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

It really looks as if medicine intends to bury this entirely and either pretend it never happened or push it in the psychosomatic void of doom. Since it's easy for governments to find medical advisers arguing that, it seems that they did.

And since the public message is obviously one of trivializing it or pretending it's not happening, most long haulers point out that almost no one around them believes them, so an AIDS movement kind of response seems unlikely since that takes healthy allies. Add a divide-and-conquer approach to pin those who recover against those who don't, vastly outnumbered...

Easy to see how this happened in the past and why medicine is oblivious to it. This is as easy as putting a pillow on a comatose patient to end them. Lake Tahoe was a small textbook example, it's a tourist town and the tourism must return, other peoples' lives are worth the sacrifice.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1412033343164669953

 

Would be interesting to know who it is at the BBC pushing that line. Is it the science editor? Does he get briefed by the usual source?

 

Also, Professor Spiegelhalter said at about 13.40 that his chance as a double-vaccinated 67-year-old of dying from COVID was greater that of a 30-year-old unvaccinated person! And that most COVID deaths now were of vaccinated people...

The bit about long COVID is at about 15.10. It seems to suggest that more will be known in a few months. I thought they had said 10 years...

The broadcast is at PM - 05/07/2021 - BBC Sounds

 

The ER doctors in the US and Canada are saying the very opposite.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1412037110807384065


(Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1
Senior Lecturer
@QMUL
Epidemiology, statistical genetics, machine learning.)

 

The UK government have decided on a script and all the usual suspects are following it.

Back to normal, nothing happening anymore, just an exaggeration.

 

What's amazing is that in going with denial, this guarantees the worst possible outcomes. Essentially medicine and governments are complicit in making every possible decision at every possible opportunity to make the problem the absolute possible worst while at the same time doing everything they can to dismiss and bury it entirely. Not a damn spine in sight out of health care, countering this obviously insane plan, it's deliberate complicity. Borne out of incompetence, but still.

Every decision, every choice, at every turn, is made almost precisely in the way that guarantees not only seeing the most possible cases but making certain that those affected get the worst possible advice and conditions, with the worst human and economic consequences.

Some "expertise" they got going on there. The very concept is going to take a beating. Maybe that's what will shake the complacency. Or more accurately, maybe that's what will force the hand of medicine to shake it, because that won't come from within. Experts are not supposed to willfully create the worst-case scenario, it makes a mockery of the entire notion of being an expert. And yet here they are doing just that, like preparing for wildfire season by putting gas tanks all over the place.

 

It's a real shame. Deaths yesterday were double what they were a week ago, but still a complete denial that there is any issue!

 

COVID and the brain: researchers zero in on how damage occurs

"How COVID-19 damages the brain is becoming clearer. New evidence suggests that the coronavirus’s assault on the brain could be multipronged: it might attack certain brain cells directly, reduce blood flow to brain tissue or trigger production of immune molecules that can harm brain cells.

Infection with the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 can cause memory loss, strokes and other effects on the brain. The question, says Serena Spudich, a neurologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, is: “Can we intervene early to address these abnormalities so that people don’t have long-term problems?”

With so many people affected — neurological symptoms appeared in 80% of the people hospitalized with COVID-19 who were surveyed in one study1 — researchers hope that the growing evidence base will point the way to better treatments."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01693-6

 

It turns out that this study was not funded, or may be delayed, or whatever. At least according to this.

Because if you don't study a problem does it even exist? You can certainly say it doesn't, or it would have been studied.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1412805488257994755

 

I'm not at all sold on the BC007 thing, just from the assumption of how hard it is to find a treatment that works without understanding the pathology and how historically it never pans out for us, but apparently they did research some years ago with pwME and found the same (GPCR-AABS?) antibodies.

May have been posted already, my memory is especially bad these days.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1412718486997057539

 

U.S. News Meet 3 Black Women Fighting for Long COVID Recognition
Article tells the stories of Long Covid sufferers Chimére Smith and Ashley Jackson and ME/CFS sufferer Ashanti Daniel

quote:
"Now we're adding a significant number of Black COVID long-haulers to a health care system that is already inherently biased towards us," Daniel said during a press briefing of long COVID and ME/CFS advocates in March. "The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the intersection of structural racism and health and highlights why we need to address structural racism now."

 

Psychiatric Times: Developing a Collaborative Approach to Post-Acute Sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 Infection

Authors are psychiatrists from Harvard Medical School:

Long COVID-19 challenges clinicians more than ever to listen to patients and break down the false dichotomy between mental and physical health. The experience of feeling trivialized and frustrated by an overemphasis on the psychological components of illness has been shared by survivors of prior coronavirus epidemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in early 2000s and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome in 2012.17 It also has been a common experience in patients diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a complex and disabling illness with features that overlap those of long COVID-19.18

The presentation of neuropsychiatric symptoms after COVID-19 are heterogeneous, and to some extent they may reflect variable and multifactorial causes. The either/or characterizations of symptoms by patients, clinicians, and society alike of psychogenic vs organic, psychological vs physiological, functional vs neurological, are all overly simplified and represent antiquated views of the brain-body connection.19,20 Breaking down long-standing silos in health care through the use of integrated multidisciplinary teams will be critical to finding more effective treatments.

