.
The usual caveats apply - not a doctor, evidence is completely anecdotal and based on my experiences, this is not medical advice, etc etc - but scheduled, compulsory rest helped me a great deal at my worst. So much of my downward spiral could likely have been abated by avoiding overexertion, prolonging the rest period after the acute phase of the illness, waiting even longer before jumping back into exercise and full work days (3-4 months as opposed to 3-4 weeks) but that is so antithetical to how we think we're supposed to act after we "get over" an illness.
This will hopefully shed some light on people suffering a very similar disease often described as Chronic Fatigue syndrome. Many also getting this after a non covid virus infection.
The biggest issue was the small sample size the difficulty to diagnose as there is sometimes also a phycological aspect to it. The now large sample size should help a lot in finding out what it really is.
Honestly that's kind of terrifying. I got Covid 2 months ago, and have been trying to start running again to improve my lung capacity. Are you saying I've been making it worse?
Not exactly - we don’t really have any way of knowing that empirically yet. Personally, I do wish I had given my body a bit of a bigger break after I got over the infection. So I guess I’m saying pay attention - watch how you’re recovering, and maybe think about easing back into vigorous exercise slower than you might have had you just gotten over a cold. And, as always, when in doubt, get your doctor involved.
It’s clear now a majority of people outside the vulnerable groups get over this illness with hardly any after effects. But it’s becoming clear that some people don’t, and suffer some amount of sequelae. We don’t know how many yet, and we can’t tell who will or who won’t yet. Given those circumstances, a slower than usual return to normal activity levels is prudent.
For instance, I’ve read that college athletes are restricted from play for about 10-14 days after even an asymptomatic COVID diagnosis, and then are carefully monitored for months afterwards. With any hint of lingering symptoms or a drop in performance, they’re given a cardiac MRI to check for heart inflammation, and potentially benched for 3-6 months. If you don’t have a team physician checking in with you after every workout, you’re gonna have to do that interrogation yourself.
I'm just going to throw this out there as a discussion point - consider for a moment what an unusually high number of people are catching the same disease at the same time. Not just feeling unwell with some sort of unspecified cold or flu, but all being confirmed tested positive with something specific. 30 million in the US and counting.
How many people amongst that 30 million would go on to experience any number of nebulous, chronic symptoms of one kind of another normally this year in the absence of Covid? In my assessment, a great many would. If not millions, then hundreds of thousands. Experiencing health problems, or odd symptoms that come and go can be scary, but it's a normal part of life. But throw in a label "long covid", support groups and a heightened sense of threat during a pandemic and you have a recipe for a confused social response.
Now, post viral syndrome is certainly real. Inflammation due to infection causes real and debilitating symptoms. But is there any evidence to suggest that SARS-COV-2 is uniquely able to cause long term health problems? Or is it the case that it causes unexceptional levels of post viral syndrome and inflammatory damage, but the unusal thing is so many people all catching the same virus at the same time with a very low level of natural immunity in the population, therefore a relativelyt high rate of serious infection (relative to other endemic viruses)?
I think this is all there likely is to it. Add on that it is suspected that viruses can trigger autoimmune diseases, and that explains potentially even more long haulers. Plus increased stress/anxiety on some due to the lockdown could cause physical symptoms.
I do suppose some research is warranted though. It seems different viruses seem to cause different types of autoimmune responses, and it would be interesting to see what COVID can cause. Plus more research needs to be done on the link between viruses and autoimmune diseases in general.
I had COVID in March 2020, and it took several months to recover - chest tightness and slight difficulty breathing being the main unending symptom.
The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing.
It would be interesting to compare COVID survivors in lockdown and non-lockdown states in the USA. The theory could be that the social isolation, stress, reduced Vitamin D, and poorer diet of people in lockdown contribute to poorer outcomes long-term.
All of the evidence seems to more immediately point to "it's all in your head". That's still real, but it isn't "COVID long haul", it's just "things kinda suck right now for a lot of people, and some manifest symptoms because of it."
What would you say the epistemic status of this is?
>The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing.
The link to Vit-D deficiency and worse covid outcomes is by now incredibly well-supported in the literature.
That anybody thinks a lockdown is good advice is just evidence that, yes, the media is effective at controlling what appears to most to be most minds (though that's not clear--most folks I talk to think covid is mild and the policy response insane).
Best advice is the same your grandma might give you: To be healthy, eat well, go outside for fresh air and exercise.
