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Comment by jokoon | Hacker News Reader

Is there such a thing as long flu? Long cold? In a way, don't most illnesses cause long term effects?

Yes, I had both long flu and long pneumonia. In both cases it took me about 2 months to fully recover after being officially cured. It annoys me a little that people are only now discovering that respiratory illnesses can have long-term effect. How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack?

Personal experience aside, it will be important to put specific numbers on the phenomenon and establish a baseline for comparison to other illnesses. So this announcement of a research effort is good news. I just hope they will put the numbers in context.

>How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack?

To amplify your point, I didn't know this until my father died last month from a series of heart attacks brought on by pneumonia, which itself was caused by COVID.

Side note: the cause of death is listed as a heart attack. How many deaths are we not counting because COVID was not the direct cause?

I'm sorry to hear that :(

I would guess anything that affects your oxygen and damages the lungs (potentially permanently) which produce your oxygen can have long term effects. Some of the patients who have died from covid have lungs that look so horrible they barely look like lungs any longer other than the shape.

Yes, it's been alternatively known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, or fibromyalgia, since at least the 1980s. We still don't know what causes it, so it's too soon to answer your last question.

Yes, there is. There is quite a bit of “long covid reporting” but I haven’t found one with reasonable healthy or comparable e.g. flu controls.

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