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NIH will invest $1B to investigate 'long Covid'

313 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

fsociety 6y ago
Seen some comments in denial about this. Just because you haven’t had a personal experience with this doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I’ve just started to hit, what I believe is, the tail end of my residual effects. I’ve measured lower blood oxygen levels and fever spikes periodically - in addition to other anecdotal symptoms. It was real to me and the data suggests something happened. Many others share similar experiences. It’s worth researching and wouldn’t be the first time we may completely revise how we think of infections.
nojito 6y ago
Long COVID is downright horrifying. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-long-haulers-symptoms-recovery/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-long-haulers-symptoms-...
- peteyPete 6y ago
  Its about time they start looking into it.. And it won't just be "long covid"... They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it. My girlfriend is pretty much disabled at this point and has been sick since barely surviving SARS in 2003. Oddly enough, most things she suffers from are the same as long-covid issues.
  - jMyles 6y ago
    > They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it. Heck yeah. And isn't "long-SARS" just another long-covid? Along with long-hku1, long-oc43, long-nl63? If 'covid' stands for coronavirus disease, then it stands to reason that the discussion about 'long covid' needs to be independent from which coronavirus is implicated in the chronic condition. It's apparent that they all cause this (albeit rarely). It seems to me that focusing on one pathogen to the exclusion of the others, despite this phenomenon being documented across all of them, is likely a political decision.
- emersonrsantos 6y ago
  Every hospitalization for pretty much everything serious with lots of medical procedures, especially for 2 weeks or more, have side effects for some months, physically and mentally.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    Yes my mother was never the same after knee replacement. Just lost her edge mentally and never recovered it.
- anoncake 6y ago
  To determine how scary "Long Covid" is, you have to take into account both how bad and how frequent it is. Articles like these are just fearmongering. They likely cause it in many cases by giving people hypochondria.
  - nojito 6y ago
    How is a story about a dedicated clinic(s) focused on a mysterious new condition fear mongering? Individuals like yourself that hand wave away COVID do much more harm.
    - anoncake 6y ago
      One story is not. The reporting of the media as a whole is. It's always FEAR FEAR FEAR, without mentioning how likely these cases actually are. Because of this, there are young, healthy people who think they have a significant chance of dying of Covid, which is just objectively wrong. But it's understandable. If you dare trying to look rationally at the matter, you get accused of "hand wav[ing] away COVID". As if the only two options were "worse than the plague" and "harmless like the common cold".
lettergram 6y ago
Curious how this compares to other illnesses, such as pneumonia. It seems to match with people having damage from pneumonia.
- jMyles 6y ago
  > other illnesses, such as pneumonia Not sure how to parse this. Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, are among the many causes of pneumonia. Do you just mean other pathogens that also cause pneumonia?
  - brational 6y ago
    op means lingering effects. very normal with pneumonia. difference here is a lot of people with mild covid (no pneumonia) are getting lingering neurological or cardiac issues (or both)
    - jMyles 6y ago
      > difference here is On the contrary, this does not seem to be distinct with SARS-CoV-2. The other endemic coronaviruses (which cause pneumonia more rarely, and are typically just called 'common colds') also produce very similar 'long covid' effects in similarly tiny slices of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" - you'll be amazed at how well documented, and yet poorly understood, this phenomenon is. There appears to be less literature for 229e, but pretty convincing for the other 3.
ggm 6y ago
Anyone with CF, or who was thrown into the fibromyalgia bucket (its used by doctors for untreatable/intractable problems, and comes with a strong implication "its all in your mind") will welcome this, if (and its a big if) they are allowed to participate in the discovery and treatment process. I'm not in either bucket, or a long-covid sufferer, I'm just observing post-viral has a huge amount of things in it, beyond covid, which might benefit from increased funding and eyeballs on the problem. Not all the long-covid is about lung function.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  By "CF" do you mean cystic fibrosis, or did you actually mean "CFS" or "ME/CFS" (aka chronic fatigue syndrome)? My wife has suffers from ME/CFS for years. She is pissed that the US government invests almost nothing in research for something that affects on the order of 1M [1] of its citizens. She certainly doesn't want people with long-covid to suffer, but she is cheering that perhaps this $1B investment will lead to research that also helps the understanding of ME/CFS. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html
  - ggm 6y ago
    I meant Chronic Fatigue. So, we're in the same place on this.
- niffydroid 6y ago
  TDLR I am now convinced I've had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome for years but covid has seriously kicked it up a level making the symptoms worse. I've suffered from chronic pain syndrome in my legs/hips for years, in fact since I was like 10 and has had a big affect on my life. As a result of chronic pain I've then mentally suffered as well, done CBT a few times as well. I've had countless sessions of physio and hydrotherapy. Before covid was even a thing (Like 2-3 years) I've reported fatigue issues to my GP multiple times, I had IBS, concentration issues and chest pains. The GP's did ECGs and said I was fine. My rheumatology kicked me of the patient list, but got me physio and a sleep study (I have mild sleep apnea) Jan 2020 I had the flu as well, my Father was the first one and did lose his taste and sense of smell. Come April 2020 I was just getting out of breath walking in my garden and slight chest pains at the bottom of my lungs, the fatigue got worse. Doctor was like "You've not got symptoms of covid, but it could be covid, some of my colleagues have felt wiped out" Come June/July 2020 I took part in the NHS home antibody test and I had a faint line that indicated I had antibodies for covid-19, at this point things had gone back to normal for me. Come December 2020, my concentration levels were the worst they've ever been. The brain fog was horrendous, I was now getting worse chest pains and feeling rather fed up with it. GP was doing nothing other than saying get a covid test. In the end I went to a walk in clinic and they thought I may have had clots on my lungs. Got sent to A&E (Yes sent to A&E during a pandemic, the worst place anyone can be) They came to the conclusion after looking at my medical record and symptoms I had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome. I now take fluoxetine in the morning alongside my amitriptyline in the evening (been on it for 10+ years), I'm doing a lot better but do have days where I've got no get up and go, it got worse in 2020 and I think covid made things worse. Also interestingly my mother ME, so do wonder if there is a genetic factor.
mrfusion 6y ago
