News about Long Covid including its relationship to ME/CFS 2020 to 2021

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Live Science What chronic fatigue syndrome can teach us about 'long COVID'

quote:
Because COVID-19 long haulers' symptoms became less severe over time, Jason predicts that many long haulers will recover, either fully or for the most part, but that patients who are still sick after a year or two "will be very comparable, probably, to the ME/CFS case definition," he said.

While Jason predicts that long COVID patients who ultimately have ME/CFS will be a subset of the total long hauler population, Nath, on the other hand, sees essentially all cases of long COVID as being similar to ME/CFS. "Anywhere from 10 to 30% of individuals at six months post [SARS CoV-2] infection are still complaining of symptoms that could overlap with ME/CFS. Whether they are exactly the same, we still do not know, but they certainly look similar in many ways," Nath told Live Science.
 
Reporting of a Chinese study published in the Lancet. Most long haulers aren't getting better.

Long COVID’s daunting toll seen in study of pandemic’s earliest patients

A detailed accounting of 1,276 people hospitalized for COVID-19 in the pandemic’s opening months reveals that a full year later, almost half continued to report at least one lingering health problem that is now considered a symptom of “long COVID.”
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For the growing number of patients who identify themselves as COVID “long haulers,” the new accounting offers cause for optimism — and concern. The period from six to 12 months after infection brought improvement for many. But most patients struggling with symptoms at the six-month mark were not yet well six months later.
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“This is not good news,” said David Putrino, a rehabilitation specialist who works with COVID long haulers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “If you run the numbers here, about one-third of the group that had persistent symptoms are getting better after 12 months, while two-thirds are not.”

Putrino also called the findings a “wake-up call” to public health officials that even when the pandemic is over — a distant enough prospect in the midst of a fourth wave of infections — its downstream consequences will not be.
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link

Edit: another story about the same study:

“This virus doesn’t end once you get discharged from the hospital or once you get over the initial acute symptoms,” says Putrino. “This virus persists.” He notes that while the recent Lancet study only focused on hospitalized COVID-19 patients, other, albeit smaller, studies have shown that COVID-19 symptoms may linger in around 20% of those who get infected but don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital.

That means the issue of persistent COVID-19 symptoms looms over any post-COVID-19 public health plan; currently, there isn’t much clarity about whether, or how much, insurers will cover rehabilitation for these patients. And that’s if patients know of and can access these services to begin with. “It’s the tip of the iceberg of enormous potential inequity and disparities in health,” says Putrino. “Most persistent symptoms are invisible symptoms, and walking into a doctor’s office and saying you have extreme fatigue”—a symptom many COVID-19 sufferers have reported experiencing months after infection—”[only] gets treated seriously when you’re not a member of a historically excluded group. And when you are, in many cases you don’t bother to even go to the doctor’s office because who is going to believe you?”
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“This virus doesn’t end once you get discharged from the hospital or once you get over the initial acute symptoms,” says Putrino. “This virus persists.” He notes that while the recent Lancet study only focused on hospitalized COVID-19 patients, other, albeit smaller, studies have shown that COVID-19 symptoms may linger in around 20% of those who get infected but don’t get sick enough to go to the hospital".

How do they know that the virus 'persists' for PWpost- long-covid? Are they basing this on persisting symptoms or testing/markers?
 
From the Time article link on LongCovid posted by Art above:

“Taken together, the implications are that people with persistent COVID-19 symptoms are looking at a long recovery,” says Putrino. At Mount Sinai’s Long COVID program that involves a personalized approach to addressing patients’ diverse symptoms, which could range from kidney, heart and lung problems to generalized fatigue and muscle weakness. For the latter, rehabilitation might include a tedious process of gradually stimulating the autonomic nervous system with carefully supervised exercises to slowly stimulate normal nerve activation, which could take as long as three to four months before patients feel better.” -

Latter sounds like the central sensitisation hypothesis, unproven and a form of graded exercise seems to be the treatment. Concerning.
 
The vaccines do not provide 100% immunity from infection. Asymptomatic people (as well as symptomatic) can develop LongCOVID. I am not sure how one can say vaccines fully protect against LongCOVID though I do see how the risk of LongCOVID is reduced in those fully vaccinated....
 
I'm not sure I can, given that the vaccines only seem to protect against the need for serious hospitalisation, given all the stories about virus load being high in those vaccinated that have circulated.

Suggesting that the vaccines are not doing as 'hoped' and are instead doing something else, and not really impeding the virus much, in its day to day job, of replicating and spreading.

So how much protection against long covid would depend on whether these 'so your not gonna die' features of the vaccine are relevant to long covid, or not, if at all.
 
Wonko said:
Suggesting that the vaccines are not doing as 'hoped' and are instead doing something else, and not really impeding the virus much, in its day to day job, of replicating and spreading.
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I think there was pretty good evidence that the vaccines did as well as hoped against the Sars Cov 2 strains they were designed to protect against. The problem seems to be that the delta variant is much more infectious and the vaccines protect less well against it.
 
Chalder said about pw ME/cfs:
Sly Saint said:
What didn’t change was their belief in the fact they had something physically wrong with them.
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(here we go again?)

What's causing long COVID?
Scientists are looking for the mechanism behind the condition...
16 August 2021
Interview with
Akiko Iwasaki, Yale University
Akiko - So there are a couple of theories that are now posed to explain long COVID. One is a lingering virus or a viral reservoir that persists in a person that can stimulate chronic inflammation. The other possibility is autoimmunity; that even a mild viral infection can trigger autoimmunity, which has long-term consequences.
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https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/whats-causing-long-covid
 
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