I think taking most illnesses seriously is wise, particularly so today as Covid has been around a shorter period of time and the long term effects are less known.
What I’m curious about is how does the frequency of “long-Covid” compare to other post-viral syndromes? Having various forms of malaise, lethargy, and other health problems after an illness is not a new phenomenon. Does this affect 1 in 100 or 1 in 100,000 people severely? How does this compare with say past flus? It’s hard to compare long Covid to anything without a basis for comparison.
I’ve had the flu before and was a physical wreck for about 6 months after until my body finally snapped back. Because it was pre-Covid times, I just sucked it up and focused on struggling through my day and then resting. I can easily imagine people going through something similar today, and because everybody is scared because of the media, we’re looking for a problem and labeling it rather than just generally sucking it up. (This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t work to understand and treat this problem, just that it might not be anything significantly different than all prior human experience)
How much of the concern over “long-Covid” is simply a byproduct of psychology? We may be fixated on a problem and looking for it and therefore finding it more even though it’s not necessarily any more common of a problem. Maybe a direct comparison with other viruses shows different, but this is the comparison I’d like to see to better understand the risk-management here.
Respectfully, no. I had Covid-19 in March 2020 and had long covid and... "just suck it up and push through" is basically the worst possible advice. Saying it causes fatigue just doesn't describe how utterly disabling it can be. I would get tired walking from my bedroom to the kitchen and I live in a small apartment. When I would push through, I'd be bedridden for days after. Seriously! We're talking too exhausted to have Netflix on in the background, not even watching it. I'm sure it's not psychosomatic because this was all new at the time, and I was far too exhausted for months after to even just surf the Internet.
The most disabling part of the illness was learning that I can't just "push through" without paying for it for days afterwards. For months after, a single beer and a big meal would lay me out. You don't usually think of digesting food as strenuous, but in my weakened state, I'd start seeing stars and almost black out.
Now, it would be easy to dismiss me, blame me for not being healthier, but when young athletes who are fit have having these symptoms, and doctors (with better access to healthcare then I) are recording their own symptoms as scientists, it's not made up.
The worst part of having long covid is people (including doctors!) who don't believe long covid is real. Thankfully for long covid, there are biomarkers that can be tested for now so unbelievers don't have to take it on faith. After the medical gaslighting I've experienced, I really feel for people that suffer from fibromyalgia or other mysterious un-seeable maladies that there are not tests for.
I believe that what you describe is your genuine experience. For you, long-covid has been a very big deal.
That wasn’t really the question though. The question isn’t, is long-covid a gut punch to anybody? It sure does seem to be so. The question is how many people is it affecting very badly, and is it radically different than other post-viral syndromes like flu sufferers have?
Im trying to put the risk profile in proper context that I can understand.
If for example ordinary influenza has an effect as bad as yours in say 1 in 500,000 patients, and Covid has an effect like that in say 1 in 400,000 patients, we can start to put the risk into a proper context that people can understand. That’s the type of clear and digestible comparison that I think we’re missing.
>Self-reported symptoms of the disease persisted for 1 to 2 months after initial diagnosis in up to 13% of patients; 4.5% experienced symptoms beyond 2 months, and 2.6% for 3 months or longer, according to mobile app data from U.K., U.S., and Swedish populations.
>In potentially more reliable clinic-based assessments, 33% to 98% of survivors have symptoms or complications for at least a month.
This doesn’t really answer the question either. The severity sought is absent. The bigger issue though is self-reported symptoms of disease are present in over 50% of people who never had the disease, in other similar studies.
Clinic-based symptoms or complications for at least a month means those individuals were monitored for at least a month, which leaves out everyone I know who had it and lived.
> In a recent study, researchers from several universities and centers, including the University of Washington, the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), and Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, discovered that four biological factors might help predict whether a patient goes on to develop long COVID.
I feel like it might be more that we weren’t concerned I’m about post-viral symptoms enough in the past than that we are overly concerned with them now. ME and Chronic Fatigue and similar can be life changing (in a bad way), but are not at all well understood, often dismissed as being in peoples heads, and do not have effective treatments.
Long-covid is an increase in prevalence, and also does seem to present some unique symptoms.
> Long-covid is an increase in prevalence, and also does seem to present some unique symptoms.
Is it though? That data is exactly what the commenter above is asking for, and I've also not seen any data comparing prevalence of long covid to long-lasting side effects of other diseases.
> I feel like it might be more that we weren’t concerned I’m about post-viral symptoms enough in the past than that we are overly concerned with them now. ME and Chronic Fatigue and similar can be life changing (in a bad way)
Being in a car crash can be life changing in a bad way (if not life ending) and yet most of us choose to get in cars on a regular basis. My point is that the severity alone is not useful: you can only make an informed decision knowing both severity and the probability of a particular outcome.
Nowadays we are constantly bombarded with things fighting for our attention. Everyone is "raising awareness" for something, but as humans we are very limited in the things we can be constantly vigilent about. The only rational response is to prioritise the things that most warrant consideration, and ignore everything else.
Long covid is a particularly pointless thing to be aware of, because it's not like any sane person chooses to get covid, so the risk calculation is already two steps divorced from the actions we can actually take to avoid it.
Thank you. Analyzing this kind of data is the kind of thing I'm talking about to try and get to grips with the risk-management calculation involved.
But even if there's no medical flaws with this study, it doesn't necessarily answer the question to me because this overall point might really be more of a psychological question mark than a medical question.
If you tell people they had Covid, some portion of people who have been stressed out by the media focus may panic and mentally exaggerate post-viral symptoms based solely on the fear they feel with Covid over the flu, even if the actual medical conditions they experienced would not cause them to panic if they were told they had the flu.
I think a study that would actually illuminate here is to tell half the patients who had Covid that they actually had the flu, and telling half the patients that had the flu that they actually had Covid, and then doing a comparison on how peoples' perception of which illness they had impacted how frequently they reported symptoms. (I don't know, but I doubt that would be considered medically ethical though.) My guess is that the media focus on Covid is impacting how people choose to go to the doctor regarding post-viral symptoms and there's no real way to measure this without some unusual experimental design.
I don't have solid experimental data on this. But my own experience was that I went into the pandemic assuming that I was young (I'm 28) and that covid likely wouldn't affect me too badly, I then catch it quite early on (Apr 2020), and come out of the initial infection finding that exercise causes me heart pain and fatigue to the point that I sometimes actually fall asleep immediately afterwards (this has gradually improved over time, but is still quite restrictive on activities that I am able to do). And now almost 2 years later this is still affecting me. I wasn't expecting this at all. I was expecting to be able to continue with my life as usual.
I don't know about you, but I've never heard of a young person getting these kind of symptoms from flu. Other viruses like Glandular Fever are known to cause these kind of affects of course. Based on this I rather suspect that the reason there is more media focus on long-covid than long-flu is because covid is causing a lot more post-viral symptoms than flu does. That doesn't mean there is no media focus factor, but I don't think it's the main driver.
I think the question is: in the absence of solid experimental evidence why would you assume that the effect is psychological when post-viral effects are well documented across multiple viruses, and have been confirmed by clinical diagnoses by Doctors in thousands of covid cases.
Being skeptical until proven unequivocally is a good approach to scientific enquiry, but it is not good public policy where we must take decisions and act despite uncertainty.
I don't have objective proof of this in the sense of "2+2=4", but I think what I've been talking about in many previous posts is a logical systemic explanation and has been repeatedly observed in the last few years.
The media's business model has changed.
At one point the media's business model was based on trust. People watched a guy like Dan Rather repeatedly because they thought he seemed genuine about telling the truth. I'm sure they knew he'd have his own feelings and human biases, but they came back to him because they thought he was focused on truth and felt trustworthy.