FWIW here’s a study showing 98% of people were symptom free after 12 weeks: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1.full#F6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v... Here’s another recent study showing 95% of former COVID (hospitalized) patients suffered no irreversible damage: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-covid-patients-suffer-no-irreversible-damage/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-cov...
- JonathanFly 6y ago
  It's good that the vast majority of people make full recoveries but 2% of the US is still over 6 million people. I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.
  - mdorazio 6y ago
    Note that's 2% of people who become infected, not 2% of the entire population (unless you're assuming everyone will get infected?). We're trending toward 10-12% of the US population getting infected before vaccines roll out more widely, so that would be somewhere in the realm of 0.25% of the total population potentially suffering long-term effects.
    - runako 6y ago
      CDC is estimating that ~25% of Americans were infected by the end of 2020: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd... And obviously a number of people have been infected since. But just using the 83 million number from the CDC, 2% of that would be 1.6 million people.
      - jjcon 6y ago
        Based on seroprevalence which the 98% was not based on so using it now would be misleading
vmception 6y ago
I've been very dismayed at the non-existent data between "dead" and "not dead". This has been guiding pretty much everyone's decisions, everybody's counterpoints on all parts of the political spectrum, and it is pretty annoying when you know that they aren't operating on the same information as you are. Its just not as simple as "hm only 10% of 90 years olds are the ones dying in my municipality, I'll play along because nobody is inviting me out anyway", encephalitis lethargica had very debilitating side effects for decades afterwards. Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery). What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is? Many of the same people consider themselves asymptomatic because they didn't get a hard dry cough. I just don't get the impression that others are putting two and two together here. I am all for getting data! Good investment.
- throwaway5752 6y ago
  In all fairness it's only been around a bit over a year (and MERS/SARS were rare enough to have limited data). The dead/non-dead distinction has been the top priority. And I don't think the data is non-existent, but on an educated guess I'd say the top minds have more been on developing treatments, vaccines, and generally reducing mortality and morbity - and the balance of research reflects it. Sadly there will be time to measure the long term consequences. For now what more can they do than tell everyone to socially distance and wear masks, and get vaccinated as soon as possible?
  - vmception 6y ago
    At first I was going to say that I wasn't arguing for anything, but really everyone has dropped the ball here. The same places that did the tests had the infrastructure to follow up with people and could have been doing this 6 months ago, and that has nothing to do with the "top minds" at all. That, alongside the failed, poorly implemented or nonexistent contact tracing methods have made getting this metadata much more difficult to do.
- burlesona 6y ago
oliv__ 6y ago
How about they start with mental health
k33n 6y ago
Can’t believe smart people buy this fear mongering.
- black6 6y ago
  It's a self-feeding cycle of being too scared by the reporting to go outside and socialize and observe for oneself that "there's no there there" so just trust the official story and stay afraid.
  - orblivion 6y ago
    What would it look like if it were real, and you went outside to socialize? Would you expect to see people randomly keeling over?
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    The wonderful thing about the internet is that you don't even have to go outside to talk to people who have been sick, who know people who have died, who are sick at this very moment and know people who are dying right now. It's myopic to pretend you can get a similarly accurate top-down view of the situation by talking to your neighbors.
  - macintux 6y ago
    You sound like the people who went to a hospital that was overflowing with COVID patients, saw fewer cars in the parking lot than they expected, and concluded it was a hoax. I'll take actual data over anecdata, thanks.
- loopz 6y ago
  Please don't call legitimate concern fear. Few people have experience with ME and it won't be anything visible to you.
- s5300 6y ago
  Could you please extrapolate a bit further to make things clearer to us? I just don't understand how you manage to come to your stated conclusion. "You" can't believe "smart people" buy "fear mongering" Isn't this implicitly stating that you're the one who's glaringly incorrect?
jMyles 6y ago
It's unclear whether this will generally be used to investigate (and ultimately take seriously) the documented but poorly understood chronic suffering which rarely but really affects a sliver of people who've recovered from various viruses. The other four endemic coronaviruses, while often called "common colds" (and make up perhaps 1/5 common cold cases) have all been documented having similar lingering cardiovascular effects in a similar miniscule segment of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" for example - you'll be amazed at how similar case reports are to what we're seeing from SARS-CoV-2. However, to my knowledge (and to the best I can tell from searching Google Scholar), the phrase 'long Covid' has never been used to describe this phenomenon. In fact, it seems that sufferers are often ignored. So it is with other mysterious chronic after-effects from illness - 'chronic lyme disease' is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks. It's obvious that this phenomenon is super rare. However, when you have viruses (and other pathogens) which ultimately infect nearly everyone on the planet, these cases add up. It's not right that sufferers have been ignored these decades, and if this is a genuine effort to right that wrong, I applaud it. If on the other hand it's just another attempt to justify bizarre restrictions instead of resources to help these same sufferers, then that's just cruel. We saw a similar happening with hospital census last year: sensational media and pundit scientists (but vanishingly few actual experts) threw bombastic fits over hospitals being overcrowded, as they almost always are, especially in underserved communities, at the peak time of the year. And was this a rallying cry to provide more resources for marginalized communities and the hospitals that serve them? Seemingly not; it was instead a pathetic attempt at justifying interventions which by then were already unambiguously ineffective, like stay-at-home orders. And now we're not even talking about it. These hospital systems and the communities they serve will not be helped; the conversation has moved on. The best thing we can do is to take seriously the experts who have credibly drawn attention to this for the past couple of decades and continued to do so in covid times. People like Stefan Baral, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, etc. Subsequent pandemics may leave less room for reflection, so this is the time to get these things straightened out.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  There's always a small percentage of people who have side effects from any biological changes to their body. People have permanent side effects from taking medicine. It seems strange to focus on Covid specifically, when all manner of biological changes to people's bodies cause a small subset of people to have permanent side effects.
