As an Elite Athlete I'm training 20-30 hours a week. I got covid last year (triple vaxed) and it wiped me out for a good 6 months. It took me 3 weeks to be able to walk longer than a minute without needing to lay down for the rest of the day and sleep.
I have dealt with fatigue problems for 6 months and only just now, do I feel like I'm getting "back to normal".
The most frustrating thing is alot of people are dismissive of the symptoms and generally say, "Oh yeah, I get tired too" but fail to understand the severity of it as they haven't experienced it.
I have a fairly good understanding of my body and the associated symptoms of overtraining/fatigue in a heavy training cycle but covid fatigue was soemthing completely different.
Similar experience — and interestingly it can be seen in my resting heart rate over time and VO2 inference on my watch. The acute fatigue was quite bad (and is what people seem to talk about) but the milder lingering fatigue reduced my running and lifting performance across the board and left me tired in the late afternoon rather than the evening. It’s not life altering per se, but it impacted my routines and productivity noticeably.
Thankfully after 5 months I seem to have kicked it fully, and am ripe for another infection. Needless to say I got the bivalent booster before the holidays
I had very mild COVID in September and I totally have this problem . I have a constant urge to just go to sleep and have been afternoon napping fairly often, compared to my previous habits of never napping ever. I'm hopeful that most people talk about it lifting after six months
That sucks. My experience was to get back to training fairly soon (2 weeks after fever went away). After that training session I knew I should rest more and took an additional 2 weeks off. Then built back up my regular training starting at 10% volume and increasing at 10% increases each week. After 3 months I was back to regular volume. My suggestion is that everyone take at least two weeks off, and build up volume very conservatively. I’ve had lots of conversations with other people that love to train. It’s hard to take it easy and do less because we love training, but this protocol seems to work for many. Maybe it’s too conservative and everyone is different.
If you were "training" 2 weeks after the fever went away, congratulations - you didn't have long covid.
You cannot exercise your way out of Long Covid, or other postviral fatigue syndromes - it presents identically to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Any attempt to exercise - even something as small as a short walk, or in severe cases merely taking a shower - results in a hard crash that feels completely unlike exercise fatigue, and can effectively confine you to bed for days. And every time you provoke a crash, you set back your recovery, potentially permanently. And you can't really tell by feel what your limits are, you just have to work it out analytically and be conservative. And the whole time, your brain feels like mush.
I have been sick for 1.5 weeks (which is an extreme time for me by itself), afterwards I did not feel quite normal and got right back to being sick just after a few days, progressively getting worse. After another 1.5 weeks, I almost felt normal, only super-tired, I got to rest all day, only to wake up in the night feeling sick again. Another 5 days went by, to get back to the point where I feel tired but not sick and again, I went back to feeling generally unwell, although it may be better than the last time. It goes for 4 weeks now.
Most recently, I woke up, felt sick right there in the morning, feeling like I should rest rather than work but with great mental exertion I overrode it and carried a full day, with little to no rest, every minute pushing against that feeling and doing some light exercise too. At the end of the day, I felt like I did not sleep the entire night and as I went to sleep, I slept like a stone. The day after I got that tiredness feeling without feeling sick I wrote about earlier - which felt like progress.
I don't have extreme tiredness like you describe, but something is clearly wrong and it cut my weekly work capacity by half. I never had something like. I also have been hearing about friends of friends also feeling unwell for 1 month or 2 months.
Actually, I have long covid. The sick feeling / malaise were some sort of early PEMs I think. Soon afterward, after I pushed it a bit too much with no awareness on the issue, I had a huge crash that did not feel like being sick, more like beign drained from all energy. I used to work a bit and play a video game when I was sick previously, now I am not able to watch more than 1h of a movie without resting.
My whole life is suspended. I hope I will get to recover. I will try to rest as much as I can. I believe I got this because I was working while being sick. Who the fuck know something like this was possible. They should fucking teach about this in school... don't work while you are sick or risk ending up disabled. Instead most doctors don't even know such illness exist.
It's kind if important whether you develop long covid or not. If you don't then you don't need a long break, if you do, you could be out for months or forever.
Not really, they're basically the same thing. Except hopefully you (eventually) recover from long covid. If you don't recover, it's medically indistinguishable.
Like CFS, "pushing through" can worsen symptoms - permanently.
It's been 4 weeks since I got sick and I still feel tired and unwell, but it's not anything as extreme as not being able to take a short walk, I even did some lightweight cardio-type exercise and there are days where I can be working almost all day (pushing through). I'm not sure what I should do and I will try to research it, but I feel like I have to push as much as I can while allowing more rest (i.e. 10h/day sleep, 1h nap in the mid day) until I'm well and trying do some lightweight cardio every day and a short walk. Reading the comments I have some fears that I could make worse / permanent though.
That's a very smart approach, and one my cyclist friend used when recovering from COVID in June of 2020. Took it easy for the rest of the year and put up some good numbers in 2021 and had his best year in 2022.
My whole family got covid so I expected to be next. But I only needed to take 2 days off at work and I paused my training for just 3 days and was almost back to my normal HR/pace in less than a week since I got first symptoms. It took me 3 more weeks before I started getting negative test results.
I find it so bizarre that in almost every discussion of long COVID, an athlete who can no longer make it up a flight of stairs is invariably referenced or partakes in the discussion. I'm amazed how many people know athletes.
And it's never just extra fatigue. It's can't walk for 60 seconds, or up a flight of stairs, or open a jar.
