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Comment by patrickdavey | Hacker News Reader

I visited two friends recently when I was back in Ireland. They had both been fit climber/orienteering types. Both now incapacitated with long covid. Both had been vaccinated.

I went for a very short very slow walk with one of them. She wears a fancy Garmin which beeps when her heart rate goes over 100bpm. We walked for 15 mins and it went off.

I really hadn't realised quite how real and quite how incapacitating long covid is.

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ME/CFS cases about doubled after covid, and is not even known to be a thing by a lot of doctors. So the symptoms are easily brushed off as "get your shit together" or misdiagnosed as depression.

Also your anecdote aligns with the fact that it's more women than men who get it.

I don't want to be rude, but if there is no way of reliably testing for long covid, you might as well say it could be anything, including depression ?

How is a doctor, who could see hundreds of patients a week supposed to know ?

Well, how is a doctor who doesn't even know about it supposed to either diagnose it or rule it out? Depression is also something you cannot just reliably diagnose from a blood sample or something, so just going "depression!" as soon as someone starts talking about brain fog and being listless seems unfair. Most Doctors think in categories, they don't want to challenge what they already know and have been practicing for years. So the most important thing now is education, spreading awareness.

judging by my wife's experience, a woman could go to the ER with a gunshot wound and leave with a prescription for an antidepressant.

I don’t want to be rude, but have you looked into the established scientific knowledge which has accumulated on the impact of SARS-CoV-2 on the human body?

I really truly don’t want to be rude. I only want to point to the existence of literature on this.

There are results from molecular biology, from the various medical specializations, from population-scale studies.

There are certainly symptoms and biomarkers. There are documented changes to physiology, and there exists at least some information on how to help the body recover.

It can be diagnosed now

Sure, but depression and immune system seem to be linked, so how do we know we aren't just more clearly separating viral components in boughts of heightened depression?

Personally I think our relationship with flu tells us a lot about the difference between our claimed ideals and our actual behavior as a society. We didn't want to know anything about it for curiosities sake and we invented all sorts of higher priorities to not study the mundane diseases between pandemics.

I had low energy a bit along the ME lines after covid+shingles and it's not really that it's not known to be a thing with doctors - they've all heard of it, but with no tests, treatment or known mechanisms there's not a lot they can do apart from maybe test for other stuff or hand out general things like vitamins/antidepressants/painkillers. We need greater scientific understanding of what is going on really.

I got tested for other stuff - low T which I thought it might be or prostate cancer which the doc thought but neither of those. I'm recovering a bit through normal passage of time.

My wife (also in Ireland) got covid in the first wave in 2020 and has had issues with muscle function (weakness and paralysis) since. She's ok right at the minute, and these days her issues are intermittent - her last episode was in April. Maybe that was the last one? Or maybe not. It's been a tough 4.5 years

I’m sorry. It’s difficult to live with a sick partner, and most people can’t quite imagine the myriad of effects it has (unless they have also been there). You’re not alone if that helps.

More of a pedantic nitpick - but 100 bpm is still zone 1 for most people.

That's me. One of the hardest parts is that people assume I'm just lazy, because how else could someone be as out of shape as I am? But the truth is that I love intense exercise, and even still try to do it. The body just doesn't respond any more.

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