26 ms·

Burden of post-Covid-19 syndrome and implications for healthcare planning

207 points by infodocket 5y ago

mygoodaccount 5y ago
RESULTS: Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized. At six to eight months, 111 (26%) reported not having fully recovered. 233 (55%) participants reported symptoms of fatigue, 96 (25%) had at least grade 1 dyspnea 111 (26%) had DASS-21 scores indicating symptoms of depression. 170 (40%) participants reported at least one general practitioner visit related to COVID-19 after acute illness 10% (8/81) of initially hospitalized individuals were rehospitalized. Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care.
- justwanttolearn 5y ago
  I haven't had covid but I definitely suffer a lot of these symptoms from the pandemic burn out..
  - gremlinsinc 5y ago
    I had bronchitis symptoms for only a week in March 2020, didn't think it was covid, took antibiotics but miraculously this really bad case of Bronchitis cleared up 3 days later.... I get Bronchitis every year or other year... and it's almost ALWAYS a 3-4 week thing. since then I've had brain fog, fatigue, pain in my extremities, numbness in hands/feet (off/on), body aches, when I stand sometimes I have to sit back down for a minute, my standing HR is about 130...just standing, AFTER getting up from sleeping. My sitting is 90... Walking is just 130-140... Depression, and the worst anxiety attacks of my life, just panic, can't stop racing thoughts, etc... Most of this stuff stopped a few months ago when I started doing 2 hours of mindfulness per day after seeing some "glitch" in the matrix type stuff which isn't really relevant here... I can't say for a certainty the weird Bronchitis was Covid, but a lot of signs point to that, and it cleared up after my vaccinations...so who knows... Feel like 80% of normal, which is way better than the 20% I was feeling just this past March.
- wk_end 5y ago
  A 20% hospitalization rate immediately throws their sample into question. Here in BC (Canada), for instance, the overall case hospitalization rate is 5% [0]. And, FWIW, in BC we performed far fewer tests per capita (around 0.6) [1] than, say, the US (~1.3) [2], suggesting that we missed cases at least as often as they did in the US (per the CDC, which estimated only ~1 in 4 COVID cases detected [3]). So a 20% hospitalization rate is beyond generous (likely by an order of magnitude), and it wouldn't be crazy to figure the same goes for the rest of their stats. Add to that the lack of control, and the self-reported (and potentially psychosomatic) nature of symptoms...not to unreasonably diminish the severity of COVID or deny the reality of Long COVID or anything, but it's frustrating that people are going to read - or the media is going to report on - this uncritically and imagine catching COVID leaves you two coin flips away from permanent disability. I suppose the damage has been long-since done, and with most of the west well on its way, blessedly, to being vaccinated it's moot anyway. It's just hard not to be sick of the hysteria. [0] http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID_sitrep/Week_25_2021_BC_COVID-19_Situation_Report_Final.docx.pdf http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID_sitrep/... [1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html?stat=num&measure=tests&map=pt#a2 https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s... [2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaltests https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaltests [3] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
jacquesm 5y ago
One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this). So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy levels are creeping back up. But still, you can have down days every now and then. But they are getting fewer and further between and the downs are less far down. I hope to get it completely behind me one of these days. When I had COVID I was just one small step away from calling for an ambulance but that was rock bottom, after that it got better and I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this (by having some oxygen earlier on and maybe avoiding some of the damage). But I figured other people had it much worse than I did (and I still believe that was the case). March last year was a pretty crazy time.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  You were tested and diagnosed with Covid in January 2020?
  - eganist 5y ago
    > You were tested and diagnosed with Covid in January 2020? 17 months ago would be mid february 2020.
    - IAmGraydon 5y ago
      Sorry you're correct - Feb 13, 2020.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No, I had it in early March, pretty much textbook, called the local doctor who said don't bother testing (it was quite obvious) but isolate from family, which we did as good as we could. There were a couple of really bad nights, and after that it got better bit by bit and after three weeks I was able to get up again and work a bit. From there it was a long slog to get back to 'normal'.
f38zf5vdt 5y ago
Severe viral diseases are no joke. I know a couple people who got COVID19 and are still dealing with issues months on. One had to drop out of university due to "brain fog" and concentration issues. > Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care. My personal experience of getting chickenpox as an adult was a high fever for almost a week and nearly two years before I felt normal again. At about 6 months in I stopped going to doctors because they had nothing new to tell me. What was a mild disease for children turned into a protracted ordeal for me.
abystander 5y ago
Since they claim a quarter of patients are showing symptoms and one of those is depression - how do they separate the out the effect of the de facto criminalization of social activity, an innate human behavior ingrained in our DNA after millions of years of evolution? You'd get significant depression in solitary confinement too.
- FiReaNG3L 5y ago
  No idea why you're getting downvoted - they have no control group and as you say there's 'depression' in their symptoms they count for. I'm pretty sure 'depression' (which I'm sure they don't count as clinically depressed, but 'im feeling more depressed') went up significantly in the whole population last year. Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    That part is fine but the part where he instead diagnoses everyone with having been driven crazy by the (by implication misguided) coronavirus response is not really thoughtful in my opinion.
    - abystander 5y ago
      > the part where he instead diagnoses everyone with having been driven crazy [...] is not really thoughtful I said you could expect "significant" depression if there's de facto (in some countries de jure) criminalizing of social activity. I think you're the one who's not being thoughtful about characterizing arguments here. I believe the policy is often misguided/short-sighted but I never said that, you're extrapolating that valid criticism of the policy would be a discredit for officials.
  - buu700 5y ago
    No idea why you're getting downvoted Speculation: conflation of his reasonable and factual statement with the ostensibly similar far-right talking point that the cure (social distancing) is worse than the disease.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
> Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized This is not a normal cohort. The hospitalization rates for Covid were much less than 19%. This seems to be a sicker cohort.
Miner49er 5y ago
> Third, we did not have a baseline (pre-COVID-19) assessment of participants’ physical and mental health. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of COVID-19 from pre-existing conditions. The interpretation of our findings regarding depression and anxiety is further limited by the psychological burden that the pandemic may impose in general [48, 49]. While we tried to compare our results with estimates from the general population, applicable comparison data was not available. Other studies investigating longer-term sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection found a relevant excess risk for longer-term symptoms among infected individuals compared to SARS-CoV-2-negative control groups [9, 50]. Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline, IMO.
- mulvya 5y ago
  > Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline Yes. As pointed out in Causation or confounding: why controls are critical for characterizing long COVID https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w "To address some of these biases, we and others used established longitudinal cohorts recruited at the start of the pandemic for regular testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and thus provided objective confirmation of infection. We asked our healthcare-worker participants about 72 symptoms reported to be associated with long COVID, at a median of 7.5 months after the development of COVID-19, and found that mental-health, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms were as common among 140 patients with mild-to-moderate symptomatic seropositive COVID-19 (‘cases’) as in 1,160 control participants who remained asymptomatic and seronegative throughout the surveillance period. Of concern, 40–60% of both cases and control participants reported mental-health symptoms, which highlights the toll of pandemic on the healthcare workforce. We also identified three clusters that included 12 symptoms—affecting the sensory, neurological and cardiorespiratory systems—that were reported by 67% of cases but also 44% of control participants, which emphasizes the ongoing difficulties in characterizing long COVID."