N.B. I'm not denying post-viral fatigue. I've experienced it myself multiple times
From my experience, this stuff isn’t limited to COVID-19, and I don’t mean that to minimize your experience with it. I just want to note that I had the flu in 2013; my temperature got up to 104F, and I was sub-par for about that same amount of time; it was about 6 months before I felt back to 100%.
Similar situation. Did a 70.3 in June and then was laid out flat like I had never been before. My watch was telling me numbers that looked like I did a full Ironman every day. For months.
I found that liver support supplements made a measurable impact.
I tried it because of doing research on my high numbers for Epstein-Barr (aka mono). I found via NIH papers that liver issues are common with mono patients so I figured I could be having that since there were no other obvious blood results.
I had Covid beforehand and when I had extreme fatigue I had the mono tests done. The EBV numbers were off the charts and then I found some NIH paper talking about how it’s thought Covid can reactivate EBV.
My biometrics jumped almost immediately up on my Garmin and stayed there. It was a life changer.
It's funny you mention that—I had Mono over a decade ago and it was a long ordeal for me. Multiple weeks of fatigue and feeling like crap. Mono was way worse than Covid in my instance—but they felt very similar.
Ouch that's a really serious and painful setback to your training! Sorry to hear about your struggles. Are you back to normal now? Any lingering issues eg cardio/breathing
My friend is in his 50s, pudgy and kinda athletic but not elite, and he just had mild symptoms for a week. I wonder if "athlete's heart" could be compounding effects in some way?
I was asking beacause a friend of a friend has the similar condition after catastrophic motorbike crash. He spent a month on a medical bed and then had to learn walking again. During that, he had to rest a lot after a minute of walking. I can't believe that COVID can make the same near-death effect on a body.
Note: I had mild-to-serious COVID myself with severe fever and 12% of lungs damaged, and was literally one day from rushing to the hospital. 0/10 will not recommend, had to fight with after effects, but nothing even near what you or OP described.
You can't draw conclusions like this from one data point, because there's no baseline to compare it to. Not sure what kind of productive discussion you are expecting here.
* About 10% of people getting COVID get some form of long COVID.
* There's long term damage. At least years. Maybe permanent in some cases.
* You can get COVID more than once.[1] Somewhere above 6-10% of infections are re-infections, and that number increases over time. Immunity seems to last 3-18 months.
What is this going to look like in 5 years? 30% - 40% of the population disabled?
I’ve had COVID multiple times — I collect variants like Pokémon cards. The first one (pre-vaccine!) was nasty with a few lingering effects that went away after a month, the last was asymptomatic. In everyone I know that has had multiple infections — which is a lot of people these days — subsequent infections are much less consequential than the last, including lingering effects. This is what you would generally expect.
It doesn’t follow that reinfection means everyone is going to get disabling long COVID eventually, especially if they weren’t susceptible the first couple times around. At least part of the reason most people don’t care about COVID much anymore is that (1) almost everyone has had it at this point and (2) if you survived the first one, there is ample empirical evidence that subsequent infections don’t have the same potential consequences so there is much less to worry about. This appears to be priced into most peoples’ view of COVID policy these days.
> Reinfected patients had a more than doubled risk of death and a more than tripled risk of hospitalization compared with those who were infected with COVID just once. They also had elevated risks for problems with lungs, heart, blood, kidneys, diabetes, mental health, bones and muscles, and neurological disorders
> priced into most peoples’ view of COVID
I 'm curious who this view is formed. Is it hearsay? Because there's probably no empirical data supporting that view
> Experts not involved with the study said the VA population does not reflect the general population.
> Patients at VA health facilities are generally older, sicker people and often men, a group that would typically have more than normal health complications, said John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York.
The VA is almost nothing but old sick people, the demographic most susceptible to serious COVID. Fortunately, most of the population isn't old sick people. The study you reference isn't relevant to conversations about the general population.
The view that risk from subsequent infections is negligible is informed by the fact that vast numbers of people have had subsequent infections, including most of the people they know. Personal experience around this is widely discussed socially, so there is a broad consensus that their personal experience was normal and not an outlier. I live in progressive urban enclaves, so if these people are all misinformed then your cause is lost.
Constantly misrepresenting the science around COVID and fear-mongering over things that are manifestly not the case discredits the people that promote that, which runs the very real risk of causing people to dismiss the real risks of COVID. We already went down this road with climate change, where chronic gross misrepresentation of the science in popular media caused people to dismiss the actual and serious risks associated with climate change.
Disasturbation may be fun but it is a terrible way to convince the broader population that a category of risk needs to be taken seriously.
> Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma when jumping from aircraft: randomized controlled trial
> Conclusions Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps. When beliefs regarding the effectiveness of an intervention exist in the community, randomized trials might selectively enroll individuals with a lower perceived likelihood of benefit, thus diminishing the applicability of the results to clinical practice.
I have a really crappy immune system - colds usually last three weeks for me. That said, my delta infection was probably 95% as bad as my infection with the original strain. Both times I had a fever of over 102f for about two weeks.
You're missing the variable of how severe the long covid symptoms are. If it's 10% long covid and 10% of those are serious it's only 1% of total covid cases.
Unless you're using a loose definition of "disabled".
According to the ONS data 75% are impacted on day to day basis by their Long Covid and 25% are severely impacted. This likely maps to Mild, Moderate and Severe from ME/CFS definitions roughly. Its a lot of people disabled and an awful lot very severely disabled.
> That assumes likelihood of getting long COVID doesn't drop after successive infections.
