Long Covid in the media and social media 2023

On a Swedish morning TV show today. No mention of ME, as usual, but very good and interesting nonetheless

Nyhetsmorgon
Överläkarna om postcovid: ”Ge inte upp – det finns hjälp att få”, 15 min 34 sek
Det är fortfarande mycket iv inte vet om postcovid och många har lidit av sjukdomen i tre år. Överläkarna Judith Bruchfeld och Artur Fedorowski berättar vad man vet om sjukdomen och hur forskarna arbetar med att ta fram ett botemedel.
https://www.tv4play.se/klipp/955a47e69099511e892f/överläkarna-om-postcovid-ge-inte-upp-det-finns-hjälp-att-få

 

Financial Times Wait goes on for effective long Covid treatments

Quotes:

Long Covid took 80 healthy life years per 1,000 residents — a preferred way of measuring quality of life — in the first two years post-infection, compared with 50 for cancer and 52 for heart disease, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs St Louis healthcare system.

...

While long Covid is clearly complex, some patients and scientists are frustrated with the time it is taking to catalogue the problems, before moving on to find treatments. Todd Davenport, a physical therapy professor at the University of the Pacific, says one problem is that there are not enough specialists in the “previously unloved [field of] post-infectious diseases”, such as chronic disease syndrome, so new researchers have flooded in: “Folks who have been active in other areas of biomedical research and are sort of picking up post-infectious illnesses on the fly.”

(I believe what was actually said by Davenport was "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" but "chronic disease syndrome" is a much better name )

 

There's a Q&A with Fedorowski as well:

Nyhetsmorgon: ”Varför har vi med postcovid så olika symtom?”
https://www.tv4play.se/klipp/784abde30a083d3f5c9f/varför-har-vi-med-postcovid-så-olika-symtom?section=nyhetsmorgon&playlist=4IAYFJFU8GOuFxWHxQlxbO

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1703448916589727835


Remember folks, just because you know someone with 5+ infections and they "seem" fine doesn't mean they are. Animals, including humans, fake being strong and healthy and hide being sick.

From the elephant app: No one returns to work after their 5th infection. This means we are on schedule for 2025 to become a big year for long-term illness.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1704970139341402532


If only we could ask the people in charge of medical research why they didn't do that...

Full interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZUBLTph5uw

 

That was very unassuring ironically. "In fairness, they are doing a bit". Doesn't explain at all why it's never talked about it. Ignores issues with the spending, ignores me/cfs (of course) but talks about it's a completely new issue (to some degree this is true). Fauci has hardly been a strong advocate here.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1704517732463501554

 

Italy's Bergamo is calling back coronavirus survivors. About half say they never fully recovered.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/09/08/bergamo-italy-covid-longterm/

 

Quote taken from the article above:

"Venturelli mentioned a man in his 80s who’d come in for his follow-up visit, mostly recovered. His son, who’d also been infected, hadn’t fared as well. When Venturelli tried to refer the father to a specialist, he said he was too busy these days.

Covid had turned the father into his son’s caretaker".

 

Kind of News from Canada but mostly generic. According to a study by a public health body in Quebec, almost 10% of healthcare workers have Long Covid to some degree, with a third of that (so about 3%) having severe symptoms, half (so 5%) for over a year.

Cannot translate from URL, browser translate works well for this.


Thousands of healthcare workers affected
https://www.lapresse.ca/actualites/...iers-de-travailleurs-de-la-sante-atteints.php

Up to 10% of healthcare workers could be affected by long COVID, reveal preliminary results of a large epidemiological survey by the National Institute of Public Health of Quebec (INSPQ).
...
“Of these, a third have severe symptoms and more than half have had symptoms for more than a year,” said Dr. Sara Carazo, epidemiologist at the INSPQ, on Thursday during the first Canadian conference of scope dedicated to long COVID.

This survey was carried out following a mandate from the Quebec Ministry of Health and Social Services (MSSS). A total of 23,000 healthcare workers participated in the survey electronically or by telephone from May to July.

Of those who completed the online survey, 10% reported persistent symptoms for more than three months, referred to as long COVID. As for those who responded by telephone, 6% reported suffering from this post-COVID syndrome.

Taking into account the 400,000 healthcare workers in Quebec, we can estimate that the number of people affected by long COVID is between 24,000 and 40,000.
...
Furthermore, 71% have noted that long COVID is impacting their ability to work, and 16% regularly experience difficulty working.
...
Some of the most common symptoms include fatigue, shortness of breath, trouble concentrating, memory loss, confusion or brain fog, muscle or joint pain, anxiety, headaches, headaches, insomnia and discomfort after exercise.

The INSPQ team also observed that the more severe the symptoms were during infection with the virus, the higher the risks of developing long COVID. Reinfections are also associated with an increased risk of long COVID.
...​

The odds of developing long COVID were higher among individuals who contracted COVID-19 early in the pandemic, before the emergence of variants and the availability of vaccines. In fact, 26% of health care workers infected at the start of the pandemic are affected by long COVID, noted D. Carazo .

With the appearance of new variants, this risk decreases to around 12%. However, due to the large number of people infected with these new variants, the number of healthcare workers with long COVID remains high. “Most healthcare workers living with long COVID have been infected since the arrival of Omicron,” says Dr. Carazo.
​

The numbers are holding up rather well so far. It's about 10% with any noticeable issues and 5% with disabling issues. A number that was called alarmist and fear-mongering. As it says, the odds have lowered since the first strain, but infections are now so commonplace that more are facing those issues, and they are clearly not going down by magic.

And although there are attempts by healthcare workers to make LC into an occupational illness, widespread mass reinfection policies have made it so that infections are just as commonplace in the general public. Thanks to false reassurances from the medical profession that "it's just a cold now". Utter foolishness basically ending the very concept of public health and infectious disease control as we knew it.

 

Making data meaningful ., except too many m and ms !
Worth sharing
https://twitter.com/user/status/1705208028302090439

 

SF Chronicle: UCSF is trying a new tactic to eradicate long COVID symptoms. Here’s how it works

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1705982231968145472

 

Something odd happening with hashtag autocomplete on twitter. It yields no results when searching it, so this is clearly being gamed somehow. #LongCovid does not autocomplete, so this suggests internal suppression by twitter.

The autocomplete suggestion is #LongCOVIDdepravity.

 

Moderators stop removing me/cfs content : r/covidlonghaulers (reddit.com)

 

Yes I agree it will be difficult to get enough participants. Particularly as you have to be located in Bergen to join (I tried to join from another city). But perhaps if they expand it to a multicenter study they can get more people.

Yes, our health authorities seem to be successful with the message that Covid is increasing, people will be hospitalised and die (Long Covid isn't even mentioned, and is just stress anyway), but it's nothing to worry about and no point to try to prevent

ETA: Oh dear, only 14 of 2 000 participants requited thus far, according to the newspaper Bergens Tidende