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Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

nytimes.com

121–130 of 159 posts

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#121
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person 1: "the world is coming to an end!" Person 2: "well, hold on now. Things still seem okay to me." Person 1: "why are you minimizing it?!?" I'm not saying that OP isn't telling the truth. I'm not even saying that their story is less representative than mine. I'm just saying that my boring story also exists, and we shouldn't fixate on (i.e. "emphasize") the emotional stories because they're emotional.

That's a very disingenuous example that bears little relation to classichasclass's original post. They said they know people who have suffered significantly because of COVID and for that reason they are still cautious. You immediately responded "let's not exaggerate". How have they exaggerated? Then you say "It still doesn't give them carte blanche to exaggerate or emphasize scary anecdotes at the expense of boring o…

I have no idea if OP is exaggerating, or even telling the truth. The point is that anecdotes are worthless. Giving anecdotes any level of serious consideration is inherently exaggeration of a niche position.

This subthread is now filled with comments taking an anecdote from a complete stranger -- someone they don't know and whose story they cannot possibly verify -- and attempting to shame/attack/villainize anyone who presents an alternative to that narrative. One anecdote is good, but the other one is bad. Why?

It's just another form of argumentum ad misericordiam (appeal to pity): if you discount the emotional narrative, you must be a heartless person, unworthy of serious consideration.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#122
post #31

Alpha ran through my family of 5 around Christmas time, 2020. We were down 4-6 days, that was it. Everyone operating normally since then, my kids play a lot of sports at a high level. I coach, exercise, etc, while not in my best shape ever, it’s mostly cause of limited time. No vaccines, won’t ever get them.

you renegade!

I gotta protect myself from "suddenly", a crisis which is sweeping the world.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#123
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. My story is just as useless as every other anecdote when it comes to evaluating the truth of something like this. The point is to provide a neutral voice in contrast to the fearful one.

"I lost my dad" doesn't warrant an immediate "well, I didn't". You don't have to void someone's experience just because you think it'll scare some folks. I lost two friends to COVID. That weighs on me a hell of a lot more than the knowledge that I didn't lose others. It's going to influence every discussion on this forever. Because they died.

No post body was provided.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#124
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Person 1: "the world is coming to an end!" Person 2: "well, hold on now. Things still seem okay to me." Person 1: "why are you minimizing it?!?" I'm not saying that OP isn't telling the truth. I'm not even saying that their story is less representative than mine. I'm just saying that my boring story also exists, and we shouldn't fixate on (i.e. "emphasize") the emotional stories because they're emotional.

That's a very disingenuous example that bears little relation to classichasclass's original post. They said they know people who have suffered significantly because of COVID and for that reason they are still cautious. You immediately responded "let's not exaggerate". How have they exaggerated? Then you say "It still doesn't give them carte blanche to exaggerate or emphasize scary anecdotes at the expense of boring o…

No post body was provided.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#125
post #60
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My anecdote is not better than another anecdote. That's the point. Anecdotes are worthless, but you're here arguing about mine, because mine is boring, and you don't think that's appropriate. That's a problem. For whatever it's worth, though...the fact that dozens of people I know have had it and are fine isn't "luck".

What kind of anecdotes do you expect in a thread about an article related to long term effects of Covid? Its like expecting 4chan comments on HN.

No post body was provided.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#126
post #38
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had it and everyone I know has had it (now in the dozens), including a number of elderly people. Everyone is fine. I recovered in a week, and out of literally dozens of people, I've not met anyone who took longer than that. I'm sorry about your dad, but let's not exaggerate based on personal anecdotes. The stories that get upvoted are the ones that scare people.

> Everyone is fine. I recovered in a week, and out of literally dozens of people, I've not met anyone who took longer than that. Calling bullshit. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01589-z Anybody who lost their sense of taste or smell took months to recover that. Loss of smell or taste is almost 50% for Covid prior to Omicron. Even with Omicron, it's about 20%.