It's not looking good. December 2022 study [1][2]:
"The risk of hospitalization, organ damage, and death rises markedly with repeat COVID-19 infection. Assistant professor of medicine Amy Barczak shared a Nature study that used data from the Veteran’s Administration to assess the cumulative risk of post-infection effects in people with one, two, and three or more SARS-CoV-2 infections, as compared to noninfected controls. The data show a consistent pattern of increased likelihood of hospitalization, cardiovascular effects, clotting and other blood disorders, diabetes, fatigue, gastrointestinal distress, kidney damage, mental health effects such as depression, musculoskeletal damage, neurological deficits, and pulmonary damage with each episode. Prior infection does not change the course of disease in subsequent infections, just the risk of severe complications."
People always cite the Veterans affair study to support the claim that reinfections are more severe, without citing this paragraph that makes it clear that this study can not support that claim:
Our analyses should not be interpreted as an assessment of severity of a second infection versus that of a first infection, nor should they be interpreted as an examination of the risks of adverse health outcomes after a second infection compared to risks incurred after a first infection.
I am not aware of any study that supports the claim that reinfections are worse.
It does matter whether the science is misprepresented, causing irrational anxiety in people, which also increases your risk of "so many diseases and death".
Respiratory infections generally increase your risk for various pathologies, but so does staying indoors in fear, not getting exercise and avoiding social contact.
Considering the impact on peoples emotions and behavior when communicating data (instead of just warning them of these possible pitfalls) is an extremely slippery slope that quickly leads to an impairment of the sensemaking process. Be it due to self censorship as well or a loss of trust when people recognize they are getting managed. In the end its not anyone call to determine what information and expected reactions would be better for other adults.
I find it a lot more fruitful to elaborate why the data doesnt support those conclusions. This way we dont risk slipping down this slope and instead actually help each other fix our errors.
I will note that around 15 to 20 percent of the population already identifies as disabled and up to 60 percent will admit to having limitations that would benefit from accommodation if you survey them without using stigmatizing language like "disabled."
These stats were true prior to covid and the pandemic.
People widely underestimate how common disability already is.
Thanks for the links. The science study seems to be looking at the tipple vaccinated. There seems to be some indication, that this might influence the risk of reinfection as well.
I was diangosed with syncope on standing shortly after getting Covid (the first time).
I'd never experienced anything like this before in my life, but suddenly the world would fade to black if I stood up too soon from a reclined position. I also experienced intense brain fog. I actually scheduled a doctors appointment specifically for "brain fog" at the time and they were confused as to what I was explaining. All I could say is that it felt like I was thinking through "mud" and lost my ability to focus. I wasn't even thinking of Covid when I booked that appointment, but looking back it makes sense.
This has gotten better with time, but I have no doubt that Covid had something to do with this. The timing was just far too coincidental. The fact that it has strong binding affinity to ACE-2, which can cause cardiovascular issues, only lends credence to this theory.
I’ve been dealing with long COVID since March last year. There’s some interesting learnings I’ve had along the way:
- I was almost perfectly healthy and in my early 30’s. Long COVID isn’t that rare and can happen to anyone, even with a mild case of COVID.
- After first getting COVID, I didn’t rest much. There’s research showing this increases chances of getting long COVID. If you test positive… rest and fully recover. Don’t make the same mistake I did.
- Quite a few people I’ve met seem to have the opinion it’s all neurological. The linked study has plenty of proof it’s not, but people seem to like putting things they don’t understand in a nice bucket.
- If you’re reasonably healthy, don’t take it for granted. Health won’t always last.
Thankfully, I’m doing much better the last few months. I think I’ll be 90% back to normal within a year. Not everyone is so lucky though, so it’s encouraging to see so much research being put forward.
Long Covid is extremely similar to ME/CFS, but affecting far more people. On the plus side for those of us living with ME/CFS, we can now explain to people "it's basically Long Covid." On the downside, this can be an extremely debilitating illness that lasts indefinitely. I am on year 14 and while I have seen improvement, I am still partially disabled.
My condolences to everyone dealing with Long Covid, which includes both the actual disease and the social consequences. It is already exhausting, but even more so when you need to convince people it's real, struggle to deal with skeptical or poorly informed doctors, and politely deal with the continuous unprompted medical advice from well-meaning friends, family, and internet strangers.
As always, it is difficult to assess this sort of thing without a reference to the flu. As far as I can tell, in daily life we are continuously encountering people with various chronic problems and systemically under-calling the impact of them. It is a total coincidence if a body is functioning at full capacity.
If COVID increases the hazard ratios there isn't much I can do. As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. There is no avoiding that. It would be interesting to know how much worse it is than a typical flu though, just for academic interest.
> As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID
This is a common feeling, but remember: You can greatly affect the probability of an infection through precautions. And if unlucky, you can greatly affect the number of times you get infected through precautions. Fewer infections, fewer rolls of the dice.
As far as I'm aware, I'm still infection free and hope to remain so. I am in a much better situation than most readers though, so good luck and try not to be defeatist and lose the war before the 2nd or 3rd battle has begun.
> And if unlucky, you can greatly affect the number of times you get infected through precautions.
not to mention that even if you do get sick it's a continuum of sickness. you can get a little sick by getting a little bit of the virus and having an immune system that can handle that with ease. you can have the same immune system but spent too much time with your SO that got covid and was giving you a huge viral load of it that your immune system couldn't handle. masking up when out using an n95 is a layer that lets a little bit in if you are around someone sick.
people seem to think "oh it's a crapshoot if i get bad covid or not" no it's a confluence of reasons that you could get sicker than you would have otherwise. masking, off hours shopping, delivery, working from home, not going to really crowded places. that's all stuff you can do even if you don't plan on getting updated vaccines which you should.
