Long Covid in the media and social media 2022

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Kalliope said:
Missoulian Missed risk: Long COVID threat extends far beyond pandemic

The article is available as audio version as well.

quote:

In January, the journal Infection Control Today compiled other research forecasting more than 8 million Americans would develop long COVID. That’s at least three times the number of people currently diagnosed with ME/CFS (pre-COVID). The journal quoted #MEACTION editor Adriane Tilman feeling unsurprised.

“Long COVID is not a new phenomenon — there are millions of Americans who got sick with a virus and never recovered before the pandemic, and developed ME/CFS,” Tilman told ICT. “The only difference is that we are seeing this happen now in real time on a massive scale.”

That scale may envelop the ME/CFS community itself. In the same article, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Director Walter Koroshetz said that in the past cases of ME/CFS developed out of a post-infectious illness: “(The) only difference here is that we know what virus is driving it in large numbers of persons.”

The ME/CFS community started raising alarms about the potential for chronic fatigue after-effects in May 2020 — two months after pandemic lockdowns started in the United States. They already had decades of research linking viral infections with the secondary health impacts.

“Coronavirus leading to more cases of ME will happen for sure, unfortunately,” Dr. Alain Moreau of Université de Montréal wrote in the 2020 advisory. “We need to be ready for the next wave.”
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I liked this description of the dangers of feeling a bit better in ME/CFS:

And for an inanimate disease, it seems to have a vindictive personality. Most ME/CFS sufferers will start feeling better, take a longer daily walk or talk to a few more friends, and 24 hours later get flattened so hard they can’t lift a fork of dinner to their mouths. The process has a name: post-exertional malaise or PEM. Teasdale can feel it coming on after an interview runs over 90 minutes. His wife says he “looks PEM-y.”

PEM reactions worry Teasdale most when he hears about others trying to shake off long COVID. The temptation to get your life back, to apply positive thinking and goal-setting, often on doctors’ advice, results in a viral bait-and-switch, like accidentally throwing a bucket of gas on a fire when you thought you grabbed water.

That feeling of your body perking up like a cell phone with 1% left on its battery — flaring to life then fading to black before anything can get done — has rearranged Teasdale’s relationship with hope.

“We don’t traffic in hope here,” Teasdale said. “Because hope hurts. Hope is actually the thing that causes me the most pain, when it doesn’t work out. So you know, I can have all the positive thoughts in the world I want. But the reality is there’s something going on inside my body. Whether it’s something with my mitochondria, whether it’s vestiges of the virus in my organs, or brain, we don’t know. But it’s neurological. It’s cardiovascular. It’s pulmonary. And positive thinking doesn’t change that.”

Twitter thread:
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Thanks for posting that Tom. I agree that's a brilliant desription of the results of goal setting, positive thinking and all the other crap that gets thrown at us. 'Hope hurts' - so true. The purveyors of toxic positivity just don't get it.
 
rvallee said:
So I call total BS on any study that finds high levels here. This may be the most universal patterns out there, there is no chance they asked the right questions to the right people and got this answer. This is what pseudoscience is all about: asking the wrong questions and being unable to process it.
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The data is definitely and obviously bad. It's not even an asking the wrong questions, it's just bad data collection and bad calculations. I'm in touch with the author and the editor to try to get this fixed.
 
The stubborn refusal of every medical and public health institution to adequately warn about Long Covid will be a black mark on the medical profession for decades. It's entirely out of 19th century beliefs about "mass hysteria", one of the weirdest examples of tradition being the tyranny of dead people.

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How long COVID is cutting HCP careers short
https://www.mdlinx.com/article/how-long-covid-is-cutting-hcp-careers-short/4vUi7sSC46SyMMBuJekQ8D

  • Individuals with long COVID may deal with symptoms ranging from fatigue, slurred speech, and vertigo to digestive difficulties, autoimmune conditions, and depression.
  • Some HCPs with long COVID have experienced medical gaslighting based on sex and race.
  • Doctors with long COVID who plan on returning to work can do so gradually, but this may require support from colleagues and managers.
 