The media's business model has changed because of technology such as the ability to measure clicks, measure the intensity of emotion, and social-media and search algorithms that promotes what gets the most activity. Once the media has the ability to essentially drive their own profit via algorithms promoting the emotionally most intense news stories and ideas that gets people sharing and watching, the fear-porn or outrage-porn of the current news cycle will become the only reality for many people.
As an example, many people went from being overly scared about Omicron and Covid-19 fear a few weeks ago, to supreme outrage about Putin and Ukraine and making that the central part of their identity without skipping a beat. And I have to note that almost nobody gave half a shit about past Russian invasions of Ukraine or Georgia until the media told them that they needed to care about this. (Not suggesting that people shouldn't care about this, but the intensity of this switch and suddenly caring about this part of the world feels notably shaped by the media promoting it this time.)
Outrage or fear porn is the new ruler of reality. The media has supreme influence in shaping peoples' perceptions, and if a study about Covid after-affects is done, I'm sure that peoples' fears that are magnified by this new media business model will have some impact in how people report symptoms. If you tell people that Covid is super-scary and long-covid is the new big concern, at least some people will feel panic and be more likely to go to the doctor and express concern over identical symptoms that they otherwise might have not cared about if they experienced it in say 2014 with a flu.
I get where you're coming from, and agree with you on the effects of media focus.
But I don't think that's a reason not to be worried about this. Reading various threads here, there are people describing pretty awful post-COVID conditions, some that seem way more severe than anything associated with post-flu conditions.
Yes, these are anecdotes. But if we believe them to be true, they should still worry us, even if the incidence is less than 1%. Because if there is even a 0.1% (or maybe even 0.01%)[0] chance that, after recovering from COVID, I might end up physically debilitated for months or years, I will absolutely change my behavior to make it less likely that I get COVID in the first place, regardless of loosening of masking and distancing restrictions. Some might consider that an overreaction, but that's my choice to make.
As you and others point out in this thread, it's not just incidence that matters; severity is important too. If I have a 0.1% chance of dying doing a particular optional activity, I would not do that activity. If instead I have a 0.1% chance of a minor injury doing that activity, I would probably still do it if it was something I believe I'd enjoy.
[0] Just to give you an idea of my own personal risk tolerance: I just did a quick search on fatalities from skydiving, and it looks like it's around 0.0002% (tandem, not solo, based on 2019 reports). That's pretty low, but still high enough for me to not be particularly interested in doing it, even though I think it would be fun. Granted, this is a very different situation than trying to avoid getting COVID.
> Yes, these are anecdotes. But if we believe them to be true, they should still worry us, even if the incidence is less than 1%. Because if there is even a 0.1% (or maybe even 0.01%)[0] chance that, after recovering from COVID, I might end up physically debilitated for months or years, I will absolutely change my behavior to make it less likely that I get COVID in the first place, regardless of loosening of masking and distancing restrictions. Some might consider that an overreaction, but that's my choice to make.
You and I have somewhat different thought-processes when it comes to thinking about risk. All other things being equal, I wouldn't want to risk even a 0.001% chance of significant problems either: but the deciding factor for me is valuing my freedom and not wanting to be scared for the rest of my life. Also, there's no guarantee that you can still avoid Covid anyway even if you do 100% of things perfectly anyway.
That said, I respect everybody's right to choose. That's one value that I hope everybody can learn to respect again.
That paper is better than most in the space, in that it has an actual control group, and there are not huge health/age differences between the populations at baseline. Nonetheless, a few interesting things about that paper that stand out to me:
1) Depression and anxiety are the most common "long covid" symptoms, by far. Even "abnormal breathing" doesn't linger to nearly the same extent (fig 1). In fact, when you look at the co-variate matrices, depression and anxiety stand out as a brightly colored axis for the "long covid" cohort (but not for flu), indicating that many/most "long covid" patients had correlated problems with depression and anxiety that aren't seen in the "long flu" group (fig 3).
2) If you look at the last figure (fig 5), it's obvious that the "long covid" symptoms are enriched in the oldest and sickest patients -- yet the main text doesn't break out these groups explicitly, and instead presents "long covid" symptoms as something equally likely to affect all. That's clearly not true. The authors could easily have done this, but did not.
3) The "long covid" symptoms include the primary disease itself (measurements start on day 1), and drops off by 3 months after diagnosis (fig 1), but the authors try to distract from this by emphasizing the group that develops symptoms at any point in the six months after diagnosis, even if they don't have the corresponding symptom in the first 90 days after infection. In fact, 40% of the people in the "symptoms within six months" cohort do not have symptoms in the first 90 days! The authors try to claim that this is proof of some kind of evolving "network" of symptoms...but ignore the simpler explanation that they're detecting "symptoms" unrelated to the original illness.
Long covid papers often make the mistake of blurring together severe, long-term symptoms with minor or unrelated ones, and mixing old people with young people. The authors here have done little to prevent either class of error. Also, looking at this, you also have to conclude that the "long covid" cohort cannot easily be separated from a group of people struggling with depression and anxiety. Are the symptoms caused by the depression? With symptoms like "fatigue" and "pain", it's quite probable.
> With symptoms like "fatigue" and "pain", it's quite probable.
I'd disagree with this. I'd argue that the causation is equally likely to go the other way. Fatigue is a well-documented symptom of multiple viral infections. And painful auto-immune induced symptoms are well-documented in post-covid patients. And who wouldn't be depressed if they can no longer work or do the activities they usually enjoy because they can't get through a day without running out of energy while they can see everyone else getting back to their normal lives.
Everything in the paper is a correlation, and correlations alone do not imply a causative relationship. Therefore, you can just as plausibly argue that the symptoms cited have nothing to do with covid. That said, there's no reason to believe that people with "long flu" (the control group) would be less likely to experience depression as a result of their lingering symptoms, but that is what is seen. And remember that depression and anxiety are more common than the other symptoms -- they're happening in the absence of other "long covid" symptoms in this cohort.
Does Covid cause depression and anxiety, or are depressed and anxious people more likely show up to the doctor seeking covid treatment? You can't tell from a study like this, but the latter is a simpler explanation, consistent with a radical, society-wide initiative that uprooted people's social structures during the study period.
Also, this:
> painful auto-immune induced symptoms are well-documented in post-covid patients.
Is not true. There is some speculation and self-reporting of symptoms, but it has not been "well documented", or documented at all.
I think the categories and the attributes assigned to them are fuzzy. That said fatigue that is attributed to CFS/ME is not just being tired, it's a whole other level, it is a crushing fatigue. CFS/ME fatigue also has clearly definable characteristics; for example Post-exertional malaise (PEM) that does not occur in depressed people unless they also have CFS/ME. In which case they're probably miscategorized.
> Long covid is a particularly pointless thing to be aware of, because it's not like any sane person chooses to get covid, so the risk calculation is already two steps divorced from the actions we can actually take to avoid it.
I disagree. While I certainly would prefer to not get COVID, I'm vaccinated and boosted, so if I do get it, my (primary) symptoms will likely be mild or nonexistent. So from the perspective of primary symptoms, I am at the point where I want to just live my life, not have restrictions, and if I get it... ok, well, I get it, no big deal. Essentially I will treat it like a cold or the flu: I would prefer not to get it, but I'm not going to change my day-to-day life in order to avoid it.
But the possibility of long COVID changes that. If long COVID is both prevalent and severe, I would choose to avoid crowds, stay home more often, continue masking and social distancing even when/where my local health guidelines don't require it, etc.
>the risk calculation is already two steps divorced from the actions we can actually take to avoid it.
This is wrong. Many of us are in a position to avoid getting covid with high probability, at the heavy cost of a complete sacrifice of an offline social life. Long covid heavily affects the expected QALY loss calculation, so it's of enormous material interest.
>it's not like any sane person chooses to get covid
I know lots of insane people then. They say things like "Omicron is mild so I decided it was a good time to get it" - by which they meant they would stop paying the cost to avoid it (and predictably contracted it immediately). They might have decided differently if it turns out that long covid is a) common and b) life-wrecking.
