Long Covid in the media and social media 2023

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RedFox said:
Translated by me (not Google!)

Banco de España (Bank of Spain):
The latest reports from CIS Institution's "health barometer" show higher demand for healthcare in our country and an increase in days of work lost to sickness, short-term disability and accidents.

(The graph is titled "Economic Bulletin Articles" and the label is
Loss of work hours due to health problems*
*Employees who were not working in the past week due to sickness, accidents or disability. Percentage of employees)

There is uncertainty regarding what caused these changes and how persistent they are, but some of these data are in line with the literature on the sequelae of Covid-19. If these dynamics are prolonged and were related to a long-term decline in general health of the Spanish population, its economic impact would be significant.

(Chart: Economic effects of a possible decline in the population's health
Short term:
  • Increased demand for healthcare
  • Loss of days of work
Long term--potential results:
  • Smaller workforce
  • Lower productivity?
  • Effect on accumulation of productive capital: ??
Source: Bank of Spain)

Comments:
"I'm going to print this thread and frame it. NOT WITHOUT MY MASK: we go on" (or: continue?)

"Covid can disable people. Long Covid is disabling! Unmitigated transmission is a mass disabling event." (Similar sentence structure and vocabulary to English and from a person who doesn't Tweet in Spanish. Composed with Google Translate?)
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And add to that brain drain and loss of institutional memory. It doesn't even need to fully disable someone, mild brain fog is enough to bring someone from high performance to below average.

Lots of companies depend on key workers. No one is irreplaceable but some people are very expensive to replace. Like physicians. I've seen a figure from a hospital administrator saying it costs about $1M to replace one.

People don't have to stop working entirely to lose what makes their productivity valuable. A healthcare system that only accepts to even look at life-threatening stuff will completely miss this. And sure enough, it has.
 
rvallee said:
And add to that brain drain and loss of institutional memory. It doesn't even need to fully disable someone, mild brain fog is enough to bring someone from high performance to below average.

Lots of companies depend on key workers. No one is irreplaceable but some people are very expensive to replace. Like physicians. I've seen a figure from a hospital administrator saying it costs about $1M to replace one.

People don't have to stop working entirely to lose what makes their productivity valuable. A healthcare system that only accepts to even look at life-threatening stuff will completely miss this. And sure enough, it has.
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Absolutely, even sporadic job losses will put companies in a jam. And mild declines in cognitive function will have major costs when they cause someone to forget a brilliant idea or result in a serious accident. These effects are so subtle that even guesstimating the costs is hard.
 
rvallee said:
The medical professionals don't even want to count us, explicitly refuse to. But other people are counting the consequences. Doesn't mean it will help us, but this is hard to miss, those are details that experts are paying attention to. Even if medicine doesn't see mass disability as an issue worth looking into, the consequences are visible everywhere else.
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Easiest way to pretend there is no problem is to just not collect any evidence of it in the first place.

Unfortunately reality doesn't work that way.
 
Midnattsol said:
Sick leave in Norway has increasingly been caused by "unspecified fatigue", potentially being after effects of covid infection.
https://www.nav.no/no/nav-og-samfun.../nyheter/korona-preger-fortsatt-sykefravaeret (In Norwegian)
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What even is "specified fatigue"? Clearly the existence of unspecified fatigue implies the existence of specified fatigue.

I guess it just happens like that. Without a cause. Which is basically spiritualism. Everything has a cause. Even if they want it to mean psychological fatigue, all this means is they can't be honest about what they mean. And what is an expert profession even doing lying on its own data?

What's amazing is all this pinning everything on the one symptom of fatigue, making everything else derivative of it, is fully generic, all because they can't accept using the also-generic but actually accurate illness. Somehow illness has to be specified, but not fatigue, even though it's even less accurate.

The whole vocabulary of this profession has to be adjusted. It's been distorted beyond repair simply to fit their traditional beliefs.
 
The latest hopeful news relates to metformin, an accessible and affordable drug that’s been U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved to treat Type 2 diabetes since the 1990s. Metformin, which belongs to a class of drugs called biguanides, is taken as a liquid or pill and works by controlling the amount of sugar in the blood. It also decreases inflammation in the body.

Metformin appeared to be even more effective when used early. Among people who took it within four days of developing symptoms, the risk of Long COVID dropped by more than 60%. In total, about 6% of people who took metformin went on to be diagnosed with Long COVID, compared to more than 10% of the people who took a placebo.


https://time.com/6263356/long-covid-treatment-prevention/
 
Fleur Harrison on Twitter said:
On #LongCovidAwaneressDay, as a researcher and a person with lived experience, I am heartened to see rigorous new studies on brain pathology released (below). However, damaging psychosomatic research continues apace. As a scientist I'm aghast, as a sufferer ... words fail me.
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I have sat silently by at previous ICBM, when biopsychosocial models of #ME/CFS have been presented as "fact". When these models are far from evidence-based. Rapid increases in biological evidence due to#LongCOVID have made them farcical these days.
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From The Washington Post:

Long-covid symptoms are less common now than earlier in the pandemic
Washington Post said:
Americans infected with the coronavirus’s omicron variant are less likely to develop symptoms typical of long covid than those who had covid-19 earlier in the pandemic, according to the largest-ever study of who is most vulnerable to being sickened — or debilitated — by the virus’s lingering effects.

