Long Covid in the media and social media 2022

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SNT Gatchaman said:
The Economist Podcast: Babbage
Scientists’ understanding of long covid is improving

Warning: the first 15 minutes is very heavy on BPS nonsense, principally from a patient who appears to have been persuaded by it. The health editor explains the concept in relatively neutral terms (as opposed to how it is applied in practice). The remainder is pretty decent, with commentary from, among others, Melissa Heightman at UCL.
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Thanks for listening. I saw it and kind of avoided it. Starting with a personal, BPS anecdote is exactly the kind of thing that will stick in people's mind and be a deciding take on the condition. I was a bit thinking that's the underlying take the Economist and it's subsidiaries would have. I think we might start to see a wave of LC "pushback", more than we have so far.
 
It's like Groundhog day except time still passes and millions of lives get ruined along the way. Always failing. Always the same way. For the same pathetic reasons, never anything learned, no accountability. Never doing anything more than small efforts meant to go nowhere by design. It's thinking small and refusing to act, even locally. There is simply no comparable failure in any other profession.
10 min into the first meeting for a #LongCovid patient advisory committee, and it looks like the research they're trying to get us to help with is all the same old bs. Who gets LC, how does it impact people? We want antivirals, microclot testing, aka REAL treatment. #TeamClots
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NHS lost a million working days to long Covid last year

NHS trusts in England lost more than a million working days to long-Covid absences last year, analysis suggests.

Thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been forced to take long periods off work because of the lingering effects of coronavirus infection.

Data released to the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus suggests that long-Covid absences are now higher than they were a year ago.

Layla Moran, who chairs the group, said: “Long Covid has upended the lives of millions and these figures suggest that the deeply damaging impact it is having on our economy and public services is only getting worse.”

Figures provided by 91 NHS trusts under freedom of information laws revealed an average of 5,913 days lost to long-Covid absence between

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-lost-a-million-working-days-to-long-covid-last-year-00gwx922x

Requires a subscription to read further.

 
John Mac said:
NHS lost a million working days to long Covid last year

NHS trusts in England lost more than a million working days to long-Covid absences last year, analysis suggests.

Thousands of doctors, nurses and other health professionals have been forced to take long periods off work because of the lingering effects of coronavirus infection.

Data released to the all-party parliamentary group on coronavirus suggests that long-Covid absences are now higher than they were a year ago.

Layla Moran, who chairs the group, said: “Long Covid has upended the lives of millions and these figures suggest that the deeply damaging impact it is having on our economy and public services is only getting worse.”

Figures provided by 91 NHS trusts under freedom of information laws revealed an average of 5,913 days lost to long-Covid absence between

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/nhs-lost-a-million-working-days-to-long-covid-last-year-00gwx922x

Requires a subscription to read further.
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Sounds expensive and not very pragmatic. As self-inflicted wounds go, this is an expensive one. The NHS wasted billions on their wet paper tiger, and all it accomplished is waste billions more. Well, that and make millions of people suffer needlessly. And trillions in indirect losses. For absolutely no gain at all. Not very smart when you look at the big picture. And oh would you look at that the paper tiger is being praised as the solution to the problem it created in the article in the next comment. So many possibilities, all imaginary.

Too bad the Appg hasn't taken LC seriously, but then again so far only the patients and maybe a few dozen people have.

Somehow, this is still blamed on "lockdowns" that ended over a year and a half ago. Or said not to be happening, depending on who asks, who you ask, when you ask.

And the fact that thousands predicted this is still not acknowledged. Too embarrassing, the failure must keep on failing because otherwise it's unfair to the people who were failed before. Or something.
 
From Medscape:

Long COVID: Who's Working to Find Treatments?

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/984510

Video with transcript.
Medscape said:
Dr Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, talks with Medscape contributing editor Maggie Fox about the goals of the clinical trials being sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. Find the latest long COVID news and guidance in Medscape's Long COVID Resource Center.

Key Points
  • Clinical trials are getting started to find the underlying causes of long COVID, ways to diagnose and measure it, and ways to treat it.

  • Researchers across the US and the world are collaborating in formal and informal networks such as the LongCOVID Research Consortium.

  • Patient advocacy groups such as the Patient-Led Research Collaborative, with its Patient-Led Research Fund, are also paying for trials.

  • In the meantime, patients are often being offered or are finding unproven treatments.
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(USA) For patients with long COVID, look out for psychiatric sequelae
“Most of our patients don’t fit into one neat box,” said former AMA President Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist.

Former AMA President Patrice A. Harris, MD, MA.
Symptoms aren’t clear-cut, and studies addressing psychiatric problems and prolonged viral symptoms have yielded inconsistent results.

Physicians can do their part by actively looking for psychiatric comorbidities in long COVID patients, noted Dr. Harris, who addressed the topic during an education session at the 2022 AMA Interim Meeting in Honolulu.

They should also be partnering with psychiatrists in the community to increase access to treatment and work with systems to address health inequities, “so that everyone can have treatment opportunities where they live,” said Dr. Harris.
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The strongest studies to date say neuropsychiatric symptoms develop four to six months after acute infection, said Dr. Harris.

It is also unclear to what extent mental health symptoms are related to severity and duration of illness, she continued.
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https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering...ents-long-covid-look-out-psychiatric-sequelae
 
So instead of approaching each patient, listening to them, and forming an opinion, doctors should start from the assumption that patients will have psychiatric issues?

and yet doctors can say this, in print, and tell other doctors that this is a correct approach to take, and not be struck off? (or whatever the equivalent is in the US)
 
ahimsa said:
From Medscape:

Long COVID: Who's Working to Find Treatments?

