One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this).
So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy levels are creeping back up. But still, you can have down days every now and then. But they are getting fewer and further between and the downs are less far down. I hope to get it completely behind me one of these days.
When I had COVID I was just one small step away from calling for an ambulance but that was rock bottom, after that it got better and I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this (by having some oxygen earlier on and maybe avoiding some of the damage). But I figured other people had it much worse than I did (and I still believe that was the case). March last year was a pretty crazy time.
Another one here (Woman, 24 y.o.). Contracted COVID, had a terrible three-weeks of infection. Nine months later, I am having weekly heart palpitations, I'm constantly fatigued and fogged in the mind and my lung capacity is half what it used to be - I now require an inhaler to go on my runs. I know several women my age experiencing far worse.
Ah yes, the heart thing. Forgot to mention that because it hasn't happened for a couple of months now but I would wake up at night every now and then with my heart going like I just ran a marathon. But that fortunately completely went away.
As for lung capacity: I used to play saxophone pretty fanatically and I think that is one of the reasons I got through this with a relatively low amount of damage.
> As for lung capacity: I used to play saxophone pretty fanatically and I think that is one of the reasons I got through this with a relatively low amount of damage.
Funnily enough, I used to play the flute and sing before contracting COVID. With my lung capacity halved, my ability is nowhere near what it used to be. Long COVID has taken all my hobbies away from me: running, singing, hip-hop dancing. If anyone knows of any support groups relating to Long COVID, please let me know.
Gah that sucks, I really feel for you. But: you will recover. For the longest time I thought that I wouldn't and then bit by bit it got better. If you can find an exercise bike I would really recommend you find one, it is super motivating to see your distance creep up day-by-day as you regain your strength and wind.
Have you tried postural drainage for your lungs? I ask because if you've lost half your lung capacity (and I expect a singer and flute player would know), then you must have some kind of junk in there.
For those not familiar with the term: You position yourself with your head a foot lower than your hips (and your back straight). You hold that for 15 minutes or so. You let gravity pull the junk out of your lungs down to where you can cough it out. Warning: It's not fun. First, your head feels like it's going to explode from the lung pressure. Second, when a chunk comes out, oxygen starts hitting an area of your lungs for the first time in maybe months. That hurts. (Or so my daughter says. She had to do this.)
"Postural drainage is considered safe and effective, but may cause some side effects. The procedure is discontinued if the patient complains of headache, discomfort, dizziness, palpitations,[3] fatigue, or dyspnea. Patients may be dyspnic after the various manuovers, since the head-down position increases the work of breathing, reduces tidal volume, and decreases functional residual capacity (FRC).[citation needed]"
The particular FB group I'm in is called (creatively enough) "Long Covid Support Group", but a search there reveals there are many more.
My email is in my profile if you want to connect further over this. I consider myself mostly healed by this point (infected March 2020) and can share my vitamin regime (its efficacy is anecdotal, my sample size is 2) but I still have lingering health issues over a year later.
Sounds terrible. Did you (and u/mygoodaccount) have loss of smell among the symptoms? I recall reading somewhere that it correlates with protracted recovery.
My sister had this. Even today (5 months after infection) she says some things taste and smell funny. She can't eat mint ice cream anymore because she says it tastes like cigarettes.
Can relate. Been 3 months since I recovered. Sense of smell has recovered definitely but since the past 2-3 weeks I've noticed it's still not fully there. A rare house plant blooming in the night which for everyone at home triggers a strong sweet fragrance which can be sensed even on the second floor, for me it was like a lingering placebo. Additionally, there is this weird stench that permeates everything I eat. I can't explain it, just a kind of smell I've never come across but now have to every other hour because it colors pretty much any earlier-pleasant-smelling thing
> Additionally, there is this weird stench that permeates everything I eat. I can't explain it, just a kind of smell I've never come across
Yes, this is exactly what she describes. The closest she could get to describing it was "cigarettes" when I pressed her, but she really insisted should couldn't even characterize it.
Is she having gastrointestinal problems too? Like digestion issues attimes, weird random pains in the abdomen, around the liver or stomach? I've been facing these since the last 2 months.
Sometimes I wonder how much our sense of smell is connected to the gut microbiome.
I am having daily heart palpitations and they are almost unbearable now. Sometimes I wake up and feel fine almost all day but not a day has gone by in the past two months where I don't have some kind of chest discomfort around my sternum/xiphoid process.
I have had a whole bunch of scans and everything is normal. I will be having an endoscopy next week to hopefully get to the bottom of it. I am 'hoping' it is something simple and obvious that they can treat. So far everything ends up being "well it's not $insertMedicalCondition so let's check for $insertSomeOtherMedicalCondition" :(
I have dysautonomia, which I had long before (probably) getting COVID-19. I have a rare form of dysautonomia. But, dysautonomia does happen, relatively frequently, as post-viral cases.
The good news is that post-viral dysautonomia has high potential for improving and even (realistically) going away. Rest will be the best treatment.
Check my profile if you want to email me or want help.
Yep, I am in the exact same position as you. I lost at least a year of my life due to this post-viral syndrome. I am back to where I was prior to getting COVID-19, though. When I was really sick in March 2020, I thought "wow, I haven't been this sick in a long time". It really was like going back to square one. It was super scary, too, given the health problems that I have.
I have autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy (autoimmune dysautonomia), which is believed to have caused my type 1 diabetes (autoimmune and insulin-dependent). It is also believed to have caused other endocrine problems and other neurological problems (I have another immune-mediated neurological disease affecting my peripheral nervous system). Anyways, autoimmune autonomic ganglionopathy is very rare, and I have the antibodies (about half of people do not), so I am tremendously lucky.
Anyways, I would be interested in chatting with you. If you want to do so, my email is in my profile information. I am very resourceful and I have tips.
Have you managed to get medication (aka beta blockers) for the palpations? I am not a doctor but I strongly recommend getting a doctor to prescribe you some if you haven't already.
What's been particularly frustrating with long covid is because it's so new, I've had to have awkward pushy conversations with doctors to get me treatment I deserve. You can't get high off beta blockers, which helps assuage my feelings of being an addict engaging in drug seeking behavior, simply trying to get my heart rate under control, but the medical industry has largely failed patients here. The only reprieve is that enough healthcare professionals also got sick, so the fact that there's nothing that shows up on scans of my heart isn't taken as fact that there's nothing wrong with it.
Last week my doctor prescribed me something called Stresam (aka Etifoxine). Apparently it is a lot like the benzo Lorazepam (Ativan) but without the whole benzo addiction problem.
I had never heard of it nor know anyone on it before but apparently it is good. Too early for me to say if it is personally. I want to avoid any kind of addictive medication if possible.
I had an awful cold or sickness about a year ago (including messed up taste and smell!) and since then I've developed heart racing, panic attacks, and working out is sooooo hard now. My strength is down, my cardio sucks, and just getting myself to work out is a chore. I can feel trouble breathing sometimes. My heart can race from sitting or walking up stairs. I was pretty dang fit and working out hard 5 days a week. Now getting 1-3 days in in a week is near impossible due to being tired.
I tested negative for covid antibodies. I'm not sure about all the data on "post covid 19 syndrome" but I check a lot of boxes for it but didn't test positive. My wife is in a similar block. Just tossing some anecdata out there.
I (anecdotally) linked the heart heart thing to viral waste in heart valves, clearing which can be helped by wild blueberries (antioxidants, which yes, are real!).
I hope this is taken the right way, but have you tried "vitamins" (broadly speaking)? Some I have seen with specific effects: Niacin, Black Seed Oil (Nigella Sativa), Magnesium megadoses, etc. etc. Don't dismiss these as "quack medicines", I've recovered from severe chronic illness thanks to some of these... I could expand if people ask, but really it's quite easy, especially for the HN crowd, to level-up rapidly on healing yourself or at least giving yourself the best chance to do so.
The greatest concentrator of such info on the whole internet, is, as far as I can tell, https://twitter.com/grimhood - follow him and get a feel for the info he's spreading, he has very valuable information on all sorts of healing protocols.
Lastly, one that will no doubt be most controversial, but also has promising anecdotes: Ivermectin.
[edit] here come the downvotes, for those that do, note that downvotes, at least on HN, are not meant to express disagreement, they are meant for content that is objectionable for other reasons.
I am not sure what I think of your comment, but I think it at least deserves discussion.
I have used said supplements before. In fact, I have a close friend who is very enamored with supplements and has about 50 different pill bottles in his medicine drawer.
Out of curiosity, I once spent two weeks taking about 25 pills a day at his recommendation, and I'm afraid they did not do very much for me — at least that I could noticeably discern.
The only supplement/herbal medicine I've had success with is St. Johns Wort, but I've been strongly discouraged from using it by a psychiatrist who emphatically emphasized that an SSRI is a much safer and more controllable way to achieve the same effects if need be.
Magnesium deficiency is relatively common, though I wonder if that isn't more of a dietary issue.
I mean, if you're basically fine, then the supplements, which have had studies run, aren't really going to do much for you unless you're really in tune with your body. For extreme cases of long covid, however, the right set of vitamin supplements are life saving. (I'm not exaggerating. eg https://www.cambridgeindependent.co.uk/news/long-covid-patie... )
There are absolutely scammers selling trash (there's someone selling stem cell injections as a cure) and fuck them. But don't ignore the very real problems that patients are experiencing, and that they're helped by simple remedies that aren't yet proven by science. Science will catch up, but people are suffering dying in the meanwhile.
Very interesting article, thank you for the link! When administered and monitored with some degree of medical oversight (as was the case for the article’s subject), I think such treatments are wonderful!
This is my stance exactly. It doesn't hurt to try, and you will learn a lot in the process. Also, some of these are proven by science, just remember there is a lot of science out there and doctors are only aware of a tiny fraction of it.
> The only supplement/herbal medicine I've had success with is St. Johns Wort, but I've been strongly discouraged from using it by a psychiatrist who emphatically emphasized that an SSRI is a much safer and more controllable way to achieve the same effects if need be.
Yep. From Wikipedia[1]:
> On average, lead levels in women taking St. John's wort are elevated about 20%.
