6 ms·

The haunting brain science of long Covid

61 points by amichail 4y ago

anjel 4y ago
One more reason to forestall improving indoor ventilation building codes until the damage to the population is even more widespread.
ck2 4y ago
Also recently "Nearly 60% of patients with long COVID had organ impairment a year after" https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/14/long-covid-patients-organ-damage/ https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/14/long-covid-patients-orga... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231154703 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231154...
rebeccaskinner 4y ago
And yet people look at me like I have two heads when I explain that I’m still actively making every effort to avoid getting Covid. The long term brain damage is going to be a massive impact on companies who are forcing RTO and causing their employees to deal with repeat exposures to Covid from co-workers.
- dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Why are you demanding empathy when you yourself deprive empathy for the people you’re demanding from (calling them “acting like a punch of anxious and feaf pansies”)? This looks like plain hypocrisy.
    - user8501 4y ago
      Where did they demand empathy?
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        Asking “what about <all these other people>” is inherently asking you to provide some level of consideration for those people, but calling other people pansies is clearly not embodying the consideration being asked of. I don’t really feel strong about the actual topic being discussed, I just think the hypocrisy is disgusting.
        user8501 4y ago
        I agree that name calling is always unhelpful, but I’m not seeing any hypocrisy in the comment. It seems to be a comment about how there are a plethora of reasons that the population may be experiencing cognitive issues.
        SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        Commenting that there are alternative experiences that others have inherently asks you to consider the experiences of others. Insulting people inherently does not consider the experiences of the people being insulted.
  - chaostheory 4y ago
    Just wear an n95 mask. All of that is still possible with masks. They even have clear ones now. If you don’t want to wear a mask, just do all of that outdoors, or keep an indoor space very well ventilated with fresh air from outdoors
  - causi 4y ago
    what is largely a cold for 99% of the population Firstly, as of January, 11% of people infected with covid still have symptoms. I'm one of them. Personally I wish I'd been more paranoid, maybe I'd still be able to drink a coke without wanting to vomit from the taste or fuel my car without the smell of gasoline making me dry heave. Secondly, that value is derived from reality, i.e., a world where people did "act like anxious and nervous pansies". They tried to avoid being infected. They tried to avoid infecting other people, especially vulnerable people. Covid killed a million people in the US. How many would it have killed if we hadn't acted like pansies? How many vulnerable people would have died before we could vaccinate them? How many dangerous variants would have evolved with an infection pool twice as large?
    - slaw 4y ago
      I wish I'd been more paranoid too. I got side effects from vaccination that I was forced to take and that I didn't need at all because I had covid before.
      - causi 4y ago
        How is this related to people "acting like pansies" to avoid catching covid?
  - snozolli 4y ago
    What about the long term brain damage of isolating everyone for years straight Sounds like you need to learn to be more adaptable. I've had no problem meeting with friends to walk outdoors, maintaining friendships throughout the pandemic, all without ever catching COVID. a large sector of the population acting like a bunch of anxious cowards Are you a coward for wearing a seatbelt in a car? How about a helmet when riding a motorcycle?
    - mjr00 4y ago
      > Sounds like you need to learn to be more adaptable. I've had no problem meeting with friends to walk outdoors, maintaining friendships throughout the pandemic, all without ever catching COVID. Let this be a lesson: this is what privilege sounds like. It's very easy to say "just be more adaptable" when your well-paying job is to sit at home, posting on reddit and occasionally resolving a bug ticket. Meanwhile, tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide who work in hospitality, music/theatre/other live performances, conferences and events, tourism, etc. had their livelihoods absolutely crushed by COVID restrictions. They got government handouts and still barely survived. But yeah, nobody cares about those people; they don't matter since they're not FAANG employees. They should just adapt and learn how to code red-black trees on a whiteboard to get a job at Meta.