> Even if prevalence per case is the same as flu; covid would still at least double the overall societal prevalence due to it being in addition to flu.
This sounds true if you don’t think long and hard about it, but actually the mechanics of viral spread are not quite that simple. For example there’s the phenomenom of interferon-mediated “viral interference” where infection with virus X wards off infection from virus Y (say, the influenza strain de jeur), which is thought to be attributable to acute upregulation of the innate immune system.
I sure hope that medical research funding decisions are driven by medical experts looking at data, not by any level of societal awareness (positive or negative).
A lot of medical funding is from charities like Cancer Research which get their money from the general public. Public awareness plays a big part in which of these charities get funding.
The major problem we have is that covid affect many organs including the heart.
This lead to cell death and regeneration all over, but with the aging of the organs affected.
In the case of the heart, there is almost no regeneration, mostly scarification. That mean the even young persons not feeling bad from covid could lose years of heart health.
The same apply to the mRNA vaccine if it is injected in a vein by error and goes to the heart.
Omicron seems to stay more in upper respiratory and thus being of less concern.
There is a bunch of things people can do to increase their chances of it being mild:
This isn't scientific evidence, but a possible relevant anecdote that potentially explains some of this. I had a very close friend working some kind of support role at one of the big Covid injection sites in a big US city.
I was told that at least some portion of the many nurses hired to do the vaccine injections appeared to have very little experience with that type of injection and weren't following the set procedures setup by the head doctor of the center. Because of the rushed nature of setting up the vaccination center, the hiring was rushed and the training was limited and the quality control and supervision was pretty bad.
I have a feeling that at least some of the reports of vaccine injuries may have just been caused by improper injection technique due to the rushed process.
Because that is essentially the state of affairs in all human endeavors. Medicine is more prone to it, because they can always claim a new 'variant' or exception to the rule when a treatment/intervention does not work. Medical college also filters for conformists who have a large debt to pay once out of medical school.
I had post-viral syndrome from glandular fever when I was ~32. It sucked. Like you, I was a wreck for 6 months. It took 2-3 years before I could exercise properly but my life was decent enough at the 12 month mark. My research at the time indicated that rates of post-viral syndromes vary by disease. Glandular fever is known to cause it in 10-20% of adults who fall sick.
> What I’m curious about is how does the frequency of “long-Covid” compare to other post-viral syndromes? Having various forms of malaise, lethargy, and other health problems after an illness is not a new phenomenon. Does this affect 1 in 100 or 1 in 100,000 people severely? How does this compare with say past flus? It’s hard to compare long Covid to anything without a basis for comparison.
Well it's only year 3 of the pandemic and we are on our 4th variant.
Is it even possible to get reliable, steady long term data?
You can ballpark it based on similar viruses, long covid is CFS/ME/Dysautonomia which is known to occur after harsh viruses at a rate of around 10-20%. It's knowable in research but doctors and public institutions are very slow to pick it up. Just look at how little was done with CFS/ME and how much medical gaslighting is still going on even though very clear diagnostic tools now exist.
I would tend to agree that this is probably in the realm of post-viral CFIDS/ME/POTS/etc - I had nearly 10 years of dealing with fatigue/tachycardia/blood pressure issues/etc/etc/etc after an intense bout of mono and then an intense bout of lyme disease.
I haven't seen any numbers, and this general area of symptoms does get pretty blurry (and has many weird rabbitholes - for me methyl-b12 injections for a year worked amazing - for someone else? maybe not)
COVID reporting doesn't seem much different to me than other pandemic reporting. I read about SARS. I read about MERS. I read about Coronavirus in its early days in exactly the same way (and thought exactly the same thing, "interesting curiosity, that sounds like it really sucks for some other country").
The difference is that this time, it started killing Americans in America, so got a little bit more attention than some weird disease in Hong Kong or the Middle East.
In Australia I can't even get a bloody antibody test to show I've had covid, because doctors are afraid it will be used to "justify" not getting vaccinated or not getting any further boosters. How is this helping us learn about the long-term effects of the virus? I've had a "scratch" in my throat for 2 years now, and with no diagnosis there's never going to be any treatment for me should something be offered.
This entire schmozzle is a cluster of historic proportions from our "leaders" at the top all the way down to your local GP. And it's clear that society won't be able to be dealt with it in an adult, non-political, evidence-based, and non-hysterical manner for years to come.
My government is still talking about mandating vaccinations. I am boostered already but if they really implement it I am not sure what to do, I will certainly not comply with any additional vaccines that hold for 1-2 months. I don't want the shitty Euro passport or app either. To me it is very well a mass psychosis. Sure, Covid is a serious disease, getting vaccinated might make sense, especially if you are older. But the fear around it is just pathological at this point. Covid is a PR problem instead of a health problem by now.
Get your vaccine turbo and afterburner for all I care, but this already moved beyond ridiculous. I am very sure my easily scared country will need a long time to drop mask mandates.
What we are seeing, society-scale, is the human ability to adapt to changing conditions.
When we have a 'normal' status in society and stable processes which have been fairly unchanged for decades, humans seem smart, since repetition is what we learn best. But when society is struck by something that forces everyone to adapt, the true human ability shines through, and it's nowhere near the one refined through times.
> In Australia I can't even get a bloody antibody test to show I've had covid, because doctors are afraid it will be used to "justify" not getting vaccinated
Honest question: What would you use it for? I'm trying to come up with a reason I would want to know whether I ever had covid (I don't think I did but who knows), but I can't think of anything I would do with that information, or any way it would change anything about my current behavior.
None of your fucking business? I'm not asking for a prescription to heroin, and I'm happy to pay the cost of the test. And if 10% of the population end up with assorted "long covid" symptoms there are likely to be interventions to address them, and I'd like to be able to access those.
I feel like the comments to this article exemplify the worst of HN - the assumption things other than computer science probably have simple solutions no one has thought of yet.
For example, one commentator suggests possibly every patient, doctor, and researcher has missed that merely taking cough drops would completely clear up long covid.
Even if it's true in some rare cases, I think we would be better off presuming that any active subject of research can't be solved by an outsider thinking about it for five minutes.
I really appreciate HN for providing a refreshingly healthy, intellectually stimulating forum for discussion. In fact, as someone who is decidedly outside the tech-space, I mainly come here for the articles and discussions that have nothing to do with technology. At the same time, I think HN prides itself on being different from the myopic hivemind typical of other social media outlets - anecdotally, this something that I haven't found to be entirely accurate. (See anything about STEM vs. non-STEM education, medicine or biotechnology for an example of what I'm talking about).
I think the subjects HN broadly has blindspots in is actually really wide but maybe being aware of them is specific to one's field. For a long time until recently I was similarly outside the tech space and the misconceptions about my former field that are asserted here with absolute confidence are staggering. Conversely, surely there are plenty of us here from all kinds of fields, so I even feel silly talking about HN as any kind of monolith. It's sticky!
I disagree with your last point. We should presume that it's very probable that an outsider thinking for five minutes won't be producing a solution, but not disregard the possibility.
I don't see any citations in this write-up. Colds and flu also cause direct cell damage. I haven't seen any concept of "long flu" anywhere.
The vaccines are not going to prevent contraction or transmission anymore. And per this article, you can apparently be asymptomatic but still get long COVID? So why is "get you vaccine and booster" in the first sentence?
It goes on to state that "10% to 30% of people might get long COVID." Not only is there no citation for that, what does that mean exactly? Isn't it 100% of people who get COVID may get long COVID?
> So why is "get you vaccine and booster" in the first sentence?
It's literally there in the second sentence -
"The odds of illness severe enough to warrant hospitalization are dramatically lowered if you stay up to date on your COVID-19 vaccine, including a booster dose."