It's also a relatively dirty drug, with effects on typical monoamine and GABA reuptake, MAO-A and MAO-B inhibition and is an inhibitor or inducer at pretty much every relevant enzyme that breaks down common medications.
I wouldn't want to become dependent on something like that because the withdrawal syndrome could be pretty nasty compared to something relatively more selective and understood like an SSRI.
Even switching from SJW to something else might be tricky because of the enzyme induction.
I'm no expert on any of this, but I think the theory is that many of these don't have a single strong directional effect like most single-compound pharmaceuticals do, but that if your body is short on something, and that's causing an issue, it can grab something from the cocktail of compounds, and that can help. If it's not, then it doesn't.
Many of the recommendations are vitamins and minerals, that are common deficiencies (magnesium is a notorious one, because of soil depletion etc.). It's reasonable to suspect that recovery from an illness finds one in a nutrient-depleted state.
Ah yeah, I was thinking more about the plant extracts. But your body is probably decent at filtering out the vitamins and minerals it doesn’t need (the water soluble ones, at least, be careful with fat soluble ones like vitamin D).
Obviously both vitamins and plant extracts need to be treated with care, after having done thorough research. Thankfully there is plenty of information available, and as I've said the HN crowd should be especially well equipped for this.
The experience you're describing doesn't disqualify supplements, you say you've taken "25 [random] pills", this is not what I'm advocating. There are various supplements, be it vitamins or plant extracts, that have definite medicinal effects. It should go without saying, really.
For illustration, just go on pubmed and search for "nigella sativa" (black seed oil).
I just want to add a bit to this. While there is a lot of snake oil supplements, there is a also quite a bit research on some supplements helping.
I'm speaking from personal experience here. I suffer from a mild case of Erythromelalgia. During typing my fingers and hands would get red and feel warm. My case is most likely secondary caused by some nerve damage from a medication I took. There is a doctor who had severe case of it and has done some research on using magnesium/ala and it made his condition 95% better and he was able to return back to work. I have been following his protocol for about a month now, and it has made an incredible difference.
Anyone who is suffering from an annoying illness, that is not aggressive and require immediate treatment, should try research possible supplements and diets. Clean/healthy diet is always good.
Megadose B3 2000mg per day does seem to be commonly effective. The theory is NAD+. Gives me a headache so an aspirin is needed as well but was one of the first treatments that pulled me out of fatigue.
> [edit] here come the downvotes, for those that do, note that downvotes, at least on HN, are not meant to express disagreement, they are meant for content that is objectionable for other reasons.
This is factually wrong. Search for posts by dang frequently explaining traditions and norms in this forum, including the downvote very much being a standard way to express disagreement (although it is better to voice your disagreement in a comment if you think the conversation would be interesting).
I didn't know that, frankly I remember reading, many years ago, people saying that downvotes are not meant to express disagreement. Maybe that changed, I personally don't agree with this and only consider downvoting if someone is not being civil, is not interested in discussion, or really voicing something obviously false. I was careful with my comment, I'm not selling anything, I was just interested in maybe nudging some people towards this information.
It's often said, but as pointed out not the case, and ~never has been for as long as there was anything resembling policy - pg commented on it in early days.
Fwiw, I'm not really a fan of it (and don't do it) either. But it's a lot harder to upvote not-objectionable things (so many!) and not upvote things purely because you agree (tempting!) - so I suppose it makes sense. I've thought before about making a 'proof of concept' type commenting system where its designed around not/objectionable; the default as you scroll past things would be to up-vote them (automatically), only down-voting on intervention when 'this does not contribute to the discussion'. Meh, might be interesting, but I'm not interested enough that I've gotten around to it :).
All the things you mentioned are very healthy to take. You're not wrong in suggesting they're worth a try if all else fails. Don't know if they can cure anyone but what the hell do you have to lose at this point if you're feeling like shit from the Corona.
If you're considering this (I wouldn't), be aware that milk of magnesia is a very effective laxative, and other magnesium salts like magnesium oxide etc work similarly.
Ever since having COVID back in March 2020 I haven't been the same. I still have regular fatigue but my biggest issue is chest pains.
For the past few months I have had worsening discomfort/pain in my chest. It was so bad a few weeks ago I ended up going to A&E thinking I was having a heart attack. They did an ECG, sonogram of my heart, chest x-rays, bloods, etc. My heart was fine so not a heart attack.
They put it down to either a panic attack (possible) or a gastro problem so I am going for an endoscopy next week however I have a feeling I will end up needing a CT scan or MRI as I had high lipase levels in a blood test a few weeks ago that makes them want to look at my pancreas in my detail. It isn't urgent as two blood tests since them have shown normal levels and it isn't getting worse.
Plus random abdominal pains all over yet an abdominal scan shows nothing out of the ordinary.
Basically COVID has fucked me up long term. When I actually had COVID it didn't feel like a big deal, just a bit of a cough for two days and a little drained. But two months after COVID I started getting a shit load of problems and over a year later it is no better.
I hear these stories and it makes me wonder if I somehow caught SARS way back in the early 2000s. Because these long symptoms people talk about were exactly what I felt back then.
There was some dramatic respiratory illness I got that took took months before I felt "like normal" again. I was a young teenager so I never felt like I needed to go to the emergency room. But the amount of time it took to recover back was insane.
I know I recovered by 6 months, but... yeah. That incident scared me for life. Sickness can be scary, not knowing if you'd ever get better from something...
I can't imagine the stress I'd feel today if some illness afflicted me for more than 6 months.
From personal experience, the symptoms being described by all of the posts on this thread overlap substantially with depression and anxiety. It's notable that the GP went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a possible panic attack. Panic attacks frequently cause your heart to race, skip, etc. Depression causes "brain fog" and fatigue, body aches, etc.
So far, ~all of the reports of "long covid" are anecdotal and post hoc. Which is not to say that they aren't real, but that there's no way of knowing what is causes by the virus, and what is caused by a year in which a significant portion of the population was isolated from contact and systematically terrified.
I've personally had "brain fog", insomnia, fatigue and distraction for the last year, and never had Covid. It's been a difficult, depressing, scary year, and a lot of people have these symptoms.
Oh, I know when I was depressed (also as a teenager, but a few years after that). That was a different time and I can talk about that if you like.
But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time.
A mental depression is... different. I know because I've been through both. In particular, depression doesn't have chronic multi-month breathing issues normally associated with it.
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I only bring it up because the timeframes line up. SARS hit in 2003, roughly the time of my mysterious illness (though I never went to the doctor for it back then. I only knew about SARS because of COVID19 studies today).
Given that SARS and COVID19 have many similarities, I really do wonder if the experience I felt back then is anything like what people with long-COVID19 feel today.
> But what hit me back then was definitely not depression and/or anxiety. It was some mysterious illness that took me out for a week (kinda typical), but then made me unable to "breath normally" for literally months. It was innately a physical condition: unable to breath, unable to sleep well, unable to feel physically good for months at a time.
Sure. Pneumonia can easily cause that. It takes a long time to recover from it, even if you're young.
Fundamentally, "covid" is pneumonia caused by a particular virus, so it's not surprising that people (esp. people who had serious cases) might have similar kinds of lingering symptoms.
You're wrong that long covid evidence is anecdotal. It is a clinical diagnosis though (i.e. it's diagnosed based on symptoms).
I think you also severely underestimate the effect this had on people, and symptoms are not generally compatible with depression. Patients often show reduced lung capacity of 60%. The brain fog is also often much more severe than just not being able concentrate a bit, people can't do simple calculations, can't follow conversations, can't read more than a page in a book, immediately forget things they just talked about. Many people become completely unable to perform their usual tasks.
> You're wrong that long covid evidence is anecdotal.
Fine, convince me. Provide a citation from a study where:
1) the results are NOT gathered by survey from a self-selected population
2) the study is pre-registered, with endpoints determined in advance
3) the study is prospective, longitudinal and randomized
4) there is a control group
5) the participants are verified to actually have Covid
6) a significant effect is shown on the pre-registered endpoints
and I'll take your claims seriously. The only current study that I'm currently aware of that remotely comes close to this standard of evidence (but doesn't meet all of them) is this one: a controlled, retrospective study of 250,000 kids, which found that kids without covid had roughly equivalent long-term symptoms to kids who did have covid.
I bring up this study only to underscore the point: essentially all current "long covid" data is self reported and uncontrolled, and when you start to be rigorous, the claims of severity rapidly diminish. Here's a relevant editorial in Nature:
"Studies of long COVID thus far—nearly all from high-income countries—have been difficult to interpret or compare, not only because of the lack of a consistent case definition but also because of systematic selection bias of cases, often without appropriate controls....Meanwhile, community-based studies have raised questions about the representativeness of cases compared with the general population, especially those using online recruitment, with many studies relying on self-reported symptoms and without laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Selection bias becomes even more pronounced when people are recruited through online support groups, where very high rates of often nonspecific long-term symptoms have been reported, even in children."https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w
> Patients often show reduced lung capacity of 60%
Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.
> The brain fog is also often much more severe than just not being able concentrate a bit, people can't do simple calculations, can't follow conversations, can't read more than a page in a book, immediately forget things they just talked about.
Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.
> Many people become completely unable to perform their usual tasks.
Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.
A pretty small study (250-ish people) but plenty of evidence for long-haul COVID19, since ~20+% of them got long-haul COVID19.
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Random, normally functioning adults don't have breathing issues under normal circumstances. There's just no need for a control group in that kind of study. The only question is how long do symptoms last for COVID19 patients.
There's a bit of self-selection since these individuals decided to get a COVID19 test to begin with. But otherwise, the % of long-haul COVID19 is high enough that we know its a real thing.
For you to be suggesting that long-haul COVID19 is entirely made up is just... ignoring the evidence we have available. You're making perfect the enemy of good: studies don't need to be "perfect" in every way to provide evidence.
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Besides, you're playing "judo" with the argument. If you want to convince ME that long-haul COVID19 is fake news, YOU are the one who has to pull up the study indicating evidence in your favor.
I'm perfectly fine leaving this argument where it is and walking away. I don't _need_ to convince you of anything to be satisfied.
> Why do you need a control group? We know that typical people don't just randomly get coughs on a daily basis.
