News about Long Covid including its relationship to ME/CFS 2020 to 2021

These people really have a low bar for trauma, especially considering how prevalent Long COVID is in young adults, who mostly suffered from only mild infections, and hence where organ damages only play a negligible role as well. LC skeptics are quick to blame news for inducing a nocebo effect, but any reasonably well-informed YA should also know that the IFR at that age is rather low, and LC occurred long before there was any significant coverage of it.

I could understand lying in the ICU for weeks on end, fighting for your life, being traumatizing, but this is just an insult to human resilience, with a dash of not-so-covert sexism mashed in, for good measure. The fact that commonly used health measurement scales for trauma do a really shit job of discriminating PTSD and dysautonomic symptoms likely won't help here.

 

This looks interesting. Brian Cox will lead a long covid discussion. I do hope that if they refer to ME, they have a good understanding of it - by no means guaranteed.

https://royalsociety.org/science-events-and-lectures/2021/04/long-covid/

 

IFR=?

 

(Ireland)

https://www.rte.ie/news/2021/0331/1207212-covid-ireland-blog/

 

"it's very hard to estimate what the prevalence will be"

This is usually the case when zero efforts are made to do the thing and in fact there is widespread denial and hostility about doing the thing.

"We tried nothing and don't care anyway so whatever I guess this is unknowable".

 

do you think he will tone down his usual presenting style . don't think that his particular brand of enthusiasm would suit this topic .

 

Living with long COVID, 1 year on

A personal account of long covid (and improvement after a low histamine diet). No mention of ME/CFS (apart from "chronic fatigue") but this is how she described some of her symptoms:

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/living-with-long-covid-1-year-on

 

It is difficult to know what the tone is likely to be. Brian Cox, as a physicist, is not an expert on medical matters. Adam Rutherford is a geneticist and presenter of BBC Radio 4’s “Inside Science”. Both he and Nisreen Alwan have experienced long covid but their knowledge of ME will be limited, if not incorrect. Nisreen Alwan and the two other participants are all professors in subjects related to Public Health. As it is a Royal Society lecture, I would expect the tone to be mostly serious.

When I listen to any discussion relating to ME, I am always on tenterhooks, never knowing whether information given on ME will be misleading. It shouldn’t be like that. It matters because it affects the lives of so many vulnerable, ill people.

 

New UK data that's likely to be of interest: Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)


This rate of recovery looks similar to with other post-viral problems we've seen before:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1256/fig03/index.html

They have info for symptoms at 5 and 12 weeks, but some of the data only seems to be at 5 weeks.

eg the sex differences don't seem that big, but it's uncertain and only at 5 weeks:

Lots more info in there.

 

I don't recall seeing this quote before from Dr Anthony Fauci, M.D., director of the NIAID at the NIH, regarding the similarity of some forms of post-acute COVID sequelae with #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis / #ChronicFatigueSyndrome

Code:

https://twitter.com/TomKindlon/status/1377644100028076035?s=20

Code:

https://www.facebook.com/TomKindlonMECFS/posts/1925383444276438

 

World at One bbc radio 4 had a section on Long Covid today. Covering Doctors with the condition, the Nice Guidelines and a suggestion at the end by a GP Gail Allsop leads on Long covid for the Royal College, that your problems are over once you get yourself referred to a long covid clinic.
At 35mins:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000tnqr

 

(Doesn't seem worth doing a thread on every paper as few add anything significant other than confirming what is known and they don't bring much discussion.)


Limited recovery from post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC) at eight months of a prospective cohort, 2021, Darley et al

There is increasing recognition of the prolonged illness following acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-1). In a longitudinal cohort of 99 patients, 32% reported persistent symptoms and 19% had Long COVID (Defined as fatigue or dyspnoea or chest tightness) at median 240 days after initial infection. There was no significant improvement in symptoms or measures of health-related quality of life between 4 and 8-month assessments.

In multivariable analysis, female gender (OR 3.2, 95%CI 1.3-7.8, p=0.01) and acute COVID-19 hospitalisation (OR 3.8, 95% 1.1-13.6, p=0.04) were independently associated with Long COVID at 8-months. Only 80% patients reported full recovery at 8 months. Further research is required to understand the immunologic correlates of abnormal recovery and the long-term significance.​

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.29.21254211v1

 

The piece says it is a quote from February but I'm wondering now whether it is the quote from last July that we knew about before? I was hopeful it was a more recent quote.

 

My mother told me that Dr Shepherd was on at the start of the 10 PM news on Sky News. It sounded like it was on this data. It might get repeated in a future hour.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1377754977263837184

 

I noticed that Matt Handcock responded to this yesterday, maybe the first government minister to comment on Long covid?

 

To me this is an indication of just how useless it is to collect statistics if you do not understand the realities of clinical medicine.

It says: Over the four-week period ending 6 March 2021, an estimated 1.1 million people in private households in the UK reported experiencing long COVID.

No they didn't report anything because there was nobody to report to and not even the people in the study group reported experiencing Long Covid. Only a statistician would miss the fact that the sentence is straightforward nonsense.

The document points out that LongCovid is a lay term - so what medical use is any of this expected to be?

Just asking about symptoms is a complete waste of time. When you take a clinical history symptoms fly around like autumn leaves in a stiff breeze and you sift and sort them according to whether or not they fit into some meaningful pattern. Nobody does medicine by counting symptoms or ticking yes or no for a symptom.

 

If only that were entirely true...

Questionnaires are the basis for much of "Evidence based medicine" (and psychology).

 

https://ejmcm.com/article_9929.html