This is something that I never thought about before, and is unfortunately glossed over too often. We’re exposed to things all the time, but only get sick when the exposure is large enough to sufficiently overwhelm our innate immune system. The degree to which it is overwhelmed correlates strongly the the severity of the subsequent illness. Reducing exposure time, or exposure volume via air dilution or filtration can make a massive difference.
you certainly must be kidding right? there might be a dearth of data on that because of the nature of ethics/how hard that is to test but if you are aware of the basic human immune system response to pathogens you would know that it's a few equations of things at a basic level.
virus particles are not smart... they infect cells and make more virus particles they don't have a mechanism that says ok slow down we infected enough to make the host sick... they just infect non-infected cells that are available to infect. for a thought experiment even if you took the replication aspect out of it the more virus cells in your body infecting more cells in your body it would make you sicker. counting in the fact that every infected cell will create more virus particles and a stronger first dose of virus particles that creates those factories would make you sicker all other things equal.
at a basic level you have some differential equations going: the B cells make the antibodies that kill the free virus particles. the T cells kill infected cells and inform the B cells to make specific antibodies.
just because this data is hard to obtain from empirical means doesn't mean that the basics of biology are that divergent from reality.
I’m not sure the study’s conclusion follows from its data. We lack data on humans because we can’t study infectious dose directly. But they cite multiple animals studies with worse symptoms following higher doses
I didn’t spot this notable macaque study in their review, which found fever occurred only at higher infectious doses
Pre-pandemic, I used to get sick about half the time I traveled. I've flown five or six times in the past couple years, and with proper FFP2 mask usage, I've been completely fine.
Most people here are privileged enough to not work a service job or anything like that, so you do in fact have the opportunity to drastically reduce your likelihood of contracting contagious diseases.
I've also not been infected that I'm aware of, although there were a couple episodes that might have been Covid. I'm tempted to pay for a blood test to check for antibodies, it only costs about $60.
That test is reliable for detecting the presence of antibodies. A positive test is reliable evidence that you have been infected with SARS-CoV-2. However, a negative test doesn't necessarily mean you were never infected.
There are some more sensitive assays that can detect cellular immunity independent of antibodies, however those are mainly used for research and aren't generally available to most patients.
Significantly worse than the flu - multi systemic organ damage. The narrative that covid is like the flu, is both wildly inaccurate as this paper explains, and also dangerous, leading to a more cavalier attitude towards covid prevention.
Maybe I'm being generous to the parent, but I also would like a comparison to the flu. Not because I don't believe covid is significantly worse (when I got it, it was way worse than the flu), but because I don't have a medical background and it is difficult to contextualize the actual risks here without some baseline where I have a decent intuition already built around. But where I disagree with the parent is the need for this paper to specify those distinctions as I'm not the target audience.
I can read data and understand it, but any good data scientist knows that you need real expertise in a domain to contextualize that data. It would be naive to think that my understanding of data directly translates to a strong understanding of this work. I'm not the domain expert.
But have you actually had the flu? I ask, because most people say “oh, I had the flu” when in actuality they just had a common cold.
The flu, the real flu, knocks you on the ass so hard that you actively start considering that death is a possibility and that heading over to the hospital would be a good idea.
I’ve had the flu perhaps twice. Once as a child, once in my early 50s. The latter completely recalibrated my understanding of illness.
It is bad. I had a few of them during my life. When I was eleven the flu triggered a reaction in my body, destroying the insulin producing cells from my pancreas. I've had a type 1 diabetes since then.
Nowadays in Finland (where I am from), they recommend flu vaccinations for kids who have type 1 diabetes in the family to reduce the risk of catching it.
Not all flus are bad to all of us, but if you catch the right strain, it can really knock you out.
Yea, that's been my experience. Incredibly frustrating. Pre Covid, people at work would put on Slack they "had the flu they can't work today". Or "I had the flu this weekend". What they don't know is if you have the flu you literally can't move from bed and the thought of typing into Slack would be a task too great.
It would be nice if someone explained the specific biological reason for why they are different. Like, because they target different types of cells, or reproduce in different ways.
The lay explanation of a virus is that it invades your cells and hijacks their machinery to make more of itself. That makes them all sound the same. For bacteria we at least can understand that they have different types of metabolism, come in different shapes, produce different defensive compounds, etc.
I have had Covid at least 2 times and influenza once in the last 2 or 3 years. The influenza is the one that knocked me on my ass and sent me to the doctor thinking I might have something more wrong with me. Covid was meh, not worse than any other sickness the toddlers bring home.
I'm willing to bet most people would pick a Covid reinfection over Influenza. That's not even minimising covid (although with such robust population immunity, now is the time to stop making such a unique deal about covid and to stop freaking out about every single variant) - it's simply that the flu is not a mild disease. Influenza is a horrible virus.
> If COVID increases the hazard ratios there isn't much I can do. As far as I can tell, everyone is going to get COVID. There is no avoiding that.
You could wear a mask. You could, if your profession allows it, work from home. You could avoid large social gatherings. You could - if you aren't yet - get your vaxx up to date.
Less direct, and with a longer time horizon, but more lasting impact: You could lobby for clean air laws. You could lobby for easier/cheaper access to testing as well as a better data collection to know where we are. You could lobby that we don't just abandon Operation Warp Speed, but get our shit together and invest in research on mucosal pan-corona vaccines.
