Long Covid in the media and social media 2022

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them Long COVID is More Common in Bisexual and Trans People. The Reasons Why Are Complicated

quotes:

In a world where transgender people are more likely to live with chronic illness in the first place, this may not seem so surprising. “Of course [trans people] have higher rates of long COVID,” says JD Davids, co-founder of the advocacy and policy group The Network for Long COVID Justice. “We have lower rates of being treated as humans. People who are denied access to health care, resources, or bodily safety are at higher risk of ill health outcomes, including this massive disabling event known as long COVID.” Davids has lived with long COVID since March 2021, and has also lived for decades with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), a similarly debilitating condition.

...

Ultimately, despite the groundbreaking research of many scientists and the observations of activists and advocates, there has been a sluggish response from the U.S. government to treat long COVID with the same urgency as they developed vaccines. #MEAction, which advocates for people living with ME and their caregivers, has also called upon the Biden administration to incorporate feedback from people most affected by chronic illness when making plans to address it. “The government’s forthcoming action plan must make a complete break with the decades-long pattern of neglect and marginalization of the ‘millions missing’ who are living with complex chronic illness,” the organization’s U.S. advocacy director Ben HsuBorger said in a statement.
 
Has COVID-19 caused an increase in [UK] Income Protection claims?

"The financial value of Covid claims paid to date is small relative to the value of claims otherwise paid by Income Protection insurers. Most Covid claims have arisen on policies with short waiting periods and most of the people claiming have returned to work rapidly.

There is little evidence of increases in premiums resulting from Covid.

The insured population is not representative of the general population. It is certainty plausible that in the general population there is higher prevalence of Long Covid that is severe enough to affect ability to work.

But for the hundreds of people who have received insurance benefits to date, the money and other support services will have relieved some of the worry that comes with suffering from Covid-related health issues."

https://covidactuaries.org/2022/07/26/has-covid-19-caused-an-increase-in-income-protection-claims/

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Which all assumes that the insurers are 'playing fair' with any claim that gets submitted to them. Claims paid is not necessarily equal to claims made.
 
"The majority of long-COVID patients suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease entity very similar to ME/CFS"

From:
Long COVID and the cardiovascular system – elucidating causes and cellular mechanisms in order to develop targeted diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. A joint Scientific Statement of the ESC Working Groups on Cellular Biology of the Heart and Myocardial & Pericardial Diseases

From:
https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cvr/cvac115/6649450

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Tom Kindlon said:
"The majority of long-COVID patients suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease entity very similar to ME/CFS"

From:
Long COVID and the cardiovascular system – elucidating causes and cellular mechanisms in order to develop targeted diagnostic and therapeutic strategies. A joint Scientific Statement of the ESC Working Groups on Cellular Biology of the Heart and Myocardial & Pericardial Diseases

From:
https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cvr/cvac115/6649450
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Thread here, Long COVID and the cardiovascular system – elucidating causes and cellular mechanisms in order to (...), 2022, Gyöngyösi et al
 
mango said:
Swedish columnist Kjöller is back again, speculating about "cultural illnesses", social contagion and mass hysteria. Lots of people in the comments are praising her for being "so brave", "for having the courage" to write about this :grumpy: (ME is not mentioned, this time.)

Hanne Kjöller: Samma symtom har i olika tider fått olika namn – nu talar vi om postcovid (Paywalled)
https://www.dn.se/ledare/hanne-kjol...der-fatt-olika-namn-nu-talar-vi-om-postcovid/

She comments on the so called "Bua illness" in the 1980s, when a lot of young people -- mostly school girls -- in a Swedish town were suffering from hip pain. Kjöller sees that as a case of cultural illness/mass hysteria, and draws parallells to long covid. She claims that the statistics on the number of children treated for long covid at specialist clinics in certain geographical areas compared to the number of children treated in primary care settings confirms that there is social contagion.
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An opinion piece published today, commenting on Kjöller's most recent opinion piece.

Elsa Kugelberg: Vi vill gå vidare, men lidandet för dem med postcovid kan inte viftas bort
https://www.dn.se/kultur/elsa-kugel...t-for-dem-med-postcovid-kan-inte-viftas-bort/
Auto-translate said:
Elsa Kugelberg: We want to move on, but the suffering of those with post-covid cannot be waved away

Public interest in a disease can wane quickly. Many long for more entertaining stories and some question the ongoing suffering. But post-infectious conditions are hardly unique to covid-19, writes Elsa Kugelberg. [...]

Nearly 40,000 Swedes are said to suffer from post-covid: a condition in which the symptoms of a covid infection do not go away, or new ones appear. Last week, the WHO reminded us that every reinfection puts you at risk of postcovid, and as part of an ambitious effort, the US National Institutes of Health is spending $1.2 billion on a giant study to investigate its causes and effects.

