Did you know there is a reduction in staffing for the SSA office and that creating an application is becoming more difficult?
Also, applications are routinely denied upon first submission and then worked on as an appeal that can span years.
Ask me how I know, I have been assisting a friend with a disability (not COVID related) to get assistance for over a year now.
So either there are applications still being processed, in appeal, or people are frankly struggling to navigate the submission process, especially with fewer SSA employees to get assistance from.
How do those payments work? Are you allowed them if you're also working?
Separate question: I vaguely remember that everything else made COVID more likely to kill, so how many people already on disability were killed, proportionately speaking?
Is it being treated any better or worse than the dozens of other "big problems" we collectively have to deal with? Are we moving heaven and earth to stop sexual assaults? Or Fentanyl overdoses? Or cardiac deaths? Or youth suicide? Or mass shootings? It seems like there is only a finite amount of friction we can endure en masse to mitigate the problems that plague our health and well-being. If anything, I see several other issues in more urgent need of greater sacrifices on all our parts than long COVID.
I think there are different people working on each issue. There's no collective "they" that has to split their focus. The microbiologists and epidemiologists that could be studying long COVID aren't the same people that would be working on preventing youth suicide.
The collective "they" I was referring to was society at large. The general public. But even among researchers working on solutions to these problems there certainly is a limited amount of resources to fund their research.
I totally agree that the "general public" has "limited focus," especially since public health campaigns are hard!
However, my claim is that a lot of progress on these issues doesn't need to be very public. Telling the public to do a thing sounds like the last step of the process, after researchers have already found a definitive solution.
I also agree that researchers have a limited amount of resources! But I don't think that funding a research area is necessarily zero-sum. If a company or government decides to throw extra money to start researching a thing, research on other things doesn't stop. As an example, when the NSF provides more funding for research, the number of PhD students goes up, since there are more research grants to go around.
I worry the impact this will have long term. Both economically as a lot are taken out of the workforce or remain but with less function. And socially as we have this bigger pool of people we need to care for (and likely fail to care for). It’s remarkable it’s been ignored but turning it into a culture war for short term political gain seems to have made any serious discussion about it impossible now. Just look how immediately comments about masking in this discussion were grayed out.
Pretty wild you think millions of people are making up a debilitating illness because they "don't want Covid to ever end". Further, you seem to forget immunocompromised people exist.
You don't seem to realize that people have different life experiences than you.
>Immunocompromised people existed before covid yet they weren't walking around like Darth Vader.
It's almost like there's a serious and highly infectious virus still circulating. Perhaps one that has a reputation for seriously harming or killing immunocompromised people.
>When is it going to end?
Better question, why do _you_ care when _others_ decide to stop wearing a mask?
This is like a non-asthmatic person criticizing someone with asthma for living in fear by carrying their inhaler in their pocket. When is asthma going to end? Surely they can't just carry around an inhaler for the rest of their lives, right?
>They cannot continue to live the rest of their lives in fear, it's debilitating to their mental health. However social media has enabled this behaviour.
Yet you're here on social media stressing about other people choosing to wear masks. Honestly for many people it's second nature at this point. Other countries like Japan had people wearing masks in public long before 2020.
1. There was a serious and highly infectious virus circulating. However this is no longer true hence the rest of society having moved on.
2. The asthma analogy is irrelevant.
3. Societies in east Asia wear masks when they're sick; to prevent the spread of illness. Somewhere along the way this narrative has changed to it being a magic invincibility cloak and credited to Asian society, which it never was.
Many people, most of whom I assume have never been to Asia, made up this narrative that people in Japan, for example, routinely wore masks day-to-day pre-pandemic. That simply isn't true and I could show you any number of photographs. Yes, it wasn't unheard of when people were sick but the idea that the average Japanese commuter was wearing a mask in 2019 is simply untrue.
Complete strawman, I never claimed everybody in Japan wore masks daily and that's an argument I've never even seen made. I live in an area with a dominate Asian culture and have visited numerous eastern asian countries.
3. Would it surprise you to hear that people are still wearing face masks for that same reason? Your "magic invincibility cloak" is a strawman argument that nobody has ever made.
> Better question, why do _you_ care when _others_ decide to stop wearing a mask?
The issue isn't that others are still wearing masks themselves. It's that they're trying their hardest to force the rest of us to wear masks still too. E.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35582836
There have been zero masks mandates in place for over a year and Covid policies are only getting more relaxed, so that "issue" doesn't really seem to have any teeth.
