Lots of people still really don't believe that some people have had their lives destroyed by Long Covid, and that they might too. And their loved ones. And sooner than they think!
Someone online posted this exchange:
"I met a woman today. She started talking about Covid and how glad she is it's all behind us. I said, but it's not. Well it's mostly gone. No. She said it's not serious anymore. I said Long Covid is serious. She doesn't know anyone with Long Covid."
Me: "This is almost every single real life conversation I've had about Covid in the last two years."
Random dude popping in to argue: "I know no one with LC not in my crew, not with my wing. I work directly with nearly 1000 people. The way you all go on about 10-40% of society with long covid only makes you look more stupid."
Me: "There's an inability to understand science and stats. People look around to make an assessment of risk anecdotally instead of looking at the overall rate of Long Covid cases relative to the number of acute infections, which is pretty consistently showing that over 30% get Long Covid after three infections."
This Canadian study (Dec, 2023) found the percentage of Canadian adults with long-term symptoms increased based on the number of acute infections they had. By 3 infections, it was up to 37.9% who experienced extended symptoms. That doesn't mean 37.9% of all Canadians has Long Covid, though. It means over a third of people who have had Covid at least three times have extended symptoms of some kind. The chance of long term problems increase the more times you're infected, but some people get Long Covid after just ONE infection.
Why aren't we noticing it?
Long Covid shows up in over 200 different ways. A lot of people are still stuck on the mistaken idea that Covid is a respiratory disease, so they expect Long Covid to look like someone struggling to breathe, maybe needing an inhaler for a while. That's sometimes the case when Covid affects the lungs. But Covid is a vascular disease, which travels through the bloodstream to hide in many different organs of the body. Some people get Covid and stay sick for months, and we might better understand that as Long Covid, but other people get Covid and get completely better, and then, a few months later, get liver disease, or diabetes, or cancer, or they have deep vein thrombosis or a stroke or heart attack from the blood clots, or GERD, or IBS, or an ulcer, or they can't think straight and make a lot more mistakes. Heart attacks in people under 40 have risen 66% since the start of the pandemic. Pneumonia in children has tripled. Those rates are unprecedented, but media still don't mention the role Covid plays.
We might not notice because Long Covid can show up as anxiety. If the underlying cause is a brain injury from Covid, not childhood issues or maladaptations, then it needs to be treated differently.
We might not notice because, without someone looking at the blood work like they do in experiments to compare Novid and Covid groups, a lot of people have Long Covid and are completely unaware. They might be walking around a little more tired than usual, and not know they have a very low white blood count, as if they've been through chemo, because Covid has wiped out their T-cells. That means they're unable to fight off any infection. And they might not be doing anything to prevent an infection because they just don't know. That's pretty much what happened to so many people who were HIV+. It took a decade to get regular testing in place and get people to wear condoms just in case. We've gone the other route for some reason: dismantling Covid testing and convincing people that masks are silly. And now many people who have had Covid have acquired an immunodeficiency syndrome with no help in sight.
We might not notice people with Long Covid because they're managing the symptoms in a way that doesn't affect their job because they really need this job to be able to pay for all the medical care. How many people are dragging themselves through work, looking productive for the boss, then coming home and collapsing in bed for the night? Nobody wants to appear to be that wounded gazelle on the Serengeti ready to be picked off by a savvy lion cub vying for their job.
We might not notice because many schools and employers paint the growing absences they're seeing as laziness or an unwillingness to work. They call it absenteeism instead of absences. They're demanding kids come to school sick and adults show up for work. Even with that reality, the number of people who can no longer work can't be easily dismissed:
We might not notice because they recovered from an acute infection, but then caught one of many opportunistic viruses, bacteria, and parasites that are resurging now that the general population is no longer robustly healthy. All these graphs show a marked increase at about 2022. Remember when tuberculosis felt like an olden times or third world disease???
"As a virologist, it's chilling but fascinating. We don't even know how much of Long Covid is due to the fact that there's persistence of the virus. So, is Long Covid merely the host response to the virus, the inflammatory response to the virus, or is it the virus itself that is persisting for months or maybe longer than that. So that's still an unresolved question, and it may be different in different patients. The other is the fact that the Covid virus, the SARS-2 virus, has the ability to reactivate other latent viruses that are inside us. . . . If we can get our arms around this it can help understand other viruses that have long term effects. . . . It could help unlock a lot of other long virus syndromes as well as things like fibromyalgia and other long-term consequences."
Because we don't know how it all works, we really need to prevent this. And well-fitting masks work!!!
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Well-fitting N95s reduce transmission by about 95% - even higher if everyone wears them; cleaning the air helps by about 30%, and vaccines reduces hospitalization by 60%. Put together, we could ALL be 99.999% protected from this mess and more! We don't have to get sick every year; it's a choice.
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