“Vaccine effectiveness of the mRNA vaccines to prevent COVID-19-associated hospitalizations included: 85% (95% CI: 82 to 88%) for 2 vaccine doses against Alpha; 85% (95% CI: 83 to 87%) for 2 doses against Delta; 94% (95% CI: 92 to 95%) for 3 doses against Delta; 65% (95% CI: 51 to 75%) for 2 doses against Omicron; and 86% (95% CI: 77 to 91%) for 3 doses against Omicron.”
Less effective, but not ineffective, especially after a booster.
It also says that breakthrough cases are "rare". When I saw that I checked the date to see if it was a pre-omicron article. It isn't. This is either unbelievable ignorance or a flat-out lie. Either way, I wouldn't trust any of the non-footnoted assertions in this article.
How can they possibly have that data when we are talking about omicron? They have no idea whether it is omicron or vaccinations, and that distinction only comes into play if we even have measurable results for long covid from omicron, which has only been around for a few months.
The 10-30% is pure junk reporting and usually requires including people who have a cough that persists for a month after infection or non-specific symptoms like brain fog. I've had coughs that lasted two months after an infection from other diseases - it sucked, but in the long run I was fine. Now, a cough lasting a year would indeed be something else and far more terrible, but it sure as hell isn't 10-30% of people who have symptoms that last a year after covid.
I don't know about everything else you mention, but dismissing brain fog is very dangerous. It can make you completely unable to think clearly for extended periods of time, and thus completely unable to work. In general it makes no sense to me we dismiss diseases that are "non-specific" (i.e. poorly understood) while ignoring the magnitude of the harms. I'm much more worried about getting something poorly understood.
Not dismissing it, I had brain fog for three months and it was terribly disconcerting. I say 'nonspecific' because it can be caused by a huge number of things, including extreme stress or burnout or anxiety, and because most people will still eventually recover with sufficient time. It's like fatigue after EBV - very few actually develop CFS.
In other words, having symptoms for 3-6 months sucks, I don't deny it, but with the very likely prospect of recovery for most it's not the worst thing. Anecdotally though I don't know a single person who has had covid who is still reporting any symptoms after ~2 months (n=~20).
Fair enough. I've heard about it happening. I've seen how it's underreported, so I suspect it's undercounted.
I understand others may want to take the gamble that, while there are short and medium term symptoms, Covid has minimal long term effect. Until there's much better research that doesn't make sense to me. I'd rather take the known small suffering of wearing a mask and avoiding indoor activities instead of accepting the unknown risk of never being able to code large projects, climb, or hike for the rest of my life.
My 'case' is that the persistence of long covid is absolutely not guaranteed and most people will recover. It's people making it out like it's a death sentence or going to last for the rest of their lives that are causing huge amounts of psychological damage at the moment. Spare a moment for the people who will recover but have to live with the opinions of so many on the internet that no, in fact, they're utterly and completely doomed. Does wonders for preventing horrible, profound depression. Does it need to be said that becoming horribly depressed does few wonders for improving health conditions?
They may start there, but they don't end there. You can objectively measure many symptoms (e.g. physical exams, blood tests, cognitive tests).
Once you start extending symptoms to "unverifiable claims made by the patient", it can be very real for the patient, but you can never eliminate the possibility that the mind is creating the symptom, and nothing is physically wrong.
That "fatigue" is one of the most common "long covid" symptoms, for example, is confounded by the fact that fatigue is one of the major symptoms of depression.
And where do you imagine this "mind" exists which is separate from physical reality for it to exist while "nothing is physically wrong"?
The answer of course, is that there is no such thing. Perhaps the fatigue/depression is due to issues with neurotransmitters or the organs that regulate them, neurons, blood oxygen levels, blood-brain barrier issues, brain structure, nerves in other parts of the body, endocrine function, etc.
If we figured out tomorrow that we could treat it with an injection of B vitamins or a pill of serotonin or a session of magnetic therapy or a fecal transplant to change the patient's gut microbiome or whatever new thing, then you could easily point to the "physically wrong" thing which was causing it. But treating "the mind" as a separate, non-physical thing is no different than suggesting some other supernatural, non-physical thing like God or spirits or curses is causing it.
My point isn't to get into a debate about metaphysics. I only emphasized that to head off the usual sorts of criticisms that get flung at someone who points out (correctly) that psychosomatic illness is a real thing. Symptoms caused by the mind are still real symptoms. They just aren't caused by a virus.
Also, the existence of a treatment no more implies the existence of a physical mechanism than the existence of a placebo implies the existence of magic. Every illness is a mixture of biological and psychological factors, and simply feeling like someone is caring for you can cure even intransigent symptoms.
Is Covid causing depression? Nobody knows. But leaping to the conclusion that it is -- and therefore we must do X,Y or Z in response -- is irresponsible when there's a more parsimonious explanation: people have have just lived through a mass cultural event that is causing a great deal of depression, everywhere.
Not a junk symptom, I said it's junk reporting. Real figures where people are quite disabled are low single digits in the worst case. A mild but persistent cough that lasts for a few months is hardly disabling even though some people will count it as 'long covid'.
Brain fog is very real, and I never said it was not.
Coughs notably persist beyond the illness that causes them - they can become self perpetuating by causing inflammation that in turn makes you cough. I've found taking cough drops is a great way to break this cycle.
So... yeah, persistent cough is a non-symptom, and I suspect a decent amount of long COVID research is a function of perverse incentives in medical research.
Had a cold a month or so back (tested twice for Covid, negative). Just some random crap my son brought home from school. Have had a persistent cough ever since. Just get through it like I have been for the last 35 years.
When I worked in grocery store had crap all the time. Then after having kids went through random sickness every 2 to 3 months. In fact I have 2 doctor visits I can point to pre covid. One in 2016 and one in 2018 when I literally went and was like I've been sick for 2 months. Doctors were like, yea you had some random virus, could take a while to shake it. Just took forever to get over it.
Why is this all the sudden a thing? I know Covid can potentially cause (maybe?) more damage than the Flu/or random colds but did people literally not get sick before Covid? Because it really seems like it.
Also are there studies on people who are hysterical about Covid getting more "Long Covid". I'm not saying there aren't physical symptoms. Definitely lost of taste or distorted taste is a big symptom, but could some symptons be mental too?
>Why is this all the sudden a thing? I know Covid can potentially cause (maybe?) more damage than the Flu/or random colds but did people literally not get sick before Covid? Because it really seems like it.
In my entire life, I cannot think of anyone I personally know (family, friends, colleagues) who has been seriously ill (either in the short term or long term) due to a cold, cough, or flu.
On the other hand, in just two years of the pandemic, I've personally known several people who have either ended up in hospital with the virus itself, or have persistent problems over a year after infection (e.g. loss of smell).
To make things more concerning, I know of people in their 20s and 30s that have been badly affected by Covid. Not just people who are 55+.
In an average year flu kills about 500k people, in the same sense of how we say those die from Covid. And infects about 1B, will a reasonable percentage of those resulting in serious disease.
So you're experience isn't typical; the average person knows more people who suffered of flu.
Yea I'm not trying to down play it, just seems a little off. I can't think of a person in my entire life that I know that ever gotten the flu (while I've known them) besides my wife when she was like 16. I know around 8 people that got Covid though.
The loss of smell one is going to be huge but that's a side effect of any virus. Maybe what we're seeing here is an insane amount of people getting a virus, not necessarily that it has worse post viral syndrome than any other virus. Either way we're in for a shit show.
Unfortunately, we can't really dwell on Long Covid. We can only do what we can individually to reduce risk and move on. Unless of course we want to live in a bubble the rest of our lives.
Also if related to loss of smell for your friends, I'd recommend them trying scent training. I ordered a kit through here https://abscent.org/learn-us/smell-training. It does seem to help. I'm doing it as a meditation almost and thinking back to past memories with the scent. It's kind of cool.
It (Long COVID) is not suddenly "a thing." It's been talked about for quite some time. I remember first hearing about it in 2020. If you think it's just now a thing, it's because you haven't been paying attention to this.