iirvine 6y ago
This is sorely needed. People are starting to get desperate - who knows how many outcomes could be improved with earlier medical diagnostics and intervention. We need clear guidelines to give those recovering a better chance of not slipping into the pit of a chronic illness. I will say, as I've been trying to tout on every "long Covid" thread I come across - it seems that rest is crucial. Your best option, obviously, is to not get Covid in the first place. But if you do, after you've passed through the 2 week acute phase, rest like your life depends on it. Extremely light exercise only, take as much time off work as possible, and pay close attention to how your recovery is progressing. The usual caveats apply - not a doctor, evidence is completely anecdotal and based on my experiences, this is not medical advice, etc etc - but scheduled, compulsory rest helped me a great deal at my worst. So much of my downward spiral could likely have been abated by avoiding overexertion, prolonging the rest period after the acute phase of the illness, waiting even longer before jumping back into exercise and full work days (3-4 months as opposed to 3-4 weeks) but that is so antithetical to how we think we're supposed to act after we "get over" an illness.
- sschueller 6y ago
  This will hopefully shed some light on people suffering a very similar disease often described as Chronic Fatigue syndrome. Many also getting this after a non covid virus infection. The biggest issue was the small sample size the difficulty to diagnose as there is sometimes also a phycological aspect to it. The now large sample size should help a lot in finding out what it really is.
- bspammer 6y ago
  Honestly that's kind of terrifying. I got Covid 2 months ago, and have been trying to start running again to improve my lung capacity. Are you saying I've been making it worse?
  - iirvine 6y ago
    Not exactly - we don’t really have any way of knowing that empirically yet. Personally, I do wish I had given my body a bit of a bigger break after I got over the infection. So I guess I’m saying pay attention - watch how you’re recovering, and maybe think about easing back into vigorous exercise slower than you might have had you just gotten over a cold. And, as always, when in doubt, get your doctor involved. It’s clear now a majority of people outside the vulnerable groups get over this illness with hardly any after effects. But it’s becoming clear that some people don’t, and suffer some amount of sequelae. We don’t know how many yet, and we can’t tell who will or who won’t yet. Given those circumstances, a slower than usual return to normal activity levels is prudent. For instance, I’ve read that college athletes are restricted from play for about 10-14 days after even an asymptomatic COVID diagnosis, and then are carefully monitored for months afterwards. With any hint of lingering symptoms or a drop in performance, they’re given a cardiac MRI to check for heart inflammation, and potentially benched for 3-6 months. If you don’t have a team physician checking in with you after every workout, you’re gonna have to do that interrogation yourself.
Itsdijital 6y ago
I'm someone who actually has some form of long-covid or perhaps just damage from the virus. March 12th will be the one year mark for me. I was a mild case, stayed home for 2 days, right back on my feet after that. 32M, no health issues. Symptoms just lingered and lingered. They would go away then come back days later. Mainly sinus pressure and dizziness. Then 4 months on I started getting intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Cardiologist noted some abnormalities but was not concerned. Put me on beta blockers. Fast forward to today and I still have shortness of breath, some cardiac symptoms, and random pains in my left arm and back. It really eats into my quality of life, but I am thankful I don't have it as bad as many others. I keep tabs on the long haul community to see if researchers have figured anything out/others found anything that helps. So far there really isn't much. I'll note that there are a surprising number of people who aren't aware they are long hauling (they "recovered" and then months later developed issues - not making the connection until stumbling upon another long hauler) and that people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling. I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or what, but people want (need?) to hear "I fully recovered" when they ask how you are doing. I don't tell anyone except those close to me about it, it's completely not worth the debate they are going to want to have about the validity of my symptoms. It's pretty common in the LH community to not be publicly upfront about it because of this. There are plenty of people who know me, know I got sick, and will relay that I fully recovered.
- in_cahoots 6y ago
  Were you able to get tested? For some reason I’ve gotten the impression that a disproportionate number of long-haulers got sick in March or April and never had a confirmed test. I’m not sure whether that points to a change in the virus or a psychosomatic component to being infected with an unknown virus at the beginning of the pandemic.
  - Itsdijital 6y ago
    I could not get tested in March. I tested positive for antibodies in August. I live right outside NYC, which based on April antibody testing, likely had 250,000 to 500,0000 cases/day for about a 3 week period from late Feb into March. This was when the media was still debating about whether or not the virus was a big deal and Trump was saying just a few people were sick.
thowaway959125 6y ago
In September of last year I was experiencing a combination of symptoms that I did not link to COVID, but looking back on it I'm starting to question it. First, I had debilitating brain fog. It felt link I was thinking through pea soup. I went to my doctor twice due to this symptom, but my blood work (CBC, not a COVID test) looked normal and he suggested this was due to "stress" or "changes in sleep", although I was not experiencing either of those. Around this same time, I would experiencing "near-syncope" upon standing. It got to the point where I everything was fading to black and I would have to take a knee to maintain consciousness. Again I talked to my doctor he shrugged his shoulders. He said my blood pressure was normal but he referred me to a cardiologist. I passed a stress EKG so they said there was nothing structurally wrong with my heart. Fast forward a few months and the symptoms have abated, although they still persist in a diminished form. This makes me really wonder if this was COVID due to autonomic nerve dysfunction. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/covid-19-story-tip-brain-fog-fatigue-dizziness--post-covid-pots-is-real https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
- dmix 6y ago
  I wonder if you can find some blood test that looks for the specific antibodies.
sigmaprimus 6y ago
Other than High blood pressure, COPD and Diabetes have there been any studies of Sars effect with other diseases? I think there is a chance that long-covid may result from a secondary virus and it's interaction with Sars. It may also be due to a lack of virus and no interaction I suppose.
Drseeth 6y ago
There already is a miracle molecule called Leronlimab that everyone who has tested +ve for Covid should be given.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jokoon 6y ago
Is there such a thing as long flu? Long cold? In a way, don't most illnesses cause long term effects?
- beagle3 6y ago