      - snozolli 4y ago
        this is what privilege sounds like. Are you suggesting that other people don't have access to the outside, or communication technology? Aside from very few places, there was never any actual lockdown. Everyone in America had the right to walk in a park with friends while social distancing. when your well-paying job is to sit at home, posting on reddit and occasionally resolving a bug ticket That's quite some projection. nobody cares about those people I guess that's why I always wear a mask when in an enclosed area...? Why I always respected personal space of workers and always had patience with them, knowing what they're going through. Yep, I'm just a privileged meanie. Can't possibly be that I behaved like a responsible, caring adult, using methods available to all Americans.
    - poszlem 4y ago
- poszlem 4y ago
  It's probable that people are unable to comprehend why someone would willingly undergo the same experiences we have all undergone for the past three years. I used to be firmly in the "I will do everything possible to avoid getting COVID-19" camp. However, I eventually contracted it and endured a challenging two-week sickness. After recovering, I decided that I am no longer willing to halt my life out of fear of catching it again because it is not worthwhile. Unless you have a compromised immune system or significant underlying health conditions, you will probably come to the same conclusion at some point. And then you will be looking at yourself from the past and wondering "what the hell was I thinking". As I do now.
  - QuantumGood 4y ago
    People always seem to play the "live my life" card, and leave out the "I want people to like me" embarrassment of wearing a mask when others don't. You can mostly live your life while wearing a well-fit N95 mask, taking it off to eat and drink. Never wearing a mask for convenience reasons seems not logical, if wearing a well-fit N95 mask helps. But not doing something due to social and self-esteem pressure is more understandable, if still not optimal. But few want to say peer pressure is a main driver of their behavior.
kyriefh 4y ago
i don't know that it would be fair of me to bemoan the slow progress of long covid research given how new it is by medical standards, but at the very least i am glad that mainstream awareness and reporting seem to be increasing it's quite scary that everyone who catches covid is rolling the dice on potentially debilitating, poorly understood complications, and i have to imagine people in general would behave very differently if they were mindful of this. and there's the systemic difficulty forced on current long covid sufferers, who have an uphill battle in persuading those around them (including, often, medical professionals!) that they have a real and sometimes severe condition
tpmx 4y ago
Why aren't we updating the mRNA vaccines to better combat the new variants? Wasn't the initial thinking that we'd all get an updated shot once or twice a year?
- throwaway12245 4y ago
  We did. It's called the "bivalent" booster. We have paxlovid and the omicron variants are much milder than the previous strains.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    I had simply missed the news, apologies. EU: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ecdc-ema-statement-booster-vaccination-omicron-adapted-bivalent-covid-19-vaccines https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ecdc-ema-statement-booster... (sep 2022) Haven't been offered this, though.
    - nend 4y ago
      Not sure about elsewhere but it's widely available in the us at pretty much any pharmacy.
    - loeg 4y ago
      In the US it's widely available, I got it something like a year ago.
- wiml 4y ago
  We are? I got an updated booster for Omicron variants last June.
- astrange 4y ago
  There is one, but it's not necessarily worth it because the original is "good enough". Also, future strains might be more like the 2020 version again; no reason they wouldn't be. A better upgrade will be when it's a nasal spray. That's more effective at blocking transmission, and some people just don't like needles.
seydor 4y ago
Covid is the crisis we keep ignoring, and there is no chance it wont come back to bite
- yinser 4y ago
  If there were a prediction market for Covid shutting the world down again I would bet against you all day
  - graeme 4y ago
    ….there are more crises than shutting down the world acutely. OP was referring to slower acting effects of covid
  - seydor 4y ago