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  I hope we don't go down the path of dismissing post-COVID symptoms as mental illness. Yes, some patients with post-COVID symptoms could simply be presenting with mental illness. However, we can't simply dismiss the patients with measurable symptoms like cardiac irregularities, exercise intolerance, orthostatic intolerance, and other physical issues that only occurred after the COVID infection. Modern medicine (in any country) is not well equipped to handle complex disorders that don't yet have specific medical tests. It's common for doctors to reach for mental illness as an explanation, to the detriment of patients. Let's not repeat that for post-COVID.
inglor_cz 5y ago
Six months after the end of a mild case: occassional heart arrhythmias, but getting less frequent. I got medication (Concor) to control them. Muscle twitching, also getting less frequent, but increasing after exercise or caffeine. Incidentally, the cardiologist who takes care about my arrhythmias has after-Covid muscle twitching too and a few days ago told me that another of his patients, fresh after Covid, has them as well. So there seem to be lingering issues. Hopefully not of the fatal or life-shortening kind, but this cannot really be ruled out. BTW My Covid was really fairly mild, only about 30 hours of fever and sweating plus a few days of blocked nose. No pneumonia or even much cough at all.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  That's about how mine is too. I had Covid late November/early December (likely caught it from a student right before the shut schools back down) and it was very mild. Only noticeable issues was a sinus-like sore throat/ear, no taste/smell and being cold. No fever. I even actually exercised during that time, keeping to 10k steps a day walking in circles around my house. All over within 5 days of first symptoms showing (and man, that first good meal after getting taste back was heavenly) But since then I've been having random heart arrhythmia, which are also getting less frequent, as well numbness in my arms and legs. Like the tingling you get when it's asleep, but without any cause for it to go to sleep, etc. Never attributed that to post-Covid until I talked to my PCP about it recently. Still really hoping there's nothing permanently wrong, but at least endurance doesn't seem to have permanently suffered -- I actually sat my fastest 2mi run time on the treadmill yesterday.
seriousquestion 5y ago
Correct me if wrong, but this doesn't appear to have a non-Covid-19 control group? This study on Long Covid found there was no statistical difference between teenagers that had Covid compared to those that didn't. Suggesting that these symptoms may be getting entangled and misattributed. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v...
- ghastmaster 5y ago
  If you read through the limitations section of the report, you will find they covered this along with several other limitations of the study.
  - samatman 5y ago
    When a study has unsurmountable limitations, which make it impossible to usefully reason about the "results" of the study, is being frank about those limitations more useful to society than not publishing the study? To me the obvious answer is "no, you toss it in the bin, or better yet you think for awhile and don't perform the useless study", but opinions can differ here.
    - IAmGraydon 5y ago
      Completely agree. The term "limitations" is being used here to mean faults. When your study has faults, its conclusions are of little to no use and only serves as fodder for the media. It should be binned.
kalaido 5y ago
Have chronic Sinusitis from many colds I got from my little one. "Long Cold"
OzyM 5y ago
How likely are these numbers to be accurate? This Swiss study of 431 adults gives a 26% incidence of "Long Covid" at 6-8 months. But another study that I'm more familiar with that tracked 4,182 people (mostly from the U.K., U.S., and Sweden) says only 2.3% of participants reported symptoms past the three month point. [0] I feel like every time I look into this topic I find a new study with a wildly different estimate. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y
- ping_pong 5y ago
  The numbers were self-reported, so it's not going to be very accurate.
- amirhirsch 5y ago
  >>Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized. The US hospitalization rate is (2,297,764 hospitalized / 33,604,986 tested positive) 6.8% so the study is a cohort of extra-sick folks. Also consider the selection bias of those who want to tell the surveyor about it. I've been thinking about how to correct for this in cohort studies, like perhaps ask people if they are vegan.
  - OzyM 5y ago
    You lost me at the vegan part? I agree that this is a major source of error in a lot of studies like these, though.
    - amirhirsch 5y ago
      The joke is that they go out of their way to tell people about it. Like, I tried the vegan diet, but gave it up after telling my cousin.
- peteretep 5y ago
  I am partial to the Zoe studies, as their cohort seems to be large, stable, and include people who haven’t been infected. Write-up: https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/long-covid https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/long-covid Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...
elzbardico 5y ago
Self-reported symptoms. And now we will have the litany of hypochondriacs that didn't even got tested for SARS-COV-2 but swear they have some misterious long term viral syndrome that in the real world, if it really exists, is extremely rare. The trash that passes as science nowadays.....
- Retric 5y ago
  1 in 4 people are not Hypochondriacs. Medical research is used to the way people play up symptoms and this is well above the noise floor.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    I don't know about 1 in 4 but it sure seems like there is a lot more of it than their used to be, just in my experience. Younger people living with constant worry about "health care" that I've only ever seen before among the elderly. When I was in my 20s the last thing I or any of my friends worried about was health care.
    - quenix 5y ago
      Are you really trying to paint the fact that the younger generation is taking greater steps to systematically take care of their health as a bad thing? That is absurd.
      - rangoon626 5y ago
        Well if that's the case, they should start with general nutrition
    - ziml77 5y ago
      The worry isn't that their health is always bad. The worry is that if they do happen to have something happen, whether that be disease or injury, they won't be able to afford to go to the hospital or visit their doctor. And death isn't the only negative outcome from not getting medical attention, it could be permanent effects like constant pain or reduced physical ability.
halotrope 5y ago
Is it possible to have an asymptomatic primary infection and still suffer long covid? Antigen tests where negative but ever since last fall I feel weird symptoms that I never had for any length of time. Stuff like trouble spelling, complete lack of concentration, difficulties comprehending things when trying to actively learn and a general feeling of confusion and exhaustion. I tend to just assume a general state of exhaustion or slight burnout after a pretty intense year. Reading long-covid experiences makes me wonder tough. Edit: spelling…
- quenix 5y ago
  Supposedly, the risk of long COVID is not correlated to the severity of symptoms. That’s a bad thing.
  - IAmGraydon 5y ago
    Yes, but is it even correlated to Covid? This study lacks a control group, so we don't know.
- perlgeek 5y ago
  Yes, it's totally possible. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210615-a-fifth-of-asymptomatic-covid-patients-develop-long-covid-study https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210615-a-fifth-of-as... claims it's 20% of asymptomatic cases that develop Long Covid. Even if the number is off, it's unlikely to be actually zero. Good luck and speedy recovery!
- inb4_cancelled 5y ago
  I'd like to know as well. Never had any covid AFAIK, yet I'm currently on my second week of feeling tired and on my fourth day of experiencing heart palpitations maybe once every hour (feels like my heart skipped a beat and the next one is a bit stronger). I've never had this before and my antigen test yesterday was negative.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I have those. At least in my case, it's a premature ventricular contraction. What happens is that the nerve fires too early, and the heart muscle says: "What? LOL, no. I'm still on my coffee break." But blood keeps arriving at the heart, so the next beat is stronger because it has more blood to move. They can get strong enough to hurt a bit. In my case, it seemed to be caused by Claritin. When I stopped taking Claritin, I quit having these. Years later, just recently, I've started having them again. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. Your symptoms may be something else.