Because this is science, not a spread in the New York Times. And if you read the link to the paper I cited, you'd see that "typical people" do randomly get these "symptoms" on a regular basis (I'm coughing right now!) And in fact, once you control for this, you find out that some of what you thought was "long covid" was just...what happens in a normal population of people.
As for your paper, it fails the criteria established:
"COVID-19 symptom data were obtained at the time of acute illness or retrospectively recounted at a 30-day enrollment visit. A total of 234 participants with COVID-19 were contacted between August and November 2020 to complete a single follow-up questionnaire between 3 and 9 months after illness onset."
In other words, this is self-reported data. The control group isn't actually a control group, because the people in each group knew if they had Covid, and are self-reporting their own symptoms...in a survey about Covid. It's a recipe for confirmation bias.
A good study of this sort would follow N people over time, randomly selected and matched on various demographic criteria (age, weight, gender, etc.), split into known sero-positives and known sero-negatives. You'd then survey all of those people over time about a few selected health issues, without telling them you're doing a study about Covid.
A gold-standard study would find a way of objectively confirming the illness, and wouldn't rely on self-reported data (e.g. medical exam with lung volume test). But even if you can't do that, you can still do a lot better than this. This is just...meaningless. It's like taking a group of people who broke their legs in the last decade, and asking them if their leg hurts today. Sure, maybe some people have "long broken leg", but your experiment is a bad way to find out.
> Besides, you're playing "judo" with the argument. If you want to convince ME that long-haul COVID19 is fake news, YOU are the one who has to pull up the study indicating evidence in your favor.
Nope. Again, this is science. The burden is on the person making the claim to prove the claim. If you believe that Cooties are a thing, or that head shape predicts personality, or that fusion can occur at room temperature in a can of Mr. Pibb, I am not obliged to believe you simply because you want very badly for it to be true.
Your turn to demonstrate your science. Please, procure a paper that supports your point of view and simultaneously satisfies your requirements.
Science is not a black and white issue. There are "cheaper science" (surveys and other "lesser" studies), and there's "expensive science" (10,000+ experiments with control groups). Both are science.
But what you're doing isn't science at all. You're just shitting on other people's work without showing what you actually like. The papers I pointed out are in respected journals and respected methodologies, albeit cheaper than what you want.
But given your "standards", I'm convinced that the "studies" you want simply don't exist, either on my side of the argument nor on yours.
The fact that you keep trying to personalize this only underscores the point that you're not coming at this rationally. You're engaged in advocacy, not science.
> Please, procure a paper that supports your point of view and simultaneously satisfies your requirements.
I gave you the one I knew about that comes closest. The fact that there are no papers meeting the criteria for a good study in this area is not an indication that my standards are too high, but that yours are too low.
> But what you're doing isn't science at all. You're just shitting on other people's work without showing what you actually like.
Science is about applying skepticism to questions and demanding evidence. Again, we're not talking about emotional spreads in People Magazine here.
> I'm convinced that the "studies" you want simply don't exist, either on my side of the argument nor on yours.
The studies don't exist. That's exactly the point. And it's not "my side" or "your side" -- I have no attachment to the outcome here. Show me a study that meets the standards I set out and provides evidence for your claim, and I'll believe you. You can't.
If the best you've got is anecdote and low-quality data, then you get my prior belief in your claim, which is that you're probably mistaken.
There is a certain kind of person who is stuck in their belief and they will do everything they can to ensure that their belief system remains in one piece. They will raise the bar for evidence that contradicts their belief to the point that no such evidence remains, they will lower the bar for evidence that confirms their belief. They will ascribe to figments of the imagination of others when it comes to their personal experiences (because 'anecdote') and will claim to be doing science while ignoring the fact that science is by definition pretty messy until it has settled.
There's also "a certain kind of person" who has no scientific or medical training. They have an emotional connection to the subject, and desperately wants to believe something is true, and therefore willing to grasp at any shred of circumstantial evidence to justify that belief.
However as someone who was diagnosed with C-PTSD back in 2009 and spent 4 months in hospital for treatment of panic disorder, depression and anxiety this is different to what I experienced back then. It is a near constant discomfort in my chest.
I am wondering if it is perhaps costochondritis or something similar to it? Perhaps costochondritis and anxiety that is making the whole thing worse? I wish I had answers. Hopefully I will next week.
I do wonder if this is proportional to your symptoms/proportional to other ailments.
For instance, is someone with Covid (who was on the verge of needing oxygen) more likely to have long term symptoms than someone the same age who got the flu/pneumonia (and was also on the verge of needing oxygen).
In other words - is there something unique about Covid? Or is that any disease that sets you back has serious long-term consequences, and Covid is just statistically much more likely to do that than the flu, for example.
For me varicella-zoster was the causative agent. I had a lot of trouble being taken seriously by friends/some medical staff after I said that I had serious issues after a bad infection with it, because of most people believe it to be a relatively benign disease. I think it's the case that most viruses will cause chronic disease in a small subset of people.
> “If Covid didn’t cause chronic symptoms to occur in some people,” PolyBio Research Foundation microbiologist Amy Proal told Vox, “it would be the only virus that didn’t do that.”
> Even with growing awareness about long Covid, patients with chronic “medically unexplained” symptoms — that don’t correspond to problematic blood tests or imaging — are still too often minimized and dismissed by health professionals. It’s a frustrating blind spot in health care, but one that can’t be as easily ignored with so many new patients entering this category, said Megan Hosey, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
It's frustrating but it's not a blind spot - we simply have no way to help these patients. You have brain fog and occasionally your heart feels like it's beating out of your chest for no discernable reason? Sorry, there's nothing we can do...try exercising and getting good sleep, we guess?
We (humanity) can still treat the symptoms - and the damage they cause. Eg the specific mechanism for covid-induced heart palpitations may not yet be understood, but a heart rate of 160 or even higher for prolonged periods will damage the heart. Beta blockers will manage that - but not all doctors have been willing to prescribe medication to people that clearly need it.
Rarely have I heard of sustained 160 BPM heart rate as a post-COVID symptom. Likely something else would be going on there. Mostly it's vague symptoms, maybe you have 90-120 BPM, but then it goes away by the time you see the doctor the next day. Beta blockers have their own problems and you don't want to just start prescribing them for these vague, transient symptoms.
It's frustrating that it took an an at-home heart rate monitor and a smartphone video of my heart rate for my cardiologist to do something about it (they sent me home w/ an ECG for a day or so), but I eventually managed to get a prescription for it. Doctor still can't explain the "something else going on there" but thankfully my heart rate no longer spikes for no apparent reason.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus binds to a specific receptor (ACE2) that is expressed in a multitude of different cells in our bodies, most curiously the endothelial cells that line up your vessels. Some hypothesis suggest that the disruption of the systems associated with ACE2 is what causes downstream effects that lead to symptoms of COVID. By virtue of infecting blood vessels, the virus can cause them to stop functioning properly, and thus impair the supply of oxygen to otherwise healthy tissue. These hypoxic microlesions, which have been found even in the brain of patient populations, could in turn be responsible for some of the sequelae that the infection leaves behind after the end of acute period of the disease.
The extent to which damage is caused, and the extent to which the body can recover will evidently dictate the period of convalescence. Because symptoms vary wildly from case to case, pinpointing general routes of treatment or estimating the duration of recovery is a highly complex problem.
I obviously realize that influenza does not attack the body in the same way with the same receptors - but it obviously attacks the body in its own unique way.
It rarely causes serious health consequences but for the people it does (I've known younger people sent hospital with it) are there long term consequences on the same order of magnitude? It doesn't seem like the data really exists for this.
I believe one difference with Covid is that people often have issues across multiple organs (I believe this is because the virus binds to ACE2 receptors which are present over the body, not an expert though) whereas with flu/pnemuonia I think it's more likely to be just generic fatigue and lung capacity as longer term effects.
I think the sheer range of long lasting symptoms is quite unique to Covid, although other diseases like Ebola or Smallpox would leave more severe damage.
Good question, and one that I would like to have the answer to too. I also wonder what the effects are on longer term immunity, apparently there is some evidence that if you had a more serious case that your immunity will be longer lasting but I have yet to find something that is conclusive.
In my early 30s: Pretty sure I had COVID-19 in early March 2020. I had shortness of breath for a couple of days and I was feverish for about 8 weeks.
Afterwards, I have severe fatigue. I also experienced bouts, off an on for like a week or two at a time, where I could not physically get warm, and I was freezing to death, no matter what I did.
I also have severe dysautonomia (autonomic nervous system dysfunction) which I had prior to probably having COVID-19, which got worse. However, it is much improved now. People who got dysautonomia from COVID-19, by the way, can expect for it to significantly improve, or go away. Just focus on resting. It is a brutal disease, trust me, but you can get through it.
I also had cognitive issues, with respect to memory, which has improved significantly.
My best tip: Get a Garmin watch, that has the "Body Battery" function. It's a literal lifesaver. Do not let the "Body Battery" ever go under a 20 (out of 100) score, ever. You will pay a huge price if you do. Use the "Body Battery" to gauge if you can exert yourself or you need to rest. (It also determines if you got a good night's rest.) By the way, it works based on heart rate variability, and is quite accurate.
The Garmin instinct have that function and works great. There are way cheaper options like the Fitbit charge, it also has a body-battery and is very accurate.
BTW I never had covid but if my body battery gets below 20, I also feel like shit. That´s the point I guess.
Thank you for the recommendation, which is thoughtful. One thing that you may want to keep in mind: Garmin has to follow GDPR, while FitBit (Google) does not.
You may not want Google (e.g. YouTube) serving you ads when it knows you are in a very low body battery state, for example.
No, I haven't and reading that I immediately picked out one more symptom: reduced appetite. I have lost significant weight, and in fact I'm still losing weight (but much more slowly now). Down to about 68 Kg, 1,76 meters tall.
> I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this
Given the prevalence of Long Covid in asymptomatic cases, many people claim that the severity of the initial disease and the long-term symptoms are not really correlated. So it's likely that seeking emergency care wouldn't have changed anything.
Wishing you the best of luck and a good/complete recovery!
Symptomatic or not if you carry the virus you should still pop hot on an antibody test. You would think.
