NIH will invest $1B to investigate 'long Covid'
nature.com
nature.com
I was a mild case, stayed home for 2 days, right back on my feet after that. 32M, no health issues. Symptoms just lingered and lingered. They would go away then come back days later. Mainly sinus pressure and dizziness. Then 4 months on I started getting intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Cardiologist noted some abnormalities but was not concerned. Put me on beta blockers. Fast forward to today and I still have shortness of breath, some cardiac symptoms, and random pains in my left arm and back. It really eats into my quality of life, but I am thankful I don't have it as bad as many others.
I keep tabs on the long haul community to see if researchers have figured anything out/others found anything that helps. So far there really isn't much. I'll note that there are a surprising number of people who aren't aware they are long hauling (they "recovered" and then months later developed issues - not making the connection until stumbling upon another long hauler) and that people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling. I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or what, but people want (need?) to hear "I fully recovered" when they ask how you are doing. I don't tell anyone except those close to me about it, it's completely not worth the debate they are going to want to have about the validity of my symptoms. It's pretty common in the LH community to not be publicly upfront about it because of this. There are plenty of people who know me, know I got sick, and will relay that I fully recovered.
I tested positive for Covid late March last year. I was moderately sick for 2 weeks, chest pains, tight chest, loss of smell etc, also had a weird rash on my shins (mini blood blisters). Any way I thought I was better, I had a bout of small relapses and general fatigue through April then come mid May, I basically had a huge relapse in symptoms, admitted to hospital with Myocarditis (heart inflammation caused by my immune response to the virus), highly elevated troponin levels (indicators of cardiac damage) - which meant bed rest for 3 months. One other weird symptom I had that was confirmed by MRI, was the V5 nerve on my cheek had its Myelin protein sheath stripped/damaged by my immune response/covid which has caused me facial pain (Neuralgia) for most of the past year. According to the Neurologist I saw this is uncommon in Covid, but happens to MS patients and more commonly post other viruses.
Anyway I am much better now and barely have any symptoms now with the exception of getting tired much more easily. I wouldnt wish this disease on anyone. I hope your symptoms improve. I also have told basically no one except my immediate family about my symptoms as its not worth the pain of discussion!
Everyone in my family (5 people) developed primary symptoms but me (33 years old). I had a very strange course of leg/muscle pain, scratchy throat the first month then chest/arm pain for another month with GI issues the next. My 3 year old niece who had beaten the primary symptoms relapsed with a fever end of September and right around that time I started getting neurological issues where I was dizzy and had a burning cheek and buzzing/tingling fingers/toes with mild muscle twitching in my face.
6 months later I’m much better but still grappling with dizzyness and nerve pain in my cheek which sounds similar to you.
I’m convinced my immune system is going nuts from exposure to Covid and I fear I may have developed a more long term auto immune issue.
Probably time I take these symptoms to a neurologist.
Did the Dr prescribe you anything for your myelin damage?
But no, if you can stop the thing that's destroying the myelin while it's happening, sure, but as far as I'm aware once the damage is done it's done
You'll heal naturally most of the way but not all the way, if the damage is anything like the damage done by RR MS
Yes, as you allude to, once the original cause is removed, peripheral nerves do typically heal in most people, however slowly. There's emerging evidence that central nerves heal as well.
I can attest to this personally, since I've have a neurological condition that causes axonal damage. Each "attack" I've had (a decade apart), it's left me with foot drop, hand drop, loss of sensation in my feet and hands, and severe nerve pain. The second time, I've also developed facial and pelvic neuralgia, including trigeminal neuralgia.
But I did slowly heal after the first attack. I regained full motor functions within 2 years, and slowly regained sensation in the years after that. Even the nerve pain got better until the second attack. Now starting to slowly heal once again.
According to my neurologist, and also a specialist neurologist he sent me to, people typically do slowly heal to some extent if they have proper nutrition unless the original cause is still present (which it would be in RR MS).
Definitely, and true of any poorly understood illness. A common response when people hear about suffering without a simple explanation is fear and rejection. It reminds them of their mortality, it breaks their just-world hypothesis, and it forces them to be burdened with the knowledge that people suffer and we don't know why because the world is vastly more complex than we understand.
Many people would rather reject people's suffering than live with these feelings.
This is largely because the self-identified "long COVID" community on FB groups etc. (as opposed to the scientific community studying the phenomenon) is behaving very similarly to the "chronic Lyme" groups that flourished just before COVID. Many of those people truly felt distress and, indeed, one shouldn’t deny their symptoms. However, any link between those symptoms and Lyme disease was extremely questionable, to put it mildly. The same holds now with COVID, and many of the "long COVID" self-reporters were never even formally diagnosed positive for the virus in the first place.
There's a parallel here with default assumptions of sexual assault / harassment being against the victim because of the existence of some claims that were clearly manufactured.
(And not entirely surprisingly the victims of autoimmune diseases tend to be disproportionately women, so there's more than just a superficial similarity here)
This is really important. The placebo effect is very powerful, and placebo-induced symptoms are absolutely real symptoms. They just aren't caused by what you think they are.
(I'm not saying that "long COVID" is or isn't placebo-induced, merely that such a conversation is separate from whether it's "real".)
This would be the nocebo effect, which definitely is as real as the placebo effect.
I somehow doubt the common animosity is being driven by social media groups and "Lyme disease self-identifying hysteria". It seems vastly more likely it's more about suppressing any concerns the costs might be greater than zero for those who don't die after infection.
Often, tough to diagnose or difficult to treat symptoms are uncomfortable truths for public officials. 9-11 responders are a good example.
Psychosomatism may be an issue — but consider also that the neurological mechanisms governing it may themselves be degraded through the course of such infections.
My one year is also coming up soon, and I still get mild symptoms like the "hot skin" and bulging veins but otherwise I'm better than 99% of people on /r/covidlonghaulers.
I'm tired of explaining it. I'm tired of everyone's advice. In the rare event I'm doing something social during this pandemic I just try to forget about it and not think about my relapses. LongCovid f-ing sucks.
The main illness lasted about 4 weeks I think, maybe a little longer to really be 'back on my feet' but I was in bed for most of the 4 weeks, and I lost about 30lbs over the whole time where I had zero appetite. But to be completely honest I don't think I ever fully recovered. Even now my fitness level must only be about 50% of what it was before, I feel like I aged about 10 years in the course of a month or so. I'm still on beta blockers, had a bunch of tests on my heart and all the cardiologist can suggest is that it might go away in a couple of years. But for now I get palpitations and general dizzy sick feeling at least once a fortnight and it stays around for a few days at a time.
