Covid's damage lingers in the heart
magazine.hms.harvard.edu
magazine.hms.harvard.edu
We check things with a pulse oximeter when feeling unwell and quite often we see elevated heart basal rates associated with infections, uncorrelated with body temperature. These tends to correlate quite fell with feelings of tiredness/uncomfort. I found it interesting that doctors most of the times feel entirely uninterested with this.
This is absolutely true and one part of the root problem. The other aspect of this is that most of the heart tracking devices we use live on the wrist and the data is of questionable quality and application. Many cardiologists know this and dismiss the devices and its uses wholesale, but that approach is wrong. The data isnt 'wholesale bad' its just bad at many things (hilariously, particularly bad at the things they advertise on the most). One of the things its GOOD at doing is noting when your heart is behaving differently from your baselines, which is why its generally pretty good at noting AFIB or pre-AFIB characteristics, for example.
This level of complexity on the issue, coupled with the relative lack of understanding with post-infection behavior/detailed immunoresponse, is definitely leading to some less than ideal approaches to patient care. and obviously the nature of COVID, being the first generally uniform viral infection of the entire population since 1918, being a huge wrench.
source: I am not a doctor in any way, my dad has a 30 year history of complex heart problems and i get to speak with his specialists a lot. like, 12 of them by this point. I work in tech and play with many types of health tracker devices regularly so it comes up in conversation.
I'd agree here. Most doctors have not really caught up to the giant data science revolution we have going on. A couple years ago I bought one of these [1] while trying to diagnose some general health/fatigue issues and after a year of data logging and life experiences it was pretty cool to watch how my HR/O2 numbers changed in response to various events - long bike rides, strength training, getting a cold, being on antibiotics, etc. The nice thing about this device was 1) it's much more accurate than smart watches and 2) provides raw time-series data vs some abstract fancy marketing UI.
At this point I now do comprehensive bloodwork panels at least quarterly and while I don't use the O2 device anymore I still have the baseline data saved. I'd recommend to anyone to start recording this type of data while you subjectively "feel good". It'll make it much easier to diagnose + press doctors on health issues if you can point to data associated with a time you felt well.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Wellue-O2Ring-Wearable-Sleep-Monitor/...
So I would say it is 100% due to the siloing and proprietary enshittification endemic to the industry. They don't want to help science, they want vendor lock-in.
Well, compared to psychology researchers, the medical researchers are doing pretty well on data science. I‘m not joking. In psychology, data science just doesn’t exist yet. P-values still rule the day and overfitting is a term they have never heard of.
I was very worried at first because one of my personally prioritized indicators of fitness was how quickly I could go from say, zone 3 to 50bpm. This was quite low, then suddenly I was having 70-90bpm around 30m after exercising.
Yet it gradually went away and I never actually experienced discomfort or anything like it. I haven’t seen a high restating rate in around 6 months. I’d say it lasted around a year, in total.
I can see why this condition could kill people with pre-existing heart issues or generally poor cardiovascular health. Having your heart working nearly double time at rest is a huge task when you’re already struggling. It was a great eye opener; I really don’t want to have this again and have it be the final straw that causes a heart attack.
That cardiologist told me that covid has no effect on the cardiovascular system and the heart cannot feel pain and discharged me to a PCP after running a handful of tests to rule out anything (Echo, EKG, labs, etc)
Now here we are in 2023, I have had long covid for almost 3 years and cardiologists are now admitting they are wrong. This article is pretty telling on the dismissive behavior and the truth catching up to them.
Not a surprise - almost everything initially said about covid was wrong; maybe next time people saying things should be so absolutely definitive about things they clear don't know enough about (yet). I would rather doctors hedged their advice/proclamations a bit, then to be definitive when they shouldn't be.
Then we'd be complaining that they're telling us two wholely different opinions.
Medicine, like science, is based on available data. I have no problem with them admitting they were wrong based on new data.
That is not 'science'.
I think this is being too demanding of doctors. Their opinion changed because the science changed. Discovery and understanding simply takes time. Practicing doctors aren't scientists, they aren't charged with the responsibility for discovering new disorders and treating them correctly on a per-patient basis. Their job is simply to understand the best available consensus about disorders and treat their patients accordingly. And... it sounds like your doctor did exactly that.
And it surely sucks terribly that the understanding was wrong. But that's not really the fault of your doctor. No one could have treated you better at the time except via dumb luck. It's OK to accuse them of being an asshole about it, but not really about being "wrong" so much.
My story I hope shows this exact sentiment mentioned in this article:
> “It’s important to acknowledge that these patients are suffering,” Anagnostopoulos says. “Many of them are young and unaccustomed to being sick or held back in any way from what they want to do. They often feel they haven’t been taken seriously. And what they want to know is that the doctor sitting with them is developing a plan for improvement.”
It's basically a converse take to the "You're not wrong, you're just an asshole" meme.
> As the COVID-19 pandemic was getting underway in early 2020, doctors in Wuhan, China, began to report that many patients hospitalized with the disease had cardiac injuries. Heart attacks were frequent, especially in patients with underlying risk factors, and there were numerous cases of myocarditis, which occurs when the heart’s muscle layers become inflamed. Roughly a quarter of patients with severe COVID-19 had elevated blood levels of troponin, a protein marker for cardiac damage.
Still was dismissive of covid having any effect on cardiovascular. But you can only learn so much in 60 minutes over 3 months right?