    Instead of betting we can take simple precautions, individually. This is not a sport
  - atemerev 4y ago
    let’s define “shutting down” properly, and I might take this bet.
navjack27 4y ago
I've been saying this since the exact start of the pandemic. I already have brain issues and I simply do not want to roll the dice that are very much not in my favor. If I get covid and I live I pretty much know that the rest of my life is more fucked than it already is. But everybody's walking around the grocery store without masks on. Nobody gives to fucks about anybody else anymore. So here I am, still purposefully having my life on pause, the one time a week if even that that I go to the grocery store I still wear my n95 mask... I just don't get it. I don't. I'm supposed to be this impulsive flighty forgetful person with ADHD and issues with executive control but the entire population is acting like they have these issues instead of me. No one is able to do risk assessment of this very glaring issue in front of us.
- thegrim22 4y ago
  I mean, there's the possibility that they ran their risk assessment and just overwhelmingly came to a different conclusion then you did. It's hard to take long covid seriously when there isn't even an agreed upon scientific definition of what it even is.
- jl6 4y ago
  Is your current level of isolation something that your doctor has recommended?
  - graeme 4y ago
    The better question would be whether their doctor recommends they get Covid or avoid it, given their condition. How you avoid Covid is a physics question, not a doctor question.
  - worksonmine 4y ago
    Psychiatrist* /s
- graypegg 4y ago
  I’m in the exact same spot. I’ve been trying to get back on medication for ADHD for the first time since childhood solely because I’m scared I’m not going to be able to experience mental clarity ever again if I get COVID. It’s impossible to talk to anyone about anxieties like that now because everyone has already determined that they got COVID and everything was fine, so therefore, I should stop trying. Some part of me would love that, but like you said, I just can’t let go. Impulsivity be damned.
SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
This only briefly links to me/cfs. Does anyone have any studies linking me/cfs and Covid behavior? I don’t understand why we’re treating long Covid differently than me/cfs, which has much of the same symptoms and also often occurs after a viral infection like the flu.
opwieurposiu 4y ago
A friend from college got long covid. In two years he lost the job, the GF, and the house. Went from being a buff, agile jujitsu black belt to shuffling along like an old drunk. In some sort of cruel irony he got crippling fatigue and insomnia at the same time. Can barely think clearly enough to write a simple email. Long covid is not a pretty thing to see.
- mjr00 4y ago
  Are you completely sure that's due to Long COVID? Because that sounds like an extremely common story of drug addiction: someone turns their normal life, complete with career and family and a white picket fence, into homelessness and relying on petty theft to survive. It's incredible (in a bad way) how quickly fentanyl can ruin people's lives.
  - fragmede 4y ago
    This, by the way, is why I don't discuss that a had long covid ever, with anyone. I don't need random strangers on the Internet that I've never met to believe me, or even believe in Long Covid (half the Internet thinks the vaccine has microchips anyway) but almost none of my friends believe me, which hurt, but fine. It's the medical professionals who didn't believe my symptoms until after there had been a preponderance of outside evidence that they bothered to take my symptoms seriously that were the worst. Yeah I'm not in the best of shape, but if I can't walk from my bedroom to my kitchen without getting winded, something is seriously wrong, and it's not simply my muscles atrophying from being indoors due to lockdowns. Eventually medical science was able to be convinced of long covid, thanks to, or unfortunately because enough doctors and nurses caught it, pre-vaccine, that it was impossible for the medical industry to ignore. When a healthy 20-year old athlete has the same problems with extreme fatigue, doctors aren't as readily able to dismiss it. These days there are clinics that specialize in Long Covid. Even though they're not able to help everybody, it's still better than going through it, along, mid 2020. But yeah, sure, dismiss it as a drug problem if it'll help you go about your day.
    - ianai 4y ago
rflec028 4y ago
[flagged]
- alar44 4y ago
  [dead]
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  [citation needed]
- ilikecakeandpie 4y ago
  Even for the people who didn't get vaccinated?