I had a Covid positive coworker last year cough around me and directly work very closely with me immediately before taking sick time. I still continued to fail the antibody tests indicating either no viral contact or no immune response of any kind.
I don’t know if there is a correlation here but in a six month period last year I caught the common cold three times. The second of those times was a month before my coworker tested positive and the third time was a week after they tested positive.
Some researchers are starting to think that the spike protein is the main contributor to this issue and not the virus itself, so if even if the virus is gone, the protein may still be present.
No, I had it in early March, pretty much textbook, called the local doctor who said don't bother testing (it was quite obvious) but isolate from family, which we did as good as we could. There were a couple of really bad nights, and after that it got better bit by bit and after three weeks I was able to get up again and work a bit. From there it was a long slog to get back to 'normal'.
- risky lifestyle: check (as in very frequent air travel for work)
- symptoms: O2 level drop, fluid in lungs, persistent cough, extreme tiredness, dizzyness, loss of smell/taste check all of these, and the rest, fortunately not. Later on: crazy beating heart for no particular reason, losing weight steadily but more slowly now.
Decision not to test was made by qualified medic, who said that they needed the tests for those cases where there was some degree of doubt, which in my case there really wasn't, besides that there was an extreme shortage of tests at that time. And to call an ambulance straight away, and not my house doctor in case things got worse than they were at that moment.
Keep in mind that there are vast numbers of people that have gotten COVID that did not get tested and that therefore do not show up in the various statistics. Especially in the beginning the health care system was totally overwhelmed and care went to those who needed it most, and either wasn't administered to those who might have benefited from it and many who simply didn't make it.
In previous Corona discussions on HN I saw multiple comments from people who were convinced they had COVID, tested after the fact, but the tests ( some tested multiple times ) came back negative.
You could check for T-cells at some point -- if you had Covid, they are measurable even after many months. In contrast, IgG titers show up in only ~80% and decline steadily. Excellent recent paper:
> Here, we investigated SARS-CoV-2 antibody and T cell responses in matched samples of COVID-19 convalescent individuals up to 6 months after infection. Longitudinal analysis revealed decreasing and stable spike- and nucleocapsid-specific antibody responses, respectively. In contrast, functional T cell responses remained robust, and even increased, in both frequency and intensity.
Thank you, if there is any benefit to having that level of certainty (and not to satisfy internet naysayers) then I may still do this, but I have received my shot (Jansen) because there are still some immunological benefits from that and it helps in a regulatory sense as well (lots of doors are closed to people that have not been vaccinated).
What matters to me is that I got through it, still live pretty carefully even now because I don't want a re-run if I can avoid it and I would advise anybody that hasn't had it yet and/or has not been vaccinated to go and get that done as soon as you can. This is no walk in the park, I used to be pretty fit for my age, and the last year has been a complete wipe-out. Avoid if you can.
Right, well let's just say that coincidentally I had a viral infection that has the exact same symptoms as COVID, has the same long term effects as are reported in many cases of COVID and which coincidentally happened to be timed to match the first wave of that particular pandemic, but according to you it wasn't COVID when it wasn't confirmed as such with a test.
Consider the alternative: you would have to come up with some kind of viral agent that did the same thing but wasn't COVID.
Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many. The test does not make the disease, it is merely positive confirmation, but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.
> let's just say that coincidentally I had a viral infection that has the exact same symptoms as COVID, has the same long term effects as are reported in many cases of COVID and which coincidentally happened to be timed to match the first wave of that particular pandemic
That happened to a lot of people. The first wave in March wasn't very big compared to later months.
You mentioned the flu season didn't happen in a different post, but that was much later, as was most masking.
> Which to me seems to be a far more outrageous claim than the one that I was simply one of many.
That's a terrible way to analyze this. You were "one of many" either way.
> but I've yet to hear of some surprise viral disease that ran in parallel to this, isn't COVID but matches the symptoms so well.
The symptoms aren't all that unique for a severe illness that messes up your lungs. There's no 'surprise' involved in other possible causes.
Extreme fatigue for months after is not neatly explainable. Myalgic Encehalomyelitis/CFS is similar, but when other symptoms are included (weird skin rash, heart palpations, smell issues, GI trouble), the simpler explanation is Covid. A deeper reading on long Covid symptoms may prove informational as the cluster of symptoms is fairly unique and unexplainable.
that’s being overly invested in the idea that it’s covid rather than realizing that infections of all kinds have long-lasting effects. individually and societally, that leads to a distortion of attention and resources to the wrong things. i.e., partial idiocy, the worst kind, and unfortunately rampant.
there is a real opportunity now for medical science to look comparatively at infectious diseases and attack them systematically and cohesively rather than myopically. hopefully we don’t squander that.
Hopefully we don't squander basic respect for our fellow human beings either. Not everything is a science experiment or a thesis. Given that the number of people that died from COVID based on excess mortality where I live is approximately 50% higher than the official figures the chances of a bunch of people having unconfirmed COVID are rather high.
So unless you are going to go out on a limb to suggest a better alternative I suggest you leave well alone.
I mean, I'm not even sure I would bother with a T-cell test in your case. The only meaningful difference in your future life would be to have the results to give people on the internet, which doesn't seem worth getting two tubes of blood drawn.
Precisely. If there is a benefit to me I'll get tested. Even the medic I talked to was pretty clear: don't bother, save the test for someone who really needs it. Which at that time could have saved a life for someone that needed to have an operation and required a COVID test prior to admission.
I don't think GP was suggesting you were dumb, just trying to point out there's a lot of widespread respiratory illnesses with exactly the same symptoms that are endemic - not to say Covid isn't more severe at a population level, but that you can't really say with any kind of certainty based only on those symptoms that someone has Covid. A few years ago I had exactly these symptoms, plus a high fever, but in my case, it was probably the flu. it was awful - I didn't really get over it for several months.
Yes, but the flu season in 2020 pretty much didn't happen and COVID did. So in your case the even money would be on it not being COVID 'a few years ago' but if it had happened in March up to today of 2020/2021 then probably it would be.
GP is playing silly games and I'm a bit tired of those given my rather personal engagement with this particular virus, and frankly, if it is some other kind of virus then it hardly matters now, does it?
> Yes, but the flu season in 2020 pretty much didn't happen
Not arguing the rest of your claims, but that's objectively not true. Based upon current estimates it was actually worse than average[1] and its season was cut short in April due to the COVID efforts[2].
Hey man, similar thing here. Every six months or so, almost to the day, I've got a spell for about 7-10 days where I have an immense fatigue, like sleeping 12-15 hours at a stretch, and a brain fog that makes it impossible to concentrate on anything. Then it all lifts, and I go back to my usual 7 hours a night, thinking all day and night. This all started for me in February of 2020, too, just before the lockdowns; I didn't get a positive test at the time because my live-in partner did receive one -- the testing clinic said with the positive exposure to just stay home and go to the hospital if I can't breathe -- since then we've both had the same symptoms at roughly the same occurrence.
I am so sorry to hear, I hope you feel back to normal soon! What are you doing to manage your symptoms right now? Are you exercising, taking vitamins, prescribed drugs, seeing a therapist, etc?
Exercising mostly, cycle as much as I can. Vitamins, drugs or therapists I haven't needed so far other than what is in my normal (pretty healthy) food.
Funny I just saw a TV program discussing long covid. One of the guests was Jördis Frommhold who was elected woman of the year in Germany for her work on long covid rehab. Very interesting discussion.
One of the things she mentioned is that many of the long covid patients had mild to moderate covid infections. Also at the moment they don't know why some people get it and others don't. So likely your not calling the ambulance did not make a difference.
Hope you'll get better, the symptoms described sound awful.
I made one critical mistake: it hurt a lot to try to sleep so I tried to sleep on my back one night, and that cost me dearly: the active area of the lungs is not symmetrically divided between front and back, the back part has a larger active surface. Fluid then migrates from the front to the back pooling there leading to less gas exchange. I suspect that this was the lowest point and after that sleeping on my belly at least kept me safe. The really stupid thing: I knew this already (had double pneumonia when I was in my 20's).
Yeah, when I had Covid my wife was doing everything she could for me... hydrating, vitamins C and D, so on, but I think the treatment with the biggest effect was resting face-down. The fact that that is now pretty common knowledge has probably saved many thousands of lives.
> I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this (by having some oxygen earlier on and maybe avoiding some of the damage).
I think you're quite fortunate you held out and got better on your own.
There's some old scientific knowledge that oxygen [O2] in excess is toxic. I've submitted links about toxic-O2 here before, but these did not get much attention [4][5].
Some modern Fire/EMS first responders are well-aware of toxic O2 [0]. My uncle (an MD) knows about toxic O2, but he's not aware of the antidote. I was waiting for someone with credentials to call out the doctors for their mistaken use of oxygen.
I did find an MD's tweet that confirms the old research [1]. The doctor's tread is about how ventilators are harmful too, and how he can kill mice in 3 days with pure oxygen. But the MD didn't mention the antidote (5% CO2) that makes O2 non-toxic.
I've put some effort into tweeting about #MedicalHyperventilation [2] and SARS-CoV-2 [3], but no one consults with a non-credentialed former taxi driver (or his real-world persona).
I've posted this with my pseudonym because it's sort of inconvenient for people to realize we've driven the global economy into a wall because our doctors are trained to apply pseudo-medicine: "if patient's blood oxygen saturation level is low, supplement pure oxygen", and more inconvenient that there's an antidote that makes oxygen nontoxic to the lungs and the rest of the body.
I got CoVid in Osaka at the beginning of November 2019. The symptoms lasted around 5 months. I got it again in May 2021 and this time I was fully recovered in 3 weeks.
I got vaccinated, even during the second infection I felt extremely tired and slightly confused, I want to minimize as much as possible the risk of repeating again.
update: For all the down-votes. Time will say. But "A new study shows that first cases of coronavirus infections could have appeared in China between October and mid-November 2019". It fits with my experience. https://www.dw.com/en/covid-study-cases-spread-in-china-earl...
update 2: I arrived to Osaka Airport (KIX) on 9th November, I had symptoms 3 days later.
update 3: Stop down-voting the people that says that it is impossible. It may be the case, I am just sharing my personal experience in case it clicks somewhere. I can be wrong and it could have been a virus with very similar symptoms. I didn't wanted to start a war of up votes and down votes, that adds nothing to the discussion.
