But isn't it that as well?
I am now three weeks from starting Covid-19 (second bout). I am probably 2 weeks from severe symptoms and a week from mild/moderate. There is no way that I would see any reason to undertake an exercise program. I have been doing odds and ends of things that I might normally have done but stopping whenever I think it might be wise judging by how I feel at the time (and also how bad I felt the time before I tired it). My impression is that the post-viral zonkness that I am still very aware of is not so very different from ME. If I do a lot I pay for it later. I am sure ME is something more (I do not have any sensitivity to stimuli although I did when the virus first hit) but the basic pattern is there.
Why on earth would someone in my situation want to exercise?
I am not a couch potato. The week before getting Covid I skied the Ventina run at Cervinia at maximum safe speed - 10-15 Km long non-stop and significantly ahead of some people thirty years younger. I enjoy exercise but I do not do it as a penance. There is absolutely no need to go out and do anything for a couple of months after a bout of illness like Covid. If people want to then let them see how they get on if they feel completely well.
It's nuts.
Take yourself back in time for any job you needed a sick note from a doctor to give to your employer pre-Covid.
you are so right @ukxmrv "get out in the fresh air!" you've got my GP, in fact every GP i ever seen, down to a tee there. Which does feel very cruel when you'd love nothing more than to do so but cant.It is nuts but the advice to get back to work and exercise has been a consistent feature after any viral attack I have had in the past 35 years. Really sorry that you are on your second bout of Covid. It's horrid stuff.
Take yourself back in time for any job you needed a sick note from a doctor to give to your employer pre-Covid. Once your temperature went down (in my experience) then the GP would expect you to have recovered and that meant back to work.
There was no concept when I saw GP's in the 1980s/90's and 2000's of an acute viral illness and caused long term sickness and an inability to do one's job for more than a week or two and never came back. Once my temperatures came down to a standard normal (rather then my normal low) that was it. End of the problem for the GP. If one was feeling to weak or was fainting or exhausted or unable to think / whatever the cure was to get out in the fresh air and go back to work.
If the viral symptoms kept coming back with regular bouts every few weeks of tonsils, swollen glands. high temperatures and delirium that was just some sort of coincidence or bad luck. No such condition existed in the GP's mind. The patient was "just picking up different bugs" and had become "run down" and needed to get out walking in the fresh air more.
If it persisted it was depression. Even of the symptoms were mainly viral.
well then its possible i have a 20yr long 'post infectious syndrome', because what Jonathan describes is how it is for me. Its like having had a bad bout of flu, getting to wk 2/3 and feeling improved, but if i do anything, any mental or physical exertion, then, after a delay, i pay for it & it's like going back to week 1 with full on flu again. Other symptoms developed on top of that - the 'something more' JE refers to - but i agree its the 'basic pattern'.
Its so hard, i think we can all agree that PEM is a lot more than 'post exertional fatigue', but beyond that it seems for many of us our experiences have a wide variation.