Instead, we're all supposed to think that the best response is waiting for Bill Gates to put just the right chemicals into a syringe to save mankind.
>The link to Vit-D deficiency and worse covid outcomes is by now incredibly well-supported in the literature.
Twitter followers I consider "in-the-know", as well as a quick Google search, says this is nonsense. Where do you get that this assertion is well-supported?
I see your response paints me as some anti-vaxxer. Why would you think that?
My kids, my wife, and myself are all accinated against polio and other illnesses.
Those vaccines a) Are real vaccines that actually stop getting the illness AND transmitting it and b) Have been battle-tested over decades and their long-term impacts and side-effects are well-understood.
I'm not anti-vaxx.
I'm against rushed, misleadingly-marketed vaccines that seem to have no impact on the actual transmission of the virus, based on every company's claims, that have been tested for months when prior to this widespread vaccine injections required close to a decade of study for approval.
This is a rushed gene therapy medical treatment for a disease that kills less than 0.4% of people under the age of 75.
The link to Vit-D deficiency and worse covid outcomes is by now incredibly well-supported in the literature.
But Vitamin D deficiency is also correlated with non healthy life styles in general. So basically all that's saying is if you're living an unhealthy lifestyle there is a better chance that covid will be worse for you if you get it.
So your response to that is some experimental medical treatment that is still undergoing phase3 FDA trials?
Why isn't the very obvious response a massive, tax-incentivized campaign to increase the health and immune system of Americans and the world in general?
Why instead of $billions to Moderna and Pfizer are we not creating world-leading tax systems that monetarily incentivize the buildup of our nation's immune system?
Seen some comments in denial about this. Just because you haven’t had a personal experience with this doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
I’ve just started to hit, what I believe is, the tail end of my residual effects. I’ve measured lower blood oxygen levels and fever spikes periodically - in addition to other anecdotal symptoms. It was real to me and the data suggests something happened.
Many others share similar experiences. It’s worth researching and wouldn’t be the first time we may completely revise how we think of infections.
Yes, I had both long flu and long pneumonia. In both cases it took me about 2 months to fully recover after being officially cured. It annoys me a little that people are only now discovering that respiratory illnesses can have long-term effect. How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack?
Personal experience aside, it will be important to put specific numbers on the phenomenon and establish a baseline for comparison to other illnesses. So this announcement of a research effort is good news. I just hope they will put the numbers in context.
>How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack?
To amplify your point, I didn't know this until my father died last month from a series of heart attacks brought on by pneumonia, which itself was caused by COVID.
Side note: the cause of death is listed as a heart attack. How many deaths are we not counting because COVID was not the direct cause?
I would guess anything that affects your oxygen and damages the lungs (potentially permanently) which produce your oxygen can have long term effects. Some of the patients who have died from covid have lungs that look so horrible they barely look like lungs any longer other than the shape.
Yes, it's been alternatively known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia, since at least the 1980s. We still don't know what causes it, so it's too soon to answer your last question.
I had a moderate case where I sick for about 10 days, mostly fatigue, fever, loss of smell and taste, night sweats.
But I developed an itch in my armpits, groin and arms post-recovery. The dermatologist gave me an anti-itch cream, now a month later, the symptoms have gotten worse to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy.
I don't have a history of skin allergies or allergies in general.
Posting it here, if someone has/had similar issues.
As you can imagine I don’t know what happens to you but - I had itches in different parts of my body and even a rash showed up on my ankle. Turns out it was a nutrition issue. Over time you may develop allergies to stuff that you weren’t allergic before (also after sicknesses). It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to eat those things ever again, but you at least won’t for some time.
Consider also dust mites allergy and do extensive cleaning where you sleep and see if that helps.
Thanks, am seeing the dermatologist again and may ask her if they need to do a blood test.I've heard that when liver enzymes are out of whack it can lead to allergy like symptoms.
I used to get bizarre skin rashes. Just out of the blue, itchy to the point that it was hard to focus on any programming task, would only last 8-10 hours and then fade away. I have a friend (nurse) who recommended I take a supplement quercetin and I haven't had a rash since. It might be worth researching for yourself. Warning I'm not a doctor nor do I claim to be, just throwing out options.
In September of last year I was experiencing a combination of symptoms that I did not link to COVID, but looking back on it I'm starting to question it.
First, I had debilitating brain fog. It felt link I was thinking through pea soup. I went to my doctor twice due to this symptom, but my blood work (CBC, not a COVID test) looked normal and he suggested this was due to "stress" or "changes in sleep", although I was not experiencing either of those.