shaicoleman 5y ago
The FLCCC have published the I-RECOVER Protocol for treating Long COVID: https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover-protocol/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover... https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321 https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321
iammisc 5y ago
When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up. The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the cough since it was interfering with my life. That was it. It was about one year later that the cough finally dissipated. It got better after about 5 months, but it took many more months for all symptoms to go away. I guess my question is... why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?
- deregulateMed 5y ago
  Physicians are not scientists. They repeat what was taught in their craft. If their professors and coworkers never mentioned this, they don't know.
- spidersouris 5y ago
  Interestingly I had a similar experience three years ago as well. I would cough non-stop and no medication was of any help. It lasted three months and then slowly disappeared. The weeks after I still had some respiratory problems (whistling when breathing), but nothing too annoying compared to the cough. Without joking, this was far from being an agreeable period and it impacted my studies quite a lot as coughing all day made me very tired and I was unable to study properly. Doctors never found what had happened.
- perlgeek 5y ago
  With a "normal" viral cough, the infection itself lasts that long. With Long Covid, the viral load is gone from your system, and symptoms still persist Previously, the general public wasn't very interested in chronic, unspecific symptoms that people have or had (google Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; it's a collection of people feeling fatigue, have concentration issues etc. similar to Long Covid, many long before COVID-19 was a thing). With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.
barefeg 5y ago
Interested in knowing how this statistic changes for a vaccinated population
- Aachen 5y ago
  For what it's worth, I did recently read somewhere (Wikipedia long covid page? Vaccines page? Not sure, but think it was in the last sentence of the intro) that uninfected vaccinated people do not report any long-covid-like effects. That's not exactly what you're asking but last week it was finally my turn for a first shot and this was something that I was a bit worried about, since we are injecting viral parts and we don't know what causes the long cases. Getting covid is obviously more risky so I got the vaccine and would have chosen to get the second dose too regardless, but I remember looking for this info a few months ago and there was nothing yet. Maybe there is now also data on what you're asking, I think I might have seen a paper about that when I looked for this related question but it's been too long to remember what the title might have been.
joeblow21 5y ago
I persoanlly experienced this too. I had no symptoms and after 6 months I still have no symptoms
standardUser 5y ago
I had a diagnosed case of COVID-19 that hit me and my partner pretty hard about 7 months ago. It lasted longer than either of us expected (close to a month) but there were only a few really rough days. Fast forward, and I have plenty of issues. We were both fairly depressed during the winter months - for me it was the worst in a great many years. I've had some moments of mental iffiness here and there, at least enough to notice. I had a really nasty throat infection a few months after COVID. And I've had a joint issue crop up in that time as well. The thing is, I never once considered any of this to be the direct consequence of my COVID infection. And I still don't. We were depressed because, after enduring nearly a year of pandemic, the weather was shit, our jobs were on shaky ground and the world was re-closed. The mental iffiness? I don't know. Sustained lack of stimulus and activity levels? Natural decline due to age? Occasionally too much drinking? I think you see where I'm going with this. I don't want to dispute anyone's own experience. But I do think it's worth considering that to not have any ailments arise within a 12-month period as unusual as this one might not be the most common outcome, with or without a COVID infection.
kamilafsar 5y ago
Not “long Covid” but my sense of smelling/tasting is still not the same after 6+ months. I had mild symptoms, but my sense of smelling and tasting were totally gone for a few weeks. After a few weeks it turned almost back to 80% only intense smells (like gasoline, garlic and diapers :shrug:) were filtered out. Since ~3 months these things stink intensely with an indescribable way… (I guess the diapers always did ;)) Additionally very neutral tasting stuff like cucumber and paprika stink too.. Curious to hear if anyone totally “recovered” from similar symptoms and if so, how they did it. Edit: seems like loss of smell/taste like symptoms is also called “long covid”
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  I feel for you, I completely lost smell and taste and it was extremely scary, you don't know how bad it is until it happens and you can't tell if your teeth are clean, your clothes are clean, your milk has gone off, it's crazy to put fragrance on and put your wrist to your nose and there's nothing. Eating suddenly becomes a miserable chore, I normally cook a lot but just ended up eating ramen and fruit and only when my stomach called for it. Thankfully mine returned mostly after 2 weeks, some things maybe smell slightly different but I think if I was one of the people to have it for 6 months or not at all I'd be pretty deep in depression by the end of it. I saw some comments online saying long term sufferers returned after taking Vitamin-D and Zinc. I was already taking D but ordered zinc and started taking it as soon as it happened. Could be quackery, normally wouldn't post something like that on HN but only doing it in case that was the reason mine came back so quickly because I know how much it impacts your quality of life.
- saiya-jin 5y ago
  Can't say anything about being 100% back with smell, it seems more like some got back and then long plateau where I am now. My story - had covid in february 2021, +-flu but complete loss of smell. But not for taste - all major tastes were there (so salt was salty, sour sour etc.) but all the fine tastes (ie you barbecue a fine steak without any seasoning, and its amazing) were gone. The result was food that didn't taste horrible, just incredibly bland. I was super sporty, and started again almost right after it. Smell was gone 100%. I used a home made 52% apple brandy bottle to test my smell continuously (very strong alcohol smell, strong fruity by-smells), for maybe 2 weeks it was like breathing fresh forest air, actually OK if I didn't consider what it meant. No alcohol smell. Then it gradually came back, same with fruity flavors. After 6 months, I would say I have my smell back. But it feels like its quite toned down, all the smells are rather mild. Did some test and my own perfumes don't smell so great anymore. Some other previously great smells are mild or not so great anymore. At least nothing smells outright horribly, and all food is OK to eat (since smell affects our tastes greatly). Smell is probably the least bad sense to lose, as long as its just about some % loss and not making many fine things smell like rotten shit.
mikewarot 5y ago
I'm fairly certain I've had it as well. I had coworkers who were confirmed to have had it, and I got sick. This was back before testing was widely available. I've since tested negative for active infection (last June), and been vaccinated (March 2021). I have almost no endurance. A trip to the store shopping for groceries, and getting them back in the house, and put away, is about all I can do for a day. The long term consequences of Covid are just starting to be recognized. I wonder how many people are going to end up on disability.
mysterypie 5y ago
> enrolled 431 adults from the general population with SARS-CoV-2 infection How do you control for people’s willingness to enter a study? If I had a mild case of Covid and no ongoing symptoms, I wouldn’t be too interested in participating in a study. But if I had serious ongoing symptoms, I’d be very interested. It’s a voluntary study, so how in the world do you control for that? If you can’t control for that, it skews the results to make long COVID seem much more common.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Autopsies are showing micro-ruptures in the brain. It’s not surprising that the brain damage takes so long to heal and has such strange side effects.
causi 5y ago