The German health minister regularly tweets and speaks about Long Covid. Yet the German government is doing absolutely nothing substantial about it. So what is the explanation here? Is he all wind? Or else what is blocking any effort whatsoever when the health minister keeps talking about doing something but the entire health ministry appears locked in denial, probably deferring to the strong tradition of psychosomatic medicine in German healthcare.

Although he often talks about prevention, rarely about actually doing something for those already ill. Can't remember even once, although my memory is unreliable and I may have missed it.

Prof. Karl Lauterbach on Twitter: "LongCovid prevention must be part of our autumn strategy."
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rvallee said:
One of the most universal patterns I see in pwLC is that alcohol is a massive trigger. I'd say about 99:1 discussion is some form of how a few sips of alcohol sent them on a massive relapse, how important it is to avoid it because of how reliable it is at making symptoms worse.

So I call total BS on any study that finds high levels here. This may be the most universal patterns out there, there is no chance they asked the right questions to the right people and got this answer. This is what pseudoscience is all about: asking the wrong questions and being unable to process it.
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I've not seen things like this from ME patients:



Surprising.
 
Not specifically about Long Covid but it is a fairly obvious sub-text (in my opinion).

Wizz Air boss sparks backlash over fatigue request

"Wizz Air is facing a backlash from pilot unions after the airline's boss appeared to call on crew to work through fatigue.

Chief executive Jozsef Varadi said staff should go "the extra mile" when tired so that the airline could avoid cancelling flights."

....

"On Wednesday Mr Varadi told workers: "Now that everyone is getting back into work, I understand that fatigue is a potential outcome of the issues but once we are starting stabilising the rosters, we also need to take down the fatigue rate.

"I mean, we cannot run this business when every fifth person of a base reports sickness because the person is fatigued. We are all fatigued but sometimes it is required to take the extra mile."

Mr Varadi added, "The damage is huge when we are cancelling the flights, it's huge. It is reputational damage of the brand and it is the other financial damage, transactional damage because we have to pay compensation for that.""

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61741139
 
Psychiatric Times: Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Complications of COVID-19

This is another article about the 2022 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, this time about Avindra Nath's presentation:

Nath explained that individuals who develop COVID-19 can be divided into 2 groups: (1) those who have very severe symptoms at the time of COVID-19 onset, but then gradually improve, and (2) those who have mild symptoms at onset or even improve for a while, but then develop new symptoms weeks or months later.

“If you look at patients acutely and they have lots of symptoms, over 3 to 5 months, many will get better, but some will not. And if they don’t get better by then, chances are they won’t,” Nath said.

(...)

“First onset of major depressive illness, anxiety, or psychosis [with none] in the past history is directly related to this infection,” Nath added, also noting that some symptoms of long COVID overlap with symptoms of other diseases such as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), Gulf War illness, and post Lyme disease syndrome. “It’s quite possible that all of these are related to one another,” Nath said. “It’s just that the event that precipitated them may be somewhat different.”

In order to learn more about what happens to the brain during and following COVID-19 infection, Nath shared that he and colleagues analyzed the brains of individuals who had died of COVID-19 in MRIs. They found, in part, that perivascular fibrinogen leakage indicated vascular injury, and that platelets were activated and formed clots in small blood vessels.

Based on this and additional neurological and neuropsychiatric research, Nath suggested that future directions should include more clinical trials involving immunomodulatory agents and more research involving biomarkers for neuronal injury (NfL, pNfH, GFAP, SNAP-25), vascular injury (sICAM, VEGF, P-selectin, E-selectin, MMP-3, antibodies to ACE2), and immune activation.​
 
Andy said:
"I mean, we cannot run this [airline] when every fifth person of a base reports sickness because the person is fatigued. We are all fatigued but sometimes it is required to take the extra mile."
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This major deficiency of language, with its associated failure to communicate and understand pathological fatigue, as distinct from the normal feeling of physiological tiredness, represents a huge risk.