  - codezero 4y ago
    It’s common for anti-vax people to believe that mRNA vaccines “shed” into the rest of the population despite that not being a thing. There’s no mental gymnastics they aren’t capable of.
monetus 4y ago
There is a notable overlap between long covid symptoms and the symptoms I've accumulated from ruptured capillaries. Tiny clots in capillaries that cause bleeding into surrounding tissues - With the viral load landing in different places, and different capillaries taking the brunt, various different organs could be damaged. I worry that those ruptures are the cause for most with long covid, as they aren't easily treatable.
somewhereoutth 4y ago
We should also consider the effects of repeat infections and how they might contribute to long Covid. The hope is that ongoing repeat infections are 'mostly harmless' as our bodies are primed to deal with the virus. However it will be a while before we can be sure. One analogy I heard was that effectively we've brought back indoor smoking. Of course you can avoid indoor smoking by not using public transport, not going to the office, not socialising indoors, wearing a mask when shopping. However many can't/won't, and so will suffer the as yet not fully understood effects.
- georgeg23 4y ago
  Smoking is a great analogy, it's distributed exactly like secondhand smoke, causes chronic inflammation in the lungs, systemic health issues, and for now most people don't believe in it! Problem is covid may be dangerous in even smaller doses than smoke.
  - ianai 4y ago
    I heard a quip that the east way to tell whether omicron is in a room was “is there air in the room?” (When omicron was new.) Basically the new variants are so transmissible that if they’re in an area it’s like avoiding a tsunami. Which isn’t to say individual avoidance should be given up. Do as much as you want (and I still wear N95 and gloves in certain situations). But society writ large can’t abate this level of spread. We could see growing numbers of long covid sufferers for quite some time. Or, the virus might give us a break as sometimes happens in outbreaks. We should all hope it doesn’t mutate into something far worse, but it can’t be ruled out.
- seydor 4y ago
  They are not harmless. Studies so far show that damage is cumulative https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/repeat-covid-is-riskier-than-first-infection-study-finds-2022-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
  - anonuser123456 4y ago
stevespang 4y ago
[dead]
G_z9 4y ago
It’s interesting that COVID’s symptoms, including long Covid, are entirely the human bodies own doing. It’s all inflammatory. Long Covid is at least in part a demonstration of the connection between inflammatory pathways and metabolism. Common infection have been giving people CFS forever but finally the skeptics have been forced to shut up with Covid. The solution to Covid will come through research on long Covid and other research on inflammation and metabolism — the reason that diabetes, obesity etc corrrlate so well with poor Covid outcomes is because those things as well as inflammation and other fundamental pathways and mechanisms are being messed up by something. When you diet and exercise, all of the above including Covid outcomes improve. That’s why kids are the least impacted — because they are the healthiest. These problems get worse with age. Once we learn how to fix whatever is at the top of the diabetes, obesity, inflammation pyramid we will make ourselves able to coexist with the virus. Besides somehow eradicating the virus, this is the only solution. It will also mean people will have very few heart attacks and cancer should be massively reduced as well. We have a lot to look forward to. But it’s important to remember, this isn’t a Covid problem. It’s really an extension of the diabetes/obesity epidemic. The virus itself doesn’t hurt you.
- Volundr 4y ago
  I was wondering why you were down voted right up until the last sentence. Pretty much everything we associate with being sick is our own bodies, not the virus. Inflammation, fever, cough, runny nose, swollen lymph nodes, etc, it's all our own bodies natural defenses, not the virus. By the time we start seeing effects from the virus our bodies defenses have been overwhelmed. The conclusion from that is not the "the virus itself does not hurt you".
  - G_z9 4y ago
    HIV definitely kills you. It doesn’t matter how healthy you are. Bacterial meningitis. The flu kills lots of kids. It’s just a simple fact that without metabolic dysfunction, covid is totally benign. This is an established fact recognized on both sides. People just don’t like to hear someone say that the virus doesn’t hurt you because it rubs them the wrong way politically.