It's so strange to think about what a difference there is before and after. I was just getting ready for a holiday with some friends to Octoberfest before I got ill, but the idea of being able to go out like that for four days is insane, there's no way I could do it. That and I had to quit drinking alcohol completely as it seems to really exacerbate the heart issues.
I've read quite a lot of people talk about post-viral issues, and I wonder if the long COVID stuff is going to turn out to be something quite similar. Would be nice to have more research being done to see if they can help at all, as it can be quite hard now to get a doctor to take it seriously. I get the impression from a conversation with my doctor that the reason they were more willing to do tests for me was that I had no history with going to the doctor before that unless I had some sort of physical injury, like a broken shoulder.
I think we maybe living with more than the economic damage for quite sometime after this is all said and done. Can only hope for the best for people that are dealing with it longer term.
But overall lack of testing capability is one of the stupidest things that happened over this past year. The US should have free testing available to everyone at least once a week. The capacity to test 100 million people in 2 days should have been built up, because testing is so vitally important to understanding what is going on. The fact we don't have that should be a crime because it has lead to so many deaths.
One thing to keep in mind is that a very bad flu went around in February/March. I know at least 10 people that thought they had COVID but didn't, because this flu was occurring at the same time. The other thing that many people have gotten mixed up with COVID is severe allergies. Try taking daily antihistamine to see if that clears up her coughing. Antihistamines need to be taken for weeks at a time in order to get good effectiveness, doing it one-off isn't nearly as effective. Her illness last March, be it COVID or not, may have made her more susceptible to alleriges or anything that irritates her lungs.
My wife got infected around 10 days ago (PCR confirmed last Wednesday, now seemingly recovered and testing negative) and while I exhibited some very mild cold symptoms (fatigue, joint pain, a single high temperature reading) it never went beyond that (so far, knock on wood) and I tested negative when tested at the same time...
Good point about the flu. I also had some flu symptoms around that time and always tested negative on antibody tests.
You're arguing that it's a travesty and a crime that the US didn't have something which no country in the world had, or even came close to. That probably wasn't even remotely feasible based on what other countries achieved and the fact that there was limited manufacturing capacity for pretty much everything that would be required to do so.
The frustrating thing is, it's not even surprising that you think that. For nakedly partisan reasons, the American media pushed the idea that the US would've had this kind of massive widespread testing and complete control over Covid if only its leader wasn't a monster who was sabotaging its efforts, warping perceptions of how everyone else was doing in the process. It worked too - they got the guy voted out of office at the cost of massively misinforming everyone about the biggest crisis facing the world, not only in their own country but elsewhere in the Western world too.
In other words, they quoted him?
Very short half life, very quick response (if any), available on Amazon.
My grandfather died a few days after getting the "vaccine" (which isn't really a vaccine because it doesn't stop getting the illness or transmitting it). So did a bunch of other old guys he knew.
Many such cases.
Full deep breaths cause all kinds of aches to shoot around my torso and laughing is outright painful. The skin on my hands shriveled so much they look like 60 yr old hands. I have head aches all the time, whereas before I never got them. At anytime I can feel my heartbeat throughout my body, especially in my hands and neck. My feet get so cold now I feel like i could get frostbite in a 70F room. Hard exertion quickly brings me to a point where I almost faint. I get dizzy periods usually for at least a few hours a day.
Also this year was hardly stressful/anxiety inducing for me, at least on the day to day level. Other periods of my life were orders of magnitude worse with typical stress/anxiety symptoms. Nothing like this.
This is a (side-)effect of the beta blockers, I suspect. They actively block your heart from exerting itself, which you would need for sustained physical activity.
Beta-blockers are useful as a protective measure after heart surgery, but you can't build up your physique while on them.
This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it and part of why we still know so little about the long-term consequences of it all.
> This behaviour is the reason people stop talking about it
If you bring something up in order to discuss it, and someone talks about it in a way you don't prefer and therefore you stop talking about it, a healthy response would be to not bring it up in the first place or reply to it in a friendly manner. We cannot decide how others treat us but we can decide how we respond to how others treat us. It's your choice to either keep quiet or be fine talking about it, you can't have both at the same time.
I have had anxiety my whole life. I've gone through times so stressful I was hallucinating. It's not that.
I hope people can see from reading this thread why it's easier to just say "I fully recovered".
Anyways I kept going to the doctor and all of my tests were normal / not bad enough to raise any major red flags so it got diagnosed as anxiety / psychosomatic.
In cases like this it seems like you can either find an online community that's dealing with a set of symptoms or accept that "it's all in your head." For the former, if you have the money, their set of friendly doctors who may be willing to pursue off label treatments. For me, I ended up sort of falling into the latter camp (though as I said, I do think something biological was happening). Diet, exercise, CBT, and time ended up helping the most.
Also, I understand that there is some stigma with mental health too.. so I am not surprised that I'm getting strong reactions as soon as it's mentioned.
Well, I'm sorry if I ruffled up some feathers. But I think all angles of the issue need to be considered, and probably the best way to deal with this is to be open to the possibility.
The lockdown is not stressing me, if anything I'm the happiest I've ever been (no commute, more time with my wife, ...), but when I go on my daily walk the struggle can be very real when it wasn't a year ago: shortness of bress, tightness in chest when going uphill. Not every day, but some days it's just there with seemingly little to trigger it.
I also use to cycle about 150km/week, I can barely last 20 min on the bike now. Even during my worst period of anxiety cycling was not an issue, if anything it always made me feel better.
Anecdotal for sure but I'm not sure stress/anxiety is a factor of significance
Feeling short of breath (short of an emergency) can cause headaches, dizziness and random pain as a consequence of breathing too much. Left arm goes numb when there's too much tension in the left shoulder. Palpitations can also be related to excessive tension in the upper body, as can the circulation issues.
It doesn't need acute stress for that, just a steady accumulation.
I hope it's not disrespectful, but this is the most common explanation, although it doesn't usually get this bad.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...
Here’s another recent study showing 95% of former COVID (hospitalized) patients suffered no irreversible damage:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-cov...
I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.
Luckily a long haul isn't always a forever haul, we can hope.
- 30 gallon plastic bin (look for one with flat sides, not a "heavy duty" model with ridges along the side -- if your cat is a side-pee-er, this will be difficult to clean).
- Cut a hole in the side with a utility (aka x-acto) knife, 9 inches from the bottom.
- Fill with 3.5-4 inches of unscented, clumping litter. I've tried Dr Elsey's and World's Best, and prefer the former, which I found clumps better; I believe other clay-based litters are equivalent to it.
- Buy a litter-lifter, it's the best scoop, hands down. After I tried it the first time, I actually placed a bulk order (25 scoops) so that I have a guaranteed lifetime supply (and for gifts), because I never want to use another scoop.
