UK, Guardian, Alarming’ rise in Americans with long Covid symptoms

Some 6.8% of American adults are currently experiencing long Covid symptoms, according to a new survey from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), revealing an “alarming” increase in recent months even as the health agency relaxes Covid isolation recommendations, experts say.

That means an estimated 17.6 million Americans could now be living with long Covid.

“This should be setting off alarms for many people,” said David Putrino, the Nash Family Director of the Cohen Center for Recovery From Complex Chronic Illness at Mount Sinai. “We’re really starting to see issues emerging faster than I expected.”

When the same survey was conducted in October, 5.3% of respondents were experiencing long Covid symptoms at the time.

The 1.5 percentage-point increase comes after the second-biggest surge of infections across the US this winter, as measured by available wastewater data.

More than three-quarters of the people with long Covid right now say the illness limits their day-to-day activity, and about one in five say it significantly affects their activities – an estimated 3.8 million Americans who are now experiencing debilitating illness after Covid infection.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/15/long-covid-symptoms-cdc

 

It's all George Monbiot's fault for writing that article.

 

Impressive that it's published on the same day as some media, including the Guardian, publish the latest bit about "scrapping" the term Long Covid, which obviously they can't do something about since it's used by the patient community, so it's not as if medicine could use it any less. It's explicitly being pushed as causing "fear", based on what I don't know, and a comeback of the "we've always known about post-viral illnesses", except for the fact that they can't and don't do anything effective about it.

Imagine going to look at the weather forecast, and you find that it's going to see a bright warm sunny day. And you also find that it's going to be stormy weather so make sure to put anything that could fly inside. And several variations in-between, including snow, tornados and a heat wave. Who would trust weather forecasts? No one. And yet this is completely typical of health and medical news.

Modern propaganda works by destroying the very concept of knowable truth, and it does it by flooding the information space with conflicting reports about the same thing. You will read a report saying that X is a big problem, another that X was fabricated by Chinese weather balloons, another that it's completely overhyped and generates fear, another with howling cries of mercy from people affected by it. And so on. Which is true? You can't know. You can't ever know the truth because there is no truth, and even authorities and experts lie all the time. You ask several MDs about it and you will get all the same variations, maybe not in the same concentrations, but what you will not be getting is a consistent report of what is actually happening.

The severity and scale of the crisis of validity in medicine is even worse than I thought. No wonder the pandemic was completely mishandled. And the next one will be mishandled even worse, since not only was not a single lesson actually learned, all the wrong ideas about it will be applied. Massive and deliberate regression. In the profession that deals with matters of life and death. Absurd. It's plain absurd. We're building the AI systems that will replace them, and at this point it's an existential need for it to happen ASAP. We are extremely badly served by this rotten corpse of the world's oldest expert profession.