  Yes, there is. There is quite a bit of “long covid reporting” but I haven’t found one with reasonable healthy or comparable e.g. flu controls.
- isolli 6y ago
  Yes, I had both long flu and long pneumonia. In both cases it took me about 2 months to fully recover after being officially cured. It annoys me a little that people are only now discovering that respiratory illnesses can have long-term effect. How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack? Personal experience aside, it will be important to put specific numbers on the phenomenon and establish a baseline for comparison to other illnesses. So this announcement of a research effort is good news. I just hope they will put the numbers in context.
  - websites2323 6y ago
    >How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack? To amplify your point, I didn't know this until my father died last month from a series of heart attacks brought on by pneumonia, which itself was caused by COVID. Side note: the cause of death is listed as a heart attack. How many deaths are we not counting because COVID was not the direct cause?
    - isolli 6y ago
      I'm sorry to hear that :(
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    I would guess anything that affects your oxygen and damages the lungs (potentially permanently) which produce your oxygen can have long term effects. Some of the patients who have died from covid have lungs that look so horrible they barely look like lungs any longer other than the shape.
Wintamute 6y ago
I'm just going to throw this out there as a discussion point - consider for a moment what an unusually high number of people are catching the same disease at the same time. Not just feeling unwell with some sort of unspecified cold or flu, but all being confirmed tested positive with something specific. 30 million in the US and counting. How many people amongst that 30 million would go on to experience any number of nebulous, chronic symptoms of one kind of another normally this year in the absence of Covid? In my assessment, a great many would. If not millions, then hundreds of thousands. Experiencing health problems, or odd symptoms that come and go can be scary, but it's a normal part of life. But throw in a label "long covid", support groups and a heightened sense of threat during a pandemic and you have a recipe for a confused social response. Now, post viral syndrome is certainly real. Inflammation due to infection causes real and debilitating symptoms. But is there any evidence to suggest that SARS-COV-2 is uniquely able to cause long term health problems? Or is it the case that it causes unexceptional levels of post viral syndrome and inflammatory damage, but the unusal thing is so many people all catching the same virus at the same time with a very low level of natural immunity in the population, therefore a relativelyt high rate of serious infection (relative to other endemic viruses)?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Miner49er 6y ago
  I think this is all there likely is to it. Add on that it is suspected that viruses can trigger autoimmune diseases, and that explains potentially even more long haulers. Plus increased stress/anxiety on some due to the lockdown could cause physical symptoms. I do suppose some research is warranted though. It seems different viruses seem to cause different types of autoimmune responses, and it would be interesting to see what COVID can cause. Plus more research needs to be done on the link between viruses and autoimmune diseases in general.
- rcpt 6y ago
  This study is controlled against people who had the flu during lockdown https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...
ArkanExplorer 6y ago
I had COVID in March 2020, and it took several months to recover - chest tightness and slight difficulty breathing being the main unending symptom. The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing. It would be interesting to compare COVID survivors in lockdown and non-lockdown states in the USA. The theory could be that the social isolation, stress, reduced Vitamin D, and poorer diet of people in lockdown contribute to poorer outcomes long-term.
- sjwalter 6y ago
  The link to Vit-D deficiency and worse covid outcomes is by now incredibly well-supported in the literature. That anybody thinks a lockdown is good advice is just evidence that, yes, the media is effective at controlling what appears to most to be most minds (though that's not clear--most folks I talk to think covid is mild and the policy response insane). Best advice is the same your grandma might give you: To be healthy, eat well, go outside for fresh air and exercise. Instead, we're all supposed to think that the best response is waiting for Bill Gates to put just the right chemicals into a syringe to save mankind.
  - gameswithgo 6y ago
    Sadly Grandma died of polio, thankfully I got the Bill Gates chemicals for that.
    - sjwalter 6y ago
      When was that? I see your response paints me as some anti-vaxxer. Why would you think that? My kids, my wife, and myself are all accinated against polio and other illnesses. Those vaccines a) Are real vaccines that actually stop getting the illness AND transmitting it and b) Have been battle-tested over decades and their long-term impacts and side-effects are well-understood. I'm not anti-vaxx. I'm against rushed, misleadingly-marketed vaccines that seem to have no impact on the actual transmission of the virus, based on every company's claims, that have been tested for months when prior to this widespread vaccine injections required close to a decade of study for approval. This is a rushed gene therapy medical treatment for a disease that kills less than 0.4% of people under the age of 75. No sense to take this fake vaccine.
JulianMorrison 6y ago
Long Covid is also important because understanding how it works could point to a common mechanism with many comparable post-viral syndromes and with chronic fatigue syndrome.
sharadov 6y ago
I had a moderate case where I sick for about 10 days, mostly fatigue, fever, loss of smell and taste, night sweats. But I developed an itch in my armpits, groin and arms post-recovery. The dermatologist gave me an anti-itch cream, now a month later, the symptoms have gotten worse to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy. I don't have a history of skin allergies or allergies in general. Posting it here, if someone has/had similar issues.
- outime 6y ago
  As you can imagine I don’t know what happens to you but - I had itches in different parts of my body and even a rash showed up on my ankle. Turns out it was a nutrition issue. Over time you may develop allergies to stuff that you weren’t allergic before (also after sicknesses). It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to eat those things ever again, but you at least won’t for some time. Consider also dust mites allergy and do extensive cleaning where you sleep and see if that helps.
  - sharadov 6y ago
    Thanks, am seeing the dermatologist again and may ask her if they need to do a blood test.I've heard that when liver enzymes are out of whack it can lead to allergy like symptoms.
- XW013K6LL 6y ago
  You must enroll in this trial https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04678830 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04678830 if there still are any slots available.
- markdog12 6y ago
  > I wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy Try a reactin or 2 an hour before sleep.
  - sharadov 6y ago
    I've tried an anti-histamine and it's not helped.
vmchale 6y ago
Honestly, this is probably more cost-effective than letting it degrade QoL for so many people. This is going to be a huge issue as the disease proper fades away.
fomine3 6y ago
Not Invested Here?