- Clean the litter box at least once per day. I know this sounds like a lot, but it's actually not -- with the scoop above, it takes me ~10 seconds per "item" (pee ball or poop cluster) you scoop out (unless your cat is a side-pee-er), plus maybe 30s moving the litter around to find the items and even out the litter at the end. (I've timed this; in total it's around 1 minute if I scoop once per day).
Info is sourced from https://catinfo.org (specifically https://catinfo.org/the-litter-box-from-your-cats-point-of-v... and https://catinfo.org/making-cat-food/#Constipation ) and verified by personal experience.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
And obviously a number of people have been infected since. But just using the 83 million number from the CDC, 2% of that would be 1.6 million people.
How can you possibly believe this, given the seroprevelance data? Every indication is that more than twice this number (some surveys suggesting substantially more even than that) were already infected a few months ago.
Given that effectively nobody was dying from COVID prior to March, and the three giant waves of exponential growth that followed, I have severe doubts about the accuracy of these tests. I have a feeling that if those same tests were ran back in 2018, they would have said the same thing.
That's not quite true. The surveys in that time frame were mostly < 10%. The > 10% surveys came months later.
However, it's certainly possible that these are false positives (particularly the wastewater studies).
However I'm not sure that this particular observation is a good basis for that conclusion. It takes a substantial mass of cases to produce excess population-level mortality, which is what gets our attention.
Since we weren't testing for cases prior to March 2020, we really don't know how many people died while infected with the virus. Now of course we count nearly every such case meticulously.
It's possible that it was fairly widespread, and some people were dying (and perhaps being reported to ILInet, etc), but not enough to cause a notable increase in population-level mortality for anybody to notice.
There is ongoing conjecture on this point all over expert circles.
2. Mortality rates were not above the baseline prior to March.
3. We know that the virus spreads like wildfire when no quarantine measures are taken. No quarantine measures were taken at any point prior to March.
4. The growth in known cases and above-baseline mortality closely matches, starting in March.
It's impossible for there to have been a significant presence of the virus in the United States at the start of 2020, as claimed by seroprevalence data, because within a matter of weeks it would have infected a large enough percentage of the population to be clearly visible in the above-baseline mortality rates, and hospitalization rates. A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital, or the morgue when they are unable to breathe. In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
Either the seroprevalence data is wrong, or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
When your measurements claim an invisible, inaudible, imperceptible phenomena that has no physical influence on any other object, the prudent scientific conclusion is that your measurements are broken.
This is only true if we presume that it was equally spread across risk strata. But it's also possible that it didn't make its way from younger travelers into the higher risk stratum in sufficient measure to start causing significant mortality for weeks.
> A large percentage of people who catch COVID end up going to the hospital
This is simply false, unless your definition of 'large' is a fraction of a percent.
> In a pre-quarantine/lockdown world, they also tend to get everyone around them, as well as a whole bundle of unrelated people sick in the process.
This is true of a lockdown world as well; in fact lockdowns don't appear to be negatively correlated with population-level mortality at all, spare a very few examples, all of which are island nations which have also maintained various travel bans and similar measures. But in the USA and mainland Europe, lockdown states have fared quite horribly. I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
I don't see any reason to believe that widespread presence of the virus would have been noticed as anything but an uptick in ILInet (which of course we did see) until it got into long-term care homes and other places with high concentrations of at-risk populations.
> Either the seroprevalence data is wrong
Again, this is possible; I'm not saying it's not. But it has been reproduced over 20 times now, with different tests, some of which appear to have a perfect record of selectivity and also good record of sensitivity.
> or the virus was somehow uncontagious or unlethal, until March, when all across the country, all at once, somehow, it turned into something that was quite contagious, and quite lethal.
In the vast majority of the population, the virus isn't particularly lethal. That's really the discussion here - whether it might have spread more widely through the lower-risk strata prior to widespread infections among the vulnerable.
It may not have been equally spread across risk strata, but in a pre-lockdown world, even if you are in a low-risk group, you have social contact with people who are in high-risk groups, through public transit, grocery stores, services that you visit, relatives that you visit, hospital waiting rooms, urgent care waiting rooms, hospital wards where doctors don't wash their hands as frequently as they should, workplaces, and the list goes on.
Is it possible for a small group of people (low thousands) to have had the virus across the country, when the official count was in the tens and low hundreds? Absolutely! I can see this happening. It seems to fit with the pattern of infections flaring up all across the country at roughly the same time.
Was it possible for millions of people to have had the virus (which is what the sero data points to), for over two months, without getting other people sick in a manner that would show up on the statistics? That is an incredibly strong claim, with only one data point that supports it, and a lot of data points that oppose it.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the sero data was not a good predictor of the future in March of 2020. What has changed about it, that makes it a good predictor of the future in March of 2021?
> I can't tell you how happy I am to be in Florida (no lockdown, mortality substantially below average, risk-adjusted mortality notably and incredibly low) instead of my home state of NY (intense lockdowns and a resulting bloodbath).
If Florida had the population density of NYC, with people of all demographics sharing the same public transit infrastructure, sharing the same elevators, packing the same grocery stores, it would be a graveyard. You're ignoring all sorts of conflating factors, by pointing at two vastly different datasets, and concluding that because one had a lockdown, and the other one didn't, lockdowns don't work.
Counterpoint - Washington state has had lockdowns, and despite having a similar population density to Florida, has half the death rate of it. To the surprise of absolutely nobody, death rates are much higher in counties with lower compliance rates (Yakima versus Pierce, for example...)
Oh, and when lockdowns would get relaxed, three weeks later, like clockwork, infections and deaths would spike up.
It's an infectious airborne disease. The more people that carriers are in close quarters with, the faster it spreads. Reducing the number of people the average person is in contact with, healthy, or otherwise, reduces it's rate spread. I am not sure why this is still controversial in 2021.
You're arguing with an imaginary friend. Nobody is making the points you are refuting.
The reason that lockdowns have so spectacularly failed isn't that there's some mystery about the nature of spread of respiratory pathogens; it's that lockdowns don't actually achieve any of the conditions that prevent spread except for people wealthy enough to have the means to isolate (and there's no reason to believe they'd refrain from isolating even in the absence of a state mandate).
Instead, lockdowns shift risk onto poor people ("essential workers") without regard to their level of risk. So, instead of a more acute spread occurring through the lower risk strata, we get a more acute spread occurring through the less affluent economic strata.
I don't have sufficient knowledge to concur with or refute your assertion that the sociological conditions of the high-risk stratum (ie, sharing public transit, etc) make the results of the dozens of seroprevalence surveys implausible. However, I do note that people who study these things for a living are saying that it is plausible.
