Long Covid in the media and social media 2022

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Andy said:
Transcript of a speech given by someone from the Bank of England a week or two ago included this section on the increase of people in the UK not looking for a job due to long-term sickness (my bolding).

The route back to 2% inflation − speech by Michael Saunders

"The workforce has shrunk by 440,000 people (1.3%) since Q4-19, and is 2.5% below the January 2020 forecast (see figure 5). The scale and persistence of this drop in labour supply has been a surprise to many forecasters, including us. The interplay between Brexit and the pandemic has reduced net inward migration (and hence population growth), while participation has fallen markedly (especially among people aged 50-64 years). Since Q4-19, the number of people aged 16-64 years that are outside the workforce and do not want a job has risen by 525,000 (1.3% of the 16-64 age population). This largely reflects increases in long-term sickness (roughly 320,000 people) and retirement (90,000), with smaller contributions from lower participation among students (65-70,000) and short-term sickness (30-35,000 people). The share of the 16-64 population who are outside the workforce and do not want a job because of long-term sickness is a record high, with an especially sharp rise among women (see figure 6). I suspect much of this rise in inactivity due to long-term sickness reflects side effects of the pandemic, for example Long Covidfootnote[3] and the rise in NHS waiting lists."

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/spe...ers-speech-at-the-resolution-foundation-event

Bank of England officials also warned MPs about this reduction in the workforce yesterday.
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Bit more analysis on that:

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And unfortunately, some reporters have gotten the framing of "do not want job because of long-term sickness" and retained only the "do not want jobs" part:

Edit: Reporter apologized

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https://khn.org/news/article/long-covid-symptoms-seniors/

But in many seniors, long covid is difficult to recognize.

“The challenge is that nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, pain, confusion, and increased frailty are things we often see in seriously ill older adults. Or people may think, ‘That’s just part of aging,’” said Dr. Charles Thomas Alexander Semelka, a postdoctoral fellow in geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University.
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The Body Pro Long COVID and Cognitive Dysfunction:Searching for Answers by Terri Wilder

quote:
Wilder: You recently co-authored a piece with Avindra Nath, M.D., from the NIH, who has done work in myalgic encephalomyelitis, often referred to as ME/CFS. Many people with ME/CFS had a viral trigger to the onset of their disease. Are you consulting with ME/CFS clinicians and researchers who have seen this type of cognitive dysfunction for decades?

Spudich: [I gained a lot of] insight through working with Avi. We have another collaborator now at Rutgers who has also had some research experience in that area, and we’re putting together a grant that will be looking at COVID as well as ME/CFS.

But I think most of my insight has actually been gained from talking to community members. Clearly, there is a confluence of some of these symptoms. But I do not want to claim that I’m an expert in that at all. I’m learning. And I certainly understand the relevance of the overlap between these conditions.

The vast experience I’ve now had with long COVID patients makes me extremely sensitive to and empathetic with people who have had ME/CFS all this time and have felt that there hasn’t been concerted effort and focus in this area. That’s been very enlightening. And I think it’s a major opportunity. There’s a lot of resources being thrown into long COVID, but I do not think that it’s only relevant to long COVID. I actually think it’s going to be relevant to a whole variety of inflammatory brain diseases, not otherwise specified—and even going back to HIV.
 
White Paper Patients Diagnosed with Post-COVID Conditions - An Analysis of Private Healthcare Claims Using the Official ICD-10 Diagnostic Code by Fair Health

Summary

Post-COVID conditions, also known by such terms as long COVID and post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, have become an issue of growing national concern. Until recently, researchers were limited by the lack of a specific ICD-10 diagnosis code for post-COVID conditions. Effective October 1, 2021, ICD-10 code U09.9 was introduced for “post COVID-19 condition, unspecified.” This report is among the first to use the U09.9 code for research purposes. Drawing on longitudinal data from FAIR Health’s repository of billions of private healthcare claims, this report studies the population of 78,252 patients in the repository who were diagnosed with the U09.9 code from October 1, 2021, to January 31, 2022. That population is analyzed by COVID-19 hospitalizations, age, gender, number of days from initial COVID-19 diagnosis to last post-COVID diagnosis during the study period, preexisting chronic comorbidities, co-occurring diagnoses and risk scores. Among the key findings:

  • The majority (75.8 percent) of patients diagnosed with a U09.9 post-COVID condition had not been hospitalized for COVID-19.