313 points by sohkamyung 6y ago

Seen some comments in denial about this. Just because you haven’t had a personal experience with this doesn’t mean it isn’t real. I’ve just started to hit, what I believe is, the tail end of my residual effects. I’ve measured lower blood oxygen levels and fever spikes periodically - in addition to other anecdotal symptoms. It was real to me and the data suggests something happened. Many others share similar experiences. It’s worth researching and wouldn’t be the first time we may completely revise how we think of infections.

nojito 6y ago

Long COVID is downright horrifying. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-long-haulers-symptoms-recovery/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-long-haulers-symptoms-...

peteyPete 6y ago
Its about time they start looking into it.. And it won't just be "long covid"... They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it. My girlfriend is pretty much disabled at this point and has been sick since barely surviving SARS in 2003. Oddly enough, most things she suffers from are the same as long-covid issues.
- jMyles 6y ago
  > They can start digging into ME/CFS, and "long-SARS" while they're at it. Heck yeah. And isn't "long-SARS" just another long-covid? Along with long-hku1, long-oc43, long-nl63? If 'covid' stands for coronavirus disease, then it stands to reason that the discussion about 'long covid' needs to be independent from which coronavirus is implicated in the chronic condition. It's apparent that they all cause this (albeit rarely). It seems to me that focusing on one pathogen to the exclusion of the others, despite this phenomenon being documented across all of them, is likely a political decision.
emersonrsantos 6y ago
Every hospitalization for pretty much everything serious with lots of medical procedures, especially for 2 weeks or more, have side effects for some months, physically and mentally.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Yes my mother was never the same after knee replacement. Just lost her edge mentally and never recovered it.
anoncake 6y ago
To determine how scary "Long Covid" is, you have to take into account both how bad and how frequent it is. Articles like these are just fearmongering. They likely cause it in many cases by giving people hypochondria.
- nojito 6y ago
  How is a story about a dedicated clinic(s) focused on a mysterious new condition fear mongering? Individuals like yourself that hand wave away COVID do much more harm.
  - anoncake 6y ago
    One story is not. The reporting of the media as a whole is. It's always FEAR FEAR FEAR, without mentioning how likely these cases actually are. Because of this, there are young, healthy people who think they have a significant chance of dying of Covid, which is just objectively wrong. But it's understandable. If you dare trying to look rationally at the matter, you get accused of "hand wav[ing] away COVID". As if the only two options were "worse than the plague" and "harmless like the common cold".

lettergram 6y ago

Curious how this compares to other illnesses, such as pneumonia. It seems to match with people having damage from pneumonia.

jMyles 6y ago
> other illnesses, such as pneumonia Not sure how to parse this. Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, are among the many causes of pneumonia. Do you just mean other pathogens that also cause pneumonia?
- brational 6y ago
  op means lingering effects. very normal with pneumonia. difference here is a lot of people with mild covid (no pneumonia) are getting lingering neurological or cardiac issues (or both)
  - jMyles 6y ago
    > difference here is On the contrary, this does not seem to be distinct with SARS-CoV-2. The other endemic coronaviruses (which cause pneumonia more rarely, and are typically just called 'common colds') also produce very similar 'long covid' effects in similarly tiny slices of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" - you'll be amazed at how well documented, and yet poorly understood, this phenomenon is. There appears to be less literature for 229e, but pretty convincing for the other 3.

ggm 6y ago

Anyone with CF, or who was thrown into the fibromyalgia bucket (its used by doctors for untreatable/intractable problems, and comes with a strong implication "its all in your mind") will welcome this, if (and its a big if) they are allowed to participate in the discovery and treatment process. I'm not in either bucket, or a long-covid sufferer, I'm just observing post-viral has a huge amount of things in it, beyond covid, which might benefit from increased funding and eyeballs on the problem. Not all the long-covid is about lung function.

tasty_freeze 6y ago
By "CF" do you mean cystic fibrosis, or did you actually mean "CFS" or "ME/CFS" (aka chronic fatigue syndrome)? My wife has suffers from ME/CFS for years. She is pissed that the US government invests almost nothing in research for something that affects on the order of 1M [1] of its citizens. She certainly doesn't want people with long-covid to suffer, but she is cheering that perhaps this $1B investment will lead to research that also helps the understanding of ME/CFS. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/me-cfs/index.html
- ggm 6y ago
  I meant Chronic Fatigue. So, we're in the same place on this.
niffydroid 6y ago
TDLR I am now convinced I've had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome for years but covid has seriously kicked it up a level making the symptoms worse. I've suffered from chronic pain syndrome in my legs/hips for years, in fact since I was like 10 and has had a big affect on my life. As a result of chronic pain I've then mentally suffered as well, done CBT a few times as well. I've had countless sessions of physio and hydrotherapy. Before covid was even a thing (Like 2-3 years) I've reported fatigue issues to my GP multiple times, I had IBS, concentration issues and chest pains. The GP's did ECGs and said I was fine. My rheumatology kicked me of the patient list, but got me physio and a sleep study (I have mild sleep apnea) Jan 2020 I had the flu as well, my Father was the first one and did lose his taste and sense of smell. Come April 2020 I was just getting out of breath walking in my garden and slight chest pains at the bottom of my lungs, the fatigue got worse. Doctor was like "You've not got symptoms of covid, but it could be covid, some of my colleagues have felt wiped out" Come June/July 2020 I took part in the NHS home antibody test and I had a faint line that indicated I had antibodies for covid-19, at this point things had gone back to normal for me. Come December 2020, my concentration levels were the worst they've ever been. The brain fog was horrendous, I was now getting worse chest pains and feeling rather fed up with it. GP was doing nothing other than saying get a covid test. In the end I went to a walk in clinic and they thought I may have had clots on my lungs. Got sent to A&E (Yes sent to A&E during a pandemic, the worst place anyone can be) They came to the conclusion after looking at my medical record and symptoms I had Fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue syndrome. I now take fluoxetine in the morning alongside my amitriptyline in the evening (been on it for 10+ years), I'm doing a lot better but do have days where I've got no get up and go, it got worse in 2020 and I think covid made things worse. Also interestingly my mother ME, so do wonder if there is a genetic factor.

mrfusion 6y ago

FWIW here’s a study showing 98% of people were symptom free after 12 weeks: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1.full#F6 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v... Here’s another recent study showing 95% of former COVID (hospitalized) patients suffered no irreversible damage: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-covid-patients-suffer-no-irreversible-damage/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-study-95-of-former-cov...