That said, I have some doubts about the 2% number. Estimates vary widely from about 2% as the lowest plausible number I've seen to about 10% at the highest plausible number. If it's really 10% of infected people reporting long-term symptoms, that changes things a bit. Also note that pretty much all of the sources are preprints or otherwise not peer reviewed articles -- an actual rigorous investigation is very welcome here, and hopefully that is what the $1B from NIH will buy.
Uh, what? The WHO updated their guidelines a month and a half ago because PCR tests were being misused: Too many cycles and not taking symptoms into account was resulting in too many false positives.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-who-instruction...
The part that primarily caught my eye, which isn't what Reuters is attempting to debunk:
> Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
"clinical presentation" - in other words, the symptoms. This advice runs contrary to the entire past year, where a single positive test in an asymptomatic person has counted as a case. This alone is enough to inflate the numbers, without even taking PCR cycles into account.
And Reuters ends up just barely short of confirming the part about PCR cycles anyway:
> ”The WHO are saying that if the manufacturer has defined a value but you could if you chose to adjust that setting, please don’t - stick to what the manufacturer has stated because they have done the earlier work to determine the best value for that threshold,” Mackay said.
Labs using too high a threshold has been a concern for about half a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... (And note the numbers in this article, almost all in the range of 33-40 cycles - I recall on rare occasion seeing higher reported elsewhere, around 45 and 50 cycles)
This is right-wing conspiracy theory.
>the tests were not being used in compliance with instructions
This is science.
But the total number of global cases is over 100,000,000 and rising. If something impacts 1-2% of people, that's still millions of people.
This research could also benefit millions more people suffering from generic post-viral fatigue disorders, which were a problem even before COVID.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
And the authors do not claim that any of the sequelae were caused by COVID.
> the authors do not claim that any of the sequelae were caused by COVID
Because a strong causality claim like you're asking for is impossible without perfect randomized controls which would be unethical.
> The estimated incidence of neurological or psychiatric sequelae at 6 months was 33.6%, with 12.8% receiving their first such diagnosis [thus 20.8% pre-existing]
From table 1:
33.6% of patients had any sequelae
24% had psychiatric disorders (only 8.6% for the first time)
6.6% had substance misuse (only 1.9% for the first time)
5.4% had insomnia (only 2.5% for the first time).
No other condition was over 3%. (Numbers add up to more than 33.6% (12.8%) because some patients had multiple conditions.)
So it looks like almost 2/3rds of the figure was preexisting conditions.
> Because a strong causality claim like you're asking for is impossible without perfect randomized controls which would be unethical.
I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
> I'm not asking for a strong causality claim, merely some effort to restrict the numbers to conditions that might plausibly have been caused by COVID.
They propensity score match against people who had the flu during lockdown
> They propensity score match against people who had the flu during lockdown
Any kind of stress can aggravate psychiatric disorders, substance misuse, and insomnia, and having COVID is surely more stressful than having the flu.
That's not the same thing as COVID causing the illness.
> The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, included patients from ages 18 to 86 in light, moderate and serious condition.
(I tried to find the actual study to see if they had a breakdown but couldn't find it)
And frankly I'd say a study which shows that 94% of COVID patients still had symptoms after 3 months and 5% had symptoms after 6 months is actually not super positive news.
LONG COVID PATIENTS SAY THEY FEEL BETTER AFTER GETTING VACCINATED
https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/2/22308965/covid-vaccine-sho...
Also, "placebo effect" is real. "Reversion to the mean" is also real.
None of those explanations are "psychosomatic".
Take the group off the drug and survey them in 30-90 days for long-COVID symptoms.
You could also play around with control groups, for example perhaps one control group is asked not to watch or read any news programming related to COVID. I think the results would be revealing.
Public interest in the putatively psychosomatic Morgellons disease spiked after Joni Mitchell said she had it. There was an outpouring of support for Mitchell, and criticism of Big Pharma, the government, and the media for not treating Morgellons with more gravity.
They have no known mechanism of action when there are no recognized antigens. If they do, that’s new science, and applying Sagan’s Criterion: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
It's actually surprising that percentage is so small in America.
Would be interesting to cross-reference "long Covid" stats in America with other countries.
Maybe the real pandemic is how unhealthy Americans are.
80% of the population is below the age of 55. A person in the below age 55 group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
That's not anecdotal.
Meanwhile when the eviction moratorium ends this month tens of thousands of people are about to be homeless.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are starting to show signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies so inequality increased.
The price we're about to pay for this is going to be significant.
It's probably going to be poor people and future generations that pay though. #yolo
When first round PPP money was available, the businesses that got it were those that could pull all their info together on a moments notice and jam out an application with supporting material quickly (like literally within hours of finding a bank taking apps) - P&L statements, tax returns, payroll reports, other vital records. I saw business owners who didn't have their stuff together miss out on first round funding because they just weren't able to pull that off quickly enough. It was a land grab and for some it was an early make-or-break moment.
Businesses that were set up from the beginning to treat their offices as "disposable" from a BC/DR perspective were a-okay switching to remote work. As in - if you were planning to be able to continue work if an asteroid hit your building, you were fine with the WFH shift. Mostly this meant very asset-light approach to infrastructure, cloud services, laptops, etc.
Restaurants that could drop ready cash (savings) on outdoor accommodations (tents, heaters, etc) were more likely to maintain a revenue stream, assuming they had land or city-granted street space to set that up.
That last point though - I've seen some businesses leverage political connections to get special permitting, wealthier business owners of course were better positioned innately. The lockdowns disproportionately impacted businesses - like the established and wealthy (read large chains, primarily) were in a far better spot, while the ones already struggling to survive (locally owned) were not.
One aspect of the devastation that may not be fully appreciated is that locally owned small businesses don't necessarily just "come back". Many business owners are of an age where they are hanging up their spurs rather than going through another round of creation and growth. It takes a special kind of person (e.g. highly risk tolerant) to step out of the corporate employment world and have a go on your own, and I think the market lost a sizable quantity of those people over the last year, along with the jobs they provided, who just aren't anxious to have another go at it again.
I see a lot of people talking about inflation concerns. I don't feel I know enough about that to predict one way or another. I do see the job market starting to bounce back a bit where I live, dining rooms starting to fill up again.
To some degree I'm going to miss the society the pandemic created - people walking their neighborhoods more, meeting their neighbors, generally being more patient with each other, empty middle seats on airlines, people less likely to sneeze on the vegetables at the grocery store, more attention to sanitation, less traffic. Ah well.
Muscles != Health or good immune system.
Do you really base your conclusions on a sample size as small as a couple of UFC fighters claiming they're sick? You should really improve your statistical reasoning.
If you want science and actual statistics.. You have more of a chance of dying of a car accident then of Covid if you're under the age of 55.
Under the age of 55 compromises 80% of the American population.
