Could you describe what you mean by "too strenuous"?
I don't know if I ever had it (I still get tested occasionally), but I don't ever feel 100% anymore. I don't know if this feeling is psychological or if it has something to do with COVID-19.
I don't know if I ever had it (I still get tested occasionally), but I don't ever feel 100% anymore. I don't know if this feeling is psychological or if it has something to do with COVID-19.
> COVID-19 has existed for less than six months, and it is easy to forget how little we know about it. The standard view is that a minority of infected people, who are typically elderly or have preexisting health problems, end up in critical care, requiring oxygen or a ventilator. About 80 percent of infections, according to the World Health Organization, “are mild or asymptomatic,” and patients recover after two weeks, on average. Yet support groups on Slack and Facebook host thousands of people like LeClerc, who say they have been wrestling with serious COVID-19 symptoms for at least a month, if not two or three. Some call themselves “long-termers” or “long-haulers.”
> I interviewed nine of them for this story, all of whom share commonalities. Most have never been admitted to an ICU or gone on a ventilator, so their cases technically count as “mild.” But their lives have nonetheless been flattened by relentless and rolling waves of symptoms that make it hard to concentrate, exercise, or perform simple physical tasks. Most are young. Most were previously fit and healthy. “It is mild relative to dying in a hospital, but this virus has ruined my life,” LeClerc said. “Even reading a book is challenging and exhausting. What small joys other people are experiencing in lockdown—yoga, bread baking—are beyond the realms of possibility for me.”
Moreover, this:
"A quarter of respondents in the Body Politic survey have tested negative, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have COVID-19."
Okay. I guess it doesn't mean that, but it means that you should be skeptical of the claims of causality.
No treatment was really able to help me. I was already on adderall, and, while it could keep me upright, I felt like a zombie the whole time. I ended up consulting a sleep neurologist, who basically said they could try "activating" antidepressants (I was already on one), or stimulants, which I was also already on. I don't know if modafinil was a thing yet, but I never heard them mention it.
I thought my life was over. What could I even do with my life, if I always had to sleep 12-14+ hours a day? No doctor seemed to be able to do anything, there was no specific cause, and it's such a rare condition that most people don't know it exists. That, along with the stigma that comes with invisible disabilities (and, believe me, this certainly was disabling) almost made me want to give up.
Then, I started getting better. I didn't know why I got better, but, at that point, I didn't care. I had my life back.
All in all, it was an awful experience, which I wouldn't even wish on someone I hated.
Not for nothing: I had idiopathic hypersomnia in graduate school, too -- it tends to happen when you're depressed from being in graduate school. As you were already on an antidepressant, and it was a suggested treatment for your illness, it sounds like this is a more probable cause than the one that you're trying to imply.
One manifestation of this is when they look at people that have bad things happening to them, they come up with a list of how they can avoid that thing happening to them.
Sometimes those things are very reasonable - I'll avoid these dangerous behaviors, I'll engage in these good behaviors, I'll avoid those areas, etc. But sometimes the threats are not the kind that you can really avoid. Sometimes people respond by blaming the afflicted with having poor intrinsic attributes, as opposed to their own superior attributes. Sometimes people respond by simply disbelieving the afflicted, discounting evidence that they would have considered otherwise. Because it is simply too taxing to really consider the risk.
I don't know you from Adam, I have no idea if that's what's motivating you, but what you said reminds me of what other people say in that situation.
If people have vague symptoms that are uncertain and ambiguous, then their opinions on the nature of their illness are probably not terribly useful or accurate.
But if there exists a severe illness, it seems almost certain that there are some people out there who have a mild form of it that is ambiguous and uncertain because there is a spectrum.
More generally, I believe that evolution implies that diseases evolve in a manner such that people find them hard to identify. Because humans are pretty ruthless at eliminating diseases that catch their attention. HIV is an example of a virus that had gotten very close to coexisting, but then people noticed it and have been trying to wipe it out. Vague chronic problems that are blamed on the victim are inherently what everything logically has to become in the long run.
To take the argument to the extreme, even hypochondria must be a physical disorder, even though of course like cancer etc. there might be many causes that are arguably not the same.
What we don't know -- and what articles like this ignore -- is how common and serious the symptoms are. And asking a group of people, one-quarter of whom haven't even tested positive for the virus, to self-report everything that has them feeling crummy, is not science.
The Atlantic is not a scientific journal, but their "science writer" should at least be aware of this basic standard of evidence, and at best, avoid the temptation to spread panic based on speculation.
Like you say, it's the Atlantic, not a scientific journal. I prefer to say "not terribly useful or accurate" rather than "not science".
I mean,in the US alone covid already killed nearly 190k people from a pool of around 6200k infected. Doesn't this justify having informed evidence-based discussions?
> COVID-19 symptoms can sometimes persist for months. The virus can damage the lungs, heart and brain, which increases the risk of long-term health problems.
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...
N = 143
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6930e1.htm
N = 270
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
N = 100
The rest of the studies cited by Mayo are all in the same range, feel free to check. Mayo Clinic or not, you're seriously going to draw conclusions over this?
I don't think I've been "wiped out" as you say. So maybe this is more psychological or something different. Or if I ever had it, it might have affected me differently. Who knows!
Did you ever test positive for COVID-19?
Do you lift weights or do strength training?
How much protein do you consume on an average day?
No
A normal amount? Probably a little more than normal? Like a turkey/ham sandwich or chicken caesar salad for lunch and then some entre for dinner? I'm not a vegetarian if that's what you're getting at
I was suffering daily after COVID when living still under lockdown.
I moved to a non-lockdown country (where the strategy is now herd immunity) and felt better immediately, and now have zero lingering symptoms.
Lockdown and Government restrictions are more suffocating than COVID.
I can easily offer my own experience with covid symptoms that is quite different than yours but I wouldn't make an "it is" statement because of it.