longcovidthrowa

Thank you for the information, and I'm sorry to hear about your struggles.

> The first is that it might not be permanent alveoli damage (which do not regenerate in humans) but rather obstruction from a "hydrogel" that forms during active covid and takes many many months if not years to dissipate entirely

I didn't go into too much detail in my original post, but we think this is likely what happened to my daughter. Post-COVID, she could still go for long durations at 80% but when she pushed her limits, she would hit a wall and start to experience asthma like symptoms along with the feeling like she had mucous in her lungs that she couldn't get out. It took close to 2 years for her to stop experiencing those symptoms, at which point her competitive running peers had passed her by. She's happy to be able to enjoy running again but she did lose out on the competition part.

I mainly created the throwaway because I'm sharing personal medical information and I'd rather not do that with my main account where people know me IRL.

I won't make a claim to the accuracy of the numbers, but I can offer an example of how long COVID can be undercounted. My daughter was a competitive long distance runner. Months after recovering from the acute symptoms of COVID, her performance numbers were still about 10% down and no amount of training would allow her to reach her previous level of performance. After many visits to doctors and specialists, she was eventually diagnosed with long COVID due to lung damage. She's still very fast by most measures, but in track, the difference between being in the 99th percentile and the 89th percentile is the difference between a top 3 finish and a bottom 3 finish. This basically ended her track career. In our case, if we didn't have hard data tracking her before and after performance levels, we may not have ever noticed a difference. How many people who aren't competitive athletes are walking around with 10% degraded pulmonary function and just didn't notice?