I had the same symptoms that I had the second time. The second time was confirmed by PCR-test.
But, of course, it could have been an equivalent disease with the same symptoms: fever, mental-fog, sore-throat.
It is just the timing, the fact that Osaka is visited by many Chinese nationals and the feeling was so similar that makes me quite sure that it was covid-19.
Those are symptoms of literally every airway infection known to man. Is is much, much, much more likely you had a flu/heavy cold instead of having Covid 1 month before the first public Chinese cases and 3 months before first European cases
Also that if the first disease wasn't covid, getting covid the second time around isn't that unlikely, but if the first disease was covid, getting covid again was shockingly unlikely (not impossible) because of the degree of immunity granted by the first infection.
Do you happen to work in a biolab? How do you know you had covid in November 2019? The first known cases in Japan aren't until January 2020. And the first reported case in China is November 2019.
Maybe you are right and it was something else. But, it was very similar and the timing is quite close.
I just feel to share it if it may help someone to build a timeline. And, as I have said in another comment, Osaka has many many Chinese visitors and I was in a very busy airport. I doubt that it took a lot of time to jump from China to other Asian countries.
Impossible is a very strong word, there are samples of people from months before covid was identified in Wuhan that are under investigation. Not specifically in Japan, but it can't be ruled out with the current information.
When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up.
The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the cough since it was interfering with my life.
That was it. It was about one year later that the cough finally dissipated. It got better after about 5 months, but it took many more months for all symptoms to go away.
I guess my question is... why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?
> doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?
Because we all decided to collectively forget every single thing we know about respiratory viruses and infectious diseases. Somehow because covid is "novel" the world needed to rebuild our entire knowledge base from the ground up.
A good example is how lasting t-cell immunity was dismissed for the longest time (and still is in many circles). People apparently seemed to think that this virus was so special and new that people would just keep getting it over and over again every six months or something. Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago....
Labeling it as "novel" let people just ignore common friggen sense and completely loose the plot.
But... we did get infected with coronaviruses (the OC43 and friends) and other common cold viruses over and over again. The reinfection rate of ~15% for SARS-COV-2 is comparable to those
It would have been better if reinfection was described as "you'll test positive again, but it will be milder". Instead the media was full of articles saying "immunity lasts only 6 months"
> If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago....
But it's only recently (~50-100 years) that we travel around the world so much, would covid-19 have propagated like it's doing now 300 or 2000 years ago ?
I can't edit but in the mean time I have been reading a bit of the Wikipedia page about the black plague in Europe and a world less connected than ours still can burn from a fast spreading virus.
And there's been plague outbursts in recent years.
> Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this?
Yes. The common cold is a set of symptoms that are caused by many things, but a majority of instances are caused by rhinovirus. It is possible for people to be infected by the same strain multiple times, but more importantly there are over 100 variations they can catch, and previous infections from one variation do not protect against another. The worst case scenario for covid was exactly that.
What was interesting to me is if you went back and read up on how various childhood disease worked. Nothing about Covid would surprise or confuse you. And one would not be blase about just letting it rip.
> why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?
I don't think most doctors are terribly surprised (at least not ones who have dealt with respiratory diseases before). The press, on the other hand, loves stories like these.
Interestingly I had a similar experience three years ago as well. I would cough non-stop and no medication was of any help. It lasted three months and then slowly disappeared. The weeks after I still had some respiratory problems (whistling when breathing), but nothing too annoying compared to the cough. Without joking, this was far from being an agreeable period and it impacted my studies quite a lot as coughing all day made me very tired and I was unable to study properly. Doctors never found what had happened.
I think it's an attention bias thing. I mean... when I found out about this phenomenon from my doctor, I was shocked -- how could people be walking around with these bad infections and just not be able to do anything about it. But then I realized that many people have medical things that I can't see that they just deal with. Like many people excrete their feces into a bag on their stomach. And some people have to inject hormones constantly.
It's just life, and you can't choose what cards you're dealt. I'm glad people are paying more attention to these disabilities (although I hesitate to even call them that), but on the other hand, we should be careful not too get drawn in simply because COVID is the current story du jour.
With a "normal" viral cough, the infection itself lasts that long. With Long Covid, the viral load is gone from your system, and symptoms still persist
Previously, the general public wasn't very interested in chronic, unspecific symptoms that people have or had (google Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; it's a collection of people feeling fatigue, have concentration issues etc. similar to Long Covid, many long before COVID-19 was a thing). With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.
> With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.
Too many to ignore or just that we decided to put a huge magnifying glass on it? We have our log levels turned up to "ultra verbose" and are collecting every single scrap of data. If we looked at other respiratory viruses with the same amount of logging... I would bet we'd see just as much, if not more, crap as we are with covid. Never has a respiratory virus been followed this closely.
Except that Post-Viral Syndrome has been a thing since before Covid:
> Post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue, refers to a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.
My friend was diagnosed with ME/CFS after a stroke at age 27. The term "myalgic encephalitis" is the preferred term, as I understand it, because the public seems to be unable to take a phrase like "chronic fatigue syndrome" seriously. In America at least, our puritan personality insists that "fatigue" is a sign of laziness.
If there's an upside to Covid-19, I hope that it's that the symptoms of ME/CFS are taken more seriously by the public and scientific community, and that the results of further research on "long covid" are transferrable.
Those here who are experiencing Long Covid symptoms should keep an eye on a drug called Ampligen. It is the first and only drug that has been approved for the treatment of ME/CFS, but thus far only in Argentina. There are a couple ongoing studies in the United States (one in Lake Tahoe), but no FDA approval yet. Recently, Ampligen has been put into trials for the treatment of Long Covid as well.
"doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?"
Doctors aren't. Epidemiologists aren't. We've been discussing and trying to study the long term effects of COVID-19 infections (and there were similar studies for SARS) pretty early on - the results are just long in coming, both due to the nature of the problem itself, and the pandemic.
It wasn't coughing for months though. It started with a runny nose. Then I got a cough (coincided with the baby being born and waking up). I took cough suppressors for about 1.5 weeks. Then I had general sinus aches and the cough stopped. Then i had body aches. Then I had a runny nose and cought again, until finally it became general malaise until it finally dissipated.
I count the 'end' of the infection as the point in time at which I was able to do my standard gym routine in full again.
Because your doctor is right. Serious viral infections are no joke. Long covid asserts that people with very mild symptoms are also likely to suffer long term. This is controversial.
> Long covid asserts that people with very mild symptoms are also likely to suffer long term. This is controversial.
I'm not sure I understand. My symptoms I described above were never that bad. Were it not for waking up my newborn, I wouldn't have gone in to the doctor. It was just a mild discomfort for a long time for me
i think the key difference is the incidence rate. if long term symptoms occur in less than one percent of cases, that's still enough for doctors to see and treat without surprise. this article says the incident rate for covid-19 is 25%, which is shockingly high.
> this article says the incident rate for covid-19 is 25%, which is shockingly high.
To be fair, we're not fully aware of all the cases of COVID. Most likely, many people had COVID but didn't know. Because we didn't have proper testing for a long time, our sampling of 'those who had COVID' is almost certainly wrong
You aren't kidding. It isn't the norm, but I've had a viral bronchial infection for almost 2 months now. All you can do is wait and suppress the symptoms.
As a side note, having an unrelated cough during a respiratory pandemic is not a good time.
> Third, we did not have a baseline (pre-COVID-19) assessment of participants’ physical and mental health. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of COVID-19 from pre-existing conditions. The interpretation of our findings regarding depression and anxiety is further limited by the psychological burden that the pandemic may impose in general [48, 49]. While we tried to compare our results with estimates from the general population, applicable comparison data was not available. Other studies investigating longer-term sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection found a relevant excess risk for longer-term symptoms among infected individuals compared to SARS-CoV-2-negative control groups [9, 50].
Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline, IMO.
"To address some of these biases, we and others used established longitudinal cohorts recruited at the start of the pandemic for regular testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and thus provided objective confirmation of infection. We asked our healthcare-worker participants about 72 symptoms reported to be associated with long COVID, at a median of 7.5 months after the development of COVID-19, and found that mental-health, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms were as common among 140 patients with mild-to-moderate symptomatic seropositive COVID-19 (‘cases’) as in 1,160 control participants who remained asymptomatic and seronegative throughout the surveillance period. Of concern, 40–60% of both cases and control participants reported mental-health symptoms, which highlights the toll of pandemic on the healthcare workforce. We also identified three clusters that included 12 symptoms—affecting the sensory, neurological and cardiorespiratory systems—that were reported by 67% of cases but also 44% of control participants, which emphasizes the ongoing difficulties in characterizing long COVID."
I hope we don't go down the path of dismissing post-COVID symptoms as mental illness.
Yes, some patients with post-COVID symptoms could simply be presenting with mental illness. However, we can't simply dismiss the patients with measurable symptoms like cardiac irregularities, exercise intolerance, orthostatic intolerance, and other physical issues that only occurred after the COVID infection.
Modern medicine (in any country) is not well equipped to handle complex disorders that don't yet have specific medical tests. It's common for doctors to reach for mental illness as an explanation, to the detriment of patients. Let's not repeat that for post-COVID.
So, to summarize this study, they basically just asked a few hundred people that had Covid in the past if they had recently felt tired, depressed, had trouble sleeping, etc., and then reported that a number of the people they asked this replied yes. That's it. There was no medical evaluation of whether the reported symptoms even had a medical cause. There was no comparison to the answers a random control sampling of the population that hadn't gotten Covid would have given. They just asked a bunch of people that had just finished living through 1+ years of lockdown if they had been tired or depressed recently.
A doctor friend of mine has had it for months. She's had test after test after test. Things come back abnormal but they can't pin down what's wrong with her to treat it. The assumption is long covid - she has the tiredness, brain fog etc.
So right now I'm not sure if they really know how to test for it.