At the same time, some of the things that drive us to forget and move on are already visible in our time. Often it is precisely the post-covid patients, whose ongoing suffering makes it particularly difficult to brush aside the pandemic, who are called into question.

DN's Hanne Kjöller has repeatedly described the diagnosis as an expression of the unwillingness of good girls to accept the torments of human life, a modern-day allergy to electricity. Why post-covid should have less in common with the other post-infectious conditions than with this type of transient cultural disease, we will never know.

Last week Kjöller made a point of the fact that the care provided at specialist clinics for postcovid is in demand (DN 21/7). That suggests that many people have postcovid, right? But no - Kjöller has looked at regions that lack such specialist clinics. There she sees no increased queues, despite the fact that primary care receives everyone, including those with postcovid.

And? Perhaps people see no point in queuing at a primary care clinic that often has been described in the media as being perplexed and heavily overladen, while a specialist clinic is expected to have cutting-edge knowledge in its field.

Who knows. In any case, Kjöller's methodology is strange: a glance at a few data points for care-seekers is the basis for wild speculation - contrary to the body of expertise - about whether postcovid is even a serious problem. As opposed to large, serious studies, an approach wholly lacking in wisdom and caution.
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Hutan said:
But he thinks Long Covid is associated with more severe acute disease, and so the risk will decrease as variants and vaccinations and treatments decrease the incidence of severe acute disease. Again, it's bad Long Covid research that includes the problems caused by severe disease like lung damage as symptoms of Long Covid. Actually, there is quite a lot of evidence suggesting the risk of Long Covid (= ME/CFS) is not related to the severity of the acute disease. Health Nerd is saying what people want to be true, because then young active healthy people don't have to feel at risk and can continue to expose themselves to repeated infections.
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I've seen this argument so many times I want to scream.
LarsSG said:
It's a really unfortunate dynamic and it's only getting worse with the constant flow of poorly-designed studies based on very broad definitions of Long Covid (and of course increasing polarization between those who are still trying to avoid Covid and those who aren't).
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Lately I have been thinking how differently we handle bad quality research based on what it is about. Take masks, the argument that they don't work in the real world because people don't use them right is common. With nutrition we continue to talk about the benefits of healthy eating despite the real world data that says people are not following dietary guidelines anyway. We have dietary guidelines for a number of illnesses, but very few controlled studies that show they work in any meaningful way. Sure someone will argue that nutrition (and lifestyle advice in general) is rubbish, but it's still an important part of public health work.

Tom Kindlon said:
"The majority of long-COVID patients suffer from chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease entity very similar to ME/CFS"
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So no longer "chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis"? :rofl:
 
Bronze John updated to Yellow Fever
Black Dog updated to Depression
Domestic Malady updated to depression or another sort of emotional breakdown
Jail Fever updated to Typhus
Change of Life updated to puberty or menopause
The Shakes updated to Parkinson's Disease

Imagine all the possibilities :emoji_rolling_eyes:
 
Mij said:
Bronze John updated to Yellow Fever
Black Dog updated to Depression
Domestic Malady updated to depression or another sort of emotional breakdown
Jail Fever updated to Typhus
Change of Life updated to puberty or menopause
The Shakes updated to Parkinson's Disease

Imagine all the possibilities :emoji_rolling_eyes:
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Now that you mention it there was an opinion piece from a GP here in Norway recently about how in some litterature relevant for medical professionals diabetes types II is still called "old man's diabetes" while type I is referred to as what occurs in children. This causes problems when people mistakenly believe someone has type I or II based on their age alone.
 
Midnattsol said:
Lately I have been thinking how differently we handle bad quality research based on what it is about. Take masks, the argument that they don't work in the real world because people don't use them right is common. With nutrition we continue to talk about the benefits of healthy eating despite the real world data that says people are not following dietary guidelines anyway. We have dietary guidelines for a number of illnesses, but very few controlled studies that show they work in any meaningful way. Sure someone will argue that nutrition (and lifestyle advice in general) is rubbish, but it's still an important part of public health work.
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Bit random because I just saw a similar discussion, but this is a flaw in human nature, and it's that different disciplines handle it better than some depending on how rigorous they are, medicine probably the worst of all. It depends on biases and incentives, whether getting things right even matters, whether it's easy to assess after the fact.

There's been a lot of discussion lately on social media over the SSRI hypothesis, and I can't help but see that in response to a major error being corrected, most people default to doing the same thing. All over all I see is people basically rolling their eyes at how obvious it is that all of this is caused by lifestyle choices, by not eating well and not exercising enough.