61 points by amichail 4y ago

One more reason to forestall improving indoor ventilation building codes until the damage to the population is even more widespread.

ck2 4y ago

Also recently "Nearly 60% of patients with long COVID had organ impairment a year after" https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/14/long-covid-patients-organ-damage/ https://fortune.com/well/2023/02/14/long-covid-patients-orga... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231154703 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01410768231154...

rebeccaskinner 4y ago

And yet people look at me like I have two heads when I explain that I’m still actively making every effort to avoid getting Covid. The long term brain damage is going to be a massive impact on companies who are forcing RTO and causing their employees to deal with repeat exposures to Covid from co-workers.

dQw4w9WgXcQ 4y ago
[flagged]
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Why are you demanding empathy when you yourself deprive empathy for the people you’re demanding from (calling them “acting like a punch of anxious and feaf pansies”)? This looks like plain hypocrisy.
  - user8501 4y ago
    Where did they demand empathy?
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Asking “what about <all these other people>” is inherently asking you to provide some level of consideration for those people, but calling other people pansies is clearly not embodying the consideration being asked of. I don’t really feel strong about the actual topic being discussed, I just think the hypocrisy is disgusting.
      - user8501 4y ago
        I agree that name calling is always unhelpful, but I’m not seeing any hypocrisy in the comment. It seems to be a comment about how there are a plethora of reasons that the population may be experiencing cognitive issues.
        SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        Commenting that there are alternative experiences that others have inherently asks you to consider the experiences of others. Insulting people inherently does not consider the experiences of the people being insulted.
- chaostheory 4y ago
  Just wear an n95 mask. All of that is still possible with masks. They even have clear ones now. If you don’t want to wear a mask, just do all of that outdoors, or keep an indoor space very well ventilated with fresh air from outdoors
- causi 4y ago
  what is largely a cold for 99% of the population Firstly, as of January, 11% of people infected with covid still have symptoms. I'm one of them. Personally I wish I'd been more paranoid, maybe I'd still be able to drink a coke without wanting to vomit from the taste or fuel my car without the smell of gasoline making me dry heave. Secondly, that value is derived from reality, i.e., a world where people did "act like anxious and nervous pansies". They tried to avoid being infected. They tried to avoid infecting other people, especially vulnerable people. Covid killed a million people in the US. How many would it have killed if we hadn't acted like pansies? How many vulnerable people would have died before we could vaccinate them? How many dangerous variants would have evolved with an infection pool twice as large?
  - slaw 4y ago
    I wish I'd been more paranoid too. I got side effects from vaccination that I was forced to take and that I didn't need at all because I had covid before.
    - causi 4y ago
      How is this related to people "acting like pansies" to avoid catching covid?
- snozolli 4y ago
  What about the long term brain damage of isolating everyone for years straight Sounds like you need to learn to be more adaptable. I've had no problem meeting with friends to walk outdoors, maintaining friendships throughout the pandemic, all without ever catching COVID. a large sector of the population acting like a bunch of anxious cowards Are you a coward for wearing a seatbelt in a car? How about a helmet when riding a motorcycle?
  - mjr00 4y ago
    > Sounds like you need to learn to be more adaptable. I've had no problem meeting with friends to walk outdoors, maintaining friendships throughout the pandemic, all without ever catching COVID. Let this be a lesson: this is what privilege sounds like. It's very easy to say "just be more adaptable" when your well-paying job is to sit at home, posting on reddit and occasionally resolving a bug ticket. Meanwhile, tens or hundreds of millions of people worldwide who work in hospitality, music/theatre/other live performances, conferences and events, tourism, etc. had their livelihoods absolutely crushed by COVID restrictions. They got government handouts and still barely survived. But yeah, nobody cares about those people; they don't matter since they're not FAANG employees. They should just adapt and learn how to code red-black trees on a whiteboard to get a job at Meta.
    - snozolli 4y ago
      this is what privilege sounds like. Are you suggesting that other people don't have access to the outside, or communication technology? Aside from very few places, there was never any actual lockdown. Everyone in America had the right to walk in a park with friends while social distancing. when your well-paying job is to sit at home, posting on reddit and occasionally resolving a bug ticket That's quite some projection. nobody cares about those people I guess that's why I always wear a mask when in an enclosed area...? Why I always respected personal space of workers and always had patience with them, knowing what they're going through. Yep, I'm just a privileged meanie. Can't possibly be that I behaved like a responsible, caring adult, using methods available to all Americans.
  - poszlem 4y ago
poszlem 4y ago
It's probable that people are unable to comprehend why someone would willingly undergo the same experiences we have all undergone for the past three years. I used to be firmly in the "I will do everything possible to avoid getting COVID-19" camp. However, I eventually contracted it and endured a challenging two-week sickness. After recovering, I decided that I am no longer willing to halt my life out of fear of catching it again because it is not worthwhile. Unless you have a compromised immune system or significant underlying health conditions, you will probably come to the same conclusion at some point. And then you will be looking at yourself from the past and wondering "what the hell was I thinking". As I do now.
- QuantumGood 4y ago
  People always seem to play the "live my life" card, and leave out the "I want people to like me" embarrassment of wearing a mask when others don't. You can mostly live your life while wearing a well-fit N95 mask, taking it off to eat and drink. Never wearing a mask for convenience reasons seems not logical, if wearing a well-fit N95 mask helps. But not doing something due to social and self-esteem pressure is more understandable, if still not optimal. But few want to say peer pressure is a main driver of their behavior.

kyriefh 4y ago

i don't know that it would be fair of me to bemoan the slow progress of long covid research given how new it is by medical standards, but at the very least i am glad that mainstream awareness and reporting seem to be increasing it's quite scary that everyone who catches covid is rolling the dice on potentially debilitating, poorly understood complications, and i have to imagine people in general would behave very differently if they were mindful of this. and there's the systemic difficulty forced on current long covid sufferers, who have an uphill battle in persuading those around them (including, often, medical professionals!) that they have a real and sometimes severe condition

tpmx 4y ago

Why aren't we updating the mRNA vaccines to better combat the new variants? Wasn't the initial thinking that we'd all get an updated shot once or twice a year?