The Germanwings disaster resulted in the deaths of all onboard (144 pax/6 crew). The cause was found to be pilot suicide (/murder). The co-pilot deemed responsible had been 'treated' for a psychosomatic illness with anti-depressants. Pictures would suggest he was previously fit and healthy.

For years, Lubitz had frequently been unable to sleep because of what he believed were vision problems; he consulted over 40 doctors and feared he was going blind.
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Clearly he should not have been flying. However, he tried to get help for his symptoms from 40 doctors over some years. The poor man tried very hard to get expert help. There's every chance he actually had a chronic postviral or related neurological condition. Yet the medical and commercial systems failed him and he will probably be considered as a monster that killed 149 people, while the blame might actually lie in a very different location.

There is a high chance of unfortunate second order effects.
 
Andy said:
Not specifically about Long Covid but it is a fairly obvious sub-text (in my opinion).

Wizz Air boss sparks backlash over fatigue request

"Wizz Air is facing a backlash from pilot unions after the airline's boss appeared to call on crew to work through fatigue.

Chief executive Jozsef Varadi said staff should go "the extra mile" when tired so that the airline could avoid cancelling flights."

....

"On Wednesday Mr Varadi told workers: "Now that everyone is getting back into work, I understand that fatigue is a potential outcome of the issues but once we are starting stabilising the rosters, we also need to take down the fatigue rate.

"I mean, we cannot run this business when every fifth person of a base reports sickness because the person is fatigued. We are all fatigued but sometimes it is required to take the extra mile."

Mr Varadi added, "The damage is huge when we are cancelling the flights, it's huge. It is reputational damage of the brand and it is the other financial damage, transactional damage because we have to pay compensation for that.""

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61741139
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Incredible how just the poor language used by professionals is causing so much confusion and failure. This is just like the famous failure of a Mars lander that crashed because one team used metric and another used imperial, except it's routine, it happens every day, it's considered normal and good and is impossible to reform. You point out the issue and damn it people just keep looking at your finger instead of what it's pointing at.

Same with brain fog. You regularly see articles, and there's a recent one in New Scientist, where they proudly announce they're making progress with brain fog, and then you read and it's so obvious that they don't even understand what the problem is at all, haven't even begun to work at it because there is a complete information breakdown because of damn language issues.

Like the Star Trek episode where the translator fails because they're dealing with a species who speaks in metaphors, except no one accepts that they must make an effort to understand and insist they must keep using their normal language as it's the others who should adapt to it. Well the main difference is that in this episode everyone was stuck together and they had to cooperate, while our BPS overlords succeed best with a state of confusion and failure.

And to think that inventing the name "chronic fatigue" is considered one of the best achievements to come out of the BPS ideology. Literally celebrating failure.
 
LarsSG said:
In the Pipeline blog:

Long Covid, Long Other Things

Derek Lowe's blog (which is generally an insider perspective on the pharma industry) is usually quite good, but this one, which takes a somewhat skeptical view of LC, ME, etc, is pretty frustrating.

He also took a pretty positive look at the Sneller NIH Long Covid paper from a few weeks ago.
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Ugh on the one hand on the other hand. (And ugh linking to a book by Shorter)
Seems like he’s so reluctant to get off that fence, no doubt he’s got plenty of splinters in uncomfortable locations.
 
There have been a few articles published on the opacity and dysfunction of the NIH initiative, where secrecy is the norm and that's never a good sign. This is what oversight is all about and why it needs to be universal, no one can self-regulate themselves, no organization or group of people can place themselves in an isolated bubble and somehow get it right. It's basically the main reason the whole BPS ideology is guaranteed to fail, it's completely detached from real life and there is no process to correct or even influence the mutual admiration society.

 
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