Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

journals.plos.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 280 posts

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

#221

Post by spookthesunset »

legolas2412 wrote: post #217
yread wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But... we did get infected with coronaviruses (the OC43 and friends) and other common cold viruses over and over again. The reinfection rate of ~15% for SARS-COV-2 is comparable to those

It would have been better if reinfection was described as "you'll test positive again, but it will be milder". Instead the media was full of articles saying "immunity lasts only 6 months"

“There is just so much we don’t understand about this virus”.

Yeah. No. It’s a respiratory virus that is pretty nasty in really old people but not so much in anybody else.

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

#222

Post by spookthesunset »

ellyagg wrote: post #190

How do you disambiguate "long Covid" from the very real fact that people are incredibly suggestible. My father-in-law was convinced he had long Covid. He talked about it all the time. He was never diagnosed, but he had a cold near the beginning of the pandemic and he decided it was Covid. He claimed he could run up and down the steps at the park before getting Covid. Now, he claimed, he was always breathless. I exerc…

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

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

#223

Post by nathias »

jacquesm wrote: post #3

One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this). So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy…

same, and I didn't even have it

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

#224

Post by wesleywt »

spookthesunset wrote: post #200
CarelessExpert wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is your studies showing these restrictions worked well enough to justify their immense costs to society? And predictably the goalposts shift. First it was that we "cannot say for certain that lockdowns did anything at all". Now it's that the results don't "justify their immense costs to society". > and even then we didn’t know it would work going in, Again: Lockdowns are a basic application of germ theory. Th…

> There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look. That isn’t proof. I could very easily claim it was seasonality or things well beyond our control that caused cases to go down. And I am probably right.…

This post is classic Dunning-Kruger. Florida arrested a statistician who was attempting to publish the real death toll. So can we seriously accept thier count as the truth? California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns. I don't understand why hundreds of thousands of deaths is okay for the right wingers like you?

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

#225

Post by PragmaticPulp »

Miner49er wrote: post #13

> Third, we did not have a baseline (pre-COVID-19) assessment of participants’ physical and mental health. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of COVID-19 from pre-existing conditions. The interpretation of our findings regarding depression and anxiety is further limited by the psychological burden that the pandemic may impose in general [48, 49]. While we tried to compare our results with estimates fro…

I hope we don't go down the path of dismissing post-COVID symptoms as mental illness.

Yes, some patients with post-COVID symptoms could simply be presenting with mental illness. However, we can't simply dismiss the patients with measurable symptoms like cardiac irregularities, exercise intolerance, orthostatic intolerance, and other physical issues that only occurred after the COVID infection.

Modern medicine (in any country) is not well equipped to handle complex disorders that don't yet have specific medical tests. It's common for doctors to reach for mental illness as an explanation, to the detriment of patients. Let's not repeat that for post-COVID.

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

#226

Post by abystander »

wesleywt wrote: post #224
spookthesunset wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's piles of evidence that shows they're extremely effective. Heck, in my own city, we saw a massive spike brewing prior to Christmas, and once a lockdown was instituted, the numbers immediately began to fall. That pattern is repeated anywhere you care to look. That isn’t proof. I could very easily claim it was seasonality or things well beyond our control that caused cases to go down. And I am probably right.…

This post is classic Dunning-Kruger. Florida arrested a statistician who was attempting to publish the real death toll. So can we seriously accept thier count as the truth? California and New York were hit before they could implement lockdowns. I don't understand why hundreds of thousands of deaths is okay for the right wingers like you?

> I don't understand why hundreds of thousands of deaths is okay for the right wingers like you?

Kamala said she wouldn't take the vaccine cause it was from Trump.

Cuomo/Murphy have clearly made massive mistakes in their handling of the most vulnerable during the pandemic likely directly causing 10s of thousands of deaths in those states.

Never mind the liberals and others that called for a WWII-like mobilization and takeover of private industry to create ventilators that likely ended up causing more death, meanwhile calling anyone else that objected to those calls heartless murderers.

No one is ok with 100s of thousands of deaths and implying that's true is slander.

