Burden of post-Covid-19 syndrome and implications for healthcare planning • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by saalweachter » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #103

clairity wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Because I'm not a complete idiot.” yah, it’s the partial idiots who are hard to discern. complete idiots are the easiest to dismiss out of hand. many infections have long lasting effects. you’d need to systematically rule them out/in via testing to be as certain as you claim to be.

Right, well let's just say that coincidentally I had a viral infection that has the exact same symptoms as COVID, has the same long term effects as are reported in many cases of COVID and which coincidentally happened to be timed to match the first wave of that particular pandemic, but according to you it wasn't COVID when it wasn't confirmed as such with a test. Consider the alternative: you would have to come up wi…

I mean, I'm not even sure I would bother with a T-cell test in your case. The only meaningful difference in your future life would be to have the results to give people on the internet, which doesn't seem worth getting two tubes of blood drawn.

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

#122

Post by peteretep » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

OzyM wrote: post #25

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

I am partial to the Zoe studies, as their cohort seems to be large, stable, and include people who haven’t been infected.

Write-up: https://covid.joinzoe.com/us-post/long-covid Paper: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.19.20214494v...

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

#123

Post by iammisc » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

shoto_io wrote: post #94

iammisc wrote: post #49

When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up. The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the c…

Same here. Had a terrible, terrible flu (?) back in 2017. I was weak and couldn’t smell nor taste anything for months. It took a long time before I was the old me. Maybe it’s common with virus diseases and we have an attention bias now and it might be additionally more common with COVID.

I think it's an attention bias thing. I mean... when I found out about this phenomenon from my doctor, I was shocked -- how could people be walking around with these bad infections and just not be able to do anything about it. But then I realized that many people have medical things that I can't see that they just deal with. Like many people excrete their feces into a bag on their stomach. And some people have to inject hormones constantly.

It's just life, and you can't choose what cards you're dealt. I'm glad people are paying more attention to these disabilities (although I hesitate to even call them that), but on the other hand, we should be careful not too get drawn in simply because COVID is the current story du jour.

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

#124

Post by rangoon626 » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

quenix wrote: post #64

throwawayboise wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about 1 in 4 but it sure seems like there is a lot more of it than their used to be, just in my experience. Younger people living with constant worry about "health care" that I've only ever seen before among the elderly. When I was in my 20s the last thing I or any of my friends worried about was health care.

Are you really trying to paint the fact that the younger generation is taking greater steps to systematically take care of their health as a bad thing? That is absurd.

Well if that's the case, they should start with general nutrition

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

#125

Post by fragmede » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

mygoodaccount wrote: post #19

jacquesm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the heart thing. Forgot to mention that because it hasn't happened for a couple of months now but I would wake up at night every now and then with my heart going like I just ran a marathon. But that fortunately completely went away. As for lung capacity: I used to play saxophone pretty fanatically and I think that is one of the reasons I got through this with a relatively low amount of damage.

> As for lung capacity: I used to play saxophone pretty fanatically and I think that is one of the reasons I got through this with a relatively low amount of damage. Funnily enough, I used to play the flute and sing before contracting COVID. With my lung capacity halved, my ability is nowhere near what it used to be. Long COVID has taken all my hobbies away from me: running, singing, hip-hop dancing. If anyone knows…

There’s are many Facebook groups, and a Slack. (No idea the overlap.)

http://survivorcorps.com

The particular FB group I'm in is called (creatively enough) "Long Covid Support Group", but a search there reveals there are many more.

My email is in my profile if you want to connect further over this. I consider myself mostly healed by this point (infected March 2020) and can share my vitamin regime (its efficacy is anecdotal, my sample size is 2) but I still have lingering health issues over a year later.

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

#126

Post by satysin » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:44 PM UTC

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 am having daily heart palpitations and they are almost unbearable now. Sometimes I wake up and feel fine almost all day but not a day has gone by in the past two months where I don't have some kind of chest discomfort around my sternum/xiphoid process.

I have had a whole bunch of scans and everything is normal. I will be having an endoscopy next week to hopefully get to the bottom of it. I am 'hoping' it is something simple and obvious that they can treat. So far everything ends up being "well it's not $insertMedicalCondition so let's check for $insertSomeOtherMedicalCondition" :(

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

#127

Post by jacquesm » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

felixbraun wrote: post #109

jacquesm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I'm not a complete idiot. - pandemic in progress: check - risky lifestyle: check (as in very frequent air travel for work) - symptoms: O2 level drop, fluid in lungs, persistent cough, extreme tiredness, dizzyness, loss of smell/taste check all of these, and the rest, fortunately not. Later on: crazy beating heart for no particular reason, losing weight steadily but more slowly now. Decision not to test was ma…

You could check for T-cells at some point -- if you had Covid, they are measurable even after many months. In contrast, IgG titers show up in only ~80% and decline steadily. Excellent recent paper: > Here, we investigated SARS-CoV-2 antibody and T cell responses in matched samples of COVID-19 convalescent individuals up to 6 months after infection. Longitudinal analysis revealed decreasing and stable spike- and nucle…

Thank you, if there is any benefit to having that level of certainty (and not to satisfy internet naysayers) then I may still do this, but I have received my shot (Jansen) because there are still some immunological benefits from that and it helps in a regulatory sense as well (lots of doors are closed to people that have not been vaccinated).

What matters to me is that I got through it, still live pretty carefully even now because I don't want a re-run if I can avoid it and I would advise anybody that hasn't had it yet and/or has not been vaccinated to go and get that done as soon as you can. This is no walk in the park, I used to be pretty fit for my age, and the last year has been a complete wipe-out. Avoid if you can.

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

#128

Post by spookthesunset » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

iammisc wrote: post #49

When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up. The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the c…

> doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?

Because we all decided to collectively forget every single thing we know about respiratory viruses and infectious diseases. Somehow because covid is "novel" the world needed to rebuild our entire knowledge base from the ground up.

A good example is how lasting t-cell immunity was dismissed for the longest time (and still is in many circles). People apparently seemed to think that this virus was so special and new that people would just keep getting it over and over again every six months or something. Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago....

Labeling it as "novel" let people just ignore common friggen sense and completely loose the plot.

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

#129

Post by Grim-444 » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

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

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

#130

Post by heavyset_go » Tue, Jul 13, 2021, 7:45 PM UTC

lambdaba wrote: post #56

mygoodaccount wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hope this is taken the right way, but have you tried "vitamins" (broadly speaking)? Some I have seen with specific effects: Niacin, Black Seed Oil (Nigella Sativa), Magnesium megadoses, etc. etc. Don't dismiss these as "quack medicines", I've recovered from severe chronic illness thanks to some of these... I could expand if people ask, but really it's quite easy, especially for the HN crowd, to level-up rapidly on…

> Magnesium megadoses

If you're considering this (I wouldn't), be aware that milk of magnesia is a very effective laxative, and other magnesium salts like magnesium oxide etc work similarly.