Its just not as simple as "hm only 10% of 90 years olds are the ones dying in my municipality, I'll play along because nobody is inviting me out anyway", encephalitis lethargica had very debilitating side effects for decades afterwards.
Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery). What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is? Many of the same people consider themselves asymptomatic because they didn't get a hard dry cough.
I just don't get the impression that others are putting two and two together here.
I am all for getting data! Good investment.
Literally everything in this quote is speculation, or factually incorrect.
Covid-19 is not a "neurological disease" -- SARS-CoV2 is a virus that infects epithelial cells. Epithelial cells are not neural cells.
Blood clotting is observed in some patients, but the mechanism is unclear. Blood clotting is a common result of inflammation -- triggered by any disease.
It does not "strip blood of the ability to carry oxygen". This is simply wrong. Inflammation associated with SARS-CoV2 infection damages the ability of the lungs to absorb oxygen.
The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage. Patients with severe inflammatory responses clearly do have some damage. It's not yet clear if the damage is due to the virus, or the response of the host's own immune system.
The claim that organ damage is caused by "worsened oxygen delivery" is speculation on speculation.
> What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is?
The loss of smell is believed to be due to infection of of supporting cells in the olfactory epithelium. Not the nerves.
Taste is lost because smell plays a huge role in the perception of taste.
"Loss of ability to think" is so vague as to be pointless to debate. Depression and anxiety are likely causes of the same symptom.
I mostly had it under control with blood thinners. If I went off for a few days I would have issues, then a stroke. ( I hate side effects of Pradaxa)
Got covid. Sucked, but got over it. However now I can’t miss any pills. If I skip tonight’s, Tomorrow one side of my body will go numb. I get severe brain fog, Plus a host of other issues that take days to weeks to resolve. Same crap as before covid, but I have no margin for error now. Oh and now I piss blood, because blood thinners, yeah.
Clotting clearly does happen for a subset of patients. But it's wrong for the OP to claim that this is because the virus is doing something to the blood. That's a leap too far. Other infections cause similar sorts of issues -- sepsis, for example.
The distinction matters, because if the clotting is mediated by a runaway inflammatory response (e.g. an over-reaction of the innate immune system), it's inherently a problem that will affect a subset of people who are infected (for reasons we don't really understand). Whereas if the virus attacks some component of the blood, it would be expected to affect most people the same way.
I completely buy the idea that all of these effects happen with other conditions, but if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
Well, no...there have been a lot of publications in this area. We hear about them all the time. Most of these publications are bad at the moment, but that's normal. It takes time for good research to be completed. It will happen.
> if there’s a surge due to covid, shouldn’t we investigate it?
Sure. I don't think anything I've written here implies otherwise.
In addition to pissing blood.
Is this a disease that you've always had? Came later in life?
If this is asking too much or prying to deep, don't answer my questions. I empathise as much I can with you, as much as I can.
Also have an Autoimmune disorder. Had it since I was a teen. Made worse by my teenage love of mountain dew.
It’s a risk factor for clotting, and probably contributes. It also causes inflammation and neuropathy. It was was annoying and a slow but growing problem.
Then I got exposed to a LOT of natural gas from a mega rental company house.
Well dormant gene for factor 5 activated and I my blood went crazy. Lots of clots. Autoimmune also went nuts and decided that nervous system and various organs needed to die in a most painful way possible.
Took a few years to get it under control..ish. Covid has clearly made it worse.
Neither one of you provided sources. I think that you're right, but how's a layperson to know?
UpToDate is what I use to manage patients, and is pretty good.
... which makes the "Don't confuse your Google search with my medical degree" meme a bit more amusing.
[1] "I'm going to throw in my two cents as a medical student"
I hope this is just sloppy writing on your part, because the sentiment your comment is actually conveying is downright dangerous.
You don't need to link references that gravity exists either.
Instead, you have doubled down and chose to continue making blithe remarks like "gravity doesn't need a reference."
Who knows why people do what they do.
One thing missing, for example, is why this doesn't appear to happen frequently. Most of the highly touted claims of cardiac involvement from summer 2020 have been debunked (e.g. in athletes).
Unfortunately, there are strong indicators that Sars-CoV-2 is capable of infecting more than just epithelial cells: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0390-x
> The claim that it "damages many organs" is at least an overstatement -- the vast majority of Covid-19 patients have no such damage.
The problem: assuming a (made up, just for the argument here) 0.1% rate of coronavirus cases that end up in long-covid / systematic organ failures, and you have 1k of infections, that's not many total cases. Assuming you have 116 millions of infected people however, suddenly even a 0.1% rate translates into hundreds of thousands of affected people. The actual rate is possibly in double-digit percentage area (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7533045/), so ... yeah.
This is why combatting infections is so important, not just because of mutation risk...
For me, the poor leadership and lack of consensus is enough for me to avoid exposure. When everyone can articulate what you said, instead of the reductive things they do say, I’ll be more comfortable
But I’ll likely be vaccinated before then, which is just as fine for my risk analysis
(Interestingly, these people did retain the ability to sense the 'heat' of chili peppers...)
https://chemrxiv.org/articles/preprint/COVID-19_Disease_ORF8...
This is little more than a story told with software.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7267810/#:~:tex....
Next time, if you're going to try gatekeeping, be sure you have grounds for it.
I do not know you, I do not know if the PhD in question actually qualifies you to speak on the subject, and I do not know if it did that you would actually be fully up to date on the subject. I do not necessarily want to dismiss this out of hand as an appeal to authority, but as a layperson, you do not making a convincing argument when it boils down to "Listen to me, I have a PhD, trust me over these other people who have PhDs who are also publishing peer reviewed papers that disagree with me."
That's not a paper. It's a pre-print. It isn't peer-reviewed. It isn't published. Literally anyone can push a document to a pre-print server.
I'm saying I have a PhD in this exact discipline, and this document isn't proof of what it claims. You certainly don't have to believe me, but saying "this is a paper, and therefore it is likely to be correct" is not a standard of evidence that exists.
I stand corrected.
> but saying "this is a paper, and therefore it is likely to be correct" is not a standard of evidence that exists.
It is still at least showing some work beyond the "making claims with zero supporting evidence", which is what you are doing.
Really? OP knew exactly what was going on in this pre-print. Unlike you who took this for a published paper. Don't ask someone to show work when you yourself didn't read the summary.
Also the paper doesn't talk about the 'ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen', the attack is first and foremost reported to result in less hemoglobin being available. There is a difference here.
This is not the only reply from him in the thread going back to the top comment. There are other articles and papers posted, in response to his reply or backing the assertions of the original post he replied to, here and throughout the rest of the rest of the comment section. In none of his posts did he provide any response to them beyond his appeals to authority.
I had no desire to reply to multiple posts with the same general concern and instead picked a single one.