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/984510

Video with transcript.
Click to expand...
Thanks for sharing, @ahimsa

Just watched it and Dr. Koroshetz mentions ME very briefly towards the end:

I would say that the key thing in doing small trials is that, as I mentioned before, sometimes you see a signal that looks like it's going above the noise, but when you increase the numbers, it goes back in the noise. You have to do this validation stage to make sure that anything that pops out of a small study is going to be replicated. In myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), for instance, tons of studies have been reported, but none have been really replicated.

...

As I said, the RECOVER Initiative was put together with the idea that this is not going to be easy. We'd be very happy if someone could figure this out very quickly. Having been involved in the ME/CFS world for so long, I think there is a chance it's not going to be easy. This type of study that is totally comprehensive and leaves no stone unturned is what's needed at this point to protect us against, 4 years from now, having our hands up in the air and not having studied things right from the beginning.
 
Wonko said:
So instead of approaching each patient, listening to them, and forming an opinion, doctors should start from the assumption that patients will have psychiatric issues?

and yet doctors can say this, in print, and tell other doctors that this is a correct approach to take, and not be struck off? (or whatever the equivalent is in the US)
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There's the added problem that psychiatric symptoms don't really mean anything anymore. It's either used as a shortcut to "affects the brain", or it means a bunch of wishy-washy stuff that usually ends up in "behave, unruly child".

What does "clear-cut symptoms" even mean? There are symptoms that are common to many illnesses, those symptoms are never clear-cut. All this boils down to differential diagnosis being everything and having no plan B for it. Most of the symptoms are clearly neurological, but they never bothered to do real work here. It's precisely those common symptoms that have been labeled as psychiatric, whatever that even means anymore. And neglected symptoms. In fact most symptoms are basically labeled as psychiatric, thanks to the growing creep of "functional overlays".

What is it about the sickness response that is so impossible to reconcile here? The complete separation between acute illness and chronic illness needing to be fully separated and having nothing to do with one another. In some cases they are delayed, in many cases they aren't. This conflict is resolved by simply not mentioning the conflict, reality continues to be ignored in favor of what they want to perceive.
 
Andy said:
APPG report on Long Covid in March of this year, https://www.appgcoronavirus.uk/home/long-covid-report-march-2022
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Decided to skim it. In this report, they mention 1.8 million days lost by NHS employees. The latest report seems to speak of 1M.

Zero recognition that this was an existing problem. All the problems exposed are the same, and knowledge overall is just as generic and superficial. It was mostly a narrative review using quotes that all add up the same: healthcare is failing completely at this. Nothing's changed since then. Many of the quotes are from 2021 and could have come from any chronic illness population at any time in the last half century.

It's everything we've been saying for decades, without any recognition of that. I assume they ignored the context to avoid the discrimination that comes with chronic illness. Which guaranteed it would fail.

This is indeed what not taking it seriously looks like.
 
The Norwegian National Institute of Public Health has also done a review of long covid, and for those of you who know the NIPH view of ME it comes as no surprise that long covid is being downplayed.

Nå vet forskerne mer om long covid
Now the researchers know more about long covid

In the article above, the researcher Søraas is interviewed. He has been following a cohort of covid patients since the beginning of the pandemic (but lost funding not that long ago so I think the project has fallen apart), and I feel he sums up NIPH's messaging approach to post viral conditions quite well:

Article said:
Søraas also believes that the Norwegian Institute of Public Health underestimates long covid.

In the new report from FHI, late effects from covid are compared with symptoms after other infectious diseases. They write that "it is therefore not unexpected that some experience long-term symptoms even after covid-19."

Søraas reacts to this:

- This is a message that in practice says that long-covid does not exist. Although this is possibly nuanced a little in the rest of the report, it is often only the preamble that people take with them
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(Audio, 17 minutes, in Swedish)

Ingen statistik på hur många som drabbats av postcovid
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ingen-statistik-pa-hur-manga-som-drabbats-av-postcovid
Auto-translate said:
No statistics on how many people have been affected by postcovid

Exhaustion, headaches, heart palpitations and angina. Thousands of people in Sweden have suffered from long-lasting symptoms after Covid 19, what is often called postcovid.

Ekot has reported that no one knows how many people in Sweden actually have postcovid. And there is also no one who has the task to find out.

Listen to the report by Ci Holmgren, who met Emma Moderato, vice president of the Swedish covid association and is herself affected. Also listen to a subsequent conversation with Petter Brodin, paediatrician and professor of immunology.
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Ingen myndighet har koll på antalet postcovid-sjuka
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/ingen-myndighet-har-koll-pa-antalet-postcovid-sjuka
Auto-translate said:
No authority has a handle on the number of post-covid sufferers

Many Swedes today live with long-lasting symptoms after covid-19, what is often called postcovid. Exhaustion, headaches, heart palpitations and angina are some of the symptoms and many people's lives are severely limited

Yet no one knows how many people in Sweden are affected, and no government agency is tasked with finding out.

Let's meet Emma Moderato, Vice President of the Swedish Covid Association, became ill with covid-19 in March 2020.
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Ekot has reported that no one knows how many people in Sweden actually have postcovid. And there is also no one who has the task to find out.
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We are long past the point after which it has to be said that this can only be deliberate. Not wanting to find out while conveniently doing nothing because it's all a "mystery" is really the same thing as "I have the only key to this lock and categorically refuse to use it so that you don't have access to what's in it".

But asking hard questions require people to care. And they can't care about a scandal when it's covered up. Medicine is all politics in the end.
 
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