"Doctors report many patients [...]" framing is true of all sorts of nonsense, all the time (including about covid! Hydroxychloroquine was being boosted by the same kind of anecdotal evidence). That's... just not how medicine works. How do you know which anecdotes are nonsense and which are correct? You do the science. And they did. But not in time for a lot of people, and yes, that's awful.
And yes, what you state is exactly what the doctor should do. Otherwise you're taking all the testing and experience of all the other doctors that have already worked on this issue and tossed it out the window. When an individual patient shows anonymous behavior your document everything you can for future investigation. You don't get to play research laboratory on your patients.
That lasts until someone who is the CTO's buddy gets a hair and decides to get exec override, then pushes to prod, deleting the company financials.
And the medical equivalent of QA is generally a very awe inspiring strain of nurse.
All airplanes of the identical model have an identical manual.
No two humans respond the same to complex (or often, even simple) health conditions/situations.
Just because we don't have enough docs doesn't mean custom solutions are the enemy.
But the country we are left with has too few doctors, too many old people, and too many unhealthy people. We can argue until we're blue on why that is the case, but that does nothing to change that your doctor has about 5 minutes with you and an entire waiting room full of patients today, tomorrow, and the everyday after that to the point they are turning patients away in most places.
In recent years the medical profession has been shifting from being mostly an art to mostly a science. Clinicians are supposed to follow evidence-based medicine protocols rather than making things up as they go along because those produce better outcomes on average. They should only deviate from those protocols if the patient has some sort of contraindication, experiences serious side effects, or fails to respond. Unfortunately we still lack clear protocols for many conditions including post-viral syndrome.
The doctor says "Yep, Covid fucked you over"... What changes?
That doctor is not handing you out a candy bag of medicine to see what fixes your issues. Your "was training" is still going to be that "was". Now after some large number of people like you start showing up for the same issue, then some smaller portion of them get direct diagnosis (either post death, or during some other surgery), the doctors won't know what to do as a means of treatment. It's likely it will be years longer till we have effective means of treating long covid symptoms.
1. I would feel taken seriously.
2. I would still be seeing them to check-up on my health.
3. I would be discussing the budding literature to try promising things (i.e. atorvastatin, AT1RB, etc) - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9520195/
4. Other patients who are young and healthy are also validated (i.e. we are seeing more of you)
5. etc
The problem with western medicine today is that if you cannot be treated, they want you out of the system. The system is starting to get much better at adapting to these novel health challenges though. I suppose that will happen when there's 65 million across the world with these issues!
For example, I'm looking at my HCP's app right now and can schedule a call with my doctors as early as next week for an e-visit. For an in-person visit, it's closer to a month. But they have absolutely been taking my extra office visits due to my condition.
AI might eventually reduce charting workload slightly. A few vendors have launched new products in that space but they haven't had much impact yet. In the ideal case they might allow for an average doctor to squeeze in a couple more short encounters per day.
Long COVID's effects are so random and personalized that many people have to throw the kitchen sink at it until they find a solution that works for them.
back then no one knew anything about COVID. it's not like the doctor was hiding the truth. people are expecting them to be all-knowing is just being unrealistic. did you expect him to just pull out a magical pill from his back pocket to fix everything.
> I wasn't getting enough sleep and I focused on fixing that. A few months after that, my resting heart rate started to trend down and has come back to pre-covid levels. I don't know what to make of it all
Of course you know what to make of it all. You were obsessing over the metrics available to you, as many have done as well (myself included), and increased your overall stress levels, bumping your heart rate and making it erratic, and messing up your sleep, which only served to compound it all. You took a year off from strenuous exercise you said, of course it takes time to get your resting rate back down to levels before you were sick and when actively exercising. Imo there is no mystery here. Focusing on your sleep calmed your mind and your body followed suite, combined with the exercise having time to improve circulation and make you more tired to give you better sleep, which helps to lower your overall stress levels, which lowers heart rate, etc, etc.
The true question is, did the heart rate elevation cause you any physical issues, or was the issue only that you had visibility into the number. Or put another way, had it not been for 24/7 readings of your heart rate, and notifications from your watch, would it ever have manifested itself physically and been something you felt, and noticed. Based on everything starting out with "my watch would alert me" or similar, I'm gonna say if you're honest with yourself, had you not had a watch the issue might have come and gone and never been noticed.
Edit: here come the downvotes for the crime of claiming some things can be self inflicted esp when it comes to fitbit/apple watches. I've watched countless friends and family members fall victim to the obsession of metrics, freaking out about their heart rates all the time, etc. I used to do it myself. It's not a bad thing, but it is a thing, and people need to acknowledge it.
I'd upvote the former, downvote the latter.
I’m mainly pointing out that downvoting isn’t necessarily “you’re wrong” but often “you’re not being constructive with your communication style”.
I had had it off and on since the 1990s, usually for a day or two. But, after each Covid infection I had it for several days, the worst lasting a couple of weeks. Burning sensation in the breast plate, physically hot to the the touch where the ribs connected to the sternum.
Also consider that taking on strenuous exercise when you haven't done it in a while is going to cause elevated heart rates, beyond what your previous normal heart rate was during that exercise. Regular exercise will also eventually lower your resting heart rate. I think "starting a new strenuous exercise regimen" (because yes, after a year's break, that counts as "new") would also be unsurprisingly linked to elevated heart rates, even resting.
Certainly the burning sensation in your chest area is concerning, but did you rule out the more simple and common cause: acid reflux?
I agree that it's unfortunate that there hasn't been enough research on consumer health monitoring data, but I don't think your story says much about the cardiologists' diagnostic process. But I also expect that, with the general lack of understanding of the long-term effects of COVID, many doctors are not equipped to diagnose lingering health issues stemming from an infection.
