Dr McCroary: I'm here as a GP from south-west Sydney. I chair the New South Wales AMA Council of General Practice and I'm also on the council of the RACGP NSW and ACT, representing the south-west of Sydney and I'm on their expert committee in quality care. I chair Sydney South West GP Link the amalgamated Divisions for General Practice in our region, and I have a significant interest in long COVID as I'm the GP lead on our multidisciplinary south-west Sydney working group on long COVID. I'm also currently the acting chair for the New South Wales community of practice for general practice COVID
...
I'd like to start by mentioning a letter I got from a patient just recently, complaining of debilitating fatigue, brain fog, shortness of breath, lack of smell, unrelenting joint and muscle pain, difficulty sleeping, difficulty doing everyday activities and difficulty participating in society in general. There were also more significant symptoms: sick sinus syndrome, requiring a pacemaker insertion; loss of peripheral vision; debilitating headaches; and nephrotic syndrome. Now, this person has all the signs and symptoms of long COVID, but her complaints have been present for about 15 years now. She's one of the many, many people that we deal with in general practice, and have been dealing with for decades, suffering from other post-viral syndromes: fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndromes and a host of other autoimmune diseases.
I just thought I'd read that one to begin with to try and explain that long COVID, and the symptoms and sequelae of COVID, are not new to general practice. We've been dealing with this sort of thing for a long time. However, at the moment we're giving a lot more attention to it because of the significant numbers we're going to be seeing, and my major theme today is trying to decrease the numbers of long COVID we're going to be seeing and also put in place structures that will help us manage them.