JonathanFly 6y ago
It's good that the vast majority of people make full recoveries but 2% of the US is still over 6 million people. I personally know two people who have long 'recovered' from Covid but still have no smell, or a reduced sense of smell. Not life threatening or really holding them back from anything, but they say it effects their quality of life more than they expected.
- mdorazio 6y ago
  Note that's 2% of people who become infected, not 2% of the entire population (unless you're assuming everyone will get infected?). We're trending toward 10-12% of the US population getting infected before vaccines roll out more widely, so that would be somewhere in the realm of 0.25% of the total population potentially suffering long-term effects.
  - runako 6y ago
    CDC is estimating that ~25% of Americans were infected by the end of 2020: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd... And obviously a number of people have been infected since. But just using the 83 million number from the CDC, 2% of that would be 1.6 million people.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      Based on seroprevalence which the 98% was not based on so using it now would be misleading

vmception 6y ago

I've been very dismayed at the non-existent data between "dead" and "not dead". This has been guiding pretty much everyone's decisions, everybody's counterpoints on all parts of the political spectrum, and it is pretty annoying when you know that they aren't operating on the same information as you are. Its just not as simple as "hm only 10% of 90 years olds are the ones dying in my municipality, I'll play along because nobody is inviting me out anyway", encephalitis lethargica had very debilitating side effects for decades afterwards. Covid is a blood clotting neurological disease. It strips blood of the ability to carry oxygen, debilitates the ability for your body to even get oxygen from air, and damages many organs (probably due to the worsened oxygen delivery). What do people think the loss of smell, taste, and ability to think clearly is? Many of the same people consider themselves asymptomatic because they didn't get a hard dry cough. I just don't get the impression that others are putting two and two together here. I am all for getting data! Good investment.

throwaway5752 6y ago
In all fairness it's only been around a bit over a year (and MERS/SARS were rare enough to have limited data). The dead/non-dead distinction has been the top priority. And I don't think the data is non-existent, but on an educated guess I'd say the top minds have more been on developing treatments, vaccines, and generally reducing mortality and morbity - and the balance of research reflects it. Sadly there will be time to measure the long term consequences. For now what more can they do than tell everyone to socially distance and wear masks, and get vaccinated as soon as possible?
- vmception 6y ago
  At first I was going to say that I wasn't arguing for anything, but really everyone has dropped the ball here. The same places that did the tests had the infrastructure to follow up with people and could have been doing this 6 months ago, and that has nothing to do with the "top minds" at all. That, alongside the failed, poorly implemented or nonexistent contact tracing methods have made getting this metadata much more difficult to do.
burlesona 6y ago

oliv__ 6y ago

How about they start with mental health

k33n 6y ago

Can’t believe smart people buy this fear mongering.

black6 6y ago
It's a self-feeding cycle of being too scared by the reporting to go outside and socialize and observe for oneself that "there's no there there" so just trust the official story and stay afraid.
- orblivion 6y ago
  What would it look like if it were real, and you went outside to socialize? Would you expect to see people randomly keeling over?
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  The wonderful thing about the internet is that you don't even have to go outside to talk to people who have been sick, who know people who have died, who are sick at this very moment and know people who are dying right now. It's myopic to pretend you can get a similarly accurate top-down view of the situation by talking to your neighbors.
- macintux 6y ago
  You sound like the people who went to a hospital that was overflowing with COVID patients, saw fewer cars in the parking lot than they expected, and concluded it was a hoax. I'll take actual data over anecdata, thanks.
loopz 6y ago
Please don't call legitimate concern fear. Few people have experience with ME and it won't be anything visible to you.
s5300 6y ago
Could you please extrapolate a bit further to make things clearer to us? I just don't understand how you manage to come to your stated conclusion. "You" can't believe "smart people" buy "fear mongering" Isn't this implicitly stating that you're the one who's glaringly incorrect?

jMyles 6y ago

It's unclear whether this will generally be used to investigate (and ultimately take seriously) the documented but poorly understood chronic suffering which rarely but really affects a sliver of people who've recovered from various viruses. The other four endemic coronaviruses, while often called "common colds" (and make up perhaps 1/5 common cold cases) have all been documented having similar lingering cardiovascular effects in a similar miniscule segment of the population. Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for "{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular" for example - you'll be amazed at how similar case reports are to what we're seeing from SARS-CoV-2. However, to my knowledge (and to the best I can tell from searching Google Scholar), the phrase 'long Covid' has never been used to describe this phenomenon. In fact, it seems that sufferers are often ignored. So it is with other mysterious chronic after-effects from illness - 'chronic lyme disease' is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks. It's obvious that this phenomenon is super rare. However, when you have viruses (and other pathogens) which ultimately infect nearly everyone on the planet, these cases add up. It's not right that sufferers have been ignored these decades, and if this is a genuine effort to right that wrong, I applaud it. If on the other hand it's just another attempt to justify bizarre restrictions instead of resources to help these same sufferers, then that's just cruel. We saw a similar happening with hospital census last year: sensational media and pundit scientists (but vanishingly few actual experts) threw bombastic fits over hospitals being overcrowded, as they almost always are, especially in underserved communities, at the peak time of the year. And was this a rallying cry to provide more resources for marginalized communities and the hospitals that serve them? Seemingly not; it was instead a pathetic attempt at justifying interventions which by then were already unambiguously ineffective, like stay-at-home orders. And now we're not even talking about it. These hospital systems and the communities they serve will not be helped; the conversation has moved on. The best thing we can do is to take seriously the experts who have credibly drawn attention to this for the past couple of decades and continued to do so in covid times. People like Stefan Baral, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, etc. Subsequent pandemics may leave less room for reflection, so this is the time to get these things straightened out.

nickthemagicman 6y ago
There's always a small percentage of people who have side effects from any biological changes to their body. People have permanent side effects from taking medicine. It seems strange to focus on Covid specifically, when all manner of biological changes to people's bodies cause a small subset of people to have permanent side effects.