Around this same time, I would experiencing "near-syncope" upon standing. It got to the point where I everything was fading to black and I would have to take a knee to maintain consciousness. Again I talked to my doctor he shrugged his shoulders. He said my blood pressure was normal but he referred me to a cardiologist.
I passed a stress EKG so they said there was nothing structurally wrong with my heart.
Fast forward a few months and the symptoms have abated, although they still persist in a diminished form.
This makes me really wonder if this was COVID due to autonomic nerve dysfunction.
It's unclear whether this will generally be used to investigate (and ultimately take seriously) the documented but poorly understood chronic suffering which rarely but really affects a sliver of people who've recovered from various viruses.
The other four endemic coronaviruses, while often called "common colds" (and make up perhaps 1/5 common cold cases) have all been documented having similar lingering cardiovascular effects in a similar miniscule segment of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" for example - you'll be amazed at how similar case reports are to what we're seeing from SARS-CoV-2.
However, to my knowledge (and to the best I can tell from searching Google Scholar), the phrase 'long Covid' has never been used to describe this phenomenon. In fact, it seems that sufferers are often ignored. So it is with other mysterious chronic after-effects from illness - 'chronic lyme disease' is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks.
It's obvious that this phenomenon is super rare. However, when you have viruses (and other pathogens) which ultimately infect nearly everyone on the planet, these cases add up. It's not right that sufferers have been ignored these decades, and if this is a genuine effort to right that wrong, I applaud it.
If on the other hand it's just another attempt to justify bizarre restrictions instead of resources to help these same sufferers, then that's just cruel.
We saw a similar happening with hospital census last year: sensational media and pundit scientists (but vanishingly few actual experts) threw bombastic fits over hospitals being overcrowded, as they almost always are, especially in underserved communities, at the peak time of the year.
And was this a rallying cry to provide more resources for marginalized communities and the hospitals that serve them? Seemingly not; it was instead a pathetic attempt at justifying interventions which by then were already unambiguously ineffective, like stay-at-home orders. And now we're not even talking about it. These hospital systems and the communities they serve will not be helped; the conversation has moved on.
The best thing we can do is to take seriously the experts who have credibly drawn attention to this for the past couple of decades and continued to do so in covid times. People like Stefan Baral, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, etc.
Subsequent pandemics may leave less room for reflection, so this is the time to get these things straightened out.
"'chronic lyme disease' is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks." My wife, a retinal surgeon, lost her career due to it. She was pretty much unable to function at a professional level for several years, until she was cured with disulfiram. https://www.lymedisease.org/disulfiram-kinderlehrer/
Wow, it gives me joy to hear about her relief! I know someone with whom I'm going to share your story right away.
I hope that this kind of chronic suffering (and the possibility for therapies) is the outcome of our discussions about long-covid, rather than pretending that this is a novel phenomenon in order to score political points.
I suggest reading the article I linked. It talks about Dr. Ken Liegner. He just happened to be my wife's Lyme doctor, and I'm pretty sure my wife was one of the 30 patients mentioned in the article. My son was another of them. (I didn't mention him in my original post because I wanted to keep it simple and short. But now that you've expressed this interest...) My son was basically unable to function for his last year of high school and had to take a year off before going to college because of it. He, too, got on disulfiram and it cured him. He had been on heavy duty antibiotics. At one point. We hypothesized that maybe the Lyme was cured, and it was the treatment that was making him feel so terrible. So we took him off the antibiotics. (This is with Dr. Liegner's consent; he thought it was worth trying.) A week later, my son felt better than he had in a couple years. Another week later, and he was starting to feel sick again. Another week later, he had all his lyme symptoms back and went back on the antibiotics, which helped but didn't cure.
Disulfiram cured both of them.
BUT!!!!! The disulfiram was a very tough treatment. Near the end of the planned multi-month course of disulfiram, I had to take my son to the ER because he was borderline hallucinating. As I said, it was near the end of the planned treatment anyway, so we took him off it. He immediately started feeling better.
This is consistent with what you'll read in the article about psychological effects from the disulfiram.
And he was cured of his chronic Lyme. Period. The Lyme symptoms were gone and they stayed gone.
I think Dr. Liegner may now being doing smaller daily disulfiram doses for a longer time, in order to avoid these affects. My wife and son were (probably) among the first 30 people to ever have this treatment, and so it is a lot better understood now.
