Long Covid Appears to Have Led to a Surge of Disabled in the Workplace (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Long Covid Appears to Have Led to a Surge of Disabled in the Workplace (2022)

libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org

65 pointswalterbell120 comments

The number of applications for disability payments from Social Security has declined every year since Covid began.

https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/dibStat.html

How do those payments work? Are you allowed them if you're also working?

Separate question: I vaguely remember that everything else made COVID more likely to kill, so how many people already on disability were killed, proportionately speaking?

Did you know there is a reduction in staffing for the SSA office and that creating an application is becoming more difficult?

Also, applications are routinely denied upon first submission and then worked on as an appeal that can span years.

Ask me how I know, I have been assisting a friend with a disability (not COVID related) to get assistance for over a year now.

So either there are applications still being processed, in appeal, or people are frankly struggling to navigate the submission process, especially with fewer SSA employees to get assistance from.

Based on how the rules for disability goes, this isn’t surprising at all.

Amazingly, this is not being treated as a big problem.

Those who are more vulnerable are watching as the world left us hanging dry.

There was no reason to end mask mandates. None. Except a few loudmouths the entire world have caved to.

We have seen how cheap DIY filter boxes are. There is no reason not to have one in every classroom and workplace. And yet.

I am desperate enough to experiment with a Cleanspace Halo, the smallest positive air pressure respirator there is to be able to go among people. If no one else is willing to provide clean air, I need to filter my own. It's bloody ridiculous but what can I do?

Whatever one thinks of general mask mandates, I think I'll always be baffled that we're ditching it in healthcare settings, especially places like ERs.

I don't expect to ever go into an ER or pediatrician's office without one.

It makes more sense if you view it as an extremely politically motivated decision to signal that we should stop thinking about COVID entirely.

Your theory sounds conspiratorial and lacking in evidence.

Ironic considering your comment.

What was conspirational in his comment?

The conspiracy of a conspiracy. ;)

Read any newspaper for the past year and a half that has been ceaselessly pumping out “COVID is over” think pieces while life expectancy is declining, excess deaths remain high (whereas before the pandemic they were largely static for years and years), and disability claims rise. It takes effort to ignore how much the consent is being manufactured.

Yes. It's called "acceptable losses".[1]

The idea that only deaths matter is part of this narrative.

[1] https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-04-01/covid-accep...

Yeah we handled the mask issue so poorly.

It very quickly stopped being about finding what is a reasonable policy to just a stupid culture war fight over all masks all the time vs any masks anytime are communist police state designed to make your child gay.

Just dumb dumb dumb.

Even in places that handled the pandemic fairly well like NZ their mask policies were kind of silly.

My peeve that I will never stop being angry about is we knew from quite early on that COVID was airborne and surgical masks were not very effective. But public health authorities refused to communicate this to the public. They did not make an effort to make people aware or to issue N95/KN95 masks and update the policies to reflect more balance about which places it’s optimal to mask vs not.

It was just left to individuals to work it out on their own.

While N95 masks actually work, most of the cloth masks do very little. But there was a huge shortage of good masks for the first year, and WHO was terrified of fights over masks if they recommended N95.

(The trick of N95 masks is that they have a charged electret layer in the middle. That will capture particles smaller than the holes in the mask. It's not like an HEPA filter, which is purely mechanical.)

It seems pretty clear that children learn a lot from seeing peoples’ facial expressions, so that’s one reason to end universal mask mandates. Our kids’ teachers strongly advised removing the school’s mask mandate when it came up for discussion, because of an uptick in speech issues and because some of their pedagogical methods relying on showing the kids the movements of their mouths.

They’re running three beefy HEPA filters at all times in one room, this isn’t politically motivated or an attempt to ignore the problem.

So then provide federal funding for HEPA filters and make exceptions in the mask mandate for those classrooms where those are present? Just a thought.

Do something instead of playing Bush on that bloody ship under the banner Mission Accomplished by declaring the pandemic over?

Counterpoint: The only thing children learn from seeing faces is how to fake a smile. By wearing masks they can observe the whole body which is much harder to control. What I said is not based on science as far as I know.

If no one else is willing to provide clean air, I need to filter my own. It's bloody ridiculous but what can I do?

Right. Isn't this the situation if you wear a mask? What does this have to do with other people?