This is not true, e.g. California just lifted its mask mandate in "healthcare settings" less than two weeks ago [1]. Different institutions still maintain their own mask mandates to this day though and not just in California.
Those who are more vulnerable are watching as the world left us hanging dry.
There was no reason to end mask mandates. None. Except a few loudmouths the entire world have caved to.
We have seen how cheap DIY filter boxes are. There is no reason not to have one in every classroom and workplace. And yet.
I am desperate enough to experiment with a Cleanspace Halo, the smallest positive air pressure respirator there is to be able to go among people. If no one else is willing to provide clean air, I need to filter my own. It's bloody ridiculous but what can I do?
It seems pretty clear that children learn a lot from seeing peoples’ facial expressions, so that’s one reason to end universal mask mandates. Our kids’ teachers strongly advised removing the school’s mask mandate when it came up for discussion, because of an uptick in speech issues and because some of their pedagogical methods relying on showing the kids the movements of their mouths.
They’re running three beefy HEPA filters at all times in one room, this isn’t politically motivated or an attempt to ignore the problem.
Counterpoint: The only thing children learn from seeing faces is how to fake a smile. By wearing masks they can observe the whole body which is much harder to control. What I said is not based on science as far as I know.
Even in countries that widely and overwhelmingly supported mask mandates pre-vaccine I don't think that support would extend to an indefinite mask mandate.
Whatever one thinks of general mask mandates, I think I'll always be baffled that we're ditching it in healthcare settings, especially places like ERs.
I don't expect to ever go into an ER or pediatrician's office without one.
It very quickly stopped being about finding what is a reasonable policy to just a stupid culture war fight over all masks all the time vs any masks anytime are communist police state designed to make your child gay.
Just dumb dumb dumb.
Even in places that handled the pandemic fairly well like NZ their mask policies were kind of silly.
My peeve that I will never stop being angry about is we knew from quite early on that COVID was airborne and surgical masks were not very effective. But public health authorities refused to communicate this to the public. They did not make an effort to make people aware or to issue N95/KN95 masks and update the policies to reflect more balance about which places it’s optimal to mask vs not.
It was just left to individuals to work it out on their own.
While N95 masks actually work, most of the cloth masks do very little.
But there was a huge shortage of good masks for the first year, and WHO was terrified of fights over masks if they recommended N95.
(The trick of N95 masks is that they have a charged electret layer in the middle. That will capture particles smaller than the holes in the mask. It's not like an HEPA filter, which is purely mechanical.)
Read any newspaper for the past year and a half that has been ceaselessly pumping out “COVID is over” think pieces while life expectancy is declining, excess deaths remain high (whereas before the pandemic they were largely static for years and years), and disability claims rise. It takes effort to ignore how much the consent is being manufactured.
You aren’t explaining it, you’re just repeating the same tired informationless phrase we were all subjected to for those ~2.75 years (after they stopped saying masks do nothing)
No, but many of us believe the worlds reaction to COVID-19 was extreme and totally unwarranted (and a bit scary too, considering how basic human freedoms went out the window in so many countries)
A million americans died and you think the reaction was extreme?? What we know worldwide is at least 18 million excess Covid deaths and at least 65 million people with Long Covid. The entire Western world has completely failed in its COVID-19 response. If you think this was extreme, you are being gaslit. Too little was done and way too late. Communication and leadership complete failed.
There is a lot of money going into making you believe what you believe. Next time maybe there won't be lockdowns because of this campaign currently being wrought and then many more millions will die. Someone will win perhaps but guess who. Hint: it ain't you.
That's not an explanation. If you wear a mask, you're protecting yourself. You can even wear a more comfortable mask with a vent, which became anathema due to your "explanation".
Sorry not as plugged into memeworld as you so don't know WTF this is.
Us both wearing masks protects you as much as you wearing two masks. But even better, you can just wear an N99 or N100. Also you should consider P95 or Pxx because of the much nicer seal.
I don't understand why you need to get other people involved in this simple thing you can do yourself.
There's a lot of dark money flowing into rewriting history to say that any response to COVID—which has killed >1 million Americans and disabled millions more—was an overreaction so the next pandemic won't disrupt businesses so much. That's what this op-ed is part of, nothing more, nothing less.
That's why this really simple thing became so controversial. I mean, if a virus sticks to droplets then it's better to put less droplets into the air. Masks do that. Easy? Should be.
