Long Covid in the media and social media 2023

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Mij said:
75 per cent of COVID ‘long haulers’ free of symptoms in 12 months: McMaster study

Full recovery is the likeliest outcome, even in severe cases says researcher

https://www.thestar.com/ths/news/hamilton-region/2023/01/04/mcmaster-long-covid-study.html
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I am not sure the text of the article says what the title suggests.

The title says “75 per cent of COVID ‘long haulers’ free of symptoms in 12 months: McMaster study” but the body of the article says “A McMaster University study on long COVID suggests that while most infected people are free of symptoms within 12 months, about 25 per cent continue to experience lingering effects such as coughing, fatigue and breathlessness.”.

The first implies that 75% of ‘long haulers’ fully recover, whereas the latter says that 75% of those infected with Covid-19 fully recover which are not the same patient populations. The same confusion appears the McMaster University website (see https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca/articles/most-long-covid-patients-recover-within-year-says-study/ ) which switches the majority of those infected with the term the majority of long haulers. On the basis of this study 25% of those infected with Covid-19 still have health issues after one year, which given the numbers of those infected in the first place is still a large number of people.

The actual study reported in the European Respiratory Journal (see https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2022/08/04/13993003.00970-2022 ) only reports people investigated at intervals up to 12 months so tells us nothing about the fate of long haulers.
 
Leaving aside the ridiculous re-framing and basic report mangling,

The study’s senior author, Dr. Manali Mukherjee, has more than clinical interest in the topic: her symptoms didn’t abate until 18 months had elapsed after contracting COVID-19 early in 2021.

Mukherjee, a respiratory scientist and immunologist, told The Spectator that even today, her symptoms — fatigue and headaches that can lead to “brain fog” — return on occasion.
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“There is no point being alarmed,” she said. “You don’t want to ignore long COVID symptoms, but have faith you will get better and that by 12 months possibly all the symptoms will be gone.”
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Hopium.
 
It's actually impressive propaganda, to frame the fact that 1/4 of patients still have significant symptoms after a year as "good news" when the starting point was always that this would never happen. Goebbels would be proud, and kind of jealous that people just eat this stuff out that easily without any sort of enforcement.

And "have faith". Holy crap we are in the absolute worst possible hands, the entire profession has lost contact with reality. This is really looking out as the kind of civilization-ending ineptitude if things don't get back on track. Imagine these fools in charge of a killer pandemic, they will fuck up every damn thing they put their hands on.

One interesting thing: an article on this "study" was published to the coronavirus subreddit and most of the comments point out the many critical flaws and aren't buying it, picking apart the misleading language. If medicine continues with this crap, they will literally lose too much credibility to repair. I'm at the point where I simply don't trust anything from this profession, they lie way too much.
 
My letter in tomorrow’s guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/05/the-struggle-to-live-a-normal-life-with-long-covid
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“In order for progress to be made with long Covid, doctors and leaders must acknowledge and learn from the mistakes that have been made with ME/CFS, including the decades of underinvestment in high-quality biomedical research and overinvestment in low-quality psychosocial research.”

I’ve had several letters on ME/CFS published in other paper and journals but I’ve never had one in the guardian, despite several attempts over the years. I hope this is a sign that the times may be a changin’.
 
RedFox said:
So we're just gonna give up. Nice job.
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Doesn't count as giving up when you don't even try.

They ran out the clock, as it turns out the public is tolerant of a large number of death and disability all around them as long as what's happening is just ambiguous enough. This is actually terrifying about what it says for the future, we are still in a everyone-for-themselves state of development.

There is a % of the population below which anything happening can be tolerated, especially with the industry tasked with it is engaged in massive cover-up and generally sees nothing wrong with that. The threshold for mass political movement is usually around 3%, but that doesn't work out with sick people, it's the level at which people start mobilizing and build up.

We can never build up, and whatever we build during the day can be destroyed in a minute in secret behind closed doors, without any effort.
 
George Garton interview: ‘Doctors said I had long Covid – it was a blood clot’
Exclusive: England hopeful nearly quit over misdiagnosed illness before chance meeting at a party led to full recovery

In the space of six dizzying months in 2022, George Garton went from realising his childhood cricketing dream to the nightmare of seriously contemplating retirement at the age of 25.

The rollercoaster has thankfully since taken another upward turn and, after a summer spent trying to play through what is now believed to have been an undiagnosed blood clot on his lung, the Sussex all-rounder is back and will next up this week with the Joburg Super Kings in the newly formed SA20 franchise in South Africa.