No post body was provided.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#128
post #19

Anecdata: I had what seemed like relatively mild covid in March 2020, but never fully recovered, and I ended up unable to do strenuous or stressful activity without a super fight or flight physical response. I was in my 20's, and originally very active and fit, although I ate a very high sugar/carb diet. I took a lot of tests and tried a lot of things and made no progress with doctors for about 2 years, until I tried…

You might want to look into ANS Rewire. Dan Neuffer does an excellent job of covering some of the (speculative) science behind ME/CFS, which is also known as 'post-viral syndrome'. A number of researchers believe long Covid might simply be ME/CFS.

Neuffer's central thesis in ANS Rewire is that CFS is a disorder of the autonomic nervous system. And that's more or less in line with the WHO, which classifies CFS as a disorder of the nervous system generally.

ANS Rewire explains what you're observing with high GI foods too: insulin spikes are interpreted as a stressor by an overreactive ANS and sugar regulation in a CFS body appears to be compromised primarily because cortisol is an insulin suppressant. He recommends dietary modifications of the kind you're pursuing.

Mostly it sounds like you're doing the right stuff already. If you want to recover faster, then there is one strategy that is essential: find ways to quickly and effectively relax yourself every time your nervous system produces an acute response to a stressor (usually in the form of intensified fatigue or brain fog). The most effective for me was to rotate through a large series of relaxing visualizations. So, for example, imagine yourself on a beach in the Bahamas. You do need to rotate visualizations because there's a tendency to become accustomed to any particular one. It sounds absurd, but it does work, so long as you're consistent. Takes about 1-2 months to start noticing major improvements. There's a fairly complete list of relaxation techniques you can try here: https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/stress-manageme....

Note that Dan Neuffer's 'REWIRE' technique works along these lines, but he doesn't recommend a visualization strategy, which I found to be far more effective than what he proposes. The principle is consistent though: the nervous system will stop overreacting to stressors if it is retrained out of the pattern. The most effective way to do that is to become deeply relaxed as often as possible throughout the day and especially when you sense that nervous system activation is spiking.

When you emerge from the CFS state, it will happen rather suddenly. There's an excellent description of the recovery pattern here: https://drmyhill.co.uk/wiki/CFS_-_Catastrophe_theory:_why_we.... (Note that the rest of this website is a mixed bag, with a lot of things I wouldn't endorse; that post was written by a guest author)

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#129
post #33

I'm curious if this study refutes or supports this often cited study on long COVID (I can't tell from the NYTimes article): > We demonstrate an absence of association between symptom burden and radiographic or biochemical abnormality. We suggest that the phenomenon of Long-COVID may not be directly attributable to the effect of SARS-CoV-2, but rather the neuropsychiatric insults may play a greater role in its aetiolo…

> We demonstrate an absence of association between symptom burden and radiographic or biochemical abnormality. We suggest that the phenomenon of Long-COVID may not be directly attributable to the effect of SARS-CoV-2, but rather the neuropsychiatric insults may play a greater role in its aetiology.

This is consistent with ME/CFS, which the WHO classifies as a disorder of the nervous system. There are no known diagnostic markers for ME/CFS.

Re: Nearly half of Covid patients haven’t fully recovered months later, study finds

#130

I can't confirm this but I _may_ have had COVID Jan 2020, and ever since then I get waves of coughs / other symptoms every couple weeks or so that last for at least a week; it never goes away. Never had anything like this before that one time being sick other than seasonal bronchitis a few years in a row about a decade ago. Only other thing I can thing of is allergies but I've now lived in multiple places during the…

> I _may_ have had COVID Jan 2020

Unless you can contract trace yourself to someone who worked in Wuhan (or you worked in China then) this is fantastically unlikely and makes you a Unicorn.

It is thousands of times more likely that you got one of the numerous flu like viruses going around in Jan 2020, and post-viral sequalae from viruses is not unique to SARS-CoV-2.

And you can have allergies to so many things that it is impossible to escape them. I have allergies to dust mites, grass, mold, Birch and a few East Coast trees. Without testing I wouldn't be able to deduce what I was allergic to at all.

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