Do you have any evidence for such claims or is it just another conspiracy theory?
As for what mask do, if it was that easy, there wouldn't be the need of so many studies. But that is not even the claim here. The article says mask mandates make no difference.
Even if we assume that masks work, people wear them wrongly, they reuse them instead of using clean ones, fidget with them and then touch other parts of their face. There are plenty of reasons why a mandate could not work.
> The high risk of bias in the trials, variation in outcome measurement, and relatively low adherence with the interventions during the studies hampers drawing firm conclusions
They asked people to wear masks, and they didn't wear masks, so they had trouble concluding things about masks.
This New York Times article prompted the Cochrane review to issue a statement:
> The Cochrane Review 'Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses' was published in January 2023 and has been widely misinterpreted.
> Many commentators have claimed that a recently-updated Cochrane Review shows that 'masks don't work', which is an inaccurate and misleading interpretation.
The actual conclusion is simply that there's no evidence to support that mandates work (or don't work). Which isn't exactly a ringing endorsement given that it's hard to prove a negative.
"It would be accurate to say that the review examined whether interventions to promote mask wearing help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses, and that the results were inconclusive. Given the limitations in the primary evidence, the review is not able to address the question of whether mask-wearing itself reduces people's risk of contracting or spreading respiratory viruses."
They were simply pointing out the obvious political bias, and that this was an opinion piece, crafted explicitly to sway opinion, not to present neutral facts.
One of my fav youtubers; Physicsgirl (Dianna Cowern) is currently completely out of action due to long covid. She was young and healthy when she was hit with this.
For all the people in this comment section saying long covid is fake, please watch the video the other commenter posted and ask yourself: Why would Dianna fake this? Why would she fake being on a ventilator for 14 months in the prime of her life? Why would she fake being unable to move, think, talk, read?
False dichotomy. The only possibilities aren't "Dianna is faking being ill" or "Dianna really has long COVID". There's also "Dianna really is seriously ill but not with long COVID".
This is an uninteresting argument. COVID happened, and suddenly way more people than before reported these kinds of symptoms. You can make this argument in any individual case, sure, but on the macro level, your argument becomes that either somehow lots of people got chronic fatigue syndrome (and similar) all at the same time, or lots of people are suddenly faking it all at the same time, or long COVID is real.
I mean yes, mass hysteria does exist, culturally-bound mental disorders also exist, but the most obvious explanation of these facts is that yes, long COVID is a thing.
From my experience with gastro issues, it sounds like covid causes leaky gut and dysbiosis which is leading to a lot of these other issues like brain fog, tiredness, laryngitis, etc.
Your bias is showing in this comment. I was just trying to be helpful. I have no agenda here. There’s plenty of articles indexed on pubmed about long Covid and GI issues.
By including an article in their database and linking to it from a .gov website, they most certainly are giving it a stamp of approval in the eyes of the public.
Sure, that's like saying that Google approves of a given page just because they pull it up in response to a search query. But that goes back to my original point: no intelligent person (or true Scotsman) would back up their argument by saying "Go search Google" and leave it at that.
A hypothetical https://www.google.gov would be held to very different standards than Google is today. I'd like to say the same about PubMed, but can't.
All new science starts with unsupported hypotheses. Going from "unsupported hypothesis" to "consensus established fact" often takes 10+ years. COVID and it's aftereffects are so new that the vast majority of claims are still somewhere in the hypothesis phase. Pretty much every idea about long COVID is still in this phase, and as sibling/cousin comments note it is an area of active research.
Science isn't static. It's contantly in evolution as people try to find justifaction for unsupported claims. Dismissing unsupported claims prima facie is fundementally incomaptible with the scientific method.
I believe that this is exactly what will happen. There are so many doctors currently treating it as a somatic condition in spite of published evidence that COVID leaves a lasting mark on every organs with an ACE2 receptor. My MIL has recovered about 70% from a bout of LC and was directed multiple times to exercise at a time that it was known that exercise would actually make her condition worse.
It doesn't help that the majority of these cases affect women, who have historically not been taken as serious as patients in the health field when it comes to MS/CFS.
I don’t think you can infer that from just this data. The timeframe for a large amount of people getting Covid plus lag time (recovering, identifying they still have an issue, and applying for disability) also lines up.
