Sounds like a call for hypochondria with no upside. “My toe hurts this morning and I had covid a year ago, must be post covid. Time to…”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
How did you learn this?
Are there any actual treatments though, besides "rest"?
This one is:
@EONutrition
Mega Dose Vitamin Therapy: Viral Infection & Post-viral Illness
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).
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.
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.
So much for your anecdotes.