My mask protects you, your mask protects me. Three years in I still need to explain this??

Wear an N99?

You aren’t explaining it, you’re just repeating the same tired informationless phrase we were all subjected to for those ~2.75 years (after they stopped saying masks do nothing)

Sigh, really, this entire thread is supremely depressing

y'all just want us to die, right?

No, but many of us believe the worlds reaction to COVID-19 was extreme and totally unwarranted (and a bit scary too, considering how basic human freedoms went out the window in so many countries)

A million americans died and you think the reaction was extreme?? What we know worldwide is at least 18 million excess Covid deaths and at least 65 million people with Long Covid. The entire Western world has completely failed in its COVID-19 response. If you think this was extreme, you are being gaslit. Too little was done and way too late. Communication and leadership complete failed.

There is a lot of money going into making you believe what you believe. Next time maybe there won't be lockdowns because of this campaign currently being wrought and then many more millions will die. Someone will win perhaps but guess who. Hint: it ain't you.

Actually I accept that theee are risks to life. I am not being gaslit - I take freedom seriously.

Ah yes, muh freedoms!

And where is my freedom? Where is my freedom to live and not breath in your infected droplets?

https://www.bryanhealth.com/app/files/public/9a4cd902-5ffd-4...

So wear two masks.

That's not an explanation. If you wear a mask, you're protecting yourself. You can even wear a more comfortable mask with a vent, which became anathema due to your "explanation".

https://www.bryanhealth.com/app/files/public/9a4cd902-5ffd-4...

give me a break. Yes wearing a mask helps me as well but nowhere near as if you were doing it.

Don't make me link the pee meme.

Sorry not as plugged into memeworld as you so don't know WTF this is.

Us both wearing masks protects you as much as you wearing two masks. But even better, you can just wear an N99 or N100. Also you should consider P95 or Pxx because of the much nicer seal.

I don't understand why you need to get other people involved in this simple thing you can do yourself.

Even in countries that widely and overwhelmingly supported mask mandates pre-vaccine I don't think that support would extend to an indefinite mask mandate.

Because surge is a bit of an overstatement looking at the graph and that long COVID seems to resolve the workforce has bigger fish to fry.

The recent progress of AI is a bigger concern.

More like the progress of AI may be our savior here. Allowing fewer to be more productive. (Hopefully.)

Hopefully, it may also reverse the trend that work tools a require higher IQs to effectively utilize.

I worry the impact this will have long term. Both economically as a lot are taken out of the workforce or remain but with less function. And socially as we have this bigger pool of people we need to care for (and likely fail to care for). It’s remarkable it’s been ignored but turning it into a culture war for short term political gain seems to have made any serious discussion about it impossible now. Just look how immediately comments about masking in this discussion were grayed out.

Is it being treated any better or worse than the dozens of other "big problems" we collectively have to deal with? Are we moving heaven and earth to stop sexual assaults? Or Fentanyl overdoses? Or cardiac deaths? Or youth suicide? Or mass shootings? It seems like there is only a finite amount of friction we can endure en masse to mitigate the problems that plague our health and well-being. If anything, I see several other issues in more urgent need of greater sacrifices on all our parts than long COVID.

I think there are different people working on each issue. There's no collective "they" that has to split their focus. The microbiologists and epidemiologists that could be studying long COVID aren't the same people that would be working on preventing youth suicide.

The collective "they" I was referring to was society at large. The general public. But even among researchers working on solutions to these problems there certainly is a limited amount of resources to fund their research.

I totally agree that the "general public" has "limited focus," especially since public health campaigns are hard!

However, my claim is that a lot of progress on these issues doesn't need to be very public. Telling the public to do a thing sounds like the last step of the process, after researchers have already found a definitive solution.

I also agree that researchers have a limited amount of resources! But I don't think that funding a research area is necessarily zero-sum. If a company or government decides to throw extra money to start researching a thing, research on other things doesn't stop. As an example, when the NSF provides more funding for research, the number of PhD students goes up, since there are more research grants to go around.

One of my fav youtubers; Physicsgirl (Dianna Cowern) is currently completely out of action due to long covid. She was young and healthy when she was hit with this.

This is scary.

It's hard to overstate how "out of action" she is. She hasn't been out of bed in months except to go to the hospital, and can barely speak.