They’re talking about after-effects of viral diseases being treated as a new thing. I’ve had the flu Knock out my cardio capacity for at least a couple of months before, this isn’t a new thing.
Have you realised that recovery is often very likely? I had brain fog for three months, and it spontaneously vanished after that. I don't know why people act like all 'long covid' is a death sentence. It's just like the fatigue that can come after certain other infections (e.g. EPV) where the vast majority will recover fine, but it might take quite a while (6 months to a year). Very few end up with actual CFS.
This implies that wearing a mask will prevent covid infection. It will not, look at a place like South Korea or Singapore to see why that's just not reality.
Anyway, yes, it sucks, the only way I got through it was by reassuring myself that for the vast majority of people issues like brain fog do tend to resolve depending on their underlying cause. I won't lie and say it wasn't scary though. Essentially it deleted three months of my life.
> This implies that wearing a mask will prevent covid infection.
There are at least two orders of magnitude difference in efficacy depending on what type of mask you happen to be wearing and what the fit is[1].
And that's assuming OP is the only party wearing a mask. If all parties are wearing them then it's four orders of magnitude depending on mask type/fit.
I don't know what the actual time-to-infection is for Omicron. But that's quite a spread in mask efficacy to blithely encapsulate with the single word "mask." Given that, I don't think it makes sense to talk about "masks" without specifying which category of mask. It's like talking about "latency" in audio-- unless users prefix it with "round trip" they are almost certain to misunderstand what it is they are measuring and will end up just confusing themselves further.
> It will not, look at a place like South Korea or Singapore to see why that's just not reality.
But OP is OP, not an entire country of citizens. And we already know a subset of citizens called "nurses" can learn to wearing a tight-fitting, uncomfortable NIOSH-approved N95 for extended periods of time. If OP wants to do that when buying groceries, OP will likely lower the risk of infection for themselves. And hell, at some point somebody is probably going to create a decent mask that is both tight-fitting and not so painful to wear. Maybe by that point there will even be a better indication of what the actual time to infection for Omicron is.
Yes, it's a reasonable point that truly effective masks do exist. I'd be very surprised if most individuals were prepared to wear them in all situations where infections could occur though. A lot of transmission is household transmission - would many people be willing to wear a fitted n95 mask or equivalent as a precaution when visiting friends or family - potentially indefinitely?
From the headline:
"ULTRA FIT™ MASK Filtration like an N95 Breathability of a 3-Ply"
From the FAQ:
"Are ULTRA FIT™ masks rated as an N95 respirators?"
"No. N95 respirators are intended for healthcare workers and, if used correctly, must be fitted to the user’s face in a specialized process called “fit testing.” A professionally fitted N95 respirator will provide more protection than an ULTRA FIT™ mask but will be much less breathable and much less comfortable than an ULTRA FIT™ mask. N95 respirators are designed for front line healthcare workers looking after COVID patients. N95 masks are not suitable for general community use, because most people will not reliably wear an uncomfortable mask in low risk community settings. ULTRA FIT™ masks are designed for comfort, compliance, and better protection than any other mask for general community use."
But then they go on to show some decent results from their ASTM testing!
They desperately need a copywriter, marketer, or someone else who's going to put a little more thought into what they're communicating.
If you dig deep, it looks legit. On the surface the claims are impressive. But right below the surface— where many scam-averse PPE shoppers will be lurking— you start to see warning signs. They're comparing it to an N95 too much but the qualifiers are awful. That FAQ answer is both condescending in the way scam copy is, and fails to offer any justification for why THEY made the comparison. They don't mention the ASTM certification, let alone the impressive tests results. The only efficacy numbers they show are at the bottom of a linked PDF.
Seems like a good product but a great example of how communication isn't making something look and sound nice. A mask made by two doctors, one also a medical engineer, working in two of the best hospital systems in the country, will look no different than some random factory pressing stuffed animal batting into the shape of KN95 masks without the proper communication.
Just quickly skimming, I notice that a) the clip compares it to the efficacy of a surgical mask, and b) it hooks around the ears rather than going around the head fully.
If it gets listed on that site of NIOSH approved masks I'll certainly give it a shot, though.
I think people are underestimating the sheer magnitude and infectiousness of this virus. Even if chances of longer effects are on par with the flu, it's MUCH more prevalent and infectious. Over the past year, we've had about one wave per season. We're quickly reaching a point where it's reasonable to expect most people will catch it every year or so, and it's entirely possible and maybe likely to get it multiple times a year.
While 3-6 months is a standard recovery timeline for longer term effects, many people are looking at years or a lifetime of serious effects. I'm close to someone who is still recovering from mono over 2 years later. Their entire life has been upended, their career is over, and most of their passions are now physically impossible.
We're looking at many millions of people of people being temporarily or permanently disabled every year on top of previous contributors like flu, etc. Many people don't have the resources to be exhausted and struggling with cognition for months. How many billions of years of life will collectively be deleted over the coming years? I believe this is worse than we realize, and it's going to get worse sooner than we're ready for.
It's not about 100% prevention. Nothing, short of 0 human contact, can guarantee that.
It's all about adding layers of prevention that each drop your chances of catching it (and its potential severity) by N% each. Get enough of those, and your chances start to look pretty good.
Yes if you look at the general population with incorrect mask fitting, long time frame. I would doubt that claim for an individual that wears properly fitted N95.
Hmm… those first four seem to be small asks of the citizen for a common good (whether or not you agree that fighting climate change or wearing masks is a common good is a bit irrelevant, the framers of such asks would believe so), where as the last one seems to be a rather large surveillance apparatus.
It just does not follow to me that asking people to wear masks during a pandemic or to raise taxes to pay for something (done literally all the time) lead to a dystopian surveillance hellscape.
No, look I’m as happy as the next guy all the mandates are going away but I would be extremely opposed to the social status thing.
Just because someone is willing to wear a mask or get vaccinated during a pandemic does not mean they would be fine with a massive surveillance state. That’s a _crazy_ leap
We all brush our teeth (mostly) because we want to preserve their health. And we wish to avoid the pain of abscesses and the dentist's drill.
The government doesn't MANDATE that we brush our teeth.
They have worked hard to make us think that the mandates are not for you but your neighbor, meaning they protect your neighbor from you. But that just isn't the case. We know that the vaccine will not stop infection or spread, and the only useful masks are the ones that will protect you from inhaling the aerosolized infective agent.
So this would come down to personal choice.
What we're seeing on a global scale is an infrastructure being put in place ever so slowly based on shocking and jarring events. Piece by piece. This has been going on since the turn of the 20th century. Maybe earlier.
DO you think the infrastructure being built for vaccine passports is going to be limited to vaccines or travel? If legislation like the PATRIOT act and dark projects like Prism have taught us anything it's that once the foot is in the door it will not retract.
The mRNA vaccine is not your grandpa's vaccine. This is a new and experimental technology that is not even close to being fully understood. And there is no data on very long term adverse events.
The trial data will not be released by the FDA for another 55 years or so [1]
The J&J Janssen vaccine is a more traditional vaccine and it's not pushed by the media or the governments almost at all.
J&J is a viral vector vaccine and it's also a very new tech. Only 6 are approved. 4 for covid, 2 for ebola. It's just a crappy vaccine, that's why it's not being pushed hard.
The inactivated vaccine, which is the actual well established old tech, seems to have worked just as well, or just as poorly, depending on how you percieve the vaccine efficacy.
India used mostly the inactivated vaccine, where nearly a billion people have been vaccinated with it. Apparently, that's just not good enough for several western countries that demand you MUST get an mRNA shot, despite being fully vaccinated by inactivated vaccines that were accepted as effective by the WHO. Clearly purely scientific decisions. /s
It gets even better. Licensed Astrazeneca vaccine that was made in India is not accepted by the EU, only the UK version that's sold under a different label. duh, this is obviously The Science. /s
Most of pharma in the world is manufactured in India, btw. Usually good enough, but for some reason not in a critical emergency such as a pandemic.