One of the things that keeps popping up on my wife's feeds is that Covid seems to be giving people auto-immune antibodies. So, the body appears to be continuing to low level attack the circulatory system, organs, etc.
Basically, we're looking at a massive increase in auto-immune diseases in the next couple years, and you're doctor friend should talk to nearby Rheumatologists about one of the biologic drug trials.
Again, based on the buzz from places like creakyjoints.
Since they claim a quarter of patients are showing symptoms and one of those is depression - how do they separate the out the effect of the de facto criminalization of social activity, an innate human behavior ingrained in our DNA after millions of years of evolution?
You'd get significant depression in solitary confinement too.
No idea why you're getting downvoted - they have no control group and as you say there's 'depression' in their symptoms they count for. I'm pretty sure 'depression' (which I'm sure they don't count as clinically depressed, but 'im feeling more depressed') went up significantly in the whole population last year.
Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.
That part is fine but the part where he instead diagnoses everyone with having been driven crazy by the (by implication misguided) coronavirus response is not really thoughtful in my opinion.
Speculation: conflation of his reasonable and factual statement with the ostensibly similar far-right talking point that the cure (social distancing) is worse than the disease.
Expressing skepticism surrounding the efficiency of social distancing, masks, "non essential business" and all these lockdowns is not a "far right" talking point. None of our response was in any playbook for this level of threat. We threw out all our pandemic planning in a fit on hysteria and panic.
To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all, let alone enough to justify their social costs. Same with social distancing or even masks for that matter. The fact that all this can be considered an uncontrolled experiment on unwilling participants is not "far right" thinking.
> Expressing skepticism surrounding the efficiency of social distancing, masks, "non essential business" and all these lockdowns is not a "far right" talking point.
You're absolutely right. This kind of misinformation isn't limited to the far right.
> To this day we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all,
LOL, what? This is a truly astonishingly statement.
Literally every place that instituted lockdowns saw a drop in COVID transmission, and every place that reduced or eliminated lockdowns saw an increase.
This isn't even controversial. It's an application of the basic germ theory of infectious transmission.
You can't seriously be making this claim in good faith, can you?
Where is your studies showing these restrictions worked well enough to justify their immense costs to society? They don’t exist. To date I’ve yet to see a single cost benefit analysis done for any of this. It simply wasn’t allowed to be done… you’d get shouted down by the mob.
It worries me greatly how little critical thinking has been applied to the last 17+ months. It’s appeals to authority all the way down.
Show me the proof this stuff worked… and even then we didn’t know it would work going in, which makes it incredibly ethically (and morally) challenged. The last 17 months have shown me the depths of what humanity can do when gripped with fear and hysteria… it is pretty terrifying.
> Where is your studies showing these restrictions worked well enough to justify their immense costs to society?
And predictably the goalposts shift.
First it was that we "cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all".
Now it's that the results don't "justify their immense costs to society".
> and even then we didn’t know it would work going in,
Again: Lockdowns are a basic application of germ theory.
The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.
You could absolutely make valid arguments for or against specific lockdown policy choices (i.e. capacity limits, sizes of gatherings, types of businesses affected, etc).
But lockdowns in general? There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look.
I honestly refuse to spend any time citing data for you, as I do not believe for a second that you're arguing in good faith. If you really wanted to find facts, you could easily dig them up. That you haven't done so tells me everything about your willingness to question your own beliefs.
> Again: Lockdowns are a basic application of germ theory.
> The only way they could not work is if infection didn't pass from human to human but was transmitted via miasma or aether.
A public measure and overall behavior are two different things. Lockdown as a behavior is clearly effective in theory and practice. But as public measure, in many cases people stopped to comply sufficiently so that at best you see a flatting effect.
You wouldn’t try to fight HIV with monogamy (as measure). It’s just against human nature of a sufficiently large part of the population.
> There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look.
That isn’t proof. I could very easily claim it was seasonality or things well beyond our control that caused cases to go down. And I am probably right. The charts and graphs all follow the same basic pattern everywhere in the world regardless of restrictions in place. Clearly if lockdowns worked so well you’d see orders of magnitude difference between a place like Florida or Sweden compared to California or New York.
The burden of proof is upon those forcing it upon us and so far, crickets from all around. It’s truly insane how nobody is allowed call out the mounds of public data suggesting the effects of lockdowns or any of our non pharmaceutical interventions are minimal at best… we pissed away well over a year of people’s lives for basically nothing.
Show me they work. And show me they worked well enough to justify the extreme damage they caused to society. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where is the evidence?
This post is classic Dunning-Kruger. Florida arrested a statistician who was attempting to publish the real death toll. So can we seriously accept thier count as the truth? California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns. I don't understand why hundreds of thousands of deaths is okay for the right wingers like you?
For what it’s worth I am a solid democratic voter my entire life. My political party betrayed me… I’m a little ticked about it. But thanks for making snap judgments.
And even if you take the person from Florida who was arrested’s claims as true, it doesn’t change my argument at all. The shape of their curve matches everybody else’s curve no matter whose dataset you look at. If lockdowns worked in any meaningful fashion, why does New York, California, Arizona, South Dakota and Florida all have the same curves?
I assert the lockdowns and masks did very little. Mere rain dances performed by frightened people who fooled themselves into thinking mankind could somehow control an airborne respiratory virus. It’s peak human arrogance.
If that makes me a right winger in your eyes, so be it.
> Florida arrested a statistician who was attempting to publish the real death toll. So can we seriously accept thier count as the truth?
If you actually want to know, the answer is "look at excess deaths." You can game the numbers for confirmed COVID deaths by doing less testing but it's a lot harder to hide the raw number of people dying. Per NYT[1], as of March 6, 2021 (which is when their data ends), Florida had 31,616 confirmed COVID deaths and 35,900 excess deaths (1.14 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,671 excess deaths per million) and California had 51,974 COVID / 69,800 excess (1.34 excess deaths per COVID death, 1,767 excess deaths per million). Since then California's wave has subsided a bit faster than Florida's but either way the difference in outcomes between the two states is very small.
> California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns.
This is true of New York. It is not true of California.
California was not hit particularly hard
before it could implement lockdowns, and in fact before winter of 2020 it was doing much better than most states. In the first 6 months after people started taking COVID seriously (mid March 2020 to mid September 2020), about 15,000 Californians died of confirmed COVID cases, or about 375 people per million (and excess deaths track at pretty much a constant multiple with the level of confirmed COVID deaths). Since mid October, there have been another 48,000 confirmed COVID deaths in California. 35,000 of those happened in the 3 month period between December 1 2020 and March 1 2021. Not coincidentally, that period is also when restrictions were at their most severe: starting around November 25, outdoor dining was banned, parks and beaches and campgrounds were closed, a curfew was put into effect, travel was restricted, and so on. Cases continued to rise for the following month after that, peaking in early January.
Really, there is significant reason to doubt that government-imposed restrictions (as opposed to behavior changes people were going to make whether they were mandatory or not), as they were actually implemented in the US, had very much positive impact at all. It's not so much a question of "are the deaths ok?" as it is one of "is this actually helping, or is it just doing something visible so that the politicians can say they tried?".
I know this is an emotionally charged topic, and we probably won't have a clear picture of what worked and didn't work for at least a few years. But certainly government-mandated restrictions were not a slam-dunk obviously effective and worthwhile solution in the way that vaccines were.
I notice a lot of run-of-the-mill liberals automatically assume their opponents who aren't manifestly crazy are "devil's advocates" or not making the argument in good faith.
It seems intellectually lazy and the epitome of condescension to cast away all criticism in this way. As those opposing arguments are always beyond the pale and not worthy of thought.
The overwhelming feeling I get from this type of person: "there's no possibility I'm wrong."
I would hope we're past the point now where we can write off legitimate complaints or concerns about the overall direction of COVID mitigation strategies implemented in most developed countries. Many well-intentioned anti-misinformation campaigns have been proven misguided and potentially harmful (for example, the debacle around the lab-leak theory, and the subsequent censorship and ostracization of anybody who dared suggest it), so we should be careful when we accuse others of arguing in bad faith, lest we repeat our past mistakes.
This isn't 2020 anymore, we should be able to take a sober look at what likely worked (universal mask-wearing, vaccines, border closures, quick contract tracing) and what may not have worked (closing otherwise safe outdoor spaces, obsessive surface cleaning, the "6-foot-rule") without judgement now.
> we cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all
This level of misinformation is no longer rational. You question that not meeting others in person can have an effect? It’s getting close to denying germ theory. Maybe it’s all bad vapors?
Sure, we can’t exactly specify the effect of different measures. But there’s plenty of evidence that they work, collectively. And the only method to come up for evidence regarding measures of this nature is to try them. You can’t do a lockdown study in a lab.
As to negative effects, we know that GDP recovers fast and suicide rates actually didn’t rise, despite constant assertions od the opposite.
Because the entire comment is clearly phrased to be antagonistic? "de facto criminalization of social activity"? Are they trying to troll people? Because that's how you troll people.
> Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.
That is absolutely not true, PLOS ONE has proper peer-review, their review guidelines just focus on technical soundness and de-emphasize subjective noteworthiness.
(As a personal anecdote, I managed to get one of my papers rejected from PLOS ONE once...)
I was about to say this also -- I haven't been to the gym for over a year and haven't done any real weight training or group exercise for this whole time in lockdown. It would be hard for me to separate the effect of that from long COVID, curious how the study is controlling for this factor.
I want to ask the commenters in this thread who have long covid if they are overweight/obese or have a medical condition. But... I don't want to get flagged.
Hey can only talk for my wife (got covid late March 2020)
40yo, not over weight, was at the gym 4 days a week, could squat and deadlift 50kg, very active life.
Only 'pre existing' was coeliac disease and very very mild asthma. Like barely ever took a blue inhaler but had one in the house. Other that That fit and healthy and very active.
Inital covid as bad, but after 2 weeks was nearly back to normal, then breathing got worse, heart rate all over the place, numbness, brain fog etc. Only just getting back to normal now but still not ready for exercise yet.
all the same on my end and for my wife. My wife was training for crossfit regional games a couple years ago, and I wasn't a slouch myself. We also have sleeping issues, heart rate all over, numbness, brain fog. Exercise is such a struggle. We both tested negative for covid antibodies. :shrug:
> how do they separate the out the effect of the de facto criminalization of social activity, an innate human behavior ingrained in our DNA after millions of years of evolution?