> It would be interesting to know how much worse it is than a typical flu though, just for academic interest.
Well, if you choose to do nothing "because everybody gets it", it likely won't stay academical.
I had the initial two Pfizer shots, then a Moderna booster. Had a strong immune reaction to the second and third shot. Still got Covid 7 months later. Unless people are very careful, I suspect everyone is going to get it.
Sadly, the vaccines were not designed to prevent infection, only to prevent severe illness. I can understand if you were misinformed, even the US President shared this untruth.
This is a very poor analysis. Its assertion that "long COVID is an often debilitating illness that occurs in at least 10% of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections" is based on a study that neither accounts for misattribution of symptoms to COVID, nor the psychosocial effects of a COVID infection, e.g. the anxiety related to getting COVID, the isolation required of those who contract COVID, etc.
The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:
Certainly misattribution explains _some_ amount of what people think is "Long Covid". It's very hard to say how much, because "Long Covid" itself lacks a proper definition.
However, that study is not the best evidence available. I agree that the original study could be improved, but the Jama Network paper doesn't account for the fact that many people test negative for Covid antibodies after a true infection (as explained in the original study).
We can't start talking about the true prevalence of Long Covid until we have a sensible definition.
Interesting that they classify loss of smell as a neurological symptom. I had Covid last January and my sense of smell has never been the same. I used to be able to walk into a room, flair my nostrils, and pick up everything from the couch, carpet, and curtains… to the subtle cool drafts from the windows and fireplace. Now everything has completely dulled out, and I only occasionally pick up those old scents in passing - functioning as a cruel reminder of what I lost.
That's fascinating - even as a kid my sense of smell has been near-nonexistent. Whenever I've read descriptions of powerful smells in books, I've always written them off as overly flowery language.
Reminds me a little generally of how some have an inner voice when they read and others don't.
How is your taste? I lost it completely (not just a little or muted, but 100% gone) for about 5 weeks. It started to come back, but 18 months later things still don't taste right. Nothing is flavorful or stands out as delicious.
There are certain things I have no problem smelling and tasting. And other things I just can't smell or taste. The result is that I have a whole entirely new set of sensitivities that I didn't have before. I cannot stand the fragrances in detergents and air fresheners. I used to keep the Fresh Linen scent Febreze fresheners around the house. It doesn't smell like Fresh Linen anymore... it just smells sickeningly sweet like dunking your head into a container of liquid detergent. I can't eat oranges anymore and have basically retired from giving recommendations on cigars because I'm just... broken... in that respect anymore.
Entirely anecdotal, but I had a freind who had been a smoker for fifty years. On giving up he was delighted to smell tomatoes for the first time since his boyhood.
Before that point, I had never before considered tomatoes as even having a smell.
Sorry to hear that… I hope it continues to recover for you. Mine is okay for the most part I think, I have never had a complex palate though so the taste of food is something I haven’t historically valued outside of “this is edible, and this isn’t”.
I was confused by this, but I think they mean "neurological" as in "relating to the nervous system," specifically to the olfactory sensory neurons that detect smells.
I was an early adopter of long COVID before it could be properly diagnosed, if I could ask for something, it would be to spread awareness for those who are still suffering.
The hardest part was, by far, feeling like I was making it all up, I felt a tremendous relief when I got diagnosed.
For me, it lasted almost a year, but I can say that I was lucky to fully recover.
I'm glad to see these findings get serious attention by researchers. It was really frustrating getting dismissed by my local physician when sharing symptoms like sugar sensitivity, fatigue, and focus issues. It was like being perpetually tipsy for months. It was a big shock as a knowledge worker to have to relearn how focus.
I hope they further study vaccines as well. In my anecdotal case my long covid symptoms resumed, along with additional symptoms like body bruising / bone pain for several weeks. There may be classes of healthy adults that react differently than expected and we can learn how to improve from the evidence.
Meanwhile long Covid sounds more or less like the chronic health problems I've had since ~2014 (which nearly ruined my life).
In my case it seems to be autoimmune, so maybe that's part of what's happening with long Covid as well.
There are various protocols (mostly dietary) that attempt to help, under names like "Autoimmune Paleo". It all seems under-studied. Maybe now that millions of people are having the same symptoms, there might be some movement on it.
That or GSK will come up with a drug that doesn't really help and has a lot of side effects but the medical community will declare the problem solved and move on.
I tested positive in mid-February 2022. I had been double vaxxed with the second one administered on Christmas Eve of 2021.
The symptoms started with swollen red feet (which I somehow dismissed) followed by really strange vivid dreams that night. The following day I woke up in the morning and was unusually tired, and so took a nap on the couch and silenced my phone for a while.
I was feeling relatively normal post-nap. Later in the evening before sleep time I took my dog for a walk. It was -2C outside and the air felt warm as it hit my face, and as I was walking the stairs back up into my flat (on the third floor) my legs felt abnormally weak, and at that stage I took a test, which was a solid positive.
That same night I contracted a high fever and informed all my co-workers. I don't recall having had a virus where I would literally spend minutes/hours self-negotiating to get a glass of water, or go to the toilet, and for the first four-five days I had no appetite whatsoever. I was in and out of sleep for that period and fully devoid of energy for about ten days. I tested negative on the ninth days.
For the next three weeks, I had almost no energy, little ability to concentrate - overall it took about a month to get back on my feet and about two months to feel "normal" again.