The top post should have included sources for their assertion. They did not. Others stepped in for them and did in the thread. Other threads include articles and sources for the same assertions. At that point, the burden of proof isn't on them - someone saying they're wrong needs to provide details on why that is not the case vs. just saying "I got a PhD in this so trust me."
It's a classic appeal to authority fallacy.
I'm saying: I have deep expertise in this exact area, and based on my experience and knowledge and ability to read papers in this area, I can confidently say that this is a bad "paper" that does not prove the claim made.
You have no skill or experience in this area, and you choose to believe the paper instead of my assessment of the paper. That is certainly your right, but your basis for doing so is "it's a paper and I don't know who you are", which is self-evidently silly.
Would be even greater to get NIH to invest $1B into looking into it further.
6 months ago people would have retorted slightly differently, although they would have balked at the assertion they would have assumed that people already researched it and ruled it out, and therefore I would have been "fearmongering" because the scientists already researched it! now we can acknowledge that they haven't and needs to be peer reviewed.
so the goal post has moved, but I'm all for data being collected.
The person you're responding to is understandably scared and is ignorantly propagating the sensationalism that the news has been hammering into our brains.
The news is not science..people need to realize.
It's a business and even the biggest news companies peddle sensationalism.
Even if only one person has some strange side effect like 'covid toes'...the news media can prey on humans emotional response which overrides statistical reasoning to lay claim that it's a possible Covid outcome.
And while it's not an outright lie...it's extremely disengenuous and very sensational. And they do it all the time.
We need to teach people statistical reasoning in school and we need to hold news agencies accountable for statistically irresponsible news.
"Scared and unable to derive statistics" is a large inaccurate stretch of the imagination, I'll make my own stretch of the imagination and say you were probably pasting this response a year ago on things that turned out to be real threats for 500k Americans that didn't even know they had a meaningful pre-existing condition.
We don't have statistics on who has the "inflammatory response" or any other side effect.
Apologies that you had to switch houses during this trying time. My heart goes out to you and your struggle.
80% of the population is under the age of 55. That age group has more of a chance of dying of a car accident than they do of Covid.
40% of all money in the money supply has been printed in the past year, building supplies are already up by two to four times and are showing signs of inflation. America just went 1.9 trillion dollars more into debt. Tens of thousands of small businesses have closed and thier business has been absorbed by large companies increasing inequality.
The price we're about to pay for this economically is going to be significant.
Poor people and future generations will probably have to pay it though. #yolo
I moved because I had the privilege to choose and did
you are reading everything wrong here
We don't teach most high school graduates to fluency the math that would be needed for this reasoning to work fluidly.
Unless you can provide a source that proves loss of sense of smell is due to “blood clotting depriving oxygen and resulting in organ damage” your statement sounds like pure bunk.
Plus, severe influenza can result in similar organ damage so Covid is not unique in that aspect.
I used to work with somebody who was never the same after a bad case of flu in their 50s, so this kind of research—regardless of which virus—is very welcome.
just have a conversation bro
you know what would be even cooler, a US health agency investing $1B to investigate
He's in his 60s. Will he experience long term effects? Who knows.
I'm starting to get invited to meet in person for business and some are like "I get tested every week". And I just say sorry I don't make exceptions. I live with someone with a rare respiratory condition. A weekly test - what does that even tell me anyway? I know you're running your business and have employees coming in.
Everything is much easier with data. But when there is still so much to learn everyone weighs their risks differently.
Many of us here are extremely fortunate and can afford to pay for delivery and stay home.
So we need to understand that some people's perspective IS a real calculated risk tolerance.
If we can get data to understand long term effects, that will help with educating those that are really only weighing the risk of them dying.
right, yeah that doesn't tell you anything, it tells that person whether they need to quarantine for an additional week and is only useful if they hadn't seen anyone the prior 7 days.
I hear many quips like "I already had it last year" or still even people that think their one test once says they were negative and thats that.
The crazy thing, the crazy thing, is that these aren't even the people that don't understand thermodynamics and think seeing hot breath in front of a mask proves that masks offer no protection effective against covid aerosols.
Oh right. So we know for a FACT that you were exposed, and became a carrier and probably a spreader; maybe by bad luck and unfortunate circumstances, maybe by being a bloody idiot. But NOW you're even MORE blasé about it, because you feel invulnerable, so you're going to be engaging in MORE risky behaviour regarding an illness that we know people can have repeated bouts of ("catch" more than once). Thanks for letting me know, I guess. Video call it is.
Make a list now, so that you remember who the idiots are after everyone is vaccinated.
I've already had to re-plan my reintroduction to retail after finding out a few of my preferred shops weren't obeying mask mandates, or in one case actively flouting them.
It will be easy to forget and put it all behind us. Don't. We're lucky to receive such useful side-channel data.
Don't get me wrong, I'm enraged at the lunacy of some. But I don't think we're going to be better off in aggregate by insisting on payback.
On the contrary, spite definitely has a useful purpose in social structures. It strengthens the negative effect of unwanted behaviour.
That's not the only utility for this.
Understanding the networks of information flows over social media will allow for easier reintroduction of accurate concepts, using similar looking quacks and new language for people who prefer to believe quacks over any reputable institution.
It can also be useful to get people to realize how consistently they are led on, as many of them forgot their prior theories and are just subscribed to random causes alongside their vegan, spiritual or political journey.
I have for years had a big list of people, companies, and other organizations I wish to actively avoid. The pandemic just gave me higher resolution on the "undefined" set of humans and organizations.
I already avoid racists, extreme partisans, assholes, anti-science types, people who are mean to waitstaff, people who don't read books, et c. Covid gave me a few more categories.
Perhaps there are false positives; I am willing to take that risk for the immense benefits so far.
"it doesn't exist"
"its just the flu"
"nothing you can do to stop it anyways"
"5G over the air microchips"
"dna-rewriting vaccines"
ideas fell apart and were just led to other wacky ideas.
Feels like we went with the Chinese "it lasts for two weeks or you die" that doctors discovered like 1-2 months in.
The same places that did the tests had the infrastructure to follow up with people and could have been doing this 6 months ago, and that has nothing to do with the "top minds" at all.
That, alongside the failed, poorly implemented or nonexistent contact tracing methods have made getting this metadata much more difficult to do.
This will also flag long-term effects from other virii, as well.
One thing that Covid drove home is: "Infection with a virus can do a LOT of extra damage that we don't track very well."
There are lot of people who get diagnosed with "Lyme" (aka the modern equivalent to "hysteria" in many ways) who may very well just be "You had a bad cold/flu/other virus and your body took a lot of damage and now its going to take quite a while to clean up."
Modern medicine is amazing, but it has a gigantic blind spot around chronic conditions.