Presumably you can tease that out to some degree by comparing to folks who didn't have COVID.
How likely are these numbers to be accurate? This Swiss study of 431 adults gives a 26% incidence of "Long Covid" at 6-8 months.
But another study that I'm more familiar with that tracked 4,182 people (mostly from the U.K., U.S., and Sweden) says only 2.3% of participants reported symptoms past the three month point. [0]
I feel like every time I look into this topic I find a new study with a wildly different estimate.
>>Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized.
The US hospitalization rate is (2,297,764 hospitalized / 33,604,986 tested positive) 6.8% so the study is a cohort of extra-sick folks.
Also consider the selection bias of those who want to tell the surveyor about it. I've been thinking about how to correct for this in cohort studies, like perhaps ask people if they are vegan.
How do you disambiguate "long Covid" from the very real fact that people are incredibly suggestible.
My father-in-law was convinced he had long Covid. He talked about it all the time.
He was never diagnosed, but he had a cold near the beginning of the pandemic and he decided it was Covid.
He claimed he could run up and down the steps at the park before getting Covid. Now, he claimed, he was always breathless. I exercise him and he'd be convinced exercise will do nothing because of his long Covid.
Of course when he got tested he had no antibodies.
But it's not just that. During the height of the pandemic, did you notice yourself, or notice in others, that people were always thinking Covid was coming on? Every little pain or weird breath and people became very worried.
The brain is incredible at turning normal sensations into symptoms. We don't realize all the sensory input we're constantly discarding until we start becoming hyperaware.
The incentives for the media to hype long Covid and for researchers to find long Covid is incredibly intense. Every shred of evidence will by hyped to the moon. Every other person you meet with a panic disorder or heart condition will have a story attributed to Covid. Ordinary people will have absolutely zero way to contextualize the true risk.
There are people right in this thread claiming long covid without ever even having tested positive for covid… this seems to be a common theme with those suffering from long covid and worse, found in research about long covid.
I had a diagnosed case of COVID-19 that hit me and my partner pretty hard about 7 months ago. It lasted longer than either of us expected (close to a month) but there were only a few really rough days.
Fast forward, and I have plenty of issues. We were both fairly depressed during the winter months - for me it was the worst in a great many years. I've had some moments of mental iffiness here and there, at least enough to notice. I had a really nasty throat infection a few months after COVID. And I've had a joint issue crop up in that time as well.
The thing is, I never once considered any of this to be the direct consequence of my COVID infection. And I still don't. We were depressed because, after enduring nearly a year of pandemic, the weather was shit, our jobs were on shaky ground and the world was re-closed. The mental iffiness? I don't know. Sustained lack of stimulus and activity levels? Natural decline due to age? Occasionally too much drinking?
I think you see where I'm going with this. I don't want to dispute anyone's own experience. But I do think it's worth considering that to not have any ailments arise within a 12-month period as unusual as this one might not be the most common outcome, with or without a COVID infection.
Been in lockdown for 18 months before I actually caught covid, to be perfectly honest most of the symptoms described for "long covid" I experienced from being locked down, after actually having covid I haven't noticed much of a difference (once my smell and taste returned, thankfully that was soon).
Low energy, out of breath, etc. You have to keep in mind most of us are doing a fraction of walking around that you would do from a commute and it can make a huge difference over time. I was already getting out of breath running up and down one flight of stairs to answer the door after 6 months staying at home, embarrassingly I was one day interviewing a potential hire over video chat, quickly had to collect a package and could barely talk after running back upstairs, completely out of breath. I can see how a sedentary life kills people.
This is before we get into what depression, doom scrolling,Journalist created hysteria fear and dread, realizing there isn't much to life once a few factors are removed, loneliness, video call fatigue and isolation, lack of distance between work space and life space can do to your body and mind.
Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever.
> Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever.
My daughters children maybe will have enough distance to reflect on it. Maybe her grandkids. And it won’t be pretty… this last year and a half has been the biggest public health care fuck up in recorded history.
What we did with lockdowns, masks, social distancing… it’s all modern day rain dances. Just humans thinking they have more control over nature than they actually do. Same basic mechanism humans used thousands of years ago to trick themselves into thinking goat sacrifices would ward off disease and famine.
What we did is truly horrific. But the truth won’t be widely recognized until most of the players involved are long dead. Unfortunately…
You think asking people to wear a piece of cloth over their face and maybe not go out to eat if they’re vulnerable is “truly horrific?”
Seems to me that, for the vulnerable portion of the population, the social distancing guidelines worked perfectly. Spend a year chilling at home in safety, get a vaccine, go back to normal. “Rain dance?” Bullshit.
Where is your proof any of it worked. And saying “chilling at home in safety” shows extreme privilege. Like, it boggles my head how privileged and detached people in this industry are from ordinary people. The privileged work from home class who posts here all gets to work “safely from home” on the backs of an expendable lower class workforce who takes all the risks.
What happened over the course of the last 17+ months was the largest generational and socioeconomic wealth transfer ever. The rich and privileged got more rich and privileged at the expense of those not so privileged. The old got to feel “safe” by completely screwing over the young generation, a generation who is, mind you, not at all at risk for covid.
I find it deplorable how dismissive people are about the costs of this and how intellectually lazy they are when it comes to answering if all this even had an effect worth mentioning.
Neither of which are true. As an ‘essential’ worker, I found it deplorable how dismissive people are of our situation and display belligerence towards basic, near zero-cost safety measures, such as wearing a mask. Which, as the data suggest, was likely beneficial in allowing myself and many of my coworkers to avoid covid. Granted, we no longer wear masks, as they are no longer necessary.
I further find your argument regarding some nebulous, broad-scale wealth transfer unmoving. Personal incomes did well in my country for all income brackets during the pandemic. Doubtless, the situation served to funnel money large tech companies, but this seems an inevitable outcome regardless of government action.
In any case, you are clearly quite cemented in your position. Further discussion would be nonproductive.
Masks aren’t zero cost. They are a very visible indicator that something is very very wrong. They heightened the hysteria and panic. And they are uncomfortable and quite frankly silly. If you are sick enough to need a mask, don’t go out.
The gaslighting around masks, telling people they are crazy to object to being forced to wear one… almost despotic.
And plus, who knows if they even worked! They could have very well made things worse by giving people false security! Yet another uncontrolled experiment forced down upon an unconsenting population. I’m not some lab rat to be used for study by some “experts.”
2020 was the year society threw out all its ethics, morals and values in a fit of hysteria and panic. It grosses me out.
Six months after the end of a mild case: occassional heart arrhythmias, but getting less frequent. I got medication (Concor) to control them.
Muscle twitching, also getting less frequent, but increasing after exercise or caffeine. Incidentally, the cardiologist who takes care about my arrhythmias has after-Covid muscle twitching too and a few days ago told me that another of his patients, fresh after Covid, has them as well.
So there seem to be lingering issues. Hopefully not of the fatal or life-shortening kind, but this cannot really be ruled out.
BTW My Covid was really fairly mild, only about 30 hours of fever and sweating plus a few days of blocked nose. No pneumonia or even much cough at all.
That's about how mine is too. I had Covid late November/early December (likely caught it from a student right before the shut schools back down) and it was very mild. Only noticeable issues was a sinus-like sore throat/ear, no taste/smell and being cold. No fever. I even actually exercised during that time, keeping to 10k steps a day walking in circles around my house. All over within 5 days of first symptoms showing (and man, that first good meal after getting taste back was heavenly)
But since then I've been having random heart arrhythmia, which are also getting less frequent, as well numbness in my arms and legs. Like the tingling you get when it's asleep, but without any cause for it to go to sleep, etc. Never attributed that to post-Covid until I talked to my PCP about it recently. Still really hoping there's nothing permanently wrong, but at least endurance doesn't seem to have permanently suffered -- I actually sat my fastest 2mi run time on the treadmill yesterday.
Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized.
At six to eight months, 111 (26%) reported not having fully recovered.
233 (55%) participants reported symptoms of fatigue, 96 (25%) had at least grade 1 dyspnea
111 (26%) had DASS-21 scores indicating symptoms of depression.
170 (40%) participants reported at least one general practitioner visit related to COVID-19 after acute illness
10% (8/81) of initially hospitalized individuals were rehospitalized.
Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care.
A 20% hospitalization rate immediately throws their sample into question. Here in BC (Canada), for instance, the overall case hospitalization rate is 5% [0]. And, FWIW, in BC we performed far fewer tests per capita (around 0.6) [1] than, say, the US (~1.3) [2], suggesting that we missed cases at least as often as they did in the US (per the CDC, which estimated only ~1 in 4 COVID cases detected [3]). So a 20% hospitalization rate is beyond generous (likely by an order of magnitude), and it wouldn't be crazy to figure the same goes for the rest of their stats.
Add to that the lack of control, and the self-reported (and potentially psychosomatic) nature of symptoms...not to unreasonably diminish the severity of COVID or deny the reality of Long COVID or anything, but it's frustrating that people are going to read - or the media is going to report on - this uncritically and imagine catching COVID leaves you two coin flips away from permanent disability.
I suppose the damage has been long-since done, and with most of the west well on its way, blessedly, to being vaccinated it's moot anyway. It's just hard not to be sick of the hysteria.
I had bronchitis symptoms for only a week in March 2020, didn't think it was covid, took antibiotics but miraculously this really bad case of Bronchitis cleared up 3 days later.... I get Bronchitis every year or other year... and it's almost ALWAYS a 3-4 week thing.
since then I've had brain fog, fatigue, pain in my extremities, numbness in hands/feet (off/on), body aches, when I stand sometimes I have to sit back down for a minute, my standing HR is about 130...just standing, AFTER getting up from sleeping. My sitting is 90... Walking is just 130-140... Depression, and the worst anxiety attacks of my life, just panic, can't stop racing thoughts, etc...
Most of this stuff stopped a few months ago when I started doing 2 hours of mindfulness per day after seeing some "glitch" in the matrix type stuff which isn't really relevant here...