I got the vaccine. Does that make me anti-vaxx? I'm anti-mandate for an experimental drug that is not fully understood.
I am ok with the MMR and tetanus and the older traditional vaccines. They have been very rigorously tested and proven. I got all those for school and whatnot and I'm cool with that.
Does anyone have authoritative data indicating how common long-covid is?
Anecdotally, I was triple vaccinated (2x Moderna + booster), but I still caught covid twice (Aug 2021 and Jan 2022). Both times I had mild brain fog and cold-like symptoms (runny nose and light headache). Both times I recovered completely within 4 or 5 days. I'm a healthy 25 year-old man living in San Francisco, California.
Not trying to imply anything about long-covid, but it hasn't been my experience or that of anyone I personally know.
As a ballpark 10-20% would be expected given other harsh viruses cause CFS/ME 10-20% of the time and Covid is a particularly harsh virus. Not as harsh as MERS though.
Agreed. I've seen some theories that long covid is related to micro blood clots, and some very preliminary studies showing universal improvements from long term anti-coagulants---though I am far from being an expert able to really vet these papers. I know many people slowly get better as well. Anecdotally, my experience was a relatively large step down in cardio, which I have seen slowly improve, however I'm young and relatively healthy.
I’m suggesting that my covid led to long covid, which has been characterized as a persistent decrease in cardio capacity. In particular, the worst of it was me gasping for breath after a flight of stairs for about the first month.
Thanks! And yeah, based on my experiences helping several relatives on anti-coagulant therapy for other reasons (heart problems, clotting), it's really terrible to be on and quite dangerous day to day. Maybe not applicable to someone younger, but the them they literally could never stop either once they started.
It is likely going to be found that long covid can be reversed with acute doses of Vitamin B3. Here's a few links, including a Nature article about it:
First paper was published March 2020, and only discusses B3 in the context of lung damage.
Last paper doesn't seem to address cognitive function either.
The fact that masks aren't mandatory in public in the US is honestly unbelievable to me. Somehow the media has managed to convince the public that Covid is not as big a deal as it was in the beginning, but the research shows the exact opposite. I think we're going to have a day of reckoning when a wave of kids become old enough to work and are completely unproductive due to long haul COVID.
Masks clearly have a measurable impact on mental health. Given what he know about aerosolization and cloth masks, masks are near useless in public spaces.
If we are talking about reducing the populations' micromorts[1] by reducing common freedom, then there are far better things to do. Enforcing helmets for drivers, breathalyzers ($70) as default in cars, banning right-turns on red are all significantly more effective at reducing total deaths than mask enforcement, with much lower costs to a civilization. Similarly, banning certain foods and mandating exercise would massively improve American health outcomes.
I find that 'masks for everyone and everything' have become more of a political rallying call driven by hysteria, than a principled outcome focused measure. It reeks of the same blind faith as those who shout 'trust science' while healthy discourse makes up a fundamental pillar of the process of science.
> Masks clearly have a measurable impact on mental health.
> Given what he know about aerosolization and cloth masks, masks are near useless in public spaces.
Both of these claims are false.
Masks have had no proven impact on mental health.[2] Masks have proven to be one of the most effective tools we have for preventing the spread of COVID-19 in public places.[2]
Mask use is science-based, as countless studies have proven. Anti-mask rhetoric is politically- and emotionally-driven hysteria.
[1] "The evidence that we have does not point us to any concern that masks affect mental health negatively." — Jeremy Kendrick, MD, assistant professor of psychiatry, Huntsman Mental Health Institute https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/08/_mas...
[2] "In settings of very high mask use, in-school transmission of the coronavirus is less than 1%. The best way to protect health and safety—particularly of those that are not vaccinated—is to wear a mask." — Adam Hersh, MD, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at University of Utah Health and Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/08/_mas...
I will concede that there has been no peer reviewed study that explicitly tries to identity an association between mask wearing and mental health. Thus, no impact has been measured. It was not for lack of trying to find a study though. There are literally no good studies (from my cursory google scholar peek) that opined one way or the other.
> There is no evidence that a child wearing a mask causes depression or anxiety
But, saying this is not correct either. [1]
> transmission of the coronavirus is less than 1%.
These studies are strongly confounded with city policy, distancing measures, individual measures and odds of being vaccinated. It is really difficult to get exclusive numbers for mask efficacy using observational or questionnaire based studies of any kind.
As for my second claim, please evaluate it in context. Public spaces is usually taken to mean outdoor spaces or high ventilation large indoor spaces. My comments are also in time where covid's fatality has collapsed and hospitals aren't overwhelmed.
Almost every mask study I read makes assumptions of ideal wearing patterns that do not seem to be match real world observations. Even then, they project modest gains when using the most common forms of cloth masks in perfectly covid-favored situations. Vaccines can't ensure zero-covid. Masks can't ensure zero-covid. The end game is that it can become endemic or we wear masks forever.
Masks are 'useless' in the same way that seat-belts in school buses are useless. The risks for the concerned demographic are orders of magnitude lower. The ideal testing scenario is impossible to recreate in practice. It is impossible to enforce compliance. It has knock-on effects that no one seems keen to study. And lastly, if draconian measure are to be used, there are alternatives with greater effectiveness and lower social cost can should be tried first.
Anecdotally, I have yet to meet a single person IRL over 2 years of the pandemic who enjoys wearing masks. It varies from minor inconvenience to a thorn in your side.
For one, uncontrolled observational studies show that there is pretty strong correlation between the pandemic and depression. [1] In narrow studies, masks are shown to reduce interpersonal trust [2] , ability to evaluate emotions. [3] and might accelerate cognitive decline in older populations [4]
There is an alarming lack of studies directly targeting the mental health impact of masks. I couldn't even find a survey. On one hand, I understand that getting any good self-reported data from the hysterically polarized population is probably futile. I tried to find peer reviewed studies, but I am not a public health / psychiatry professional. On the other hand, silence can be deafening.
Tangentially, my trust in peer reviewed medical research has declined sharply over the pandemic. These folks need statistics, a sophisticated understanding of causality, experiment design and variable control. I can see why many of the best healthcare writers exclusively stick to meta-studies instead of individual studies.
Wearing a seatbelt is inconvenient and restricts movement, yet anyone I know wears one. Why aren’t masks seen the same way? No one questions seatbelts anymore and they provably and dramatically improve your odds in a crash.
I enjoy masking, and many of the people you've met in the last two years do too. Masks are an issue for many children, but for adults complaining about masks is like complaining about the weather: something to talk about that doesn't require thought because lots of people we meet don't like to think.
N95 masks work. Well designed, well fitted, correctly worn, hygienically cleaned cloth masks probably work okay, though good evidence of this is still limited and based largely upon assumptions. From my own observations, the overwhelming majority of people are wearing a mask of poor quality and/or in a manner which the scientific consensus couldn't possibly agree was effective. And I doubt most people are washing them with soap and water every single day.
If we're not going to mandate an effective mask, I honestly don't see what the point of mandates are. It makes as much sense to me as mandating seatbelts and accepting a knitted scarf as an acceptable form of seatbelt.
There was a paper posted on HN ages ago now, studying the mechanism by which masks were effective against covid... they argued it was essentially due to maintaining a higher temperature and humidity in the nose and throat. It's well known that rhinovirus for instance, reproduces more efficiently in cooler environments, so this seems plausible.
It's also possible there is more than one mechanism, and that an n95 or equivalent mask with fine enough particulate filter can additionally reduce exposure significantly (initial exposure level also being accepted as having some effect for viruses in general).
So you can look down on people with those fabric masks, but possibly not be completely correct. Honestly though... the whole mask wearing thing is more about trends of what is "socially acceptable" than science. I'm not saying there is no value, but that the forces dictating when most people do or do not wear a mask have very little to do with how well informed they are or on the current accepted understanding having changed, and far more to do with what is considered socially acceptable at the present time... so it's hardly surprising no one particularly cares about the type of mask.