Update from early March presented by her friend Simone Giertz: https://youtu.be/vydgkCCXbTA

Really awful situation.

For all the people in this comment section saying long covid is fake, please watch the video the other commenter posted and ask yourself: Why would Dianna fake this? Why would she fake being on a ventilator for 14 months in the prime of her life? Why would she fake being unable to move, think, talk, read?

False dichotomy. The only possibilities aren't "Dianna is faking being ill" or "Dianna really has long COVID". There's also "Dianna really is seriously ill but not with long COVID".

No true Scotsman would...

This is an uninteresting argument. COVID happened, and suddenly way more people than before reported these kinds of symptoms. You can make this argument in any individual case, sure, but on the macro level, your argument becomes that either somehow lots of people got chronic fatigue syndrome (and similar) all at the same time, or lots of people are suddenly faking it all at the same time, or long COVID is real.

I mean yes, mass hysteria does exist, culturally-bound mental disorders also exist, but the most obvious explanation of these facts is that yes, long COVID is a thing.

From my experience with gastro issues, it sounds like covid causes leaky gut and dysbiosis which is leading to a lot of these other issues like brain fog, tiredness, laryngitis, etc.

Is there any research looking into this?

There's a lot of research looking into this. Go search on pubmed.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36639608/

There's also a large RECOVER initiative to better understand it.

https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2023/03/02/recover-what-clinic...

"Go search on pubmed" isn't the argument-winning strategy it used to be. They will sanction any sort of quackery that anyone comes up with.

Not saying you're wrong or that I disagree, just that PubMed citations aren't a useful way to prove anything.

Your bias is showing in this comment. I was just trying to be helpful. I have no agenda here. There’s plenty of articles indexed on pubmed about long Covid and GI issues.

> They will sanction any sort of quackery...

pubmed doesn't 'sanction' anything. it just a database of published articles.

By including an article in their database and linking to it from a .gov website, they most certainly are giving it a stamp of approval in the eyes of the public.

Sure, that's like saying that Google approves of a given page just because they pull it up in response to a search query. But that goes back to my original point: no intelligent person (or true Scotsman) would back up their argument by saying "Go search Google" and leave it at that.

A hypothetical https://www.google.gov would be held to very different standards than Google is today. I'd like to say the same about PubMed, but can't.

Is there any reputable research establishing "leaky gut" as a thing at all?

It sounds squarely in the pseudoscience category thus far: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leaky_gut_syndrome

Click the link in that same article for "increased intestinal permeability."

These terms are often used interchangably. This particular wikipedia stub is trying to draw a bright line where none exists.

Your own link says that "leaky gut" and "leaky gut syndrome" are not the same.

“COVID causes a leaky gut and thus widespread vague symptoms” sure sounds like it falls in the unsupported side of things versus, say, celiac.

All new science starts with unsupported hypotheses. Going from "unsupported hypothesis" to "consensus established fact" often takes 10+ years. COVID and it's aftereffects are so new that the vast majority of claims are still somewhere in the hypothesis phase. Pretty much every idea about long COVID is still in this phase, and as sibling/cousin comments note it is an area of active research.

Science isn't static. It's contantly in evolution as people try to find justifaction for unsupported claims. Dismissing unsupported claims prima facie is fundementally incomaptible with the scientific method.

Cue Long COVID being being disqualified as a disability, just like the pandemic “ended.”

I believe that this is exactly what will happen. There are so many doctors currently treating it as a somatic condition in spite of published evidence that COVID leaves a lasting mark on every organs with an ACE2 receptor. My MIL has recovered about 70% from a bout of LC and was directed multiple times to exercise at a time that it was known that exercise would actually make her condition worse.

It doesn't help that the majority of these cases affect women, who have historically not been taken as serious as patients in the health field when it comes to MS/CFS.

To get the convo started: The skeptical take is of course that there is no long covid. either people are faking for benefits or they are being sincere but imagining it. Similar concerns around Lyme disease.

Q: is there firm evidence for long covid that excludes these possibilities?

I would argue at least in the United States, the benefits for being disabled is quite limited. There’s wealth limitation (ie. You cannot own more than a certain amount of anything among any assets) and this often precludes disabled people from marriage among other sucky things. The other thing is iirc there’s been brain scans and other biomarker testing of long Covid that shows noticeable differences similar to ME/CFS.