But IANAD(octor), so what do I know.
Yes, that was my first thought too while reading the comment. A lower heartrate during exercise and resting is a strong fitness indicator. And pausing your exercises for a year significantly reduces your fitness. Of course you will see elevated heart rates.
That doesn’t sound like they ignored your concerns at all. It’s odd that you present it as such.
Then my wife went for hip surgery. We were told it was routine, everything is going to be great, less pain, better range of motion. My wife came out of the ER with the inability to move her leg, drop foot, nerve damage. She went in able and came out disabled. 3 big surgeries later, she can walk again. UCSF doesn't want to hear us out on anything related to that botched surgery and the surgeon has since moved to New York.
Dealing with medical professionals is like dealing with toddlers. You have to push them on everything or they simply do not care.
I get all my care done in Taiwan and everything is fine and the doctors all seem to be mostly happy with their jobs, and a few regular nurses like me because I look like a famous actor, so they're always pretty chatty and seem to be mostly ok with life.
I don't necessarily encourage medical tourism but simply fly to Taipei, find a doctor you want to see, and sign up for an appointment. It will be a little more work without the NHI card but still probably less than whatever you're dealing with. If you get medical scans, almost everyone can print a CD with them in a day or two if you ask. Getting care even without insurance was cheaper than just my US insurance premiums.
Having someone fluent in Chinese is important enough I'd say it was required but if you restrict yourself to a smaller sunset of hospitals and clinics that serve foreigners around like Tianmu you may be able to get by with a translator app.
People outside NHI are uncommon and their medical system isn't really set up to support it. You may want to consider actual medical tourism facilities of which I've heard of several in Mexico or Costa Rica.
You and your mother may also want to consider rioting, because the US system is deliberately and almost uniquely stupid.
Also, people don't realize, you can get health insurance in other countries. Prior to covid, I was an expat living in Vietnam and had very good full health coverage for about $4500 a year. I just found a local insurance broker who did all the paperwork for me.
That is, our general health cost picture and way insurance works is a subject of concern, but the bigger issue for this specific talking point is just general lack of safety net.
This isn't limited to the US. I am in the Netherlands and to the best of my knowledge Belgium/Germany aren't much better.
I'm not sure what you do, but lets say you're a programmer. You love programming and want to make the world better with it. Of course you also have $400,000 in education debt from becoming a programmer and need a job to ensure you don't end up bankrupt. So you get a job for $bigCorp that pays well. BigCorp tells you that you must push out 100,000 lines of code per day or you're out. You look around and all the jobs in what you do pretty much act the same way, and those bills are coming up at the end of the month. Now, you know you cannot turn out quality code at that rate so you cut back quality to a bare minimum to meet the metrics of continued employment.
Most doctors are in a similar situation these days, very few independent offices exist. They are parts of "GiantHealthCareCorpofAmerica,INC" that cares far more about how much the shareholders are going to make than how the patents are, even though each individual doctors would like to give better individual patient care.
I did a little adjustment to the numbers in the sense I put them closer to the numbers actual doctors pay for their schooling, not exactly programmer pay. On average doctors pay and programmers pay is very similar. Doctors schooling and programmers schooling is nothing alike at all. Moreso, it's far easier to get blacklisted as a doctor then a programmer for any number of reasons (programmer ethics, lol funny). Where you have more risks, more regulations, and more costs the more likely the default behavior becomes to toe the line.
My personal side project is finding and documenting ways to get treatment while avoiding the insurance system as much as possible. IMO you really should only see a GP in the sick-care system as someone to order the most basic labs and screenings, and to receive reports you seek out on your own from specialists who take cash payments.
You can download the US Preventative Services App, punch in your data, and see the recommended screeners for your situation.
For accute issues like getting in a car accident going through the established system is still the best option.
I noticed a similar problem in other fields. The other day I spent an additional, unnecessary hour at the dealership, because the guy who was supposed to notify me that the car is ready... vanished. He had three other clipboards from other customers on his desk when I arrived to ask about the status.
My mortgage application process was, simply put, a dumpster fire - my form sat idle for a month until someone finally looked at it.
I feel as if all the accumulated karma from all my botched ticket estimates is finally coming back.
Let us know if this is true so we can prove the simulation hypothesis.
The idiomatic transfer is fairly obvious, although the implication of consequences if the admonished party is insufficiently contrite has become sort of optional, I think.
Glad you recovered. If you have an Apple watch be sure to also track your overnight HRV. (I have a Garmin). While many blood tests fail to be illuminating, RHR and HRV at least can indicate something is wrong. A high HRV/Low RHR is good, Low HRV/High HR is bad. And yeah, cardiologists are the worst when it comes to unexplained heart issues that are not picked up by an ECHO.
There’s solid research causally linking lack of sleep to high blood pressure the next day.
Gotta ask, what did you do for this?
Good sleep comes with good habits.
No liquid consumption near bedtime. Caffeine intake reduction and cutoff at least 6 hours before bedtime. Having a wind down routine instead of waiting on my body to tell me to sleep. (Use phone in bed instead of a computer mainly)
I was averaging less than 6 hours of sleep a night. Nodding off at work was common, and I would compensate with caffeine.
I still don't feel energetic, but I'm less tired now, and looking to increase my nightly sleep to 7.5 hours. It just sucks sometimes to get home at 7 PM and try to sleep at 10 PM.