Yeah given the time lag I think the graph clearly falsifies the connection to the vaccine. It isn't like people got the vaccine and 3 days later still felt crappy and filed for disability.
My wife’s long covid (14 months and counting) started after her 3rd jab. You know that day after the jab sometimes when you feel all tired and woozy and sick-ish and can’t get anything done? That just never ended for her.
Even though she got vaccinated 3 times, she got called an anti-vaxx loony for a long time, for even daring to suggest that the vaccine clearly marked day one. But by now, increasingly many official sources concur that there are indeed a very small % of people whose symptoms started after a vaccine. Eg C-Support, a semi-government non-profit here in NL says[0] that ~400 of the people they track long covid got it from the vaccine. Out of 39 million jabs, mind - these are tiny (but nonzero!!) likelihoods.
This shit shouldn't be political. Saying that the vaccine can or cannot have bad side effects got hijacked as signaling which camp you’re in. This is nuts. Insights can change, and a vaccine can both be effective (ie better on average than the alternative, getting sick without) and harmful at the same time.
Maybe its time for both camps, at least on a place like HN, to stop triggering so intensely when people say stuff about covid vaccines that don’t match your priors.
I do agree with you that people are way too quick to politically dismiss criticism and questions surrounding the vaccine. However the logic you're showing here seems very quick to draw the causal connection between vaccines and long covid.
I got covid immediately after receiving my first Nintendo Switch for a Christmas present, but most people would consider it absurd to blame the switch for my covid.
On a more serious note, my grandmother did die of heart failure very shortly after her covid vaccine. However she was 91 and in poor health.
It's not outside the realm of possibility that your wife happened to get covid roughly the same day as she got her vaccine. The claim that "there are indeed a very small % of people whose symptoms started after a vaccine" also covers this possibility unless you can clearly show that the incidence of getting covid among this population is significantly higher than would be expected.
It wouldn't surprise me terribly if there was eventually found to be a variety of complications caused by the vaccine which explain many of these things, but I also see people making very quick causal connections between events that seem to have a great many other plausible explanations.
At least some long COVID is likely to be autoimmune and caused by the immune systems response to an antigen.
Both the virus and the vaccine are actually antigens. Your Nintendo Switch is not.
It is likely that some people who got the vaccine got severe lasting side effects. The incidence though has been measured to be orders of magnitude lower than the side effects (including death) from the actual virus.
The problem that we have is that we cannot talk about these kinds of tradeoffs in this society where any action that leads to negative consequences is treated as something to be litigated out of existence to make the world "safe".
The vaccine is a trolley problem. There are a few people who will get seriously hurt by flipping the switch. There are vastly more people who are going to be killed and disabled by letting it run.
> It's not outside the realm of possibility that your wife happened to get covid roughly the same day as she got her vaccine.
A Nintendo! Come on! You could have chosen to assume that we thought this through, instead of getting pedantic. Consider actually having a bit of an open mind instead of second-guessing everything you read that doesn’t fit your worldview. You don’t have all the facts.
But ok, because you “asked”: My wife got tested positive for covid about 6 weeks after she got this jab, same as myself and our kids. We were all super sick.
So it’s possible that she got 6 weeks of long covid from the vaccine and then 13 months from covid.
It’s also possible that without the vaccine, the covid would have hospitalized her.
But it’s not possible that her symptoms started because of an undetected covid infection around the time she got vaccinated, because to the best of my information, you can’t get covid twice so quickly in a row.
Sure, there can be lots of other explanations. Some other viral infection? Psycho-somatic shit? Maybe I’m a troll making shit up?
But the fact of the matter is that on January 6th she felt fine and got her third jab, and on January 7th she called in sick and that was that, she’s been struggling ever since. Sure that’s not proven causality, but it fits Occam’s razor.
Why is it so hard to accept that maybe some small likelihoods are really just that, small but nonzero likelihoods? It’s totally possible for something like this to not come out of early clinical trials and still be true. And it doesn’t mean that vaccines are bad.
I’m still angry at you. You used the term “very quick” twice. We spent more than a year thinking about this! The only “very quick” conclusion here is your extremely dismissive comment.
Vaccines can, and do. There were certainly folks who had reactions to the COVID vaccinations, at times severe. With every vaccine, we have to do the safety versus efficacy versus disease impact math.
There's absolutely no solid evidence widespread "long COVID" is a vaccine reaction, but flatly stating vaccination can't ever damage a human is false.
