United Kingdom News (including UK wide, England, NI and Wales - see separate thread for news from Scotland)

Long Covid sufferer's call for better support

A doctor from Leeds who developed long Covid and the debilitating effects of ME has said NHS patients like her have been “left to rot”.

Becky Williams, 34, first caught Covid in March 2020 and has been left house-bound ever since, with her symptoms including extreme fatigue, brain fog and pain.

Dr Williams, who said she had "lost my job, lost friends, lost my independence", has joined about 200 other healthcare workers who have signed a letter calling on the government to provide better support for patients with these conditions.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the government would “ensure patients receive the care they deserve”.
LINK

 

Medical experts love to boast how they apply Occam's razor to good effect. They use the "horses, not zebras" analogy. Which is a huge stretch but whatever.

Here, there is one and only one obvious main explanation, and it actually makes sense. But instead they seem to prefer basically hundreds, if not thousands, of convoluted and unrelated explanations working in complex dynamics, all of which happened alongside the most obvious explanation, which has a huge amount of published evidence, all while never actually pointing to it.

It's an amazing feat of ignoring the giant elephant in the room that raises huge questions about the viability of our current medical systems, especially their ability to tell the truth and not make ridiculous stuff up to cover up their own ineptitude and servitude to powerful interests.

We truly are in the post-truth era, medicine has fully embraced it. Medical leaders seem completely oblivious to the consequences of losing credibility, how it has by now completely overtaken the Lancet's MMR vaccine blunder as the main fuel for conspiracy crowds and antivaxxers, among so many consequences.

Over 2K comments so this gets a lot of attention. And seems to be out of paywall.


How Covid destroyed our lives, from newborns to pensioners
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-...ed-every-generation-from-babies-to-pensioner/

A growing body of evidence shows that the impact of lockdown continues to affect every generation – and will do for decades to come

 

The Telegraph continuing its efforts to ensure that the public health response to the next pandemic will be even worse than the last one.

 

Thanks for posting. This seems a good development given she was involved in the parliamentary debates on ME/CFS too wasn't she?

I've read the article and get a sense these are relatively important things but if anyone has more knowledge of the actual impact these things can make I'd be interested to learn more about how these things work and likelihood of this helping to change things - and of course any tips about whether there is anything we can do to help that be more likely.

 

Oh, public health is perfectly capable of doing that on their own, and have done quite well at being awful so far. Everywhere. To loud cheers from their peers, odd as that may be. They're quoting MDs and researchers, after all, and most MDs would agree and nod to this. Somehow.

But in the end we're mostly in the same state as we were. With COVID the entire thing was down to chance, and the next one will also be. If COVID had been worse, all things would have been worse, and vice versa if it had fizzled out quickly, like SARS, or not had so much ability to mutate wildly, like flu epidemics. Humanity is basically like a tiny craft in a storm when it comes to this, nothing we're doing has any impact outside of what size and force the waves hit us.

Which is all incredibly silly since we could have an impact, but our institutions, and the governments that run them, are pretty much completely inept so not much of what they do really changes the outcomes. They're all focused entirely inward, at what's good for them, and otherwise everything they do only serves wealthy corporate interests and keeping people at work or consuming.

It will no doubt be worse in some ways, but 95-99% of it will come down to the pathogen itself. And it's not as if the health care industry could manage to do worse on the long term outcomes, they're pretty much doing every single thing to maximize the harms and blind themselves to it, all on their own.

Although I do wonder how much of this "a few weeks of limited lockdowns were basically worse than living through years of non-stop warfare for everyone" comes down to the job of health care workers being so awful during this time, and mindlessly extrapolating that it was just as awful for everyone else. Probably a lot.

 

Long Covid teachers join forces to sue ministers
https://schoolsweek.co.uk/long-covid-teachers-join-forces-to-sue-ministers/

About 85 teachers in the UK have expressed an interest in joining the action

Founder Emily Mason said long Covid had been “catastrophic for people’s lives and careers”. Many had to leave the profession or take early retirement, leading to loss of income, she said.

“We were told to ‘go into schools, carry on keeping the country running, children have to be in school’. And we’re hung out to dry now when so many of us can’t work,” she said.​

Hard to argue the case for an occupational illness when the virus was widespread and there has been a deliberate policy of mass reinfections. The risk is higher for some professions, but not by much.

 

COVID inquiry, CMO of England (Chris Whitty):

And yet, nothing. Continued denial. Not much to say about the £50M they mostly wasted on pet projects or known deniers of chronic illness. It yielded absolutely nothing because it was poorly allocated. Some of it even was pretty much "Long Covid? I don't know, doesn't seem to be anything there".

They seem to think they did an OK job. Some mention at the end of looking at the long-term consequences of other infections. Maybe it was cut but doesn't seem to be any awareness of how this relates to the big controversy over chronic illness and ME/CFS. Which itself is the controversy behind the controversy, the cluelessness about the most basic facts.

Twitter reply from Danny Altmann, one of the few researchers with a credible proposal who was funded, but with a very small budget:

 

There's a piece in the Mail about how many Long COVID clinics have closed (Surrey, Croydon, Hertfordshire, Lanarkshire) or are due to close (Devon). I didn't know they were set up with a £10m ring-fenced fund, either:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/...s-patients-without-treatment-desperately.html

 

(Suffolk & North East Essex, UK)
“Local people are being asked to give their views on NHS plans to combine services for those living with the post-viral conditions #MyalgicEncephalomyelitis (ME), #chronicfatiguesyndrome (#CFS) and #LongCOVID”

https://suffolkandnortheastessex.ic...r-new-combined-post-viral-condition-services/

 

Merged thread

Long Covid phone in on James O’Brien, UK LBC radio, 1st November 2024

This has just started now
https://twitter.com/user/status/1852294553752977428

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1852416978436149696

 

'They sort of see it in a similar category to ME which is also kind of a sort of difficult one in terms of....'

I wish he'd let her finish there because I think it would have been very revealing about what doctors really think of ME.

 

Not often I agree with him, but he’s right the Covid health impact should still be a prominent conversation, rather than sort of ignoring it and hoping it will be all ok

 

The reason the government isn't doing anything is because they have an alternate explanation for it all and the message isn't coming from the NHS because the NHS doesn't diagnose these diseases. As bad as ME diagnosis is in the NHS Long Covid is worse.
Which is why they are choosing people are lazy and obese rather than Long Covid is destroying everybody, they trust the NHS doctors. The NHS is the unofficial national religion, the idea they could mistreat and misdiagnosed this many patients isn't even on their list of possibilities.

Andrew Gwynne ought to know better but he clearly doesn't and is about to roll out an attrocious roll out plan for ME that forces people back to work with a nice chat of encouragement. They are that out of touch with reality.