Interestingly, I have an irregular heartbeat just normally, and have inner ear problems that cause my heart rate to change for doing nothing at all, and my watch has never made any warning about it.
The other doctor has a magnetic resonanz device (doesn't work...) and suggested to me homeopathy with the sentence 'i know people say it doesn't work but it works for my patients' (come on srsly? textbook stupidity...)
Since i know how broad the spectrum is in my field of expertise (its huge and i work in it obviously) i just have to assume the spectrum is still wide enough for doctors too.
I hate this.
I hope/wish for an AI doctor
Don't delegate the most important parts of your life.
Doctors will kill you.
Police will show up too late.
Lawyers will miss important details and defenses, and you'll be stuck with the consequences.
Accountants and financial advisors will squander your wealth.
Know how to defend yourself against violence. Read and understand legal documents before you sign them. Understand your investments. Ask questions.
And reject anyone who gets defensive when you exercise your right to control your own life.
Fire your doctor if they are offended when you advocate for yourself.
Fire your financial advisor if they get irritated when you sit and read the 40 page contract they ask you to sign.
Fire your accountant if they write you off when you ask them questions about your books or taxes.
These are your support systems, you want experts in your corner you can rely on. You want people you can delegate "sticking to the plan" to. But, ultimately, your life and freedom is yours. Do not delegate them.
On the other hand, I asked my wife to give me a back massage, so she booked an appointment for me at the spa down the road. I wasn't expecting her to delegate that, but it was still nice...
The worst thing is that the incidence of post-covid is hard to predict as it does not depend on severity of the initial disease. If you had a covid, you should be very attentive to a possible onset of post-viral symptoms.
Why? This might cause more harm than good, and if it's something that turns out bad enough, you probably don't need to be particularly attentive to notice it.
There is no standard treatment yet, but things that treat beriberi and pellagra do seem to work for post-covid as well, to some degree.
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/new-research-offers-clues-to-...
Have you considered you might be depressed?
I have somewhat severe post-Covid symptoms. I took a look at the Beriberi symptoms list. I have every single symptom of both wet and dry beriberi.
Time for a Thiamine blood test.
Post-covid is mostly physiological. Sure, it may cause some cognitive and psychological manifestations as well (asthenia, depression, derealization), but without treating the underlying physiology there is no way out.
Are there any actual treatments though, besides "rest"?
This one is:
@EONutrition
Mega Dose Vitamin Therapy: Viral Infection & Post-viral Illness
Many of those are so subjective that just posting it here is almost guaranteed to lead to people freaking out and seeking unnecessary treatment.
Just like "freaking out" can cause unnecessary doctor trips, telling people they're seeking unnecessary treatment can cause negative health outcomes. There are many minority communities (most of which have almost no representation on HN, but anyway) have a myriad of different factors preventing them from going to or listening to doctors.
Ultimately you can't control if someone "freaks out" or not. But you can share information that someone might use to protect their health.
How did you learn this?
There’s a difference between telling people to talk to their doctor if they have concerns and posting a list of symptoms which is likely to create concern where none of existed. Most of the mentioned symptoms are highly correlated with stress and anxiety. Listing them and encouraging people to pay attention to them is almost certainly doing more harm than good.
There is also no widely recognized evidence based treatment for any of this. Advising people to seek treatment is likely going to be completely unhelpful, or worse encourage people to go down some quack rabbit hole and start mega dosing vitamins.
Also I’d appreciate if you didn’t imply that cautioning people against posting this kind of medical advice was somehow anti-minority. I can guarantee you that no serious medical professional or minority health advocates are happy to see people posting these symptom lists on forums.
With the exception of loss of smell and taste, these are all also associated with stress physiology. The exact mechanisms are unclear, but lifelong anxiety sufferers will be familiar with many of these. I've personally experienced all of these since I was a young teenager/child. Well before COVID was around.
I don't want to minimize long COVID, because it is very real. But we should be careful about encouraging people with generalized anxiety symptoms to over-identify as long COVID.
When the body is in a fight or flight mode and there is no apparent danger, we tend to notice these much more. But overall, they are absolutely and without doubt harmless.
But there is a big difference: slow metabolic rate leads to eventual cell death (metabolic encephalopathy), while panic disorder is physiologically harmless in comparison. It's hard to distinguish between the two, and not every doctor is able to do that.
As an interesting observation, a metabolic disorder is not responsive to antidepressants alone.
Among the people I know and that I'm aware of, there are three broad groups (spanning age, sex, and numerous other traits):
1) People who generally ignored the fear that governments, doctors, and the media tried to instill. They disregarded the lockdowns and other measures imposed by government, and remained calm. They didn't take tests, they didn't wear masks, they didn't get any shots, and they generally went about their lives as best that they could as if nothing was happening.
2) People who bought into it, and got somewhat worked up whenever it was pushed by the media. They masked, they stayed indoors when asked to do so, they took tests when they had to, they got shots and maybe boosters, and so on. But once the media focus moved on to other topics, they pretty much forgot about it all and moved on, too.
3) People who became extremely paranoid. Some of them masked month after month, even while at home, which they avoided leaving for weeks at a time. They took daily tests. They've taken every shot and booster available. They lived in a constant state of fear for years. Even after most other people moved on, they didn't, or in some cases, still haven't.
The people I know who fall into the first group are consistently doing well, including those in their 70s, 80s, and even a few in their 90s. None have died, and none have had any major medical problems. I know that some of them don't even know if they ever contracted it, since they never got tested. If they had it, it was indistinguishable from any other cold or flu.