Getting on the disability rolls in the US is a long, arduous slog. If a substantial number of people make it there, especially if the economy is doing well, that would indicate that, yes, Long Covid is real.

The data from the St Louis Fed do look concerning.

Civilian Labor Force - With a Disability, 16 to 64 Years, Men: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01076955 Civilian Labor Force - With a Disability, 16 to 64 Years, Women: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01076960

There’s more than one definition of disability. Getting any kind of financial support is extremely hard, but getting ADA provision much less so. Most people with a chronic disease which affects your life will have at least some protection from the ADA.

Getting onto disability can be made harder and therefore artificially deflate stats on the number of people who are suffering.

There are fewer SSA workers since the start of the pandemic and often, it takes multiple years for a disabled person to receive disability, often requiring resources that they do not have to complete the process.

This take is basically “I dont know anyone with X” -> “X isn’t real”. I mean you’re not even trying to make an argument.

You could say the same about any other sickness that doesnt have obvious externally visible symptoms, and you’d still not be making an argument.

>I mean you’re not even trying to make an argument.

So why are you also suggesting they are making one?

They clearly presented a skeptical take as an option, then asked a question about whether a better alternative exists. More charity in interpretation would be useful for you.

The issue with the argument is that it's non-falsifiable because it outright rejects the only evidence without providing any counter evidence.

As the other poster said, they did not make an argument. The impulse to interpret an earnest question as an argument is incorrect.

If I say "here is option X" and make no suggestion that it is my position or advocate it as fact, why would you then try to force it to become my position? Analysis of possible positions is allowed and encouraged.

They did make an argument by the way they framed their question. Let's say the only evidence of long covid can also be explained by people lying. The way their question is framed makes it sound like we should assume lying is the most likely explanation in such a case.

You're confusing a hypothetical with an argument. No science would be possible if were were constantly tripped up in this way.

> You're confusing a hypothetical with an argument.

What's the difference between a hypothesis and an argument?

Hypothesis: "highly conjectural; not well supported by available evidence."

This should be obvious...

Conjecture not well supported by evidence is not mutually exclusive with making an argument. In fact, that’s what people are saying: OP was making a bad argument [because it’s conjecture].

Again, argument requires them to suggest it's fact, which they did not. Your interpretation of the framing is subjective. They said "To get the convo started: The skeptical take" which clearly offers distance between their view and the statement. You are uncharitably ignoring this.

> which clearly offers distance between their view and the statement.

It’s also not a requirement that you exclusively argue your own personal view point. And of course appearing impartial to an argument via language like “to play devil’s advocate, etc.” is a common device used to introduce an argument you may believe, or want other to believe, without being inflammatory.

It's possible for long covid to be real and not have a definitive biomarker as evidence. For instance, it would have been obvious that someone with Alzheimers or dementia was ill even before the invention of the microscope. Likewise with long covid, it is extremely frustrating and dehumanizing when aloof skeptics question its very existence when you can simply talk to the sufferers and see the proof for yourself. Why would a marathoner suddenly be unable to walk up the stairs without their heart rate rising to over 150bpm? Our lack of understanding of the illness is not good reason to dismiss the existence of the illness; or else if it were, then the field of medicine should have never began at all!

The way your question is phrased implies that you think that sufferers of complex and poorly understood diseases should be assumed guilty (of fraud or insanity) until proven innocent.

If that is what you're trying to say, then I would reply that both the history of medicine, as well as the sheer amount of known (to say nothing of unknown) blind spots within current medical practice point toward a more credulous approach toward these sufferers, if you want to believe the truly sick significantly more often than you want to catch the fakers.

> The skeptical take is of course that there is no long covid. either people are faking for benefits or they are being sincere but imagining it.

I think the skeptical take is neither of these things. What you've described is more of a cynical contrarian take.

The skeptical take is not "there's no long covid" but "there MIGHT not be long covid".

And it's not ~"people are faking or imagining"~ it's "lots of people develop weird health problems every day that never get explained, which many will now point to as long covid, which makes it super hard to know if long covid exists".

Is there firm evidence that pain even exists? I don’t think there are any biomarkers, we just have to take the patients word for it.

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