throwaway12245 4y ago
We did. It's called the "bivalent" booster. We have paxlovid and the omicron variants are much milder than the previous strains.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I had simply missed the news, apologies. EU: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ecdc-ema-statement-booster-vaccination-omicron-adapted-bivalent-covid-19-vaccines https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/ecdc-ema-statement-booster... (sep 2022) Haven't been offered this, though.
  - nend 4y ago
    Not sure about elsewhere but it's widely available in the us at pretty much any pharmacy.
  - loeg 4y ago
    In the US it's widely available, I got it something like a year ago.
wiml 4y ago
We are? I got an updated booster for Omicron variants last June.
astrange 4y ago
There is one, but it's not necessarily worth it because the original is "good enough". Also, future strains might be more like the 2020 version again; no reason they wouldn't be. A better upgrade will be when it's a nasal spray. That's more effective at blocking transmission, and some people just don't like needles.

seydor 4y ago

Covid is the crisis we keep ignoring, and there is no chance it wont come back to bite

yinser 4y ago
If there were a prediction market for Covid shutting the world down again I would bet against you all day
- graeme 4y ago
  ….there are more crises than shutting down the world acutely. OP was referring to slower acting effects of covid
- seydor 4y ago
  Instead of betting we can take simple precautions, individually. This is not a sport
- atemerev 4y ago
  let’s define “shutting down” properly, and I might take this bet.

navjack27 4y ago

I've been saying this since the exact start of the pandemic. I already have brain issues and I simply do not want to roll the dice that are very much not in my favor. If I get covid and I live I pretty much know that the rest of my life is more fucked than it already is. But everybody's walking around the grocery store without masks on. Nobody gives to fucks about anybody else anymore. So here I am, still purposefully having my life on pause, the one time a week if even that that I go to the grocery store I still wear my n95 mask... I just don't get it. I don't. I'm supposed to be this impulsive flighty forgetful person with ADHD and issues with executive control but the entire population is acting like they have these issues instead of me. No one is able to do risk assessment of this very glaring issue in front of us.

thegrim22 4y ago
I mean, there's the possibility that they ran their risk assessment and just overwhelmingly came to a different conclusion then you did. It's hard to take long covid seriously when there isn't even an agreed upon scientific definition of what it even is.
jl6 4y ago
Is your current level of isolation something that your doctor has recommended?
- graeme 4y ago
  The better question would be whether their doctor recommends they get Covid or avoid it, given their condition. How you avoid Covid is a physics question, not a doctor question.
- worksonmine 4y ago
  Psychiatrist* /s
graypegg 4y ago
I’m in the exact same spot. I’ve been trying to get back on medication for ADHD for the first time since childhood solely because I’m scared I’m not going to be able to experience mental clarity ever again if I get COVID. It’s impossible to talk to anyone about anxieties like that now because everyone has already determined that they got COVID and everything was fine, so therefore, I should stop trying. Some part of me would love that, but like you said, I just can’t let go. Impulsivity be damned.

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago

This only briefly links to me/cfs. Does anyone have any studies linking me/cfs and Covid behavior? I don’t understand why we’re treating long Covid differently than me/cfs, which has much of the same symptoms and also often occurs after a viral infection like the flu.

opwieurposiu 4y ago

A friend from college got long covid. In two years he lost the job, the GF, and the house. Went from being a buff, agile jujitsu black belt to shuffling along like an old drunk. In some sort of cruel irony he got crippling fatigue and insomnia at the same time. Can barely think clearly enough to write a simple email. Long covid is not a pretty thing to see.

mjr00 4y ago
Are you completely sure that's due to Long COVID? Because that sounds like an extremely common story of drug addiction: someone turns their normal life, complete with career and family and a white picket fence, into homelessness and relying on petty theft to survive. It's incredible (in a bad way) how quickly fentanyl can ruin people's lives.
- fragmede 4y ago
  This, by the way, is why I don't discuss that a had long covid ever, with anyone. I don't need random strangers on the Internet that I've never met to believe me, or even believe in Long Covid (half the Internet thinks the vaccine has microchips anyway) but almost none of my friends believe me, which hurt, but fine. It's the medical professionals who didn't believe my symptoms until after there had been a preponderance of outside evidence that they bothered to take my symptoms seriously that were the worst. Yeah I'm not in the best of shape, but if I can't walk from my bedroom to my kitchen without getting winded, something is seriously wrong, and it's not simply my muscles atrophying from being indoors due to lockdowns. Eventually medical science was able to be convinced of long covid, thanks to, or unfortunately because enough doctors and nurses caught it, pre-vaccine, that it was impossible for the medical industry to ignore. When a healthy 20-year old athlete has the same problems with extreme fatigue, doctors aren't as readily able to dismiss it. These days there are clinics that specialize in Long Covid. Even though they're not able to help everybody, it's still better than going through it, along, mid 2020. But yeah, sure, dismiss it as a drug problem if it'll help you go about your day.
  - ianai 4y ago

rflec028 4y ago

[flagged]

alar44 4y ago
[dead]
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
[citation needed]
ilikecakeandpie 4y ago
Even for the people who didn't get vaccinated?
- codezero 4y ago
  It’s common for anti-vax people to believe that mRNA vaccines “shed” into the rest of the population despite that not being a thing. There’s no mental gymnastics they aren’t capable of.