It's a mix for people in the second group, although this is a numerically larger group. Some have had major health complications, including cancer and cardiovascular-related issues, but they generally don't blame their health problems on having tested positive for infection at some point.
The third group are the only ones I hear of attributing ongoing health problems, no matter how minor or common, to a prior infection. Collectively, they now seem to have more serious medical issues, even among those who appeared quite healthy prior to early 2020. Also, I know that a number of these people are repeatedly testing positive for infection, even recently, despite having had numerous shots and boosters, and despite having supposedly overcome one or more prior infections that should have granted some degree of immunity.
I can't say for sure if it's the only factor, but a person displaying more fear/paranoia in the past and present does appear to correlate with more medical problems in the present, and a greater likelihood of attributing such problems to having had prior test-indicated infection(s).
The general mood there was anti mask from the beginning and anti vaccine once that emerged, obviously. And let me tell you, those people got FUCKED UP by covid. No one I know there has any grandparents now! They all died of covid. Several families lost a parent in their 50s to covid, several more to "pneumonia" since like you said they don't even test for it. Another handful are newly bedridden with mysterious illnesses that they're totally sure have nothing to do with covid. I'm not certain that they do either but it's hard to rule it out.
So I don't know man. I don't know who you know. But the people I know who ignored covid get wrecked by it. Every family touched.
The least-fearful subset tended to be in Ontario and Alberta, the central US, Eastern Europe, and India.
The most-fearful subset were in BC, Quebec, urban Ontario, the coastal and urban areas of the US, and urban Western Europe.
For the grandparents you mention in the cases you're aware of, were they in care homes of some sort?
In Canada, for example, neglect was allegedly a serious problem at some facilities, even leading to significant numbers of deaths there among the elderly:
"Patients died from neglect, not COVID-19, in Ontario LTC homes, military report finds: ‘All they needed was water and a wipe down’"
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-canadian-mili...
Could something like that have been going on in the region you mention?
I personally knew someone in their 40s who died and two others around the same age who got hospitalised.
I knew several older people who died; I don't know how fearful they were of the disease, but given that it killed them they would have been right to have scared of it.
The mumbo jumbo idea that people were avoiding getting sick through positive thinking is nonsense.
The death counts from Canada's government officials from that era are very questionable, for example.
As early as June of 2020, the "public health" authority in Canada's most-populous city (and the 4th highest population in North America) revealed that the counting of deaths was being done using a methodology that sounds quite dubious:
"Individuals who have died with COVID-19, but not as a result of COVID-19 are included in the case counts for COVID-19 deaths in Toronto."
https://twitter.com/TOPublicHealth/status/127588839006028596...
BC was using a dubious counting approach as of April 2022:
"Fewer than half of COVID-19 deaths reported since B.C. changed counting methods were caused by the disease"
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/fewer-than-half-of-covid-19-deaths-rep...
Alberta was also using a dubious death-counting approach, as described in this April 2021 article:
"According to Dr. Deena Hinshaw, any death that has been flagged where COVID-19 is a possible cause is included in the initial count, even if the official cause of death remains unknown."
https://globalnews.ca/news/7814731/alberta-determine-covid-1...
Quebec's counting of deaths as of May 2022 (and apparently before that) was also dubious:
"Quebec’s interim public health director, Dr. Luc Boileau, has acknowledged that the province has seen a “huge” number of deaths linked to COVID-19. Quebec’s high death toll, he said last Thursday, is explained by the fact the province counts a COVID-19 death as any death involving someone who has the disease.
He said a government study from January indicated that around 30 per cent of the official COVID-19 deaths in the province’s hospitals involved people who tested positive for COVID-19 but whose principle cause of death was not the disease. He said about 40 per cent to 50 per cent of official COVID-19 deaths in the province involve people who had the disease but who died of other causes."
https://globalnews.ca/news/8801205/quebec-still-reporting-do...
As you can see, "the actual data" from that time period are essentially garbage, which explains why they often don't correspond well to real-world observations.
Also, given that your categories are basically politely-reworded "Heroes who didn't believe the evil lie that Covid is a serious public health problem that we should probably do some stuff about", "People who believed the evil lies somewhat but eventually learned the Truth" and "Weak paranoid stupid people who bought into all the lies and were consumed by fear and panic as a result", I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not really coming at this from a perspective of honest inquiry.
So much for your anecdotes.
However, the cells cannot consume all that glucose despite the massive insulin presence due to a wrecked metabolic machinery of mitochondria, and the body remains hanging in a diabetic, insulin-resistant state of T2DM. If ATP demand is still not met, hyperventilation eventually reaches its peak state, and the individual starts experiencing shortness of breath. If this state of unmet homeostasis lasts for some longer time, the signs of pathological tissue hypoxia start to kick in, causing the appearance of neurological symptoms, which are then followed by metabolic panic attacks (crashes) when left untreated. After that, a more serious cognitive impairment may follow: slurred speech, partial vision loss, problems with spatial navigation, photophobia, etc. All those symptoms correspond to a border-line dementia and may signify the close proximity of a point of no return.
There are various groups who are now using machine learning to predict long covid based on reporting of symptoms and even immune features.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iB5NclIemQ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYNMzaZk_iU&t=3203s
Lots of budding research here on long covid / post covid conditions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=278vwGkFXRM
Also this sentence is just strange to me. The whole point of open science is peer review and truth I thought?
> An initial rush to respond to the pandemic produced a flood of observational and non-randomized studies in this area, he says, which spread more confusion than illumination.