iirvine 6y ago

This is sorely needed. People are starting to get desperate - who knows how many outcomes could be improved with earlier medical diagnostics and intervention. We need clear guidelines to give those recovering a better chance of not slipping into the pit of a chronic illness. I will say, as I've been trying to tout on every "long Covid" thread I come across - it seems that rest is crucial. Your best option, obviously, is to not get Covid in the first place. But if you do, after you've passed through the 2 week acute phase, rest like your life depends on it. Extremely light exercise only, take as much time off work as possible, and pay close attention to how your recovery is progressing. The usual caveats apply - not a doctor, evidence is completely anecdotal and based on my experiences, this is not medical advice, etc etc - but scheduled, compulsory rest helped me a great deal at my worst. So much of my downward spiral could likely have been abated by avoiding overexertion, prolonging the rest period after the acute phase of the illness, waiting even longer before jumping back into exercise and full work days (3-4 months as opposed to 3-4 weeks) but that is so antithetical to how we think we're supposed to act after we "get over" an illness.

sschueller 6y ago
This will hopefully shed some light on people suffering a very similar disease often described as Chronic Fatigue syndrome. Many also getting this after a non covid virus infection. The biggest issue was the small sample size the difficulty to diagnose as there is sometimes also a phycological aspect to it. The now large sample size should help a lot in finding out what it really is.
bspammer 6y ago
Honestly that's kind of terrifying. I got Covid 2 months ago, and have been trying to start running again to improve my lung capacity. Are you saying I've been making it worse?
- iirvine 6y ago
  Not exactly - we don’t really have any way of knowing that empirically yet. Personally, I do wish I had given my body a bit of a bigger break after I got over the infection. So I guess I’m saying pay attention - watch how you’re recovering, and maybe think about easing back into vigorous exercise slower than you might have had you just gotten over a cold. And, as always, when in doubt, get your doctor involved. It’s clear now a majority of people outside the vulnerable groups get over this illness with hardly any after effects. But it’s becoming clear that some people don’t, and suffer some amount of sequelae. We don’t know how many yet, and we can’t tell who will or who won’t yet. Given those circumstances, a slower than usual return to normal activity levels is prudent. For instance, I’ve read that college athletes are restricted from play for about 10-14 days after even an asymptomatic COVID diagnosis, and then are carefully monitored for months afterwards. With any hint of lingering symptoms or a drop in performance, they’re given a cardiac MRI to check for heart inflammation, and potentially benched for 3-6 months. If you don’t have a team physician checking in with you after every workout, you’re gonna have to do that interrogation yourself.

Itsdijital 6y ago

I'm someone who actually has some form of long-covid or perhaps just damage from the virus. March 12th will be the one year mark for me. I was a mild case, stayed home for 2 days, right back on my feet after that. 32M, no health issues. Symptoms just lingered and lingered. They would go away then come back days later. Mainly sinus pressure and dizziness. Then 4 months on I started getting intense chest pain and shortness of breath. Cardiologist noted some abnormalities but was not concerned. Put me on beta blockers. Fast forward to today and I still have shortness of breath, some cardiac symptoms, and random pains in my left arm and back. It really eats into my quality of life, but I am thankful I don't have it as bad as many others. I keep tabs on the long haul community to see if researchers have figured anything out/others found anything that helps. So far there really isn't much. I'll note that there are a surprising number of people who aren't aware they are long hauling (they "recovered" and then months later developed issues - not making the connection until stumbling upon another long hauler) and that people are really hostile about the idea of long hauling. I don't know if it's a coping mechanism or what, but people want (need?) to hear "I fully recovered" when they ask how you are doing. I don't tell anyone except those close to me about it, it's completely not worth the debate they are going to want to have about the validity of my symptoms. It's pretty common in the LH community to not be publicly upfront about it because of this. There are plenty of people who know me, know I got sick, and will relay that I fully recovered.

in_cahoots 6y ago
Were you able to get tested? For some reason I’ve gotten the impression that a disproportionate number of long-haulers got sick in March or April and never had a confirmed test. I’m not sure whether that points to a change in the virus or a psychosomatic component to being infected with an unknown virus at the beginning of the pandemic.
- Itsdijital 6y ago
  I could not get tested in March. I tested positive for antibodies in August. I live right outside NYC, which based on April antibody testing, likely had 250,000 to 500,0000 cases/day for about a 3 week period from late Feb into March. This was when the media was still debating about whether or not the virus was a big deal and Trump was saying just a few people were sick.

thowaway959125 6y ago

In September of last year I was experiencing a combination of symptoms that I did not link to COVID, but looking back on it I'm starting to question it. First, I had debilitating brain fog. It felt link I was thinking through pea soup. I went to my doctor twice due to this symptom, but my blood work (CBC, not a COVID test) looked normal and he suggested this was due to "stress" or "changes in sleep", although I was not experiencing either of those. Around this same time, I would experiencing "near-syncope" upon standing. It got to the point where I everything was fading to black and I would have to take a knee to maintain consciousness. Again I talked to my doctor he shrugged his shoulders. He said my blood pressure was normal but he referred me to a cardiologist. I passed a stress EKG so they said there was nothing structurally wrong with my heart. Fast forward a few months and the symptoms have abated, although they still persist in a diminished form. This makes me really wonder if this was COVID due to autonomic nerve dysfunction. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/covid-19-story-tip-brain-fog-fatigue-dizziness--post-covid-pots-is-real https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...

dmix 6y ago
I wonder if you can find some blood test that looks for the specific antibodies.

sigmaprimus 6y ago

Other than High blood pressure, COPD and Diabetes have there been any studies of Sars effect with other diseases? I think there is a chance that long-covid may result from a secondary virus and it's interaction with Sars. It may also be due to a lack of virus and no interaction I suppose.