(Hell, some of the polio vaccines can cause polio. They're still worth it.)
Look, I'm not a fan of the Conservative And Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, but blaming them for the four different privately researched vaccines that the FDA of the American government decided to allow private healthcare providers in the USA to choose to offer during a transition from Republican to Democrat President is a bit much.
Or did your conspiracy theory just forget that 95% of the word population isn't American?
To get the convo started: The skeptical take is of course that there is no long covid. either people are faking for benefits or they are being sincere but imagining it. Similar concerns around Lyme disease.
Q: is there firm evidence for long covid that excludes these possibilities?
I would argue at least in the United States, the benefits for being disabled is quite limited. There’s wealth limitation (ie. You cannot own more than a certain amount of anything among any assets) and this often precludes disabled people from marriage among other sucky things. The other thing is iirc there’s been brain scans and other biomarker testing of long Covid that shows noticeable differences similar to ME/CFS.
> The skeptical take is of course that there is no long covid. either people are faking for benefits or they are being sincere but imagining it.
I think the skeptical take is neither of these things. What you've described is more of a cynical contrarian take.
The skeptical take is not "there's no long covid" but "there MIGHT not be long covid".
And it's not ~"people are faking or imagining"~ it's "lots of people develop weird health problems every day that never get explained, which many will now point to as long covid, which makes it super hard to know if long covid exists".
>I mean you’re not even trying to make an argument.
So why are you also suggesting they are making one?
They clearly presented a skeptical take as an option, then asked a question about whether a better alternative exists. More charity in interpretation would be useful for you.
As the other poster said, they did not make an argument. The impulse to interpret an earnest question as an argument is incorrect.
If I say "here is option X" and make no suggestion that it is my position or advocate it as fact, why would you then try to force it to become my position? Analysis of possible positions is allowed and encouraged.
They did make an argument by the way they framed their question. Let's say the only evidence of long covid can also be explained by people lying. The way their question is framed makes it sound like we should assume lying is the most likely explanation in such a case.
Conjecture not well supported by evidence is not mutually exclusive with making an argument. In fact, that’s what people are saying: OP was making a bad argument [because it’s conjecture].
Again, argument requires them to suggest it's fact, which they did not. Your interpretation of the framing is subjective. They said "To get the convo started: The skeptical take" which clearly offers distance between their view and the statement. You are uncharitably ignoring this.
> which clearly offers distance between their view and the statement.
It’s also not a requirement that you exclusively argue your own personal view point. And of course appearing impartial to an argument via language like “to play devil’s advocate, etc.” is a common device used to introduce an argument you may believe, or want other to believe, without being inflammatory.
The way your question is phrased implies that you think that sufferers of complex and poorly understood diseases should be assumed guilty (of fraud or insanity) until proven innocent.
If that is what you're trying to say, then I would reply that both the history of medicine, as well as the sheer amount of known (to say nothing of unknown) blind spots within current medical practice point toward a more credulous approach toward these sufferers, if you want to believe the truly sick significantly more often than you want to catch the fakers.
It's possible for long covid to be real and not have a definitive biomarker as evidence. For instance, it would have been obvious that someone with Alzheimers or dementia was ill even before the invention of the microscope. Likewise with long covid, it is extremely frustrating and dehumanizing when aloof skeptics question its very existence when you can simply talk to the sufferers and see the proof for yourself. Why would a marathoner suddenly be unable to walk up the stairs without their heart rate rising to over 150bpm? Our lack of understanding of the illness is not good reason to dismiss the existence of the illness; or else if it were, then the field of medicine should have never began at all!
Getting on the disability rolls in the US is a long, arduous slog. If a substantial number of people make it there, especially if the economy is doing well, that would indicate that, yes, Long Covid is real.
The data from the St Louis Fed do look concerning.
There’s more than one definition of disability. Getting any kind of financial support is extremely hard, but getting ADA provision much less so. Most people with a chronic disease which affects your life will have at least some protection from the ADA.
Getting onto disability can be made harder and therefore artificially deflate stats on the number of people who are suffering.
There are fewer SSA workers since the start of the pandemic and often, it takes multiple years for a disabled person to receive disability, often requiring resources that they do not have to complete the process.
Being dismissive is not helpful, trying to reduce some one's attempt to bypass the bullshit and get to the meat of the matter to a 'cognitive bias' is also not helpful.
https://www.ssa.gov/OACT/STATS/dibStat.html