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

#227

Post by sethammons »

mygoodaccount wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #3

One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this). So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy…

Another one here (Woman, 24 y.o.). Contracted COVID, had a terrible three-weeks of infection. Nine months later, I am having weekly heart palpitations, I'm constantly fatigued and fogged in the mind and my lung capacity is half what it used to be - I now require an inhaler to go on my runs. I know several women my age experiencing far worse. Long COVID should not be ignored.

I had an awful cold or sickness about a year ago (including messed up taste and smell!) and since then I've developed heart racing, panic attacks, and working out is sooooo hard now. My strength is down, my cardio sucks, and just getting myself to work out is a chore. I can feel trouble breathing sometimes. My heart can race from sitting or walking up stairs. I was pretty dang fit and working out hard 5 days a week. Now getting 1-3 days in in a week is near impossible due to being tired.

I tested negative for covid antibodies. I'm not sure about all the data on "post covid 19 syndrome" but I check a lot of boxes for it but didn't test positive. My wife is in a similar block. Just tossing some anecdata out there.

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

#229

Post by atatatat »

mygoodaccount wrote: post #10
jacquesm wrote: post #3

One of those cases here. Symptoms: suddenly out of energy, occasionally suddenly being unable to spell, even mild physical exercise leaves me floored (and I was pretty fit for my age prior to this). So, 17 months in: it's still not back to where it used to be but if you think of it in terms of trends instead of absolutes it is definitely still improving. The downs are less far down, the fog is lifting and the energy…

Another one here (Woman, 24 y.o.). Contracted COVID, had a terrible three-weeks of infection. Nine months later, I am having weekly heart palpitations, I'm constantly fatigued and fogged in the mind and my lung capacity is half what it used to be - I now require an inhaler to go on my runs. I know several women my age experiencing far worse. Long COVID should not be ignored.

I (anecdotally) linked the heart heart thing to viral waste in heart valves, clearing which can be helped by wild blueberries (antioxidants, which yes, are real!).

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

#230

Post by timr »

cycomanic wrote: post #208
timr wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From personal experience, the symptoms being described by all of the posts on this thread overlap substantially with depression and anxiety. It's notable that the GP went to the hospital and was diagnosed with a possible panic attack. Panic attacks frequently cause your heart to race, skip, etc. Depression causes "brain fog" and fatigue, body aches, etc. So far, ~all of the reports of "long covid" are anecdotal and p…

You're wrong that long covid evidence is anecdotal. It is a clinical diagnosis though (i.e. it's diagnosed based on symptoms). I think you also severely underestimate the effect this had on people, and symptoms are not generally compatible with depression. Patients often show reduced lung capacity of 60%. The brain fog is also often much more severe than just not being able concentrate a bit, people can't do simple c…

> You're wrong that long covid evidence is anecdotal.

Fine, convince me. Provide a citation from a study where:

1) the results are NOT gathered by survey from a self-selected population

2) the study is pre-registered, with endpoints determined in advance

3) the study is prospective, longitudinal and randomized

4) there is a control group

5) the participants are verified to actually have Covid

6) a significant effect is shown on the pre-registered endpoints

and I'll take your claims seriously. The only current study that I'm currently aware of that remotely comes close to this standard of evidence (but doesn't meet all of them) is this one: a controlled, retrospective study of 250,000 kids, which found that kids without covid had roughly equivalent long-term symptoms to kids who did have covid.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.05.21256649v...

I bring up this study only to underscore the point: essentially all current "long covid" data is self reported and uncontrolled, and when you start to be rigorous, the claims of severity rapidly diminish. Here's a relevant editorial in Nature:

"Studies of long COVID thus far—nearly all from high-income countries—have been difficult to interpret or compare, not only because of the lack of a consistent case definition but also because of systematic selection bias of cases, often without appropriate controls....Meanwhile, community-based studies have raised questions about the representativeness of cases compared with the general population, especially those using online recruitment, with many studies relying on self-reported symptoms and without laboratory-confirmed diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Selection bias becomes even more pronounced when people are recruited through online support groups, where very high rates of often nonspecific long-term symptoms have been reported, even in children." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w

> Patients often show reduced lung capacity of 60%

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

> The brain fog is also often much more severe than just not being able concentrate a bit, people can't do simple calculations, can't follow conversations, can't read more than a page in a book, immediately forget things they just talked about.

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

> Many people become completely unable to perform their usual tasks.

Citation required. See above for standards of evidence.

Post reply on HN