Yes, you can easily see symptoms that arise well after the active infection is over. Personally I had complete loss of smell and taste that slowly came mostly back over a two month period, only to suddenly go bizarre at the tail end. Six months later I can only assume something between my nasal membranes or olfactory bulbs healed wrong because my sense of smell is just as good as it was pre-covid, it's just incorrect. Feces, beef, chocolate, and french fries all have the same stale/burnt grease smell. I've essentially lost hope the problem is going to correct itself.
thinkingemote 5y ago
This is an example of attention, social media and science: My anecodte. Last year I didn't get a bad infection and didn't get long covid. My story is not interesting, no one wants to hear it and no one else will share their similar anecdotes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Grim-444 5y ago
So, to summarize this study, they basically just asked a few hundred people that had Covid in the past if they had recently felt tired, depressed, had trouble sleeping, etc., and then reported that a number of the people they asked this replied yes. That's it. There was no medical evaluation of whether the reported symptoms even had a medical cause. There was no comparison to the answers a random control sampling of the population that hadn't gotten Covid would have given. They just asked a bunch of people that had just finished living through 1+ years of lockdown if they had been tired or depressed recently.
- nprateem 5y ago
  A doctor friend of mine has had it for months. She's had test after test after test. Things come back abnormal but they can't pin down what's wrong with her to treat it. The assumption is long covid - she has the tiredness, brain fog etc. So right now I'm not sure if they really know how to test for it.
  - parrellel 5y ago
    One of the things that keeps popping up on my wife's feeds is that Covid seems to be giving people auto-immune antibodies. So, the body appears to be continuing to low level attack the circulatory system, organs, etc. Basically, we're looking at a massive increase in auto-immune diseases in the next couple years, and you're doctor friend should talk to nearby Rheumatologists about one of the biologic drug trials. Again, based on the buzz from places like creakyjoints.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Aren't those who didn't have covid the control here? They would provide a baseline of tired/depressed feelings in the current population.
raarts 5y ago
Maybe related to Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome? [1] [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/593658 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/5...
reader_mode 5y ago
It's self reported symptoms and the sample contains a massive amount of hospitalization cases compared to general pop. Couldn't they secure funding to do a more meaningful study where they actually examined random samples of population post COVID and looked for abnormalities in lung function or cognitive abilities, etc. ? Considering the stakes this seems like an important question to answer correctly and gathering data about potential long term complication sounds valuable.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Been in lockdown for 18 months before I actually caught covid, to be perfectly honest most of the symptoms described for "long covid" I experienced from being locked down, after actually having covid I haven't noticed much of a difference (once my smell and taste returned, thankfully that was soon). Low energy, out of breath, etc. You have to keep in mind most of us are doing a fraction of walking around that you would do from a commute and it can make a huge difference over time. I was already getting out of breath running up and down one flight of stairs to answer the door after 6 months staying at home, embarrassingly I was one day interviewing a potential hire over video chat, quickly had to collect a package and could barely talk after running back upstairs, completely out of breath. I can see how a sedentary life kills people. This is before we get into what depression, doom scrolling,Journalist created hysteria fear and dread, realizing there isn't much to life once a few factors are removed, loneliness, video call fatigue and isolation, lack of distance between work space and life space can do to your body and mind. Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  > Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever. My daughters children maybe will have enough distance to reflect on it. Maybe her grandkids. And it won’t be pretty… this last year and a half has been the biggest public health care fuck up in recorded history. What we did with lockdowns, masks, social distancing… it’s all modern day rain dances. Just humans thinking they have more control over nature than they actually do. Same basic mechanism humans used thousands of years ago to trick themselves into thinking goat sacrifices would ward off disease and famine. What we did is truly horrific. But the truth won’t be widely recognized until most of the players involved are long dead. Unfortunately…
  - strikhedonia 5y ago
    You think asking people to wear a piece of cloth over their face and maybe not go out to eat if they’re vulnerable is “truly horrific?” Seems to me that, for the vulnerable portion of the population, the social distancing guidelines worked perfectly. Spend a year chilling at home in safety, get a vaccine, go back to normal. “Rain dance?” Bullshit.
abz10 5y ago
A theory that I ascribe to is that Long Covid is viral induced CFS/ME. As someone with hEDS I've battled CFS/ME for most of my life. I don't want to celebrate too soon but in the last few weeks do I feel like I have now won the battle. I just started using a combination of very powerful but targeted drugs. I feel 110% and no longer get Post Exertion Malease (PEM) which is a major indicator of CFS/ME. I take Low Dose Naltrexone, Testosterone Cypionate, BPC-157, TB-500, Mod GRF, Ipamorelin, Thyroxine (T4), and Triiodothyronine (T3). I take a ton of vitamins but the effective ones seem to be the megadoses of B1 and B3. I also take NMN for NAD+ deficiency but I'm not sure if that is doing anything. I eat a low carb diet and take cold showers and work out every other day. Low Dose Naltrexone is great for brain fog and I've been taking it for 5 years. The Test, hGH peptides, and T3/T4 is probably responsible for the bulk of my improvement. I've only been taking them for a few weeks and it's night and day difference. I'm not saying this is for everyone but it definitely worked for me so it may help others looking for ideas.
ellyagg 5y ago
How do you disambiguate "long Covid" from the very real fact that people are incredibly suggestible. My father-in-law was convinced he had long Covid. He talked about it all the time. He was never diagnosed, but he had a cold near the beginning of the pandemic and he decided it was Covid. He claimed he could run up and down the steps at the park before getting Covid. Now, he claimed, he was always breathless. I exercise him and he'd be convinced exercise will do nothing because of his long Covid. Of course when he got tested he had no antibodies. But it's not just that. During the height of the pandemic, did you notice yourself, or notice in others, that people were always thinking Covid was coming on? Every little pain or weird breath and people became very worried. The brain is incredible at turning normal sensations into symptoms. We don't realize all the sensory input we're constantly discarding until we start becoming hyperaware. The incentives for the media to hype long Covid and for researchers to find long Covid is incredibly intense. Every shred of evidence will by hyped to the moon. Every other person you meet with a panic disorder or heart condition will have a story attributed to Covid. Ordinary people will have absolutely zero way to contextualize the true risk.
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  There are people right in this thread claiming long covid without ever even having tested positive for covid… this seems to be a common theme with those suffering from long covid and worse, found in research about long covid.
sunkenvicar 5y ago
Ivermectin improves long-Covid symptoms. Worth a try because its safe and effective.
andred14 5y ago
More lies for the stupid masses. Any flu or cold will have lasting symptoms if you don't shake it off, do some exercise, eat well and force yourself to 100% Also avoid pharamceuticals. I was sick in the winter 2019/2020. Took a few weeks to get running again so what. It was just a flu we are being lied to: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Z4s9cYZ5IBUz/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/Z4s9cYZ5IBUz/
ctyc 5y ago
May not help everyone but was a mega game changer for me - extra strength breath right strips, both at night when sleeping and also while working out (or meditating/working on breathing exercises).
nprateem 5y ago
Anyone know of any studies regarding whether the vaccines reduce the risk of long covid if you catch it after being double vaccinated? They're only supposed to be about 95% effective after 2 shots, so if you catch it in that 5% probability how likely is long covid afterwards?