I also believe that "Lyme disease" became a medical/medical insurance bucket for "We don't know what's wrong with you, and you're annoying enough that we can't just ignore you, but we don't want to spend any more time or money on you figuring out what is really wrong."
I'm not in either bucket, or a long-covid sufferer, I'm just observing post-viral has a huge amount of things in it, beyond covid, which might benefit from increased funding and eyeballs on the problem.
Not all the long-covid is about lung function.
My wife has suffers from ME/CFS for years. She is pissed that the US government invests almost nothing in research for something that affects on the order of 1M [1] of its citizens. She certainly doesn't want people with long-covid to suffer, but she is cheering that perhaps this $1B investment will lead to research that also helps the understanding of ME/CFS.
I've suffered from chronic pain syndrome in my legs/hips for years, in fact since I was like 10 and has had a big affect on my life. As a result of chronic pain I've then mentally suffered as well, done CBT a few times as well. I've had countless sessions of physio and hydrotherapy.
Before covid was even a thing (Like 2-3 years) I've reported fatigue issues to my GP multiple times, I had IBS, concentration issues and chest pains. The GP's did ECGs and said I was fine. My rheumatology kicked me of the patient list, but got me physio and a sleep study (I have mild sleep apnea)
Jan 2020 I had the flu as well, my Father was the first one and did lose his taste and sense of smell.
Come April 2020 I was just getting out of breath walking in my garden and slight chest pains at the bottom of my lungs, the fatigue got worse. Doctor was like "You've not got symptoms of covid, but it could be covid, some of my colleagues have felt wiped out" Come June/July 2020 I took part in the NHS home antibody test and I had a faint line that indicated I had antibodies for covid-19, at this point things had gone back to normal for me.
Come December 2020, my concentration levels were the worst they've ever been. The brain fog was horrendous, I was now getting worse chest pains and feeling rather fed up with it. GP was doing nothing other than saying get a covid test. In the end I went to a walk in clinic and they thought I may have had clots on my lungs. Got sent to A&E (Yes sent to A&E during a pandemic, the worst place anyone can be) They came to the conclusion after looking at my medical record and symptoms I had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome. I now take fluoxetine in the morning alongside my amitriptyline in the evening (been on it for 10+ years), I'm doing a lot better but do have days where I've got no get up and go, it got worse in 2020 and I think covid made things worse. Also interestingly my mother ME, so do wonder if there is a genetic factor.
I will say, as I've been trying to tout on every "long Covid" thread I come across - it seems that rest is crucial. Your best option, obviously, is to not get Covid in the first place. But if you do, after you've passed through the 2 week acute phase, rest like your life depends on it. Extremely light exercise only, take as much time off work as possible, and pay close attention to how your recovery is progressing.
The usual caveats apply - not a doctor, evidence is completely anecdotal and based on my experiences, this is not medical advice, etc etc - but scheduled, compulsory rest helped me a great deal at my worst. So much of my downward spiral could likely have been abated by avoiding overexertion, prolonging the rest period after the acute phase of the illness, waiting even longer before jumping back into exercise and full work days (3-4 months as opposed to 3-4 weeks) but that is so antithetical to how we think we're supposed to act after we "get over" an illness.
The biggest issue was the small sample size the difficulty to diagnose as there is sometimes also a phycological aspect to it. The now large sample size should help a lot in finding out what it really is.
It’s clear now a majority of people outside the vulnerable groups get over this illness with hardly any after effects. But it’s becoming clear that some people don’t, and suffer some amount of sequelae. We don’t know how many yet, and we can’t tell who will or who won’t yet. Given those circumstances, a slower than usual return to normal activity levels is prudent.
For instance, I’ve read that college athletes are restricted from play for about 10-14 days after even an asymptomatic COVID diagnosis, and then are carefully monitored for months afterwards. With any hint of lingering symptoms or a drop in performance, they’re given a cardiac MRI to check for heart inflammation, and potentially benched for 3-6 months. If you don’t have a team physician checking in with you after every workout, you’re gonna have to do that interrogation yourself.
How many people amongst that 30 million would go on to experience any number of nebulous, chronic symptoms of one kind of another normally this year in the absence of Covid? In my assessment, a great many would. If not millions, then hundreds of thousands. Experiencing health problems, or odd symptoms that come and go can be scary, but it's a normal part of life. But throw in a label "long covid", support groups and a heightened sense of threat during a pandemic and you have a recipe for a confused social response.
Now, post viral syndrome is certainly real. Inflammation due to infection causes real and debilitating symptoms. But is there any evidence to suggest that SARS-COV-2 is uniquely able to cause long term health problems? Or is it the case that it causes unexceptional levels of post viral syndrome and inflammatory damage, but the unusal thing is so many people all catching the same virus at the same time with a very low level of natural immunity in the population, therefore a relativelyt high rate of serious infection (relative to other endemic viruses)?
I do suppose some research is warranted though. It seems different viruses seem to cause different types of autoimmune responses, and it would be interesting to see what COVID can cause. Plus more research needs to be done on the link between viruses and autoimmune diseases in general.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing.
It would be interesting to compare COVID survivors in lockdown and non-lockdown states in the USA. The theory could be that the social isolation, stress, reduced Vitamin D, and poorer diet of people in lockdown contribute to poorer outcomes long-term.
>The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing.
That anybody thinks a lockdown is good advice is just evidence that, yes, the media is effective at controlling what appears to most to be most minds (though that's not clear--most folks I talk to think covid is mild and the policy response insane).
Best advice is the same your grandma might give you: To be healthy, eat well, go outside for fresh air and exercise.
Instead, we're all supposed to think that the best response is waiting for Bill Gates to put just the right chemicals into a syringe to save mankind.
Twitter followers I consider "in-the-know", as well as a quick Google search, says this is nonsense. Where do you get that this assertion is well-supported?
I see your response paints me as some anti-vaxxer. Why would you think that?
My kids, my wife, and myself are all accinated against polio and other illnesses.
Those vaccines a) Are real vaccines that actually stop getting the illness AND transmitting it and b) Have been battle-tested over decades and their long-term impacts and side-effects are well-understood.
I'm not anti-vaxx.
I'm against rushed, misleadingly-marketed vaccines that seem to have no impact on the actual transmission of the virus, based on every company's claims, that have been tested for months when prior to this widespread vaccine injections required close to a decade of study for approval.
This is a rushed gene therapy medical treatment for a disease that kills less than 0.4% of people under the age of 75.
No sense to take this fake vaccine.
But Vitamin D deficiency is also correlated with non healthy life styles in general. So basically all that's saying is if you're living an unhealthy lifestyle there is a better chance that covid will be worse for you if you get it.