  • Among patients who presented with a U09.9 post-COVID diagnosis, 81.6 percent of females had not had a COVID-19 hospitalization compared to 67.5 percent of males.

  • The age group 36 to 50 was the most likely to be diagnosed with U09.9 post-COVID conditions; 34.6 percent of patients with that diagnosis were in that age group.

  • Females were more likely than males to be diagnosed with U09.9 post-COVID conditions. Females made up 59.8 percent of the population of patients with that diagnosis, while males made up 40.2 percent. By comparison, within the cohort of people diagnosed with COVID-19 in the FAIR Health repository, 53.8 percent of patients were female and 46.2 percent were male.

  • Of patients who presented with a U09.9 post-COVID condition, 30.7 percent had no identified preexisting chronic comorbidities.

  • The three diagnoses most commonly co-occurring on the same claim line with the U09.9 post- COVID diagnosis in patients across all ages and genders were abnormalities of breathing (23.2 percent of patients with post-COVID conditions), cough (18.9 percent) and malaise and fatigue (16.7 percent).

  • In patients with a U09.9 post-COVID diagnosis, certain co-occurring diagnoses were more common in some age groups than across all age groups: for example, multisystem inflammatory syndrome in patients aged 0 to 12; abnormalities of heartbeat in the age group 13 to 22; generalized anxiety disorder in patients aged 23 to 35; and hypertensive diseases in the age group 65 and older.

  • “Other and unspecified myopathies” (diseases that affect the muscles that control voluntary movement) occurred in patients in the post-COVID population 11.1 times more often than in the same population prior to COVID-19. Pulmonary embolism occurred 2.6 times more often. “Other disorders of brain,” including post-viral fatigue syndrome and certain forms of encephalopathy, occurred two times more often.

  • On average, in all age groups, patients with a U09.9 post-COVID condition had higher Department of Health & Human Services-Hierarchical Condition Category (HHS-HCC) risk scores after their diagnosis of COVID-19 than before. HHS-HCC risk scores identify which patients are likely to consume more healthcare resources and potentially incur more healthcare-related costs in the long run.
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ETA: Summary on twitter by Hannah Davis







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I'm pretty sure the 75% is an undercount. I still see a huge trend in LC forums where most have no formal diagnosis, their PCP simply refuse to use it. They'll have generic mental labels like depression or anxiety. So at best it's a study of physicians' use of that diagnostic code, whether it's accurate and comprehensive or not, impossible to tell.
 
MarketWatch 'This isn't just gonna go away': Long COVID is crashing the retirement hopes of many Americans

quotes:
“As a chronically ill and disabled person, I don’t have retirement plans,” said Davids. He was already living with several chronic diseases, including myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), before developing long COVID in 2020.

“I don’t have the capacity to save or invest like many people of my class background do,” he explained. “If people are significantly chronically ill, that is your job. Because if your job is to stay healthy and alive, then it really is a full-time job a lot of the time.”

...

Dr. David Putrino, who works at the Mount Sinai Center for Post-COVID Care in New York City, said the government needs to enforce long COVID support. For Putrino, the current situation with long COVID is reminiscent of the years it took for companies to obey the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1973, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in employment, and access to state and local government programs and services. He believes there are millions of long haulers in the U.S. unable to work who need care, and they’re getting stuck with large bills because their insurers are refusing to pay, compounding their problems. The financial and retirement ramifications for individuals and the nation are bleak, Putrino added.
 
So the UKHSA asked a prominent pandemic, and LC, minimizer to talk about Long Covid in children, who is also the clinical lead for Covid in children. Cool. Cool cool cool.

There's also a huge infectious disease conference happening soon that invited 2 prominent LC deniers and general pandemic minimizers. Awesome.