monetus 4y ago

There is a notable overlap between long covid symptoms and the symptoms I've accumulated from ruptured capillaries. Tiny clots in capillaries that cause bleeding into surrounding tissues - With the viral load landing in different places, and different capillaries taking the brunt, various different organs could be damaged. I worry that those ruptures are the cause for most with long covid, as they aren't easily treatable.

somewhereoutth 4y ago

We should also consider the effects of repeat infections and how they might contribute to long Covid. The hope is that ongoing repeat infections are 'mostly harmless' as our bodies are primed to deal with the virus. However it will be a while before we can be sure. One analogy I heard was that effectively we've brought back indoor smoking. Of course you can avoid indoor smoking by not using public transport, not going to the office, not socialising indoors, wearing a mask when shopping. However many can't/won't, and so will suffer the as yet not fully understood effects.

georgeg23 4y ago
Smoking is a great analogy, it's distributed exactly like secondhand smoke, causes chronic inflammation in the lungs, systemic health issues, and for now most people don't believe in it! Problem is covid may be dangerous in even smaller doses than smoke.
- ianai 4y ago
  I heard a quip that the east way to tell whether omicron is in a room was “is there air in the room?” (When omicron was new.) Basically the new variants are so transmissible that if they’re in an area it’s like avoiding a tsunami. Which isn’t to say individual avoidance should be given up. Do as much as you want (and I still wear N95 and gloves in certain situations). But society writ large can’t abate this level of spread. We could see growing numbers of long covid sufferers for quite some time. Or, the virus might give us a break as sometimes happens in outbreaks. We should all hope it doesn’t mutate into something far worse, but it can’t be ruled out.
seydor 4y ago
They are not harmless. Studies so far show that damage is cumulative https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/repeat-covid-is-riskier-than-first-infection-study-finds-2022-11-10/ https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
- anonuser123456 4y ago

stevespang 4y ago

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G_z9 4y ago

It’s interesting that COVID’s symptoms, including long Covid, are entirely the human bodies own doing. It’s all inflammatory. Long Covid is at least in part a demonstration of the connection between inflammatory pathways and metabolism. Common infection have been giving people CFS forever but finally the skeptics have been forced to shut up with Covid. The solution to Covid will come through research on long Covid and other research on inflammation and metabolism — the reason that diabetes, obesity etc corrrlate so well with poor Covid outcomes is because those things as well as inflammation and other fundamental pathways and mechanisms are being messed up by something. When you diet and exercise, all of the above including Covid outcomes improve. That’s why kids are the least impacted — because they are the healthiest. These problems get worse with age. Once we learn how to fix whatever is at the top of the diabetes, obesity, inflammation pyramid we will make ourselves able to coexist with the virus. Besides somehow eradicating the virus, this is the only solution. It will also mean people will have very few heart attacks and cancer should be massively reduced as well. We have a lot to look forward to. But it’s important to remember, this isn’t a Covid problem. It’s really an extension of the diabetes/obesity epidemic. The virus itself doesn’t hurt you.

Volundr 4y ago
I was wondering why you were down voted right up until the last sentence. Pretty much everything we associate with being sick is our own bodies, not the virus. Inflammation, fever, cough, runny nose, swollen lymph nodes, etc, it's all our own bodies natural defenses, not the virus. By the time we start seeing effects from the virus our bodies defenses have been overwhelmed. The conclusion from that is not the "the virus itself does not hurt you".
- G_z9 4y ago
  HIV definitely kills you. It doesn’t matter how healthy you are. Bacterial meningitis. The flu kills lots of kids. It’s just a simple fact that without metabolic dysfunction, covid is totally benign. This is an established fact recognized on both sides. People just don’t like to hear someone say that the virus doesn’t hurt you because it rubs them the wrong way politically.