207 points by infodocket 5y ago

RESULTS: Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized. At six to eight months, 111 (26%) reported not having fully recovered. 233 (55%) participants reported symptoms of fatigue, 96 (25%) had at least grade 1 dyspnea 111 (26%) had DASS-21 scores indicating symptoms of depression. 170 (40%) participants reported at least one general practitioner visit related to COVID-19 after acute illness 10% (8/81) of initially hospitalized individuals were rehospitalized. Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care.

justwanttolearn 5y ago
I haven't had covid but I definitely suffer a lot of these symptoms from the pandemic burn out..
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
  I had bronchitis symptoms for only a week in March 2020, didn't think it was covid, took antibiotics but miraculously this really bad case of Bronchitis cleared up 3 days later.... I get Bronchitis every year or other year... and it's almost ALWAYS a 3-4 week thing. since then I've had brain fog, fatigue, pain in my extremities, numbness in hands/feet (off/on), body aches, when I stand sometimes I have to sit back down for a minute, my standing HR is about 130...just standing, AFTER getting up from sleeping. My sitting is 90... Walking is just 130-140... Depression, and the worst anxiety attacks of my life, just panic, can't stop racing thoughts, etc... Most of this stuff stopped a few months ago when I started doing 2 hours of mindfulness per day after seeing some "glitch" in the matrix type stuff which isn't really relevant here... I can't say for a certainty the weird Bronchitis was Covid, but a lot of signs point to that, and it cleared up after my vaccinations...so who knows... Feel like 80% of normal, which is way better than the 20% I was feeling just this past March.
wk_end 5y ago
A 20% hospitalization rate immediately throws their sample into question. Here in BC (Canada), for instance, the overall case hospitalization rate is 5% [0]. And, FWIW, in BC we performed far fewer tests per capita (around 0.6) [1] than, say, the US (~1.3) [2], suggesting that we missed cases at least as often as they did in the US (per the CDC, which estimated only ~1 in 4 COVID cases detected [3]). So a 20% hospitalization rate is beyond generous (likely by an order of magnitude), and it wouldn't be crazy to figure the same goes for the rest of their stats. Add to that the lack of control, and the self-reported (and potentially psychosomatic) nature of symptoms...not to unreasonably diminish the severity of COVID or deny the reality of Long COVID or anything, but it's frustrating that people are going to read - or the media is going to report on - this uncritically and imagine catching COVID leaves you two coin flips away from permanent disability. I suppose the damage has been long-since done, and with most of the west well on its way, blessedly, to being vaccinated it's moot anyway. It's just hard not to be sick of the hysteria. [0] http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID_sitrep/Week_25_2021_BC_COVID-19_Situation_Report_Final.docx.pdf http://www.bccdc.ca/Health-Info-Site/Documents/COVID_sitrep/... [1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html?stat=num&measure=tests&map=pt#a2 https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s... [2] https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaltests https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#cases_totaltests [3] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burden.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...

jacquesm 5y ago

One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this). So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy levels are creeping back up. But still, you can have down days every now and then. But they are getting fewer and further between and the downs are less far down. I hope to get it completely behind me one of these days. When I had COVID I was just one small step away from calling for an ambulance but that was rock bottom, after that it got better and I will always wonder if I had called them earlier if I could have avoided the worst of this (by having some oxygen earlier on and maybe avoiding some of the damage). But I figured other people had it much worse than I did (and I still believe that was the case). March last year was a pretty crazy time.

IAmGraydon 5y ago
You were tested and diagnosed with Covid in January 2020?
- eganist 5y ago
  > You were tested and diagnosed with Covid in January 2020? 17 months ago would be mid february 2020.
  - IAmGraydon 5y ago
    Sorry you're correct - Feb 13, 2020.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No, I had it in early March, pretty much textbook, called the local doctor who said don't bother testing (it was quite obvious) but isolate from family, which we did as good as we could. There were a couple of really bad nights, and after that it got better bit by bit and after three weeks I was able to get up again and work a bit. From there it was a long slog to get back to 'normal'.

f38zf5vdt 5y ago

Severe viral diseases are no joke. I know a couple people who got COVID19 and are still dealing with issues months on. One had to drop out of university due to "brain fog" and concentration issues. > Individuals that have not fully recovered or suffer from fatigue, dyspnea or depression were more likely to have further healthcare contacts. However, a third of individuals (37/111) that have not fully recovered did not seek further care. My personal experience of getting chickenpox as an adult was a high fever for almost a week and nearly two years before I felt normal again. At about 6 months in I stopped going to doctors because they had nothing new to tell me. What was a mild disease for children turned into a protracted ordeal for me.

abystander 5y ago

Since they claim a quarter of patients are showing symptoms and one of those is depression - how do they separate the out the effect of the de facto criminalization of social activity, an innate human behavior ingrained in our DNA after millions of years of evolution? You'd get significant depression in solitary confinement too.

FiReaNG3L 5y ago
No idea why you're getting downvoted - they have no control group and as you say there's 'depression' in their symptoms they count for. I'm pretty sure 'depression' (which I'm sure they don't count as clinically depressed, but 'im feeling more depressed') went up significantly in the whole population last year. Also PLoS one is basically not peer reviewed - they accept every paper after a short review.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  That part is fine but the part where he instead diagnoses everyone with having been driven crazy by the (by implication misguided) coronavirus response is not really thoughtful in my opinion.
  - abystander 5y ago
    > the part where he instead diagnoses everyone with having been driven crazy [...] is not really thoughtful I said you could expect "significant" depression if there's de facto (in some countries de jure) criminalizing of social activity. I think you're the one who's not being thoughtful about characterizing arguments here. I believe the policy is often misguided/short-sighted but I never said that, you're extrapolating that valid criticism of the policy would be a discredit for officials.
- buu700 5y ago
  No idea why you're getting downvoted Speculation: conflation of his reasonable and factual statement with the ostensibly similar far-right talking point that the cure (social distancing) is worse than the disease.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

> Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized This is not a normal cohort. The hospitalization rates for Covid were much less than 19%. This seems to be a sicker cohort.

Miner49er 5y ago

> Third, we did not have a baseline (pre-COVID-19) assessment of participants’ physical and mental health. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of COVID-19 from pre-existing conditions. The interpretation of our findings regarding depression and anxiety is further limited by the psychological burden that the pandemic may impose in general [48, 49]. While we tried to compare our results with estimates from the general population, applicable comparison data was not available. Other studies investigating longer-term sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection found a relevant excess risk for longer-term symptoms among infected individuals compared to SARS-CoV-2-negative control groups [9, 50]. Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline, IMO.

mulvya 5y ago
> Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline Yes. As pointed out in Causation or confounding: why controls are critical for characterizing long COVID https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w "To address some of these biases, we and others used established longitudinal cohorts recruited at the start of the pandemic for regular testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and thus provided objective confirmation of infection. We asked our healthcare-worker participants about 72 symptoms reported to be associated with long COVID, at a median of 7.5 months after the development of COVID-19, and found that mental-health, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms were as common among 140 patients with mild-to-moderate symptomatic seropositive COVID-19 (‘cases’) as in 1,160 control participants who remained asymptomatic and seronegative throughout the surveillance period. Of concern, 40–60% of both cases and control participants reported mental-health symptoms, which highlights the toll of pandemic on the healthcare workforce. We also identified three clusters that included 12 symptoms—affecting the sensory, neurological and cardiorespiratory systems—that were reported by 67% of cases but also 44% of control participants, which emphasizes the ongoing difficulties in characterizing long COVID."
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I hope we don't go down the path of dismissing post-COVID symptoms as mental illness. Yes, some patients with post-COVID symptoms could simply be presenting with mental illness. However, we can't simply dismiss the patients with measurable symptoms like cardiac irregularities, exercise intolerance, orthostatic intolerance, and other physical issues that only occurred after the COVID infection. Modern medicine (in any country) is not well equipped to handle complex disorders that don't yet have specific medical tests. It's common for doctors to reach for mental illness as an explanation, to the detriment of patients. Let's not repeat that for post-COVID.