Bridging this divide is urgent, not only to understand and treat the consequences of this pandemic, but also to face the longstanding issue of mental health stigmatization that serves as an enduring barrier to patients seeking care for their mental health.21 Patients with PASC are at risk of mental health consequences, whether it be from the direct consequence of the virus, indirect consequences of quarantine and the pandemic, exacerbation of preexisting conditions, and/or ongoing challenges of coping with a new, poorly understood, chronic illness.​

(...)

A number of patients with long COVID-19, similar to patients with ME/CFS, have postexertional fatigue.22 Therefore, pushing themselves to exercise beyond an identified energy envelope may be counterproductive and, in fact, propagate crash-and-burn cycles.22 For that reason, care must be taken in suggesting exercise, an otherwise recommended lifestyle intervention for improving stress, depression, cognition, and insomnia.​

Full article: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/vi...oach-post-acute-sequelae-sars-cov-2-infection

 

Former director of the CDC. Sad that he didn't do a damn thing about it when he was in a position to.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1412871690300932110

 

Patient advocate Vlad appeals to dr. John Campbell to talk about Long Covid and ME. Starts at 9.40

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16PNx403DtM

 

Worth watching. Vlad nailed it.

It really seems as if there is about to be a clash of ideology, science and common sense vs. the biopsychosocial model. Long Covid alone makes that strategy insane, on top of creating a breeding ground for variants. But the BPS ideology cannot reconcile that, sees it as a trivial non-problem that will actually feed in nicely with the IAPT machine and the mass psychologization of illness. Which of course only serves to maximize the problem, as usually happens when people are in denial.

 

The CDC has published this very disappointing report that shows they are not learning anything. Recommends standard exercise rehabilitation and therapy even though it recognizes the severity of the illness is so high LC patients are on average worse than cancer patients going to those services. Or says they could benefit from, because apparently learning from experience is not possible here.

There are better parts but overall shows people are anchored to the old model and can't let go of it. Clearly medicine can hold on to indefensible beliefs about "deconditioning" for well over a year.


Outcomes Among Patients Referred to Outpatient Rehabilitation Clinics After COVID-19 diagnosis — United States, January 2020–March 2021
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7027a2.htm

Patients recovering from COVID-19 might experience continued poor health and could benefit from additional support and tailored physical and mental health rehabilitation services. Health care systems and providers should be prepared to recognize and meet the ongoing needs of this patient population. Efforts to increase COVID-19 vaccination could include messaging that states that preventing COVID-19 also prevents post–COVID-19 conditions with potential effects on long-term health.​

I'm still unsure what "mental health rehabilitation" even means in that context. I don't think that's a thing, other than the BPS tropes of "illness beliefs".

 

This just came up in my news feed:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9775925/Can-long-Covid-cured-monthly-dose-vaccine.html

Dr David Strain (AfME's new medical adviser) is planning a trial to determine if repeated vaccination alleviates the symptoms of long COVID.

 

A Norwegian article about MIS-C in Swedish children. (I haven't seen any similar reporting in Swedish media.)

Dennis (16) fikk hjertesvikt etter korona
https://www.nrk.no/norge/dennis-_16_-holdt-pa-a-do-som-en-reaksjon-pa-korona-1.15567837

Google Translate, English ("Dennis (16) got heart failure after corona")

Around 250 children and young people in Sweden who have been sick in covid-19 have subsequently been affected by MIS-C (Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children). In comparison, there have been about 25 cases in Norway.

Region Skåne is currently doing some research into MIS-C:

Ny forskning på Sus ska sprida ljus över MIS-C
https://vard.skane.se/skanes-univer...-forskning-pa-sus-ska-sprida-ljus-over-mis-c/

Google Translate, English

 

‘Their childhood has been stolen’: calls for action to tackle long Covid

"A growing cross-party group of MPs and peers is demanding an urgent overhaul of the services offered to sufferers of long Covid amid warnings that thousands of new cases will emerge every day as coronavirus restrictions are lifted this summer."

.....

"Part of the work at long-Covid clinics is helping sufferers discover their physical limits, because overexertion one day can lead to days or weeks in bed. That’s much harder for Gracie, her mother said. “Now, if she wants to walk to the park and see her friends, you know that a couple of days later she’s not going to be able to get out of bed for two days. It’s heartbreaking.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/society...-stolen-calls-for-action-to-tackle-long-covid