> So you can look down on people with those fabric masks, but possibly not be completely correct.
And strapping yourself to your car seat with a knitted scarf might reduce injury risk/severity relative to a person with no seatbelt. That doesn’t mean we should expand the seatbelt mandate to include scarves.
Your comparison suggests a quantitative difference, because seatbelts are effective through only one mechanism; whereas I've highlighted two qualitatively different mechanisms through which masks reduce probability of becoming infected, exploiting completely different properties of the mask. It's not even clear if filtering has more or less of an impact than change in temperature and humidity.
Your response remains starkly oblique to my point. My point is that people in elevated risk groups (elderly, immunocompromised, etc) should be encouraged to wear an effective mask. We know that N95+ masks have strong supporting evidence of their efficacy. We know that similar evidence is distinctly lacking when it comes to most cloth and surgical masks. The continued social acceptance of sub-standard masks sends (IMHO) a dangerously misleading message which places these people at risk.
> "The fact that masks aren't mandatory in public in the US is honestly unbelievable to me"
I'm glad you don't run things here. We have a constitutional republic that makes it impossible for the federal government to unilaterally mandate such things as masks and vaccines. Biden tried to mandate vaccines through OSHA but the Supreme Court determined that was an overreach.
What kind of masks? Cloth masks are proven to be worthless and only well fitting N95 masks may help prevent infection.
I think what's going to happen is COVID will be less and less damaging as time goes on (like all novel diseases) and we will go on to live our lives as free people.
>We have a constitutional republic that makes it impossible for the federal government to unilaterally mandate
This isn't the only way the Fed can get things done. For example, the drinking restriction for 21+ is a state level issue strongly encouraged by the Fed. Louisiana tried to hold to 18+ for the longest, but the Fed finally won by threatening to withhold federal funding for highways.
I mean, it’s not as big of a deal as it was in the beginning. We have vaccines now which we didn’t have back then and these have dramatically reduced the severity.
You've got to be kidding. The virus is here to stay. I am absolutely unwilling to spend the rest of my life wearing a mask, regardless of the consequences. Most Americans feel the same way. There's more to life than avoiding a minor respiratory virus.
> …Omicron (the dominant variant) is like a mild cold.
Omicron appears mild in the statistics because by the time it hit western countries like the US and UK, there was almost nobody left who hasn’t either been vaccinated or exposed to a prior variant, or both.
Countries with low vaccination rates and low prior exposure rates are seeing severity of outcome with Omicron that is comparable to prior variants.
> Countries with low vaccination rates and low prior exposure rates
How is that relevant when the complaint is specifically about how "masks aren't mandatory in public in the US"? Vaccines have been freely available in the US for a year, yet the US should mandate masks because other countries have low vaccination rates?
I don’t know what point you’re trying to make, but I’m not advocating for mask mandates. In fact I disagree with them. Mask mandates were a highly imperfect but prudent policy measure prior to widespread deployment of effective vaccines. Now they are pointless and arguably counter-productive.
People who have specific concerns about COVID and want to protect themselves (or others) should be encouraged to wear an N95 mask. Cloth and surgical masks should no longer be treated as a valid medical choice.
I have had Covid twice. Omicron was more like severe flu than a cold for me and my wife. In several ways it is quite unlike either a cold or flu. The brainfog, the feeling that one is ok one part of the day followed by a wave of fatigue were both quite dissimilar to cold and flu.
Unfortunately not. From my first infection I have fatigue, sleep apneoa, shortness of breath, brain fog and palpitations still. My wife had not had Covid previously is a keen runner and has just cancelled a race 3 months after 'recovery' because she can no longer run those distances.
Yet because 'some guy we know' had it easy, there are a bunch of people hanging around internet forums willing to refute all talk of covid being serious.
> Unfortunately not. From my first infection I have fatigue, sleep apneoa, shortness of breath, brain fog and palpitations still. My wife had not had Covid previously is a keen runner and has just cancelled a race 3 months after 'recovery' because she can no longer run those distances.
Sorry to hear that. Hope you end up finding a way to recover.
> Yet because 'some guy we know' had it easy
I have no idea where you're pulling this from. I wasn't citing you an anecdote I gathered from "some guy I know". I was citing facts that have been circulating all over the news for a while now, along with the relevant hospitalization statistics. And I hadn't heard anything to the contrary. Here's [1] one link:
> In fully vaccinated and/or boosted people, omicron symptoms tend to be mild. In unvaccinated people, symptoms may be quite severe, possibly leading to hospitalization or even death.
> In fully vaccinated and/or boosted people, omicron symptoms tend to be mild.
Mild in comparison to other strains of Covid, yes. Tends not to require hospitalisation and has a lower risk of death. It doesn't say 'mild compared to a cold' though. I think it its too early for a study too be able to suggest that Omicron changed the possibility of developing long Covid either.
In regards to identifying yourself as one of the people I was targeting in my comment about 'some guy', I will put that down to a guilty concience.
That's massively understating the effects of vaccination or acquired immunity on hospitalizations for omicron. 3 doses of MRNA are 99% effective, and where it doesn't work there are often other health issues at play.
VE against hospitalization with Delta or Omicron infection after three doses was greater than 99% across the study population. Of the four patients hospitalized with Omicron infections who had received three COVID-19 vaccine doses, all were older than 60 years and had chronic diseases; one had a compromised immune system.
GP cited data on vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization. Do you have any corresponding data that omicron hospitalization rate is over 1% among fully vaccinated?
> It doesn't say 'mild compared to a cold' though.
"Mild compared to a cold" is not what I wrote either. I said it's "like a mild cold" for vaccinated people. "Mild cold" being, you know, what people get all the time: some sore throat/cough/congestion. No high fevers, not bedridden, etc.
If you read the news beyond that one link I pasted above, you'll see what I said is pretty consistent with what has been reported. Here's [1] another one:
> For many people, especially those who are vaccinated and otherwise healthy, Omicron does appear to have relatively mild symptoms, including upper respiratory or cold like symptoms like a runny nose congestion, sneezing, and sore throat—which is relatively common—and headaches. Fever is less common than we’ve seen with other variants, especially in vaccinated people.
4 people in my company, my sister and their spouses (so 10 all together) just had Covid in the last 3 weeks. 2 reported mild flu like symptoms, the others range between that and full blown flu. The least affected said it was like a cold but went on for longer. The ones at my company all tried to work through it and all failed to keep a full schedule, despite being the kind of people who might work through a cold.
I didn't sign up to be a lab rat, and it was a 3 day head cold when I caught Omicron on NYE. But I also paid close attention to the independent research and followed the advice of my doctors to improve my health (as measured by Vitamin D in this case).
The fact that people believe mandates are good public policy is honestly unbelievable to me. To be clear I not debating the effectiveness of mask but the effectiveness of mask mandates which have shown many many many times to be unenforceable and ineffective.
That said even if they were shown to be effective I would still oppose them on basis human rights ground. I do not believe it is the proper role of government in general, and certainly not the US Federal government to mandate what I wear when I leave my home. At most that should be a local matter, but even though I would advocate against it in my local government. However is certainly has no constitutional basis under our system of government for the federal government to impose such a mandate
>I would still oppose them on basis human rights ground
I hear this as an argument against left and right, but when I ask why it is different from the vaccine requirements for public schools I typically get a "it just is" response. Here's hoping someone might have a better response to why this vaccine is different in that aspect.
I doubt that. I couldn't STOP hearing the arguments last year. Not trying to be 'smart', but just believe a minimal effort to understand an opposing view gets you there.