Drseeth 6y ago

There already is a miracle molecule called Leronlimab that everyone who has tested +ve for Covid should be given.

deleted 6y ago

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jokoon 6y ago

Is there such a thing as long flu? Long cold? In a way, don't most illnesses cause long term effects?

beagle3 6y ago
Yes, there is. There is quite a bit of “long covid reporting” but I haven’t found one with reasonable healthy or comparable e.g. flu controls.
isolli 6y ago
Yes, I had both long flu and long pneumonia. In both cases it took me about 2 months to fully recover after being officially cured. It annoys me a little that people are only now discovering that respiratory illnesses can have long-term effect. How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack? Personal experience aside, it will be important to put specific numbers on the phenomenon and establish a baseline for comparison to other illnesses. So this announcement of a research effort is good news. I just hope they will put the numbers in context.
- websites2323 6y ago
  >How many people know that pneumonia can increase the risk of heart attack? To amplify your point, I didn't know this until my father died last month from a series of heart attacks brought on by pneumonia, which itself was caused by COVID. Side note: the cause of death is listed as a heart attack. How many deaths are we not counting because COVID was not the direct cause?
  - isolli 6y ago
    I'm sorry to hear that :(
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  I would guess anything that affects your oxygen and damages the lungs (potentially permanently) which produce your oxygen can have long term effects. Some of the patients who have died from covid have lungs that look so horrible they barely look like lungs any longer other than the shape.

Wintamute 6y ago

I'm just going to throw this out there as a discussion point - consider for a moment what an unusually high number of people are catching the same disease at the same time. Not just feeling unwell with some sort of unspecified cold or flu, but all being confirmed tested positive with something specific. 30 million in the US and counting. How many people amongst that 30 million would go on to experience any number of nebulous, chronic symptoms of one kind of another normally this year in the absence of Covid? In my assessment, a great many would. If not millions, then hundreds of thousands. Experiencing health problems, or odd symptoms that come and go can be scary, but it's a normal part of life. But throw in a label "long covid", support groups and a heightened sense of threat during a pandemic and you have a recipe for a confused social response. Now, post viral syndrome is certainly real. Inflammation due to infection causes real and debilitating symptoms. But is there any evidence to suggest that SARS-COV-2 is uniquely able to cause long term health problems? Or is it the case that it causes unexceptional levels of post viral syndrome and inflammatory damage, but the unusal thing is so many people all catching the same virus at the same time with a very low level of natural immunity in the population, therefore a relativelyt high rate of serious infection (relative to other endemic viruses)?

deleted 6y ago
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Miner49er 6y ago
I think this is all there likely is to it. Add on that it is suspected that viruses can trigger autoimmune diseases, and that explains potentially even more long haulers. Plus increased stress/anxiety on some due to the lockdown could cause physical symptoms. I do suppose some research is warranted though. It seems different viruses seem to cause different types of autoimmune responses, and it would be interesting to see what COVID can cause. Plus more research needs to be done on the link between viruses and autoimmune diseases in general.
rcpt 6y ago
This study is controlled against people who had the flu during lockdown https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...

ArkanExplorer 6y ago

I had COVID in March 2020, and it took several months to recover - chest tightness and slight difficulty breathing being the main unending symptom. The key for me was moving out of a lockdown country (Australia) to a non-lockdown country (Ukraine), and stopping wearing masks (just wearing a face shield). The psychological impact of freedom lead to an almost immediate improvement in my wellbeing. It would be interesting to compare COVID survivors in lockdown and non-lockdown states in the USA. The theory could be that the social isolation, stress, reduced Vitamin D, and poorer diet of people in lockdown contribute to poorer outcomes long-term.

sjwalter 6y ago
The link to Vit-D deficiency and worse covid outcomes is by now incredibly well-supported in the literature. That anybody thinks a lockdown is good advice is just evidence that, yes, the media is effective at controlling what appears to most to be most minds (though that's not clear--most folks I talk to think covid is mild and the policy response insane). Best advice is the same your grandma might give you: To be healthy, eat well, go outside for fresh air and exercise. Instead, we're all supposed to think that the best response is waiting for Bill Gates to put just the right chemicals into a syringe to save mankind.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Sadly Grandma died of polio, thankfully I got the Bill Gates chemicals for that.
  - sjwalter 6y ago
    When was that? I see your response paints me as some anti-vaxxer. Why would you think that? My kids, my wife, and myself are all accinated against polio and other illnesses. Those vaccines a) Are real vaccines that actually stop getting the illness AND transmitting it and b) Have been battle-tested over decades and their long-term impacts and side-effects are well-understood. I'm not anti-vaxx. I'm against rushed, misleadingly-marketed vaccines that seem to have no impact on the actual transmission of the virus, based on every company's claims, that have been tested for months when prior to this widespread vaccine injections required close to a decade of study for approval. This is a rushed gene therapy medical treatment for a disease that kills less than 0.4% of people under the age of 75. No sense to take this fake vaccine.

JulianMorrison 6y ago

Long Covid is also important because understanding how it works could point to a common mechanism with many comparable post-viral syndromes and with chronic fatigue syndrome.

sharadov 6y ago

I had a moderate case where I sick for about 10 days, mostly fatigue, fever, loss of smell and taste, night sweats. But I developed an itch in my armpits, groin and arms post-recovery. The dermatologist gave me an anti-itch cream, now a month later, the symptoms have gotten worse to the point where I wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy. I don't have a history of skin allergies or allergies in general. Posting it here, if someone has/had similar issues.

outime 6y ago
As you can imagine I don’t know what happens to you but - I had itches in different parts of my body and even a rash showed up on my ankle. Turns out it was a nutrition issue. Over time you may develop allergies to stuff that you weren’t allergic before (also after sicknesses). It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to eat those things ever again, but you at least won’t for some time. Consider also dust mites allergy and do extensive cleaning where you sleep and see if that helps.
- sharadov 6y ago
  Thanks, am seeing the dermatologist again and may ask her if they need to do a blood test.I've heard that when liver enzymes are out of whack it can lead to allergy like symptoms.
XW013K6LL 6y ago
You must enroll in this trial https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04678830 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04678830 if there still are any slots available.
markdog12 6y ago
> I wake up in the middle of the night scratching like crazy Try a reactin or 2 an hour before sleep.
- sharadov 6y ago
  I've tried an anti-histamine and it's not helped.

vmchale 6y ago

Honestly, this is probably more cost-effective than letting it degrade QoL for so many people. This is going to be a huge issue as the disease proper fades away.

fomine3 6y ago

Not Invested Here?