The common "streetlight effect" bias comes to mind:
> A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, "this is where the light is".
The "trust the science" messaging emerged only in response to a tidal wave of nonsense.
Do you really think anyone involved wanted to focus on PR rather than the real problem(s) at hand?
A quick google search shows this isn't that uncommon and it's one of those 'wait and see' situations. Frustrating and I wonder if there's a longterm consequence. Strangely, the first time I got COVID it had no impact on RHR. Second time I was hit much harder and couldn't leave bed for a full day, something that has never happened to me.
It isn't entirely surprising given that the heart is in constant motion, unlike skeletal muscles which can repair while uncontracted.
> The human heart has only limited self-healing powers and a limited regenerative capacity. A damaged heart muscle and the resulting loss of function can usually not be fully restored. The reason for this is that heart muscle cells in the adult organism have largely lost their ability to divide.
> https://www.mpg.de/17679417/heart-regeneration-after-reprogr...
One description that always resonated with me is the tradeoff between capacity for repair and uncontrolled repair or cancer.
Think of two extremes: 1) no capacity for repair: once something is damaged, the cells don't divide and you lost functionality. But there can be no run-away growth or cancer. 2) infinite capacity for repair: damage cells can always be repaired but a bad instruction can cause run away division and growth and become cancerous.
So evolution has to figure out where to turn that knob. Do you want to allow repair at a risk of cancer?
Generally things that didn't get "injured" evolved to reduce repair capacity. Rarely (ever?) do you hear of heart or eye cancer. Those cells just don't have much repair capacity. But think of skin. That's always getting damaged, so it makes sense for there to be more capacity of repair there at the cost of more cancer.
It's all tradeoffs. And it can change over (generational) time. Consider a warring population, if people are getting killed younger before they have the time to get cancer, then that population will end up with more capacity for repair because it makes more sense for survival to repair because cancer never gets involved.
And the converse can happen, when long life becomes the norm then the tradeoff change and cancer prevention is more beneficial than total repair capacity.
Just painting with broad strokes here, it's not exact, but a trend that does show up between populations.
It may very well be that this particular vaccine caused new health problems in some (likely small, but non-negligible) part of the population, and that the trade-offs involved still weigh heavily in favor of vaccination.
Absent mindless "if you aren't with us, you're with the terrorists" thinking, one might hope that the negative health impacts would be investigated and mitigated to further improve the vaccine technology.
Heart damage has been a known likely problem for a while, hopefully we're on the cusp of better diagnosis and treatment protocols.
"Among the more common lingering problems — affecting up to one-third of all patients with long COVID — is postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), which causes the heart to beat abnormally fast. [...] in people with POTS, the blood vessels may not constrict appropriately. Instead, the heart rate must rise even more than normal to compensate for the “lazy” blood vessels, says Lee Lewis. Conversely, the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in when the body rests, instructing blood vessels to dilate and instructing the heart to beat more slowly so the blood pressure goes down."
"Similar to POTS, if patients remain sedentary for too long, Anagnostopoulos says, they could develop cardiac atrophy; decreased stroke volume, meaning that the heart doesn’t pump enough blood out of the left ventricle during contraction; or compensatory tachycardia, characterized by resting heart rates that exceed 100 beats per minute."
A blood thinner or anti-inflammatory isn't going to treat the POTS or sedentary effects, and deprivation of oxygen is going to do longer-term damage to the heart. If you did use an anti-inflammatory, you'd have to use it at a low dose for a long period of time (months), but that's still not addressing the other issues.
Specifically vitamin D deficiency makes things worse and most people are at least mildly lacking.
Good thing we're adding more Purell stations everywhere /s
lol jk no one even refills them anymore
So you're saying that all those scientific studies that prove you wrong with 0 that prove you right actually prove that the vast majority of scientists, pharmacists and medical doctors are "in on it"? You should work more on critical thinking, but I'm not expecting anything but personal insults from a person like this.
I actually know a guy that was on respirators and a medical induced coma for 2 weeks because of covid. Age 45, morbidly overweight. They saved his life. Still doesn't believe in covid and talks shit about doctors. Fits his personality tho as he once killed a guy because of a minor drunken disagreement (hit him in the face, the fall and trauma to the head did the rest, spent years in jail).
Reality is, its not all that new, is not solely attributable to Covid and there should/could have been much more research conducted a long time ago that would/could have laid way more ground work instead of researchers coming out with articles years after the fact that just reverberate what many have known all along.
Post-Acute Sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC) overlaps other post viral fatigue syndromes associated with other infections. SARS 2003 also left many with a storm of symptoms that almost perfectly aligned with Long-covid. The infection itself may stem from a different virus or one related, so the onset of the infection, the aggressiveness of the virus, how quickly it peaks and how the immune system reacts, may be different, but many of the sequelas overlap. Many viral infection impact the body differently but devolve into pneumonia for example. So the connection between viral illnesses and ME/CFS and/or POTS may not be a specific protein, or specific interactions, but the shock to bodies, the response to a viral illness followed by secondary infections. The strain put on the immune system, the inflammation, the cytokine storm, etc.
Myalgic encephalomyelitis, also called chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS for short, has been affecting people for a long time. It has been triggered in people after viral infections. POTS risk factors as noted by Hopkins medicine (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...) "may begin after an apparent or confirmed viral illness, but it can also appear following surgery and other health events."