> hoping someone might have a better response
Regarding required vaccines for grade-school kids at public schools in the U.S.:
1. Aren't actually forced. You can opt out in several ways.
2. The diseases they treat have a much higher death/hospitalization and/or transmissibility rate among children.
3. We better understand the diseases they treat.
4. Approvals for vaccines were not given under emergency order.
5. Meet the CDC's pre-2019 definition of 'vaccine'.
6. Side affects are published, well known, and readily available.
That's just off the top of my head. And I assume you and I agree on most things.
I'm pretty sure that the school vaccine mandates are state mandates, not federal mandates.
There are many things that I think are a good idea, but that I oppose the Federal government taking the power to do. I don't object to my state or city taking that same power.
I’ve been fortunate that I haven’t had Covid, but 3 of my siblings have (I mainly attribute that to my living in a state that took the pandemic seriously while they live in Republican states that thrive on Faux News). All three of them have had long Covid ranging from rapid severe weight gain to still not being able to smell or taste anything more than a year after being infected. I am vaccinated and boosted, but I am still masking up and social distancing because even the vaccinated can develop long Covid.
And all my friends in Austin resumed their normal fun lives a while ago, and all of them I know that got covid have recovered perfectly fine. Funny how anecdotes work. Statistically, living in a blue state vs a red state didn’t protect anyone from covid.
Ya, vaccines make it less deadly, that’s not new news. But you’re asserting that yin didn’t get covid because you live in a blue state, and that’s demonstrably false.
My state had almost no restrictions, the quality of life is a trade off I welcome.
I had it in Feb 2020 before it really took off, and I recovered just fine. The reality is that we don’t have the medical technology to stop it. It’s here to stay.
My quality of life has been just fine (frankly my mental health is better now than it was prior to March 2020). Yet, I haven’t had so much as a cold in all of that time, which is fantastic.
Good point. I was actually admitted to hospital with one of my symtoms without considering that it could be long Covid, so I suppose I did this in reverse.
I had glandular fever in 2018 and was struck down by a reasonably severe post-viral syndrome. The term is nearly synomonous with chronic fatigue syndrome. I had brain fog, horrible post-exertional malaise (the most defining symptom of chronic fatigue), etc.
There is no test to diagnose. There is no recovery timeline. I was simply told "you should get better within 1-5 years" by an endocrinologist. Luckily it took only 12 months to get my life onto track and somewhere around 2-3 years before I was comfortable doing strenous exercise.
There is zero advice on what to do except vaccination in the article.
If you want to know what to do look at this video by a doctor treating people with covid.
There is a host of things you can do to stack the chances in your favor.
The article mentions help being available, but what really does it recommend if you do have long-covid?
Everyone knows vaccines and masks help, but there seems to be remarkably little being studied about dietary habits/supplements/physical activities that might aid before or after covid.
Anecdotally, my brain fog was lifted pretty quickly once I started taking vitamin D and B-complex, which I just took on a hunch, but I honestly have no idea if it actually helped. Does anyone know of any larger-scale data collection efforts?
At least anecdotally, the mRNA vaccines do appear to provide some protection against infection. I know three people who are mRNA-vaccinated who were recently extensively exposed to omicron. (They spent multiple hours in a single room or car with someone with symptoms who was later confirmed infected.) The exposed individuals are PCR tested at least twice a week and almost certainly never previously had covid. One of the three later tested positive, but the other two never tested positive.
Maybe by sheer luck two out of three could have remained uninfected by omicron without being vaccinated, but I'd be pretty surprised.
> I know multiple people who are PCR tested at least twice a week, who have never had covid, who had extensive exposure to omicron (multiple hours in a single room or car) who never tested positive afterward.
Do PCR tests indicate if you've ever been infected? I thought they only indicate if you're currently infected. In fact I'm curious if there is any test that can tell whether you've been infected by any variant of SARS-CoV-2 more than a few months ago; is there?
Your understanding is correct. PCR tests can only tell if you are currently infected. (Or at least have been so recently infected that enough remnant mRNA is still lingering in your body to be detectable.)
Antibody tests can determine whether someone was infected previously, and I have heard that there are some that look for antibodies that are associated with infection but not vaccination. I don't know anything more about them than that, but maybe that could provide a thread to help start searching if you are interested in finding out more about them.
Yeah I've looked that up before, and from what I recall reading, the antibody tests only work for "recent" infections in the last few months, not something that may have happened (say) a year or more ago. I don't remember reading that any test works for non-recent infections.
Yeah, there's a limited window over which antibody testing is useful. I hadn't heard that it was only a few months, but that wouldn't be shocking, especially if you want a low rate of false negatives. Hopefully someone reading this knows more than me about approaches to testing that might work over longer time scales and not be confused by vaccination.
Actually I just Googled again, and they simply say the precise duration is unknown [1]:
> IgG antibodies, including IgG against the S and N proteins, persist for at least several months in most persons, but the precise duration of time that antibodies persist after infection is unknown.
Omicron does a better job of getting around vaccine-induced immunity than the previous variants did, but vaccinated people still have a lot of protection against infection compared to unvaccinated people.
Pure anecdote in our household. High school aged daughter who was not eligible for 3rd dose of vaccine got covid twice in 6 weeks, unknown variant, mild symptoms.
The rest of us in the household had the 3rd dose. None of us got covid despite not really following the guidelines for isolation.
Seems like the 3rd dose vaccine was pretty effective for us.
If you're boosted, your chances of infection are reduced by around half. Double vaccinated is only a reduction of about 20% which is not high but also not nothing.
> “The vaccines are effective. But in those rare instances where you do get an infection despite vaccination, this protects you from having post-COVID syndrome—there’s a double insurance.”
"Rare instances" of breakthrough infection? I had been taking the article seriously up to this point, but it lost all credibility when I saw this sentence.
I still think about COVID-19 in relation to other common diseases, like STDs. We fear many STDs and readily take protections against them. But most STDs are quite benign and easily treatable compared to COVID-19.
In this article, the long-COVID symptoms include:
- loss of taste and smell, anxiety, depression, insomnia, cognitive dysfunction (brain damage), palpitation, shortness of breath (damage to lungs), loss of appetite, bowel symptoms, permanent acute kidney injury, blood clots, hair loss, rashes, sick euthyroid syndrome
> And with the high transmissibility of the Omicron variant—which often results in milder disease outcomes—many patients may be concerned about developing long COVID.
I have yet to read about anyone concluding that Omicron causes long COVID in vaccinated folks. If they have (or anyone else has) evidence indicating this is likely, I would love to hear it. Even the article doesn't claim this is the case.
Dr. Daniel Griffin on This Week In Virology works with long covid patients and is starting to see the first Omicron induced LC patients coming in. The variant has only been around for a few months, so by definition we won't have as many LC patients from it yet. Research takes time, and we're just starting to see the effects of this strain. We have no reason to be confident that Omicron won't induce LC.
There hasn't been enough time for anyone to be conclusive, Omicron has only been out for 4 months. Most health professionals expect more long COVID from it. The destruction of cells throughout the body is still happening and patient outcomes are still wildly different because individual health is wildly different. Reinfection also results in worse cases.
What I’m curious about is how does the frequency of “long-Covid” compare to other post-viral syndromes? Having various forms of malaise, lethargy, and other health problems after an illness is not a new phenomenon. Does this affect 1 in 100 or 1 in 100,000 people severely? How does this compare with say past flus? It’s hard to compare long Covid to anything without a basis for comparison.
I’ve had the flu before and was a physical wreck for about 6 months after until my body finally snapped back. Because it was pre-Covid times, I just sucked it up and focused on struggling through my day and then resting. I can easily imagine people going through something similar today, and because everybody is scared because of the media, we’re looking for a problem and labeling it rather than just generally sucking it up. (This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t work to understand and treat this problem, just that it might not be anything significantly different than all prior human experience)
How much of the concern over “long-Covid” is simply a byproduct of psychology? We may be fixated on a problem and looking for it and therefore finding it more even though it’s not necessarily any more common of a problem. Maybe a direct comparison with other viruses shows different, but this is the comparison I’d like to see to better understand the risk-management here.