 
Article (paywalled) in The Times (London) on how longitudinal studies are being used to look at Long Covid.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/twins-help-solve-long-covid-mystery-nr268jpw0

Over the next year, working with his colleague Dr Chloe Park, Hughes will analyse 800 people from those studies — comparing those with and without long Covid and without infection entirely. Separately, more than 30,000 people in the studies will have their records analysed and checked against antibody tests. The study has already found that risk of long Covid is associated with being female, overweight and mental health problems. It, like the virus, is stratified, affecting 1.2 per cent of 20-year-olds but 4.8 per cent of 60-year-olds. As to the ultimate prognosis — for patients, long Covid and the country — that will only come with time.
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Mij said:
Québec ME/CFS patients deserve access to new long-Covid clinics, advocates say.

The network of clinics will focus on long COVID and Lyme disease, but not myalgic encephalomyelitis, leaving patients with the complex illness feeling forgotten again.


https://montrealgazette.com/news/lo...ccess-to-new-long-covid-clinics-advocates-say

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I had to laugh at that. Typical. I'm not going to bother frankly, I'm done with hoping it won't be massively disappointing, it always is. I don't have the energy to tell them every wrong thing they'll do, will leave this to LC whipper-snappers.
 
Jaybee00 said:
What We Know About Long Covid So Far--NYT

Not a very good article

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/21/...73MoH-c2TlazTLJskKo6WlEdzUpeMk&smid=url-share
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Like we're still at day 1. Nothing learned at all that we didn't know for a long time. Hell, like we're still in the 1980's.

The only difference it that it all isn't almost universally dismissed as silly nonsense, just mostly misrepresented and with bits of BPS pseudoscience here and there (also all there is behind the scenes, but the public doesn't see that). But otherwise there has been absolutely no progress that would count above mediocre and minimal. Entire new industries will spring up and mature by the time a single step of progress can be made.

I don't get the infinite tolerance for failure. It's not normal to dig the same hole endlessly and never find any fault to the process, or the outcome. Does medicine have no self-efficacy? They have to be compelled, cajoled into putting enough effort to make a difference? Given incentives? Prizes? Riches? Wealth beyond their wildest dreams? It's like there is simply no self-motivation to do anything.
 
Long Covid? Don’t fall for quick-fix ‘cures’! Private clinics are marketing a range of therapies including supplements to help tackle the condition

Blood cleaning, brain-stimulating massages, electromagnetic energy zaps, vitamin cocktails or even having your cells’ energy ‘boosted’.

These are just some of the costly ‘treatments’ being touted by clinics in the UK and abroad that promise to treat long Covid.

Latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that 1.7 million people in the UK report having long Covid — defined as symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath and brain fog that last for at least two months.

Around half say their symptoms have lasted for a year or more.

In response, private clinics are marketing a range of therapies to tackle long Covid.

However, experts say these have no scientifically accepted proof of effectiveness (even the NHS’s long Covid services are providing unproven therapies).

Yet several private UK clinics are offering intravenous drip treatments with cocktails of supplements said to help with recovery.

For instance, the private London Clinic of Nutrition, is marketing an ‘intravenous (IV) nutrient therapy’ for long Covid, as well as ‘high-quality supplements’ and ‘bespoke herbal formulas’.

Dr David Strain, a senior clinical lecturer at Exeter University Medical School, is also working to find new ways to diagnose and treat long Covid.

He warns: ‘These private clinics have popped up because at the moment no one knows what the proper treatment is. But if you see a clinic that offers to cure your long Covid, then they are lying.’

‘No one can offer a cure for long Covid because we don’t even know what long Covid is doing to people yet — let alone how we can fix it.’
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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10846665/Long-Covid-Dont-fall-quick-fix-cures.html
 
Long Covid? Don’t fall for quick-fix ‘cures’! Private clinics are marketing a range of therapies including supplements to help tackle the condition
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The above article (perhaps inadvertently) makes a good point:

Which brings us to the question: what is the NHS offering? The UK has more than 80 specialist NHS long Covid clinics that take referrals from GPs and are staffed with doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists and mental health professionals.

And while much of what they offer (such as physiotherapy) may have been proven for other conditions, none has been the subject of a major trial for long Covid.
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It's a bit rich for the medical establishment to warn patients about trying untested, quacky quick-fix cures when they are also offering untried, untested treatments (such as physiotherapy, singing therapy, mindfulness) themselves.
 
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