It might be a good idea for your friend to give Dr. Liegner's office a call. He's in Pawling, NY. He's expensive and not in a convenient location for most people. We lived in Bangor ME, and drove 7 hours each way for every appointment with him. Well worth it. And he's probably Zooming now for at least a portion of the necessary appointments.
Please let me know if anything positive comes from our exchange of messages here, I'd love to know that it had been of use! Or write if you or your friend would like any other info. garyrob at me.com.
There's always a small percentage of people who have side effects from any biological changes to their body.
People have permanent side effects from taking medicine.
It seems strange to focus on Covid specifically, when all manner of biological changes to people's bodies cause a small subset of people to have permanent side effects.
Not sure how to parse this. Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, are among the many causes of pneumonia. Do you just mean other pathogens that also cause pneumonia?
On the contrary, this does not seem to be distinct with SARS-CoV-2. The other endemic coronaviruses (which cause pneumonia more rarely, and are typically just called 'common colds') also produce very similar 'long covid' effects in similarly tiny slices of the population.
Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" - you'll be amazed at how well documented, and yet poorly understood, this phenomenon is. There appears to be less literature for 229e, but pretty convincing for the other 3.
Long Covid is also important because understanding how it works could point to a common mechanism with many comparable post-viral syndromes and with chronic fatigue syndrome.
Its about time they start looking into it.. And it won't just be "long covid"... They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it. My girlfriend is pretty much disabled at this point and has been sick since barely surviving SARS in 2003. Oddly enough, most things she suffers from are the same as long-covid issues.
> They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it.
Heck yeah.
And isn't "long-SARS" just another long-covid? Along with long-hku1, long-oc43, long-nl63? If 'covid' stands for coronavirus disease, then it stands to reason that the discussion about 'long covid' needs to be independent from which coronavirus is implicated in the chronic condition. It's apparent that they all cause this (albeit rarely).
It seems to me that focusing on one pathogen to the exclusion of the others, despite this phenomenon being documented across all of them, is likely a political decision.
Every hospitalization for pretty much everything serious with lots of medical procedures, especially for 2 weeks or more, have side effects for some months, physically and mentally.
To determine how scary "Long Covid" is, you have to take into account both how bad and how frequent it is. Articles like these are just fearmongering. They likely cause it in many cases by giving people hypochondria.
One story is not. The reporting of the media as a whole is. It's always FEAR FEAR FEAR, without mentioning how likely these cases actually are. Because of this, there are young, healthy people who think they have a significant chance of dying of Covid, which is just objectively wrong.
But it's understandable. If you dare trying to look rationally at the matter, you get accused of "hand wav[ing] away COVID". As if the only two options were "worse than the plague" and "harmless like the common cold".
Other than High blood pressure, COPD and Diabetes have there been any studies of Sars effect with other diseases?
I think there is a chance that long-covid may result from a secondary virus and it's interaction with Sars. It may also be due to a lack of virus and no interaction I suppose.
You sound like the people who went to a hospital that was overflowing with COVID patients, saw fewer cars in the parking lot than they expected, and concluded it was a hoax.
The wonderful thing about the internet is that you don't even have to go outside to talk to people who have been sick, who know people who have died, who are sick at this very moment and know people who are dying right now.
It's myopic to pretend you can get a similarly accurate top-down view of the situation by talking to your neighbors.
I was a mild case, stayed home for 2 days, right back on my feet after that. 32M, no health issues. Symptoms just lingered and lingered. They would go away then come back days later. Mainly sinus pressure and dizziness. Then 4 months on I started getting intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Cardiologist noted some abnormalities but was not concerned. Put me on beta blockers. Fast forward to today and I still have shortness of breath, some cardiac symptoms, and random pains in my left arm and back. It really eats into my quality of life, but I am thankful I don't have it as bad as many others.
I keep tabs on the long haul community to see if researchers have figured anything out/others found anything that helps. So far there really isn't much. I'll note that there are a surprising number of people who aren't aware they are long hauling (they "recovered" and then months later developed issues - not making the connection until stumbling upon another long hauler) and that people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling. I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or what, but people want (need?) to hear "I fully recovered" when they ask how you are doing. I don't tell anyone except those close to me about it, it's completely not worth the debate they are going to want to have about the validity of my symptoms. It's pretty common in the LH community to not be publicly upfront about it because of this. There are plenty of people who know me, know I got sick, and will relay that I fully recovered.