Overall, I think there's something to long covid, but I'm no doctor.
A coworker mentioned her partner was struggling with long covid. The wait time for a long covid specialist was long, and the eventual appointment yielded little.
Seeking a referral for the specific underlying symptom and abstaining from mentioning long covid finally resulted in better care it seems.
in the USA if you are near a research hospital or can get to one.. a person signing up for a support group might find themselves heading to eligibility for participating in a formal medical study.
My wife started to have many of the symptoms of long COVID starting around September of this year. No official diagnosis from her many doctors and specialists, just a constant barrage of co-pays and test after test after test. Some of her doctors say for certain it is not long COVID but they also say they do not know what it is... so... uh huh. Just have to keep on testing, and do the same test multiple times.
I really hope they find something for the tinnitus that is COVID related. It's insane. I'm on friggin' hearing aids for it. 34y/o, always taken good care of my ears.
And then I got infected 4 months before I could get a vaccine. It's just not fair.
This is very comprehensive and highlights the major challenges with something so novel. I hope more doctors read up on these challenges. I’ve been lucky to have doctors advocate for me recently now that more research is coming out.
Especially around diagnosis, markers, and treatments. Many are just self diagnosing given many cannot find any underlying cause.
While I’m one of the unlucky ones who gets long Covid with each infection, many are throwing darts at what helps manage their day to day symptoms. The good news in my case is each long covid bout is shorter than the previous.
Unease and woe are the two feelings I'm left with after my quick layman reading of the article.
Think I am most concerned with the reproductive implications, which seem under researched. Coupled with the unrelated decline in sperm count the past decade... I'm hoping my ruminations are just me catastrophizing.
Can anyone more medically and scientifically literate provide some context to temper my doom and gloom?
> Can anyone more medically and scientifically literate provide some context to temper my doom and gloom?
Most of these issues stem back to endothelium damage. And the good news is that, in addition to taking all the vaccines you're eligible to get, there are a bunch of other things you can do to strengthen and protect your endothelium, e.g. doing HIIT and taking ACE inhibitors. The one risk we (afaik) don't really know how to mitigate is the risk of developing an autoimmune disorder, but this can happen after any viral illness and isn't necessarily a COVID-specific risk.
And in terms of reducing the risk of neurological issues, Palmitoylethanolamide seems to a least be much safer than NSAIDs, albeit expensive and still somewhat experimental.
Except for me and many others long covid symptoms got worse after vaccination. Additionally new research is uncovering serious and significant risks for the vaccine with fairly marginal protection benefits.
> Except for me and many others long covid symptoms got worse after vaccination.
Sure, because the MRNA spike protein appears to be rough on the endothelium even in healthy individuals, so it's easy to see why this could be problematic for people who already have vascular damage. But there are a lot of other long covid symptoms that folks have reported improving after getting vaccinated, e.g. loss of smell.
I suffered severe depression after getting the J&J vaccine - it wasn't even an mRNA vaccine. It became significantly harder to code and my brain felt like it had been dragged across concrete. Later it'd be stinging and I was dry heaving. Not fun.
I hate to ask - but what sort of research is available so far?
I assume this is collecting some downvotes because it's unclear if the second sentence is supposed to apply specifically to the long covid population or the general population.
Based on the submitted paper, if it is intended to apply specifically to the long covid population, then it seems to be a reasonable comment. It did mention post-long-covid vaccinations seemed to be more harmful than helpful - something like ~15% found their long covid symptoms improved afterwards while ~20% had their symptoms worsen.
If that second sentence was intended to apply to the general population, then it's neither supported nor contradicted by the submitted paper. I don't believe it addressed risks outside of those already suffering from long covid. While it did address protection against long covid, it didn't come to a particular conclusion on the matter. It mentioned that studies on this aren't in general agreement yet, and pointed out a number of potential reasons for this, such as varying and potentially incomplete standards for discriminating between both long covid and control groups, in addition to the basic difficulties involved in keeping up with new strains.
As for other research... well that's a whole other thing.
To clarify when I was making the comment I was thinking about vaccination and boosters for Covid recovered individuals with lingering symptoms associated with Covid.
> new research is uncovering serious and significant risks for the vaccine
The frequency of the reaction mentioned in this article is around 2 in 100,000 people.
The frequency of death from covid is somewhere in the range of 1000-2000 in 100,000 people.
I'll take the vaccine odds.
> with fairly marginal protection benefits
Your source says nothing about protection benefits being marginal.
In fact, one of the author's of this research said:
"What the results don’t do, she stressed, is change the fact that the data strongly support getting vaccinated against COVID-19. “Clearly, developing postvaccine myocarditis is much more rare than developing any of the complications of infection with SARS-CoV-2,” she noted." https://www.tctmd.com/news/free-spike-protein-mrna-covid-19-...
As individuals those averages are looking at too large of a group. There are known subgroups with different risk profiles and grouping them together isnt helpful. You get very different risks from both for for example a healthy <30yo male and an obese >60yo male.
We have had that data for a while and simplifications serve no benefit. Its not early 2020 anymore, as always, as we get more accurate data, we get to adapt some strategies based on that.
edit: Not to mention the difference in strains (omicron vs delta) as well as the confidence into the different risks (under counting (detection problem) vs over counting(hospitalized/dying from vs with covid)
If an interpretation of self reported raw monitoring data seems obvious to you and your favourite criminal justice lecturer on substack, but not to epidemiologists working in the field, well yeah probably just cognitive dissonance on their part.