inglor_cz 5y ago

Six months after the end of a mild case: occassional heart arrhythmias, but getting less frequent. I got medication (Concor) to control them. Muscle twitching, also getting less frequent, but increasing after exercise or caffeine. Incidentally, the cardiologist who takes care about my arrhythmias has after-Covid muscle twitching too and a few days ago told me that another of his patients, fresh after Covid, has them as well. So there seem to be lingering issues. Hopefully not of the fatal or life-shortening kind, but this cannot really be ruled out. BTW My Covid was really fairly mild, only about 30 hours of fever and sweating plus a few days of blocked nose. No pneumonia or even much cough at all.

dorchadas 5y ago
That's about how mine is too. I had Covid late November/early December (likely caught it from a student right before the shut schools back down) and it was very mild. Only noticeable issues was a sinus-like sore throat/ear, no taste/smell and being cold. No fever. I even actually exercised during that time, keeping to 10k steps a day walking in circles around my house. All over within 5 days of first symptoms showing (and man, that first good meal after getting taste back was heavenly) But since then I've been having random heart arrhythmia, which are also getting less frequent, as well numbness in my arms and legs. Like the tingling you get when it's asleep, but without any cause for it to go to sleep, etc. Never attributed that to post-Covid until I talked to my PCP about it recently. Still really hoping there's nothing permanently wrong, but at least endurance doesn't seem to have permanently suffered -- I actually sat my fastest 2mi run time on the treadmill yesterday.

seriousquestion 5y ago

Correct me if wrong, but this doesn't appear to have a non-Covid-19 control group? This study on Long Covid found there was no statistical difference between teenagers that had Covid compared to those that didn't. Suggesting that these symptoms may be getting entangled and misattributed. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.11.21257037v...

ghastmaster 5y ago
If you read through the limitations section of the report, you will find they covered this along with several other limitations of the study.
- samatman 5y ago
  When a study has unsurmountable limitations, which make it impossible to usefully reason about the "results" of the study, is being frank about those limitations more useful to society than not publishing the study? To me the obvious answer is "no, you toss it in the bin, or better yet you think for awhile and don't perform the useless study", but opinions can differ here.
  - IAmGraydon 5y ago
    Completely agree. The term "limitations" is being used here to mean faults. When your study has faults, its conclusions are of little to no use and only serves as fodder for the media. It should be binned.

kalaido 5y ago

Have chronic Sinusitis from many colds I got from my little one. "Long Cold"

OzyM 5y ago

How likely are these numbers to be accurate? This Swiss study of 431 adults gives a 26% incidence of "Long Covid" at 6-8 months. But another study that I'm more familiar with that tracked 4,182 people (mostly from the U.K., U.S., and Sweden) says only 2.3% of participants reported symptoms past the three month point. [0] I feel like every time I look into this topic I find a new study with a wildly different estimate. [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01292-y

ping_pong 5y ago
The numbers were self-reported, so it's not going to be very accurate.
amirhirsch 5y ago
>>Symptoms were present in 385 (89%) participants at diagnosis and 81 (19%) were initially hospitalized. The US hospitalization rate is (2,297,764 hospitalized / 33,604,986 tested positive) 6.8% so the study is a cohort of extra-sick folks. Also consider the selection bias of those who want to tell the surveyor about it. I've been thinking about how to correct for this in cohort studies, like perhaps ask people if they are vegan.
- OzyM 5y ago
  You lost me at the vegan part? I agree that this is a major source of error in a lot of studies like these, though.
  - amirhirsch 5y ago
    The joke is that they go out of their way to tell people about it. Like, I tried the vegan diet, but gave it up after telling my cousin.
peteretep 5y ago
I am partial to the Zoe studies, as their cohort seems to be large, stable, and include people who haven’t been infected. Write-up: https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/long-covid https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/long-covid Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...

elzbardico 5y ago

Self-reported symptoms. And now we will have the litany of hypochondriacs that didn't even got tested for SARS-COV-2 but swear they have some misterious long term viral syndrome that in the real world, if it really exists, is extremely rare. The trash that passes as science nowadays.....

Retric 5y ago
1 in 4 people are not Hypochondriacs. Medical research is used to the way people play up symptoms and this is well above the noise floor.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I don't know about 1 in 4 but it sure seems like there is a lot more of it than their used to be, just in my experience. Younger people living with constant worry about "health care" that I've only ever seen before among the elderly. When I was in my 20s the last thing I or any of my friends worried about was health care.
  - quenix 5y ago
    Are you really trying to paint the fact that the younger generation is taking greater steps to systematically take care of their health as a bad thing? That is absurd.
    - rangoon626 5y ago
      Well if that's the case, they should start with general nutrition
  - ziml77 5y ago
    The worry isn't that their health is always bad. The worry is that if they do happen to have something happen, whether that be disease or injury, they won't be able to afford to go to the hospital or visit their doctor. And death isn't the only negative outcome from not getting medical attention, it could be permanent effects like constant pain or reduced physical ability.

halotrope 5y ago

Is it possible to have an asymptomatic primary infection and still suffer long covid? Antigen tests where negative but ever since last fall I feel weird symptoms that I never had for any length of time. Stuff like trouble spelling, complete lack of concentration, difficulties comprehending things when trying to actively learn and a general feeling of confusion and exhaustion. I tend to just assume a general state of exhaustion or slight burnout after a pretty intense year. Reading long-covid experiences makes me wonder tough. Edit: spelling…

quenix 5y ago
Supposedly, the risk of long COVID is not correlated to the severity of symptoms. That’s a bad thing.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Yes, but is it even correlated to Covid? This study lacks a control group, so we don't know.
perlgeek 5y ago
Yes, it's totally possible. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210615-a-fifth-of-asymptomatic-covid-patients-develop-long-covid-study https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210615-a-fifth-of-as... claims it's 20% of asymptomatic cases that develop Long Covid. Even if the number is off, it's unlikely to be actually zero. Good luck and speedy recovery!
inb4_cancelled 5y ago
I'd like to know as well. Never had any covid AFAIK, yet I'm currently on my second week of feeling tired and on my fourth day of experiencing heart palpitations maybe once every hour (feels like my heart skipped a beat and the next one is a bit stronger). I've never had this before and my antigen test yesterday was negative.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I have those. At least in my case, it's a premature ventricular contraction. What happens is that the nerve fires too early, and the heart muscle says: "What? LOL, no. I'm still on my coffee break." But blood keeps arriving at the heart, so the next beat is stronger because it has more blood to move. They can get strong enough to hurt a bit. In my case, it seemed to be caused by Claritin. When I stopped taking Claritin, I quit having these. Years later, just recently, I've started having them again. Disclaimer: I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. Your symptoms may be something else.