ME/CFS + POTS (very often comorbid) like chronic illnesses have been cropping up for a long time. Due to the array of symptoms experienced by everyone, its made it hard to differentiate between the combination of potential symptoms and individual symptoms in isolation and the fact that there's no single test to diagnose ME/CFS. The diagnostic requirements for POTS are much simpler and clear, although a cure is also elusive. There has also been a severe lack of knowledge within the medical community, as these aren't resolved illnesses, so patients have been brushed under the rug, misdiagnosed and prescribed treatments which have often been counter productive and even harmful in many events. The complexity of it all and lack of explanations or solutions for patients has frustrated doctors.
Lets go back a look at multiple flu epidemics and their long term outcomes.
In "Historical Insight into Infections and Disorders Associated with Neurological and Psychiatric Sequelae Similar to Long COVID" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33633106/ they mention "Historically, the common symptom of altered cognition has been reported during earlier pandemics, which include the influenza pandemics of 1889 and 1892 (Russian flu), the Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1919), encephalitis lethargica, diphtheria, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome or post-viral fatigue syndrome)."
In "Lessons from the 1918/1919 Influenza Pandemic" https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2020/04/09/lessons-19181..., "Dr. G. Holliday wrote to the British Medical Journal on August 17, 1918, that “mental symptoms were frequent” in the cases he saw; Samuel West informed readers of The Lancet in Feb. 1, 1919, that “the depression which follows influenza is so constant that it ought to be regarded as part of the disease.” The medical correspondent for The Times, having contracted the illness himself, advised readers that “the most distressing symptom was a swift loss of mental capacity and then inability to think coherently.” “All forms of hysteria have been observed after influenza,” reported Thomson and Thomson in 1919,” such as hysterical convulsions and the so-called hystero-epilectic attacks.” “Post-influenzal neurasthenia is very familiar,” they noted, “post-influenzal psychoses” “frequently observed and reported.” They cited a study that asserted that influenza, “of all the infectious diseases . . . is the most likely to be followed by mental disorder.”
Note "Post-influenzal neurasthenia", or "an ill-defined medical condition characterized by lassitude, fatigue, headache, and irritability, associated chiefly with emotional disturbance.". In today's medicine, doctors are required to rule all known and understood causes of all your symptoms before coming to the conclusion that you suffer from ME/CFS. Thats if you're lucky to get a doctor who's heard of this and if your doctor had the patience to follow you through all these non conclusive diagnostic tests, all while not defaulting to the simple and all to common medical gaslighting which usually involve telling you its all in your head. Since after all, you're complaining of too many things wrong at once, everything seems inconclusive, so you sound a bit off, and mental capacity is most often affected, brain fog being a very common overlapping symptom between all these post viral conditions, and you're easy to dismiss. Combine brain fog, uncontrollable fatigue, POTS like symptoms, and patients are more often than not just seen as headcases, hysterical, and a waste of time. If you read stories of patients who are now diagnosed with ME/CFS / POTS, many have been ill for decades, spent years and years if not decades seeking answers, most of them no longer living among the masses but chronically ill and barely meeting their basic needs day to day, the majority unable to even work. They're referred to now as "millions missing", and they've been too ill to fight, to ill to be seen, too ill to be recognized.
Its not until there's pandemics or large groups affected by some viral strain that the media starts talking about a rise in deaths or illnesses that some fringe articles will dig deeper and mention how a subset of people seem to just "stay sick" etc, often without relating the similarity between outcomes after other viral illnesses. With Covid having been so impactful and so much money being invested in research, its being talked about quite a bit more now, finally. That being said, it was clear before this even left China that what was to follow would be just as bad as the virus itself. Some people already had "long-covid", or post-viral fatigue, or one of the many names that seem to all want to describe these illnesses, and what would seem to be this fresh discovery of "long-covid" and all these mysteries left all previous sufferers dumb founded since they had been brushed under the rug and medically gaslit for decades. Its almost like the medical community runs out of time trying to figure it out and eventually moves on and when it comes up again, they slap another title on it and start all over again, often without taking into account every previous instance that could be used as a starting point. Obviously every virus, often every strain, can infect differently and have a different set of primary symptoms, but it should be clear by now that post viral and often chronic conditions, especially after flu like infections, seem to have a definite overlap.
I remember watching clips and amateur news coming out of China in early to mid January 2020 and thinking to myself OMG, I hope this doesn't spread across the globe. The aftermath is going to be worse than the virus itself. Only reason I instantly thought this is my partner contracted SARS in 2003 and after barely surviving, having spent 2 weeks in the ICU, went on to develop a host of issues including stroke, ME/CFS, POTS, and brain fog to just name the main overlapping ones. Having dealt with this for two decades, having exhausted all options available in current medicine, the impact of long-covid or post viral illness has been devastating. It has stripped so many of their lives, it has left so many as dysfunctional shells of their former selves, unable to work or contribute in meaningful ways in their lives, not due to lack of desire or willpower, but a body and mind that won't follow. I've seen first hand the struggle of seeing someone fight with everything they have to just be themselves, a person who did what they had to in order to overcome whatever life through at them, but now, the harder they fight, the harder they fall as their bodies reminds them after any amount of effort, exercise, or too much brain work, that they are ill, and they crash, almost as a punishment for even trying to fight, exacerbating many of their symptoms for days, weeks, even months.