The analysis of nearly 5 million U.S. patients who had covid, a study based on a collaboration between The Washington Post and research partners, shows that 1 in 16 people with omicron received medical care for symptoms associated with long covid within several months of being infected. Patients exposed to the coronavirus during the first wave of pandemic illness — from early 2020 to late spring 2021 — were most prone to develop long covid, with 1 in 12 suffering persistent symptoms.

This pattern mirrors what leading doctors who treat long covid — and some scientists who study it — have noticed as the coronavirus pandemic evolves. But the reasons they offer for the shifting rates are closer to conjecture than to proof.
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Regular Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/03/18/long-covid-less-likely/

Gift Link (no paywall for 14 days): https://wapo.st/3n74Mjl

I didn't see any mention of ME/CFS.

I wasn't able to read this very carefully but it looks like the study put everyone with any symptoms after acute COVID infection into a single category.

Edited to add this quote (last paragraph, my bolding):
Patients may have been constrained from seeking care for new symptoms during the pandemic, especially in its early phases. That may have affected patients’ reported rates of new symptoms before they had coronavirus infections. The duration of symptoms or how many symptoms each patient had — or their severity — were not measured in this study.
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I am not going to include a link but Washington Post columnist Dr. Leana Wen, who has written some pretty horrible opinions over the last few years, actually wrote that more disability in the form of Long Covid will simply become our new normal.
Dr. Leana Wen said:
How should we think about long covid? ...

One crucial area of inquiry is what happens with repeat infections, which will almost certainly become more common with covid exposure going forward. We might come to expect some frequency of post-covid symptoms, and the resulting disability, as a “new normal.” In that case, health resources must shift from avoiding the coronavirus to reducing and treating its worst consequences — including long covid.
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So, let's not bother trying to avoid COVID and Long Covid? Long Covid will simply become our new normal?? :banghead::banghead::banghead:

Also, when talking about shifting resources to treatment, what magic treatment(s) does she know about for Long Covid?

Sorry for the snark but she's being even more irritating than usual.
 
Doctors try to explain long COVID. Why don't we know more about it?
Health News Florida | By Joe Mario Pedersen - WMFE
More than 1 million Americans have died from COVID-19 since President Donald Trump declared it a national emergency three years ago. That includes 87,000 Floridians. Among the survivors, are those with long-haul COVID, or long COVID, a phenomenon still not fully understood.

But what is long COVID?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines it as a wide range of ongoing health problems with conditions lasting weeks, months or years after being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.
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Trouble identifying it
Dr. Kenneth Alexander, chief of pediatric infectious diseases at Nemours Children’s Hospital in Orlando, said properly documenting long COVID can be difficult due to its similar appearance to chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also hard to define.

"If you could really explain what chronic fatigue syndrome is, I'd get you into the National Academy of Sciences. So we really don't know. But we know it's real," Alexander said.

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a complex medical condition characterized by severe fatigue that lasts for at least six months and is not relieved by rest, and characterized a range of other symptoms such as pain, headaches, and memory problems, according to the CDC.

Like long COVID, chronic fatigue can be tricky to diagnose as it doesn't always have a physical manifestation that can be readily seen.

Some of the symptoms it shares with long COVID include trouble sleeping, difficulty concentrating and dizziness.

"Chronic fatigue is in many ways diagnosed not by its cause, because we don't know what that is, but by its manifestations, and the manifestations are fatigue myalgias (muscle pain) that disrupt life," Alexander said.

Chronic fatigue can be brought on by social or physical trauma. Technically speaking, a patient could have both chronic fatigue and long COVID, Alexander said.
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why the swap to 'chronic fatigue' halfway thro? and I'm guessing there should be a comma or an and in 'fatigue myalgias'?

the article features a number of patient accounts

https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/healt...ain-long-covid-why-dont-we-know-more-about-it
 
ahimsa said:
From The Washington Post:

Long-covid symptoms are less common now than earlier in the pandemic



Regular Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/03/18/long-covid-less-likely/

Gift Link (no paywall for 14 days): https://wapo.st/3n74Mjl

I didn't see any mention of ME/CFS.

I wasn't able to read this very carefully but it looks like the study put everyone with any symptoms after acute COVID infection into a single category.

Edited to add this quote (last paragraph, my bolding):
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Aside from the absurdity of a newspaper having to conduct their own epidemiological research because the institutions tasked with this are negligent, by less common they mean slightly less common, and that's based on whatever flawed definition they used, which often focuses on "primary symptoms" and miss out many.

The medical profession is failing miserably at this, at all levels, and it's so bad that the future of healthcare has to consider working around the profession entirely, or stagnate.

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