shaicoleman 5y ago

The FLCCC have published the I-RECOVER Protocol for treating Long COVID: https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover-protocol/ https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover... https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321 https://youtu.be/ZCYM2HW2Ayw?t=321

iammisc 5y ago

When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up. The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the cough since it was interfering with my life. That was it. It was about one year later that the cough finally dissipated. It got better after about 5 months, but it took many more months for all symptoms to go away. I guess my question is... why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?

deregulateMed 5y ago
Physicians are not scientists. They repeat what was taught in their craft. If their professors and coworkers never mentioned this, they don't know.
spidersouris 5y ago
Interestingly I had a similar experience three years ago as well. I would cough non-stop and no medication was of any help. It lasted three months and then slowly disappeared. The weeks after I still had some respiratory problems (whistling when breathing), but nothing too annoying compared to the cough. Without joking, this was far from being an agreeable period and it impacted my studies quite a lot as coughing all day made me very tired and I was unable to study properly. Doctors never found what had happened.
perlgeek 5y ago
With a "normal" viral cough, the infection itself lasts that long. With Long Covid, the viral load is gone from your system, and symptoms still persist Previously, the general public wasn't very interested in chronic, unspecific symptoms that people have or had (google Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; it's a collection of people feeling fatigue, have concentration issues etc. similar to Long Covid, many long before COVID-19 was a thing). With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.

barefeg 5y ago

Interested in knowing how this statistic changes for a vaccinated population

Aachen 5y ago
For what it's worth, I did recently read somewhere (Wikipedia long covid page? Vaccines page? Not sure, but think it was in the last sentence of the intro) that uninfected vaccinated people do not report any long-covid-like effects. That's not exactly what you're asking but last week it was finally my turn for a first shot and this was something that I was a bit worried about, since we are injecting viral parts and we don't know what causes the long cases. Getting covid is obviously more risky so I got the vaccine and would have chosen to get the second dose too regardless, but I remember looking for this info a few months ago and there was nothing yet. Maybe there is now also data on what you're asking, I think I might have seen a paper about that when I looked for this related question but it's been too long to remember what the title might have been.

joeblow21 5y ago

I persoanlly experienced this too. I had no symptoms and after 6 months I still have no symptoms

standardUser 5y ago

I had a diagnosed case of COVID-19 that hit me and my partner pretty hard about 7 months ago. It lasted longer than either of us expected (close to a month) but there were only a few really rough days. Fast forward, and I have plenty of issues. We were both fairly depressed during the winter months - for me it was the worst in a great many years. I've had some moments of mental iffiness here and there, at least enough to notice. I had a really nasty throat infection a few months after COVID. And I've had a joint issue crop up in that time as well. The thing is, I never once considered any of this to be the direct consequence of my COVID infection. And I still don't. We were depressed because, after enduring nearly a year of pandemic, the weather was shit, our jobs were on shaky ground and the world was re-closed. The mental iffiness? I don't know. Sustained lack of stimulus and activity levels? Natural decline due to age? Occasionally too much drinking? I think you see where I'm going with this. I don't want to dispute anyone's own experience. But I do think it's worth considering that to not have any ailments arise within a 12-month period as unusual as this one might not be the most common outcome, with or without a COVID infection.

kamilafsar 5y ago

Not “long Covid” but my sense of smelling/tasting is still not the same after 6+ months. I had mild symptoms, but my sense of smelling and tasting were totally gone for a few weeks. After a few weeks it turned almost back to 80% only intense smells (like gasoline, garlic and diapers :shrug:) were filtered out. Since ~3 months these things stink intensely with an indescribable way… (I guess the diapers always did ;)) Additionally very neutral tasting stuff like cucumber and paprika stink too.. Curious to hear if anyone totally “recovered” from similar symptoms and if so, how they did it. Edit: seems like loss of smell/taste like symptoms is also called “long covid”

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
I feel for you, I completely lost smell and taste and it was extremely scary, you don't know how bad it is until it happens and you can't tell if your teeth are clean, your clothes are clean, your milk has gone off, it's crazy to put fragrance on and put your wrist to your nose and there's nothing. Eating suddenly becomes a miserable chore, I normally cook a lot but just ended up eating ramen and fruit and only when my stomach called for it. Thankfully mine returned mostly after 2 weeks, some things maybe smell slightly different but I think if I was one of the people to have it for 6 months or not at all I'd be pretty deep in depression by the end of it. I saw some comments online saying long term sufferers returned after taking Vitamin-D and Zinc. I was already taking D but ordered zinc and started taking it as soon as it happened. Could be quackery, normally wouldn't post something like that on HN but only doing it in case that was the reason mine came back so quickly because I know how much it impacts your quality of life.
saiya-jin 5y ago
Can't say anything about being 100% back with smell, it seems more like some got back and then long plateau where I am now. My story - had covid in february 2021, +-flu but complete loss of smell. But not for taste - all major tastes were there (so salt was salty, sour sour etc.) but all the fine tastes (ie you barbecue a fine steak without any seasoning, and its amazing) were gone. The result was food that didn't taste horrible, just incredibly bland. I was super sporty, and started again almost right after it. Smell was gone 100%. I used a home made 52% apple brandy bottle to test my smell continuously (very strong alcohol smell, strong fruity by-smells), for maybe 2 weeks it was like breathing fresh forest air, actually OK if I didn't consider what it meant. No alcohol smell. Then it gradually came back, same with fruity flavors. After 6 months, I would say I have my smell back. But it feels like its quite toned down, all the smells are rather mild. Did some test and my own perfumes don't smell so great anymore. Some other previously great smells are mild or not so great anymore. At least nothing smells outright horribly, and all food is OK to eat (since smell affects our tastes greatly). Smell is probably the least bad sense to lose, as long as its just about some % loss and not making many fine things smell like rotten shit.

mikewarot 5y ago

I'm fairly certain I've had it as well. I had coworkers who were confirmed to have had it, and I got sick. This was back before testing was widely available. I've since tested negative for active infection (last June), and been vaccinated (March 2021). I have almost no endurance. A trip to the store shopping for groceries, and getting them back in the house, and put away, is about all I can do for a day. The long term consequences of Covid are just starting to be recognized. I wonder how many people are going to end up on disability.

mysterypie 5y ago

> enrolled 431 adults from the general population with SARS-CoV-2 infection How do you control for people’s willingness to enter a study? If I had a mild case of Covid and no ongoing symptoms, I wouldn’t be too interested in participating in a study. But if I had serious ongoing symptoms, I’d be very interested. It’s a voluntary study, so how in the world do you control for that? If you can’t control for that, it skews the results to make long COVID seem much more common.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Autopsies are showing micro-ruptures in the brain. It’s not surprising that the brain damage takes so long to heal and has such strange side effects.

causi 5y ago

Yes, you can easily see symptoms that arise well after the active infection is over. Personally I had complete loss of smell and taste that slowly came mostly back over a two month period, only to suddenly go bizarre at the tail end. Six months later I can only assume something between my nasal membranes or olfactory bulbs healed wrong because my sense of smell is just as good as it was pre-covid, it's just incorrect. Feces, beef, chocolate, and french fries all have the same stale/burnt grease smell. I've essentially lost hope the problem is going to correct itself.

thinkingemote 5y ago

This is an example of attention, social media and science: My anecodte. Last year I didn't get a bad infection and didn't get long covid. My story is not interesting, no one wants to hear it and no one else will share their similar anecdotes.