> The CDC analysis shows that the number of serious adverse events reported in less than two years for mRNA COVID-19 vaccines is 5.5 times larger than all serious reports for vaccines given to adults in the US since 2009 (~73,000 vs. ~13,000).
Wait, the self report monitoring system that went from virtually unknown to a household name at a time the number of adult vax administrations skyrocketed.. detected an uptick in absolute number of adverse events? Stop traffic! This article is off to a great start.
For good reasons, which is why it is a peculiar choice of highlight for the criminal justice lecturer's substack article. You haven't supported your prior claim by linking it.
Shoutout to the British NHS Data that lists for risk of hospitalization/overnight hospitalization /dying per agegroup(decade each) per month.
I find it worth mentioning that the conscious choice not to do this and argue with overall numbers is clearly showing a lack of integrity in the source aimed at pushing a predetermined narrative.
You can not in good concise pretend or even imply that this an evenly distributed risk. Be it among agegroups, comorbidities or among the time axis since the start of the pandemic.
And to give some food for thought, people will reliably overcorrect to adapt for that distortion in their sense making process. Its how a justified loss in credibility looks like and influences peoples behavior.
I can’t believe we are still arguing about IFR at this at this point in the pandemic. It’s now well studied and we know the shape as a function of age is a huge hockey stick and the population average is not 1.1%. I suspect you understand well that your information is misleading and disinformation.
I stand by what I originally said. It seems like you are misinterpreting it somewhere along the line but what I said is backed by fact. Again, check the source I linked.
It is verifiably true that the death rate of covid is 1.1% in the U.S. Do you have a different definition of "death rate"?
> now admit it is at least 5-10x lower
Never did I say anything to this effect. So who is really arguing in bad faith?
Come on you don’t even know the definition of IFR? Seriously.
You linked to CFR data yet frame it as IFR, this is like an amateur level discussion if we are back to discussion IFR and CFR. I don’t even know where to start if that is where we are at.
>I don’t even know where to start if that is where we are at.
I have been thinking about this a bit, i believe the pandemic (and this conversation) has been a great example for the general limits of distributed sensemaking and how it breaks down at communicating (and capsuling) all the relevant aspects and perspectives to a topic or statement.
I think in the end everyone has their map of the problem and we are failing (due to the limited bandwith of speech and text among others) at comparing why they differ where. Be it incomplete data, overlooking important perspectives or simply cognitive biases/ ego induced (not wanting to be wrong, tribalism...) errors.
In general people have very poor intuition around risks and orders of magnitude. With Covid this is truly extreme differences in risk, under 18 with IFR of 20 per 1M but over 65 with 90,000 per 1M. 4,500x different risk.
Have not ghosted and many links provide by me and others. My observation is that for people who have had covid, like me, I’ve had it twice actually, once early on, so Alpha, and then post vaccination, more recently, so an Omicron variant. For these people like me who experience symptoms described as long covid, the following 3 observations are absolutely true and justified by lots of scientific published research:
(1) mRNA vaccinations can actually worsen long covid symptoms for a significant percentage of people. This is a fact.
(2) each day we are learning additional risks of vaccination. we even have a study using mice that can explicitly link the exact mechanism of cardiovascular damage caused by mrna vaccine. Also it’s very odd that suddenly anything that mentions VAERS is automatically junk science, especially as the system was created for exactly this problem. Objective analysis that accounts for reporting biases is showing serious and very statistically significant risks. Even CDC is increasingly acknowledging this as we learned this week.
(3) the marginal benefits of boosters is extremely small for most of the population, except perhaps some high risk segment. and even worse we now have studies indicating repeat mrna vaccination can have a negative impact on immune system.
Why these 3 points are so controversial when they are clearly true is simply evidence that the topic is completely politicized now. Unfortunately.
Without any justification you accuse me of being a disinformation agent, which I absolutely am not, and request the moderator “nuke” me. This approach to this complex problem is really toxic and unhelpful imho.
I would also point out another commenter you are implicitly aligning yourself with in this discussion stated the IFR of Covid is 1-2% (or 1,000-2,000 per 100,000 using their notation). That my friend is pure disinformation!
I’d be curious if you have any comment of mine that you can point to which is disinformation, especially in comparison the the blatant example of the IFR.
Not entirely. There's some of that yes, but the reality is regardless of the source of the spike protein when it gets into tissues it causes damage and that damage can be long term. It's all about what the protein is binding to or what tissues it gets in and how the body's immune system responds to that. It's the immune system responding that is doing the most damage and the lingering effects from that.
so maybe it would be more appropriate to say, “other people disagree with this” rather than playing some strange kind of victim with “they won’t allow me to speak!”
Covid infection outcomes exist on a continuum from death to harmless. There is also "long-flu", and I'm sure there are persistent responses to other respiratory viruses, so long covid isn't totally novel.
If you're scared for your health the best thing you can do is be healthy, eat right, exercise, don't smoke, etc.
That’s all good advice in general, but it also doesn’t seem to have much bearing on who gets long covid - plenty of elite athletes have contracted long covid.
There are simple changes that don't affect people's lives but can promote protection to those that want to be protected. Longer winter school breaks (instead of summer) could somehow mitigate the flu/cold/covid season. Remote work helps, as does the normalization of wearing masks (and perhaps stop politicizing it)
My experience is that after two doses of Pfizer I had unexpected positive side effects, such as increased performance (e.g. I can do a lot more push-ups) and my allergy symptoms (runny nose) have significantly decreased. Do you know any research on unexpected positive side effects?