The long lasting effects of this will not only be those who were lost, but those who now depend on the system and their loved ones, while requiring more medical attention. When its one person, its one thing, when its a percentage of your population, regardless of the whole digit representing that subset, the costs are huge. You're talking about a whole percentage of your population who essentially becomes a disabled retiree at whatever age they get ill. Those costs pile up over a lifetime, as does the collective loss of productivity within society. While society will adapt and readjust, it doesn't change anything for the millions upon millions who spend the rest of their lives desperately seeking answers, cures, any simple advancement that will give them a piece of their old lives back.
alright.. done typing, thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Whereas Long Covid is caused by a virus that more and more is linked to endothelial damage causing microcirculation problems. And Fucoidan is almost perfect for that job.
So I really do think it could be "the one"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19#Cause
> Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2)[2] is a strain of coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic
source!?!?
stop fearmongering!!!
thats a preprint!!
despite such things clearly needing 3 years to begin existing while there was a need to react in the present.
so having a source is nice.
thats the odd paradigm of studies, either nobody agrees with it or everyone says “well, duh”
There was a sea of preprints pointing in different directions, and it was difficult to navigate and know whom to believe.
Someone believing something strongly 3 years ago based on a few preprints is hardly vindicated for having great process when published research comes out validating that view now.
IMO the only approach is to roll with the punches and to go "ehhhhh, mayyyybe." (And of course use the best weight of information we have now).
right, this was only obvious with particular education instead of relying on the educated, who were saying all sorts of random things in every direction.
Hindsight bias. We tend to remember our intuitions when we were right, instead of fairly measuring them. Thus, we become convinced we are reliable and experts are not.
Damage to other tissues, especially from mild illness, was a possibility that was neither well-supported nor well-refuted in 2020. It was clear there was morbidity risk, but the mechanism was not understood (and is still not well-understood) and the magnitude was also uncertain and confounded.
In this case, I started keeping logs of what people said what across social media. I noticed that they never revisit their theories and just go on to the next one. In one example, the people calling the existence of the virus fictional were same people that were having 5g hysteria for the next year, some of the same people that moved to theories that required the existence of that virus but to stick with issues about the vaccine. Everyone that took the vaccine is supposed to have dropped dead by now according to many individuals theories. But these are not being revisited, there is no “I was wrong about that” “what happened to 5g” “how come only a couple people have myocarditis problems in 2023 instead of 75% of the population, or more since the actual virus does the same thing” its just on to the next one
so I try to revisit which theories I made to at least address them
But we were all talking about this way back in 2020. People just have strange memories and attention windows.
Indeed, but IMHO the strangeness is in you (and many others): How do you are you still calling this behavior "strange" - as if it's inexplicable - after seeing it right in front of your nose for years (in many areas, not just covid)?
Think of it this way: I can predict when this behavior will occur (though not its precise presentation). So can you. What predicts - what strongly correlates with - this behavior of theirs?
\ \ \ \ \ \
(Answer, obscured to prevent accidental reading: xreactionaryxpoliticsx.xthexreactionaryxmovementxfabricatesxwhateverxsuitsxtheirxideologicalxgoalsx;xtruthxandxconsequencesx,xincludingxhumanxlifex,xarexdisregarded.xwhenxthexmovementxturnedxagainstxcoronavirusx(toxbexantiliberal)xixhadxnoxdoubtxwhatxwasxcoming).
> It has to be one of this century's most widespread conspiracy theories.
The same group of people believe all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Being too dead set in opinions not well supported is always error but only sometimes a problem. IMO, that latter part is a big part of why it can be so difficult to correct.
Because for them Corona is harmless and the flu is harmless, even worse, to them Corona and flu are the same.
Only the vaccines are dangerous.
Fun fact, for some of these guys the flu shot isn't a vaccination because it's called a shot.
The low efficacy is, at least in part, because every spring they make an educated guess as to which ones would be best to put into the shot distributed in the fall. Not all of them can be put into the shot for cost and compatibility reasons.
One might get allergy shots (no vaccine at all). One might get a shot of morphine in an ambulance. Liquid injections have been known as shots since before we had vaccines.
"Research has since shown that myocytes for the most part escape infection. Instead, SARS-CoV-2 damages the heart indirectly by unleashing inflammatory reactions that affect cardiovascular functioning."
What is the true narrative?
There were many get go’s, and one for each variant. I know a healthy person who got the original and then delta variant, the latter which attacked his pancreas and left him with type 1 diabetes.
> for most people or was fine but that it was dangerous for certain people with pre-existibg respiratory issues
For most people, it’s asymptomatic in the short term. We’ve known it would have novel systemic effects from the “get go,” because it hits a nasty receptor. With the flu, a cytokine storm and non-respiratory cellular damage is a fluke. With Covid, every infection—even the asymptomatic ones—damage the gut, testes, gallbladder and heart (ACE2).
We don’t know how that damage manifests in the long run, there hasn’t been a long run. But we know there is damage being accumulated. We just don’t know if it’s benign. (You can’t generally look at a body and tell how many times it’s had the flu. You can with Covid.)
Citations?
This is posted on a lot of the social media that prays on people with medical anxiety. Nothing credible is ever provided.
There are two sides to every polarizing issue like this. In this case, the Covid doesn’t exist crowd are loud and the Covid irreparably damages you crowd are hunkered down in their homes and sticking to their in group.
Well, there are more sides. It's the primitive human brain that breaks it down to a dichotomy.
I wonder if it's the same with other Primates.
Weren't the mortality rates something like 1% for adults? I remember being shocked by the numerical consequences of the "just infect everyone and get it over with" plans floated by some governments.
I forget who the statistician was that accurately predicted the mortality rate of the initial variants by just scaling the predictions down.
Mortality of subsequent variants trends down on average because of selection pressures.
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