Is long COVID the next global health crisis? 2022, Faghy et al.

Many ME patients anticipated this might be the case. Data is growing that LC is becoming more prevalent. If this data is right, and if all the LC patients have ME (unlikely but I cannot rule it out) then its currently roughly five times the number of the previous ME population. Even if only half have ME it triples the prior numbers of ME patients. This is how more than a century of neglect bites the world that hoped it would all go away.

If LC is not ME, and something new or a bit different, we cannot be sure we understand the natural recovery rate, and still need more data. Otherwise if it is indeed ME than the prognosis is dire, and the world may be facing a growing disability crisis. At some point the naysayers will not be able to ignore it any more, and those pushing bogus therapies, like CBT/GET etc., will be exposed though they will most likely just redefine their definitions and claims yet again.

Point two, however, that new variants will increase LC, is speculation. Its probably right, but if Covid mutates enough it might not create so much LC. The flip side of this is disturbing however, as new variants might instead be more capable of inducing LC.

 

If we take an approximate figure of seven million deaths from Covid globally, then it looks like for every person who dies twenty have long term health issues.

 

I get the feeling 144 million is a bit of an under estimate. Prevalence is varying enormously in the world from 1% to nearly 10% and that just can not be the case. I think the historical societal lense of prejudice is impacting the estimate, even the ONS had significant problems with this in its hired contractors and I bet that is a varying world wide problem that is impacting the numbers.

 

If there is such a change, though, it may eventually reveal something about what flips the switch to trigger post-viral illness.

Not that that's much comfort to patients or to society at large, as unless serendipity steps in, unpicking it still looks like many years of work!

 

How PEM evolves over the years would also be a significant finding. My first PEM experience was very different during the five years of PVFS.

Exercise and immune modulating meds relapse made PEM worse.

 

Hardly garners confidence when the first reference: "The latest data highlight that vaccines only offer a 15% reduction against developing long COVID and a 34% reduction in the risk of mortality [1]."
= SARS-CoV-2 Vaccines is from February 2021. Multiple papers since provide a very difference picture e.g https://www.s4me.info/threads/preva...toms-among-us-adults-perlis-et-al-2022.30192/

and statements like "While data sets remain infrequent, >144 million people globally are living with multi-dimensional and episodic symptoms that broadly impact functional status and quality of life[11]" based on a reference that reads "We estimated that 144.7 million (54.7–312.6) cases globally in 2020 and 2021 suffered from one or more of three common symptom clusters of long COVID." borders on being grossly misleading - an estimate in one paper does not equal a 'fact'. https://www.s4me.info/threads/prepr...n-2020-and-2021-2022-wulf-hansen-et-al.28006/

 

Is the flood after a huge storm a different natural disaster than the storm itself? Of course not, that's silly.

The right way to frame this as a separate-but-connected crisis would be the huge neglected crisis of chronic illness, which is relevant in COVID but indeed a separate issue, a global health crisis, and one that has been neglected for many decades, with disastrous outcomes for millions.

Because otherwise Long Covid is the same crisis as COVID, it's just that there were multiple similarly-neglected crises already, of which Long Covid is only the latest.

It's an ongoing health crisis. Nothing next about it. In fact it literally dates back many decades, centuries if we're going to be pedantic about it. But all this talk about an upcoming crisis or a looming disaster serves is to keep the pretense that it's a concern for the future, rather than a decades-old crisis of negligence and ideological systemic failure that is ongoing and where the negligence only compounds the harm.

Also because it has to be said: we told you so, literally thousands, probably tens of thousands, told you so, at a detailed level that is frankly unique in how accurate it ended up being, right up to the complete mismanagement by the medical profession.

Everyone in a position of authority ignored this crisis, including every single medical and public health institution in the world. And yet many thousands of complete amateurs predicted it, millions of amateurs understood it quickly out of lived experience, and the medical profession is still leagues deep up their own ass over it, refuses to do anything, which is the real ongoing crisis dating back decades.

 

Blurb on Leonardi

https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2022/11...ce=daily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=071122