Why isn't the very obvious response a massive, tax-incentivized campaign to increase the health and immune system of Americans and the world in general?
Why instead of $billions to Moderna and Pfizer are we not creating world-leading tax systems that monetarily incentivize the buildup of our nation's immune system?
Many others share similar experiences. It’s worth researching and wouldn’t be the first time we may completely revise how we think of infections.
Personal experience aside, it will be important to put specific numbers on the phenomenon and establish a baseline for comparison to other illnesses. So this announcement of a research effort is good news. I just hope they will put the numbers in context.
To amplify your point, I didn't know this until my father died last month from a series of heart attacks brought on by pneumonia, which itself was caused by COVID.
Side note: the cause of death is listed as a heart attack. How many deaths are we not counting because COVID was not the direct cause?
Consider also dust mites allergy and do extensive cleaning where you sleep and see if that helps.
Try a reactin or 2 an hour before sleep.
First, I had debilitating brain fog. It felt link I was thinking through pea soup. I went to my doctor twice due to this symptom, but my blood work (CBC, not a COVID test) looked normal and he suggested this was due to "stress" or "changes in sleep", although I was not experiencing either of those.
Around this same time, I would experiencing "near-syncope" upon standing. It got to the point where I everything was fading to black and I would have to take a knee to maintain consciousness. Again I talked to my doctor he shrugged his shoulders. He said my blood pressure was normal but he referred me to a cardiologist.
I passed a stress EKG so they said there was nothing structurally wrong with my heart.
Fast forward a few months and the symptoms have abated, although they still persist in a diminished form.
This makes me really wonder if this was COVID due to autonomic nerve dysfunction.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
The other four endemic coronaviruses, while often called "common colds" (and make up perhaps 1/5 common cold cases) have all been documented having similar lingering cardiovascular effects in a similar miniscule segment of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" for example - you'll be amazed at how similar case reports are to what we're seeing from SARS-CoV-2.
However, to my knowledge (and to the best I can tell from searching Google Scholar), the phrase 'long Covid' has never been used to describe this phenomenon. In fact, it seems that sufferers are often ignored. So it is with other mysterious chronic after-effects from illness - 'chronic lyme disease' is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks.
It's obvious that this phenomenon is super rare. However, when you have viruses (and other pathogens) which ultimately infect nearly everyone on the planet, these cases add up. It's not right that sufferers have been ignored these decades, and if this is a genuine effort to right that wrong, I applaud it.
If on the other hand it's just another attempt to justify bizarre restrictions instead of resources to help these same sufferers, then that's just cruel.
We saw a similar happening with hospital census last year: sensational media and pundit scientists (but vanishingly few actual experts) threw bombastic fits over hospitals being overcrowded, as they almost always are, especially in underserved communities, at the peak time of the year.
And was this a rallying cry to provide more resources for marginalized communities and the hospitals that serve them? Seemingly not; it was instead a pathetic attempt at justifying interventions which by then were already unambiguously ineffective, like stay-at-home orders. And now we're not even talking about it. These hospital systems and the communities they serve will not be helped; the conversation has moved on.
The best thing we can do is to take seriously the experts who have credibly drawn attention to this for the past couple of decades and continued to do so in covid times. People like Stefan Baral, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, etc.
Subsequent pandemics may leave less room for reflection, so this is the time to get these things straightened out.
I hope that this kind of chronic suffering (and the possibility for therapies) is the outcome of our discussions about long-covid, rather than pretending that this is a novel phenomenon in order to score political points.
Disulfiram cured both of them.
BUT!!!!! The disulfiram was a very tough treatment. Near the end of the planned multi-month course of disulfiram, I had to take my son to the ER because he was borderline hallucinating. As I said, it was near the end of the planned treatment anyway, so we took him off it. He immediately started feeling better.
This is consistent with what you'll read in the article about psychological effects from the disulfiram.
And he was cured of his chronic Lyme. Period. The Lyme symptoms were gone and they stayed gone.
I think Dr. Liegner may now being doing smaller daily disulfiram doses for a longer time, in order to avoid these affects. My wife and son were (probably) among the first 30 people to ever have this treatment, and so it is a lot better understood now.
It might be a good idea for your friend to give Dr. Liegner's office a call. He's in Pawling, NY. He's expensive and not in a convenient location for most people. We lived in Bangor ME, and drove 7 hours each way for every appointment with him. Well worth it. And he's probably Zooming now for at least a portion of the necessary appointments.
Please let me know if anything positive comes from our exchange of messages here, I'd love to know that it had been of use! Or write if you or your friend would like any other info. garyrob at me.com.
People have permanent side effects from taking medicine.
It seems strange to focus on Covid specifically, when all manner of biological changes to people's bodies cause a small subset of people to have permanent side effects.
Not sure how to parse this. Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, are among the many causes of pneumonia. Do you just mean other pathogens that also cause pneumonia?
difference here is a lot of people with mild covid (no pneumonia) are getting lingering neurological or cardiac issues (or both)
On the contrary, this does not seem to be distinct with SARS-CoV-2. The other endemic coronaviruses (which cause pneumonia more rarely, and are typically just called 'common colds') also produce very similar 'long covid' effects in similarly tiny slices of the population.
Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" - you'll be amazed at how well documented, and yet poorly understood, this phenomenon is. There appears to be less literature for 229e, but pretty convincing for the other 3.
This is going to be a huge issue as the disease proper fades away.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-long-haulers-symptoms-...
Heck yeah.
And isn't "long-SARS" just another long-covid? Along with long-hku1, long-oc43, long-nl63? If 'covid' stands for coronavirus disease, then it stands to reason that the discussion about 'long covid' needs to be independent from which coronavirus is implicated in the chronic condition. It's apparent that they all cause this (albeit rarely).
It seems to me that focusing on one pathogen to the exclusion of the others, despite this phenomenon being documented across all of them, is likely a political decision.
Individuals like yourself that hand wave away COVID do much more harm.
But it's understandable. If you dare trying to look rationally at the matter, you get accused of "hand wav[ing] away COVID". As if the only two options were "worse than the plague" and "harmless like the common cold".
I think there is a chance that long-covid may result from a secondary virus and it's interaction with Sars. It may also be due to a lack of virus and no interaction I suppose.
I just don't understand how you manage to come to your stated conclusion.
"You" can't believe "smart people" buy "fear mongering"
Isn't this implicitly stating that you're the one who's glaringly incorrect?
They're going to trot this thing out for years!
How much do you want to bet they make major discoveries and need another few billion to continue the research!
Meanwhile in a year it's going to be completely out of the news and there will be infinitesimally small numbers of medical reports of it.
We're learning about the world around us!
That money belongs in NASA or cancer researchers pockets not some stuff that will be minimal once the news stops reporting about it.