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Grim-444 5y ago

So, to summarize this study, they basically just asked a few hundred people that had Covid in the past if they had recently felt tired, depressed, had trouble sleeping, etc., and then reported that a number of the people they asked this replied yes. That's it. There was no medical evaluation of whether the reported symptoms even had a medical cause. There was no comparison to the answers a random control sampling of the population that hadn't gotten Covid would have given. They just asked a bunch of people that had just finished living through 1+ years of lockdown if they had been tired or depressed recently.

nprateem 5y ago
A doctor friend of mine has had it for months. She's had test after test after test. Things come back abnormal but they can't pin down what's wrong with her to treat it. The assumption is long covid - she has the tiredness, brain fog etc. So right now I'm not sure if they really know how to test for it.
- parrellel 5y ago
  One of the things that keeps popping up on my wife's feeds is that Covid seems to be giving people auto-immune antibodies. So, the body appears to be continuing to low level attack the circulatory system, organs, etc. Basically, we're looking at a massive increase in auto-immune diseases in the next couple years, and you're doctor friend should talk to nearby Rheumatologists about one of the biologic drug trials. Again, based on the buzz from places like creakyjoints.
Aachen 5y ago
Aren't those who didn't have covid the control here? They would provide a baseline of tired/depressed feelings in the current population.

raarts 5y ago

Maybe related to Post-Viral Fatigue Syndrome? [1] [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/593658 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/5...

reader_mode 5y ago

It's self reported symptoms and the sample contains a massive amount of hospitalization cases compared to general pop. Couldn't they secure funding to do a more meaningful study where they actually examined random samples of population post COVID and looked for abnormalities in lung function or cognitive abilities, etc. ? Considering the stakes this seems like an important question to answer correctly and gathering data about potential long term complication sounds valuable.

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whywhywhywhy 5y ago

Been in lockdown for 18 months before I actually caught covid, to be perfectly honest most of the symptoms described for "long covid" I experienced from being locked down, after actually having covid I haven't noticed much of a difference (once my smell and taste returned, thankfully that was soon). Low energy, out of breath, etc. You have to keep in mind most of us are doing a fraction of walking around that you would do from a commute and it can make a huge difference over time. I was already getting out of breath running up and down one flight of stairs to answer the door after 6 months staying at home, embarrassingly I was one day interviewing a potential hire over video chat, quickly had to collect a package and could barely talk after running back upstairs, completely out of breath. I can see how a sedentary life kills people. This is before we get into what depression, doom scrolling,Journalist created hysteria fear and dread, realizing there isn't much to life once a few factors are removed, loneliness, video call fatigue and isolation, lack of distance between work space and life space can do to your body and mind. Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever.

spookthesunset 5y ago
> Doubt we'll ever get a truly objective assessment for the past year and a half for at least 10-15 years, if ever. My daughters children maybe will have enough distance to reflect on it. Maybe her grandkids. And it won’t be pretty… this last year and a half has been the biggest public health care fuck up in recorded history. What we did with lockdowns, masks, social distancing… it’s all modern day rain dances. Just humans thinking they have more control over nature than they actually do. Same basic mechanism humans used thousands of years ago to trick themselves into thinking goat sacrifices would ward off disease and famine. What we did is truly horrific. But the truth won’t be widely recognized until most of the players involved are long dead. Unfortunately…
- strikhedonia 5y ago
  You think asking people to wear a piece of cloth over their face and maybe not go out to eat if they’re vulnerable is “truly horrific?” Seems to me that, for the vulnerable portion of the population, the social distancing guidelines worked perfectly. Spend a year chilling at home in safety, get a vaccine, go back to normal. “Rain dance?” Bullshit.

abz10 5y ago

A theory that I ascribe to is that Long Covid is viral induced CFS/ME. As someone with hEDS I've battled CFS/ME for most of my life. I don't want to celebrate too soon but in the last few weeks do I feel like I have now won the battle. I just started using a combination of very powerful but targeted drugs. I feel 110% and no longer get Post Exertion Malease (PEM) which is a major indicator of CFS/ME. I take Low Dose Naltrexone, Testosterone Cypionate, BPC-157, TB-500, Mod GRF, Ipamorelin, Thyroxine (T4), and Triiodothyronine (T3). I take a ton of vitamins but the effective ones seem to be the megadoses of B1 and B3. I also take NMN for NAD+ deficiency but I'm not sure if that is doing anything. I eat a low carb diet and take cold showers and work out every other day. Low Dose Naltrexone is great for brain fog and I've been taking it for 5 years. The Test, hGH peptides, and T3/T4 is probably responsible for the bulk of my improvement. I've only been taking them for a few weeks and it's night and day difference. I'm not saying this is for everyone but it definitely worked for me so it may help others looking for ideas.

ellyagg 5y ago

How do you disambiguate "long Covid" from the very real fact that people are incredibly suggestible. My father-in-law was convinced he had long Covid. He talked about it all the time. He was never diagnosed, but he had a cold near the beginning of the pandemic and he decided it was Covid. He claimed he could run up and down the steps at the park before getting Covid. Now, he claimed, he was always breathless. I exercise him and he'd be convinced exercise will do nothing because of his long Covid. Of course when he got tested he had no antibodies. But it's not just that. During the height of the pandemic, did you notice yourself, or notice in others, that people were always thinking Covid was coming on? Every little pain or weird breath and people became very worried. The brain is incredible at turning normal sensations into symptoms. We don't realize all the sensory input we're constantly discarding until we start becoming hyperaware. The incentives for the media to hype long Covid and for researchers to find long Covid is incredibly intense. Every shred of evidence will by hyped to the moon. Every other person you meet with a panic disorder or heart condition will have a story attributed to Covid. Ordinary people will have absolutely zero way to contextualize the true risk.

spookthesunset 5y ago
There are people right in this thread claiming long covid without ever even having tested positive for covid… this seems to be a common theme with those suffering from long covid and worse, found in research about long covid.

sunkenvicar 5y ago

Ivermectin improves long-Covid symptoms. Worth a try because its safe and effective.

andred14 5y ago

More lies for the stupid masses. Any flu or cold will have lasting symptoms if you don't shake it off, do some exercise, eat well and force yourself to 100% Also avoid pharamceuticals. I was sick in the winter 2019/2020. Took a few weeks to get running again so what. It was just a flu we are being lied to: https://www.bitchute.com/video/Z4s9cYZ5IBUz/ https://www.bitchute.com/video/Z4s9cYZ5IBUz/

ctyc 5y ago

May not help everyone but was a mega game changer for me - extra strength breath right strips, both at night when sleeping and also while working out (or meditating/working on breathing exercises).

nprateem 5y ago

Anyone know of any studies regarding whether the vaccines reduce the risk of long covid if you catch it after being double vaccinated? They're only supposed to be about 95% effective after 2 shots, so if you catch it in that 5% probability how likely is long covid afterwards?