COVID-19 is no joke. I know people want to move on with their lives, but people should stick to N95/KN-95/KF-94/FFP2/FFP3 masks for the time being unless we want to create a massive health care crisis and ruin the global economy as the if people get reinfected every few months, this would be imminent!
Yup, I have avoided COVID this whole time by simply wearing KN95. It's really not that hard. Actually, the hardest part is dealing with ridicule and condescension from people who think I'm being "paranoid" or overly careful. Maybe if everyone took that level of precaution, we wouldn't be where we are. I set my policy when a friend's mother died quickly from COVID.. People straight up dying is pretty much a "yup I'm wearing a mask" trigger for me. The constantly-trickling-out research on COVID's effects have repeatedly validated my stance. Not getting COVID despite being in public and in crowds and near people who are just coughing into the air (maskless of course) has also validated my stance.
Two of my cousins died from COVID-19, and one of my best friends - first her daughter died, and then she got it from her grandson. I don't recall a single person dying from flu - and I know thousands!
That was my point as well - if everybody wore the proper mask for a month around the globe, this would have been over with long ago! But, no, people feel entitled to make this stay here and continue to kill millions each year!
Strongly agree. It’s been frustrating to deal with this at work. I’m at a FAANG, and we’re required to come in 3 days a week. Coworkers came in visibly sick coughing away without wearing a mask. I wrote to people support and they say they can’t do anything about it, just recommend that I wear a mask and that’s about it.
Millions if not billions get sick every year, because sick people don't want to stay home. This irresponsible behavior should be regulated somehow otherwise people won't change!
You can't acquire meaningful immunity against such a highly contagious and rapidly mutating RNA virus! After measures were removed and people stopped wearing face masks, the phylogenic tree went bonkers [0]!
Yes you can, that's why elderly people who get influenza strains that they were exposed to as children are much less likely to succumb to it than those who didn't. Lack of full lasting immunity doesn't mean zero immunity.
You can't avoid exposure to a highly contagious respiratory virus. You can't spend the rest of your life masked. And evolution would have make us capable of adapting to being able to handle such viruses. It's not like COVID-19 would be the end of the human race without indefinite masking/social-distancing. Viruses like COVID-19 have emerged innumerable times in the past. Without an innate ability to acquire some level of immunity to such viruses, we wouldn't exist.
COVID-19 was only different in that in 2019, at risk demographics like the elderly population, had no prior exposure to it.
You get COVID-19 every couple of months - with or without prior illness or vaccination! This is not the case with measles, which has a proven vaccine with few and minor side effects!
This is no different than the coronaviruses that cause the common cold. The infections get progressively milder until, at about the 5th infection, exposure no longer leads to infection.
> people should stick to N95/KN-95/KF-94/FFP2/FFP3 masks for the time being
Now that we have a vaccine and a bivalent booster, realize that you're suggesting masking for at least another 5 years. You said this, but it also has to be N95 at this point with how contagious it is.
I use an N95 myself, but have family who just use surgical but don’t hang out with sick people and get cautious in places with lots of people and they never got it
It’s very very contagious and you have higher odds with worse measures but it also isn’t magic.
The boosters do almost nothing about XBB.1.5 and the upcoming strains - this is evolution at play! You can't use the same strategy we've used for the flu - this virus mutates much faster as it infects a lot more people.
I am fully aware of it and well used to it already - I've gone through hundreds of 3M and Moldex N95s already, I can properly put on and take off a face mask with a single hand in a second. I'm sure the first people who put on underwear were also ridiculed and others thought of them as crazies, but from modern day's perspective, they were the clever bunch.
Face masks might be a novelty in the Western Hemisphere, but in the more populated other half of our planet, people have been wearing masks as less inconvenient than getting sick.
People should learn about Hayflick limit before saying they can keep surviving a reinfection every couple of months - especially one, which exploits such a common receptor as ACE2!
I got Covid in November and I was fully jabbed but no boost. As soon as I felt something different, I performed nasal rinsing and added Iodine to it. I did this for the first 5 days twice a day. This was the crucial thing for me. I felt fine after the 4th day but still tested positive. I tested negative on the 10th day and I ended my self quarantine. Before that, I was already taking Zinc, Vitamin D3, Vitamin C for years. I feel normal and I'm very glad that whatever I did before and during infection seemed to have help me recover fast.
I can't really know for sure because I've only gotten COVID once. Even with that in mind, they are low risk. It's not the first time I've tried nasal irrigation. It's given me relief every time I had performed it during the times I had a cold or even just a stuffy/runny nose. This goes way back to when I was a child. The supplements I take have a lot of data points as far as their benefits. If you Google these things individually: nasal irrigation, vitamin c/d and zinc and add filter "before:2020", you will see all the pre-COVID data points. I'm not just jumping into some fringe left COVID hipster trend.
As an Elite Athlete I'm training 20-30 hours a week. I got covid last year (triple vaxed) and it wiped me out for a good 6 months. It took me 3 weeks to be able to walk longer than a minute without needing to lay down for the rest of the day and sleep.
I have dealt with fatigue problems for 6 months and only just now, do I feel like I'm getting "back to normal".
The most frustrating thing is alot of people are dismissive of the symptoms and generally say, "Oh yeah, I get tired too" but fail to understand the severity of it as they haven't experienced it.
I have a fairly good understanding of my body and the associated symptoms of overtraining/fatigue in a heavy training cycle but covid fatigue was soemthing completely different.