“I feel great - 100 per cent,” says Garton, who credits a chance meeting at his grandmother's 90th birthday party with Dr Rob Galloway, a clinical professor in emergency medicine at the Royal Sussex Hospital, for setting him on the road to recovery.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cricket...rton-interview-said-had-long-covid-got-wrong/

It would appear the symptoms of long COVID can be mimicked by a blood clot in the lung or is this more evidence of a possible link between blood clots and long COVID
 
Another Long Covid misdiagnosis. A young woman died from cancer that was misdiagnosed as Long Covid over some six months. This was in the second half of 2020, but the mother recently has started a petition on improving cancer awareness and resources, see https://www.change.org/p/stevebarclay-improve-the-awareness-and-diagnosis-of-cancer-in-young-adults

There is not enough information in the petition background blurb to say if this relates to the medical profession failing to take conditions like Long Covid seriously or if it was doctors failing to adequately test once they have dismissed the patient as having one of the various poorly understood conditions such as ME or FND. We do need meaningful recording of misdiagnoses of such conditions resulting in harm or even potentially preventable deaths.

This type of situation may become more frequent give the UK NHS are putting any additional spending on services for Long Covid on hold.
 
Peter Trewhitt said:
There is not enough information in the petition background blurb to say if this relates to the medical profession failing to take conditions like Long Covid seriously or if it was doctors failing to adequately test once they have dismissed the patient as having one of the various poorly understood conditions such as ME or FND.
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Speaking generally, I think it's possible for an LC diagnosis to be quite correct (with the clinical tools we currently have) and that a patient might also develop something like metastatic adenocarcinoma with unknown primary. It's also possible the two conditions could be linked, with an immune dysregulation adding a predisposing factor to cancer development and/or rapid progression.
 
Merged thread

LC/ME Discussed on Jon Stewart

On yesterday's episode of 'The Problem With Jon Stewart' Podcast. the plight of LC/ME + need from Congress support/funding discussed. Sharing a thread of the highlights from the episode as that's a pretty huge platform.




Direct link of the start of the segment:
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Emma har varit sjuk i tusen dagar
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/eJzAGy/langtidscovid-emma-33-har-varit-sjuk-i-1000-dagar

Google Translate, English ("Emma has been sick for a thousand days")

Well worth a read! :thumbsup:
Auto-translate said:
Emma has been sick for a thousand days

For 33-year-old Emma, the corona pandemic was the start of a whole new life - that of post-covid.

From being an active and social person, she now struggles to cope with everyday life.

- I feel like a 90-year-old because the only hobby I can do today is knitting.
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When the history of Long Covid gets written, it will essentially be a long list of very specific warnings and recommendations being ignored, then when those warnings came to be, the default reaction is cover-up and paralysis. The warnings were very specific, but they don't matter because they aren't even acknowledged. The first step to solving a problem is to acknowledge it. We aren't even at step 1 yet.

This is by a very wide margin the worst failure of expertise in human history, since usually failures of expertise are when experts are nearly unanimously right, warn well in advance, and it's non-experts who simply don't pay attention. This is a unique case where the entire profession is itself the problem, with a tiny few exceptions like this.

Thanks @ShaneyWright no one has ever talked to me. It’s probably common knowledge but I spent a year attending local meetings and offered to run a long Covid NHS clinic. The healthboard were supportive- cannot fault them. However SG announced the funding& Woudnt cover a doctor.
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I wrote to the health minister in 2020 and said what are you going to do with the huge numbers of people with post viral syndrome from Covid. I was told they would go to existing specialist clinics (eg cardio for chest pain) and I said it would not work. It has not worked.
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There has been zero change from the initial stance that specialists in different fields can manage this illness despite the fact they do not communicate with each other, have no specific expertise in these type of illnesses& the waitlist for each specialty is long.
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So no in summary, I don’t think they would listen. I know people who applied for the lead long Covid job (I didn’t apply) were told their approach was too pathophysiology based. Eg clotting etc rather than rehab based. Unless this approach changes, nothing will improve.
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Meanwhile, the entire profession is paralyzed waiting for the pathophysiology, since medicine is built around pathophysiology or bust. And they refuse, this is how an entire profession can get to be the problem itself, not just part of the problem, but the only relevant part of the problem.

(Quoted tweets in reply to this tweet, unchained so putting parent tweet)
 
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