For which the evidence is just as poor as the serotonin hypothesis. It's too easy to ascribe failure to not doing something basic right. The answer is so damn easy, so basic, it's so evident and everyone is basically guilty of not doing simple things right. The main consequence of this is that being guilty of doing simple things wrong obviously has a simple fix: you. You are doing it wrong. So just do it right. Right? Poor? Make more money. Sick? Don't be sick. Exhausted? Just stop being exhausted and move. Discriminated? Don't be discriminated. It's so simple a child could think of it. Literally, it's childish thinking after all.

This isn't just the general public, because medicine, surprise, comes from the general public as well. They represent the whole population and culture, more or less. We see generally the same over Covid's shortness of breath, and how the immediate default, and somehow going strong, was that the obvious answer to people not being able to breathe right... is that they aren't breathing right. Duh. Your breathing patterns are just wrong. You are literally breathing wrong, unlike people who breathe right and have no breathing problems. Idiot.

The same with us and the generic MUS model of thinking too much. Or too little. Or wrong. Essentially though, we're thinking wrong. And not moving right. All simple things that a child does naturally, and we kind of just "forgot" how to do it right, I guess.

Medicine is every bit as guilty of this as any random person. It comes from the same place, from having lived 99% of our species' existence without the knowledge that there is such a thing as actual knowledge. Science is very unnatural to us and it's simply too easy to fall back to our default algorithm of blaming vague shadows out there, somewhere.
 
This is a good article by Marie-Claire Seeley from The Australian POTS Foundation:

Long COVID should make us rethink disability – and the way we offer support to those with ‘invisible conditions’
From the outset, long-COVID sufferers faced the same prejudice experienced by patients before them who sought assistance through Centrelink and the National Disability Insurance Scheme for the effects of post-infection conditions.
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Long COVID is not a new phenomenon. Various post-infection illnesses have been documented in medical literature for decades.

And such conditions bear a striking resemblance to each other. First, an individual is knowingly (or unknowingly) exposed to a pathogen (a virus, bacterium or other microorganism). An acute illness of varying degrees of severity ensues before a partial or complete recovery. But following “recovery”, a broad range of symptoms emerge. And these lead to functional decline. In other words, they stop the sufferer from doing the daily activities they would normally be able to do.

Two of these conditions, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome, appear closely related. And their symptoms look a lot like long COVID too. Both seem to affect more women than men and additional immune problems are often present.
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The burden of these systemic failings now weighs heavy on a society faced with a worldwide tsunami of post-COVID conditions. And it goes some way to explaining the collective shrugging of shoulders by health authorities when it comes to providing answers for sufferers.
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Andy said:
Opinion piece in the UK's Financial Times: Covid’s chronic effects loom increasingly large

"The chief concern is now long Covid. This condition frequently draws sceptical responses due to its oft-changing clinical definition and the difficulties in teasing it apart from other underlying health issues, but there is mounting evidence of a very real phenomenon.

...

If an uptick in self-reported brain fog still doesn’t pass muster for you, then perhaps an uptick in self-reported dropping out of the workforce might. The above trends are echoed by labour market data on both sides of the Atlantic, which show marked increases in the number of people either absent from work, cutting their hours or exiting the labour force entirely due to ill health.

In the UK, 1.8mn people were out of work and not looking for a job due to illness in the three months ending April 2022, up by 269,000 or 17 per cent since the start of the pandemic. In the US, 1.35mn people were absent from work due to illness in May 2022, up 44 per cent on the pre-pandemic average for the same month, while 2.2mn had shifted from full-time to part-time work due to illness, a 37 per cent rise. The number outside the labour force who have a disability has jumped by 800,000 since the pandemic began, accounting for one-fifth of the 4mn labour force dropouts over this period."

https://www.ft.com/content/63dcc4d1-8b53-4110-bd44-10e3d1d98585
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This early on, changes in working patterns will very much be an underestimate. Some with mild conditions will manage by severely curtailing their other activities to stay in full time work. Some will succeed in this struggle to continue working but others in the next few years will recognise the struggle is futile.

I did not go part time at work until after some four or five years, and then I was only forced to finally take ill health retirement some four or five years after that. This included a final six months of sick leave, before the retirement was agreed.

[for some mysterious reason I managed to publish this post before I had written the content, so edited to include my actual post.]
 
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From our national public broadcaster. Message seems to be slowly getting out in Australia that this a long haul health problem.

It is a more general article that discusses a wide range of issues, including the long term consequences of repeat reinfection, but not Long Covid specifically (IIRC), and also possible universal (all variants) Covid vaccines.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07...s-universal-booster-stop-the-spread/101284428
 
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