I can't say for a certainty the weird Bronchitis was Covid, but a lot of signs point to that, and it cleared up after my vaccinations...so who knows...
Feel like 80% of normal, which is way better than the 20% I was feeling just this past March.
> enrolled 431 adults from the general population with SARS-CoV-2 infection
How do you control for people’s willingness to enter a study? If I had a mild case of Covid and no ongoing symptoms, I wouldn’t be too interested in participating in a study. But if I had serious ongoing symptoms, I’d be very interested. It’s a voluntary study, so how in the world do you control for that? If you can’t control for that, it skews the results to make long COVID seem much more common.
Severe viral diseases are no joke. I know a couple people who got COVID19 and are still dealing with issues months on. One had to drop out of university due to "brain fog" and concentration issues.
> Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care.
My personal experience of getting chickenpox as an adult was a high fever for almost a week and nearly two years before I felt normal again. At about 6 months in I stopped going to doctors because they had nothing new to tell me. What was a mild disease for children turned into a protracted ordeal for me.
Not “long Covid” but my sense of smelling/tasting is still not the same after 6+ months.
I had mild symptoms, but my sense of smelling and tasting were totally gone for a few weeks. After a few weeks it turned almost back to 80% only intense smells (like gasoline, garlic and diapers :shrug:) were filtered out. Since ~3 months these things stink intensely with an indescribable way… (I guess the diapers always did ;)) Additionally very neutral tasting stuff like cucumber and paprika stink too..
Curious to hear if anyone totally “recovered” from similar symptoms and if so, how they did it.
Edit: seems like loss of smell/taste like symptoms is also called “long covid”
Can't say anything about being 100% back with smell, it seems more like some got back and then long plateau where I am now.
My story - had covid in february 2021, +-flu but complete loss of smell. But not for taste - all major tastes were there (so salt was salty, sour sour etc.) but all the fine tastes (ie you barbecue a fine steak without any seasoning, and its amazing) were gone. The result was food that didn't taste horrible, just incredibly bland. I was super sporty, and started again almost right after it.
Smell was gone 100%. I used a home made 52% apple brandy bottle to test my smell continuously (very strong alcohol smell, strong fruity by-smells), for maybe 2 weeks it was like breathing fresh forest air, actually OK if I didn't consider what it meant. No alcohol smell. Then it gradually came back, same with fruity flavors.
After 6 months, I would say I have my smell back. But it feels like its quite toned down, all the smells are rather mild. Did some test and my own perfumes don't smell so great anymore. Some other previously great smells are mild or not so great anymore. At least nothing smells outright horribly, and all food is OK to eat (since smell affects our tastes greatly).
Smell is probably the least bad sense to lose, as long as its just about some % loss and not making many fine things smell like rotten shit.
I feel for you, I completely lost smell and taste and it was extremely scary, you don't know how bad it is until it happens and you can't tell if your teeth are clean, your clothes are clean, your milk has gone off, it's crazy to put fragrance on and put your wrist to your nose and there's nothing. Eating suddenly becomes a miserable chore, I normally cook a lot but just ended up eating ramen and fruit and only when my stomach called for it.
Thankfully mine returned mostly after 2 weeks, some things maybe smell slightly different but I think if I was one of the people to have it for 6 months or not at all I'd be pretty deep in depression by the end of it.
I saw some comments online saying long term sufferers returned after taking Vitamin-D and Zinc. I was already taking D but ordered zinc and started taking it as soon as it happened. Could be quackery, normally wouldn't post something like that on HN but only doing it in case that was the reason mine came back so quickly because I know how much it impacts your quality of life.
Is it possible to have an asymptomatic primary infection and still suffer long covid? Antigen tests where negative but ever since last fall I feel weird symptoms that I never had for any length of time. Stuff like trouble spelling, complete lack of concentration, difficulties comprehending things when trying to actively learn and a general feeling of confusion and exhaustion. I tend to just assume a general state of exhaustion or slight burnout after a pretty intense year. Reading long-covid experiences makes me wonder tough.
I'd like to know as well. Never had any covid AFAIK, yet I'm currently on my second week of feeling tired and on my fourth day of experiencing heart palpitations maybe once every hour (feels like my heart skipped a beat and the next one is a bit stronger). I've never had this before and my antigen test yesterday was negative.
I have those. At least in my case, it's a premature ventricular contraction. What happens is that the nerve fires too early, and the heart muscle says: "What? LOL, no. I'm still on my coffee break." But blood keeps arriving at the heart, so the next beat is stronger because it has more blood to move. They can get strong enough to hurt a bit.
In my case, it seemed to be caused by Claritin. When I stopped taking Claritin, I quit having these. Years later, just recently, I've started having them again.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. Your symptoms may be something else.
I'm fairly certain I've had it as well. I had coworkers who were confirmed to have had it, and I got sick. This was back before testing was widely available. I've since tested negative for active infection (last June), and been vaccinated (March 2021).
I have almost no endurance. A trip to the store shopping for groceries, and getting them back in the house, and put away, is about all I can do for a day.
The long term consequences of Covid are just starting to be recognized. I wonder how many people are going to end up on disability.
It's self reported symptoms and the sample contains a massive amount of hospitalization cases compared to general pop. Couldn't they secure funding to do a more meaningful study where they actually examined random samples of population post COVID and looked for abnormalities in lung function or cognitive abilities, etc. ?
Considering the stakes this seems like an important question to answer correctly and gathering data about potential long term complication sounds valuable.
A theory that I ascribe to is that Long Covid is viral induced CFS/ME. As someone with hEDS I've battled CFS/ME for most of my life. I don't want to celebrate too soon but in the last few weeks do I feel like I have now won the battle. I just started using a combination of very powerful but targeted drugs. I feel 110% and no longer get Post Exertion Malease (PEM) which is a major indicator of CFS/ME.
I take Low Dose Naltrexone, Testosterone Cypionate, BPC-157, TB-500, Mod GRF, Ipamorelin, Thyroxine (T4), and Triiodothyronine (T3). I take a ton of vitamins but the effective ones seem to be the megadoses of B1 and B3. I also take NMN for NAD+ deficiency but I'm not sure if that is doing anything. I eat a low carb diet and take cold showers and work out every other day.
Low Dose Naltrexone is great for brain fog and I've been taking it for 5 years.
The Test, hGH peptides, and T3/T4 is probably responsible for the bulk of my improvement. I've only been taking them for a few weeks and it's night and day difference.
I'm not saying this is for everyone but it definitely worked for me so it may help others looking for ideas.
For what it's worth, I did recently read somewhere (Wikipedia long covid page? Vaccines page? Not sure, but think it was in the last sentence of the intro) that uninfected vaccinated people do not report any long-covid-like effects. That's not exactly what you're asking but last week it was finally my turn for a first shot and this was something that I was a bit worried about, since we are injecting viral parts and we don't know what causes the long cases. Getting covid is obviously more risky so I got the vaccine and would have chosen to get the second dose too regardless, but I remember looking for this info a few months ago and there was nothing yet.
Maybe there is now also data on what you're asking, I think I might have seen a paper about that when I looked for this related question but it's been too long to remember what the title might have been.
Yes, you can easily see symptoms that arise well after the active infection is over. Personally I had complete loss of smell and taste that slowly came mostly back over a two month period, only to suddenly go bizarre at the tail end. Six months later I can only assume something between my nasal membranes or olfactory bulbs healed wrong because my sense of smell is just as good as it was pre-covid, it's just incorrect. Feces, beef, chocolate, and french fries all have the same stale/burnt grease smell. I've essentially lost hope the problem is going to correct itself.
Correct me if wrong, but this doesn't appear to have a non-Covid-19 control group?
This study on Long Covid found there was no statistical difference between teenagers that had Covid compared to those that didn't. Suggesting that these symptoms may be getting entangled and misattributed.
When a study has unsurmountable limitations, which make it impossible to usefully reason about the "results" of the study, is being frank about those limitations more useful to society than not publishing the study?
To me the obvious answer is "no, you toss it in the bin, or better yet you think for awhile and don't perform the useless study", but opinions can differ here.
Completely agree. The term "limitations" is being used here to mean faults. When your study has faults, its conclusions are of little to no use and only serves as fodder for the media. It should be binned.
Anyone know of any studies regarding whether the vaccines reduce the risk of long covid if you catch it after being double vaccinated? They're only supposed to be about 95% effective after 2 shots, so if you catch it in that 5% probability how likely is long covid afterwards?
May not help everyone but was a mega game changer for me - extra strength breath right strips, both at night when sleeping and also while working out (or meditating/working on breathing exercises).
Self-reported symptoms. And now we will have the litany of hypochondriacs that didn't even got tested for SARS-COV-2 but swear they have some misterious long term viral syndrome that in the real world, if it really exists, is extremely rare.
Long COVID is mostly a myth, popular in a bubble, but without any hard evidence for it. Any of the few long term effects are not that different from what you see from other viral diseases.
I don't know about 1 in 4 but it sure seems like there is a lot more of it than their used to be, just in my experience. Younger people living with constant worry about "health care" that I've only ever seen before among the elderly. When I was in my 20s the last thing I or any of my friends worried about was health care.
The worry isn't that their health is always bad. The worry is that if they do happen to have something happen, whether that be disease or injury, they won't be able to afford to go to the hospital or visit their doctor. And death isn't the only negative outcome from not getting medical attention, it could be permanent effects like constant pain or reduced physical ability.
Are you really trying to paint the fact that the younger generation is taking greater steps to systematically take care of their health as a bad thing? That is absurd.
Your comment was not the right tone, to put it mildly. On the other hand there is probably no way to bring up this possibility without being attacked.
For anyone curious, I am not a doctor, this is not medical advice, and every case is different, but state of mind alone can almost certainly do real and serious damage:
So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy levels are creeping back up. But still, you can have down days every now and then. But they are getting fewer and further between and the downs are less far down. I hope to get it completely behind me one of these days.
When I had COVID I was just one small step away from calling for an ambulance but that was rock bottom, after that it got better and I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this (by having some oxygen earlier on and maybe avoiding some of the damage). But I figured other people had it much worse than I did (and I still believe that was the case). March last year was a pretty crazy time.