Long Covid in the media and social media 2022

Hilarious. I just searched Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez M.D only to realize I blocked her a long time ago.

 

...what if people have the capacity to change, just curious?

 

Thanks for listening. I saw it and kind of avoided it. Starting with a personal, BPS anecdote is exactly the kind of thing that will stick in people's mind and be a deciding take on the condition. I was a bit thinking that's the underlying take the Economist and it's subsidiaries would have. I think we might start to see a wave of LC "pushback", more than we have so far.

 

It's like Groundhog day except time still passes and millions of lives get ruined along the way. Always failing. Always the same way. For the same pathetic reasons, never anything learned, no accountability. Never doing anything more than small efforts meant to go nowhere by design. It's thinking small and refusing to act, even locally. There is simply no comparable failure in any other profession.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1603484279375204352

 

Haven't watched yet. 2nd video from this source.
https://twitter.com/user/status/1604168763636682753

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hug0CqfkyMI

 

NHS lost a million working days to long Covid last year

NHS trusts in England lost more than a million working days to long-Covid absences last year, analysis suggests.

Thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been forced to take long periods off work because of the lingering effects of coronavirus infection.

Data released to the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus suggests that long-Covid absences are now higher than they were a year ago.

Layla Moran, who chairs the group, said: “Long Covid has upended the lives of millions and these figures suggest that the deeply damaging impact it is having on our economy and public services is only getting worse.”

Figures provided by 91 NHS trusts under freedom of information laws revealed an average of 5,913 days lost to long-Covid absence between

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-lost-a-million-working-days-to-long-covid-last-year-00gwx922x

Requires a subscription to read further.

 

Full article here: https://archive.ph/z7k6q


Only about 40% of the comments below the line are in the “public sector workers are skivers” category.

 

Sounds expensive and not very pragmatic. As self-inflicted wounds go, this is an expensive one. The NHS wasted billions on their wet paper tiger, and all it accomplished is waste billions more. Well, that and make millions of people suffer needlessly. And trillions in indirect losses. For absolutely no gain at all. Not very smart when you look at the big picture. And oh would you look at that the paper tiger is being praised as the solution to the problem it created in the article in the next comment. So many possibilities, all imaginary.

Too bad the Appg hasn't taken LC seriously, but then again so far only the patients and maybe a few dozen people have.

Somehow, this is still blamed on "lockdowns" that ended over a year and a half ago. Or said not to be happening, depending on who asks, who you ask, when you ask.

And the fact that thousands predicted this is still not acknowledged. Too embarrassing, the failure must keep on failing because otherwise it's unfair to the people who were failed before. Or something.

 

From Medscape:

Long COVID: Who's Working to Find Treatments?

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/984510

Video with transcript.

 

APPG report on Long Covid in March of this year, https://www.appgcoronavirus.uk/home/long-covid-report-march-2022

 

(USA) For patients with long COVID, look out for psychiatric sequelae

https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering...ents-long-covid-look-out-psychiatric-sequelae

 

So instead of approaching each patient, listening to them, and forming an opinion, doctors should start from the assumption that patients will have psychiatric issues?

and yet doctors can say this, in print, and tell other doctors that this is a correct approach to take, and not be struck off? (or whatever the equivalent is in the US)

 

Thanks for sharing, @ahimsa

Just watched it and Dr. Koroshetz mentions ME very briefly towards the end:

I would say that the key thing in doing small trials is that, as I mentioned before, sometimes you see a signal that looks like it's going above the noise, but when you increase the numbers, it goes back in the noise. You have to do this validation stage to make sure that anything that pops out of a small study is going to be replicated. In myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), for instance, tons of studies have been reported, but none have been really replicated.

...

As I said, the RECOVER Initiative was put together with the idea that this is not going to be easy. We'd be very happy if someone could figure this out very quickly. Having been involved in the ME/CFS world for so long, I think there is a chance it's not going to be easy. This type of study that is totally comprehensive and leaves no stone unturned is what's needed at this point to protect us against, 4 years from now, having our hands up in the air and not having studied things right from the beginning.

 

There's the added problem that psychiatric symptoms don't really mean anything anymore. It's either used as a shortcut to "affects the brain", or it means a bunch of wishy-washy stuff that usually ends up in "behave, unruly child".

What does "clear-cut symptoms" even mean? There are symptoms that are common to many illnesses, those symptoms are never clear-cut. All this boils down to differential diagnosis being everything and having no plan B for it. Most of the symptoms are clearly neurological, but they never bothered to do real work here. It's precisely those common symptoms that have been labeled as psychiatric, whatever that even means anymore. And neglected symptoms. In fact most symptoms are basically labeled as psychiatric, thanks to the growing creep of "functional overlays".

What is it about the sickness response that is so impossible to reconcile here? The complete separation between acute illness and chronic illness needing to be fully separated and having nothing to do with one another. In some cases they are delayed, in many cases they aren't. This conflict is resolved by simply not mentioning the conflict, reality continues to be ignored in favor of what they want to perceive.

 

Decided to skim it. In this report, they mention 1.8 million days lost by NHS employees. The latest report seems to speak of 1M.

Zero recognition that this was an existing problem. All the problems exposed are the same, and knowledge overall is just as generic and superficial. It was mostly a narrative review using quotes that all add up the same: healthcare is failing completely at this. Nothing's changed since then. Many of the quotes are from 2021 and could have come from any chronic illness population at any time in the last half century.

It's everything we've been saying for decades, without any recognition of that. I assume they ignored the context to avoid the discrimination that comes with chronic illness. Which guaranteed it would fail.

This is indeed what not taking it seriously looks like.

 

(Audio, 17 minutes, in Swedish)

Ingen statistik på hur många som drabbats av postcovid
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ingen-statistik-pa-hur-manga-som-drabbats-av-postcovid

 

Ingen myndighet har koll på antalet postcovid-sjuka
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ingen-myndighet-har-koll-pa-antalet-postcovid-sjuka

 

We are long past the point after which it has to be said that this can only be deliberate. Not wanting to find out while conveniently doing nothing because it's all a "mystery" is really the same thing as "I have the only key to this lock and categorically refuse to use it so that you don't have access to what's in it".

But asking hard questions require people to care. And they can't care about a scandal when it's covered up. Medicine is all politics in the end.