While anecdotal, I do know of at one person that has lost their sense of smell and taste for now over 5 months. Even worse, any smell she can actually notice (often the faintest of smells ) is disgusting to her. Independently of what the smell actually is. That person is young and to my knowledge not in a risk group at all. In the UK, she struggles to even get someone to take it more serious than just prescribing antidepressants. I would not be surprised if many of the minority of people with long-lasting effects are unknown to the system, because either they do not search for help, or because the health system does not take them seriously.
So again, one sample is not a study, but I just want to point out that overgeneralising in either direction does not help.
She has a prolonged non-life-threatening condition with no known treatment. There's no tests to run or nothing more to diagnose, that's apparently done already. There's no drugs or procedures prescribed because, as far as I know, there are no drugs or procedures known to be effective for that. And that (looking seriously at her issue and giving a serious answer "do nothing") is a reasonable end state for diagnosis - it sucks, it's less common nowadays than it used to be, but it still happens.
That's it, the next step is acceptance, not continuing to seek soomeone to "take it more serious" - and if acceptance isn't working and is causing distress that's causing further problems, then indeed the next step is psychological help or pharmaceutical help for the psychological issues. Perhaps a few years later (not sooner) there will be treatment for that issue, so when (if!) that happens, then it would be a different discussion, but until that IMHO it's dangerous to encourage people to keep looking, as it can only lead to various snake-oil charlatans who'll make false promises. If the system would deny her some test or treatment that's likely to help, then it would be justified to seek attention and have someone take the complaint seriously and do the thing that needs to be done, but it doesn't seem to be the case here.
I'm sorry as this does sound like a dismissal, but if there are suggestions about what the system should do differently in this case, I'd be glad to hear, perhaps there can be a better way to go about this, but I'm all out of ideas.
It's an issue of perception and condescending attitudes by medical professionals that is the real problem. If I were a medical professional, I would at the very least acknowledge the problems as genuine physical symptoms and do my best to re-assure the patient that it's being researched by the scientific community so a treatment might be possible in the future.
Yes, it's completely inappropriate to say 'just take these weird, possibly life-long systems and deal with it'.
'The answer' is obviously to adjust our policies given the fact that 'a lot of people are having symptoms off-the-record'. Meaning possibly aggressive push for vaccines among youth, and factoring this into 'opening up schedules' etc..
The parent post and my response was about "the system" not taking her seriously, about the people where the damage was already done - are there any policy adjustments that would be useful for people like that? For people who now do have these weird, persistent, possibly life-long conditions, is there any better option than "dealing with it"? Denial helps noone, and can be quite harmful.
There've been reports that people suffering from long-COVID have seen improvements after getting the vaccine.
What additional actions should be taken by the medical system or the political system at this point for a (supposed) disease that has no known treatment or even any understood cause?
The daily had an episode[1] about a food critic who lost her sense of smell after a COVID infection and the effort she went to in order to get it back. Her descriptions of what it was like to eat her favourite food without being able to taste made me want to wear two masks.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/podcasts/the-daily/corona...
I also had really bad Parkinson’s-like shaking a few times, but luckily that’s gone away. Post viral issues do happen with other diseases and I’m personally glad COVID’s symptoms of it are so unique. From personal experience doctors have a hard time acknowledging fatigue. This should lead to more research on the matter.
The estimates I see are over 10% across age groups do not fully recover.
This: 'All those people before COVID who claimed to have chronic Lyme disease, doctors tell us, likely didn't, and long-COVID self-reporting and anecdotes is the same thing. '
Is a little bit of a wild claim ('they're all lying!') and unsubstantiated.
Comparison between Finland and Sweden: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbf...
That some cases go without symptoms is besides the point.
Kids are almost as likely to get COVID as any other group [1], they are just a lot less likely to die.
The epidemiological data on that has been consistent for some months now.
The study you presented was a short time-frame at the very start of the pandemic.
COVID is a wildly infectious disease, so the notion that 'kids don't die from it it so it's ok' is really bad logic: everyone who has symptoms, spreads, and causes other people to get it which creates the pandemic.
Also - you have provided no evidence for your wild claim that all the 'long-covid people were lying about their lyme disease'.
[1] https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-s...
(0-19 year-olds are the 2cnd highest cohort. Granted it's a bigger cohort, that said, they are getting infected at very meaningful rates i.e. they are spreaders)
Isn’t it odd that there was no spike in the virus after the protests and riots in the US? Millions of people were out in the streets packed together.
The data was 5 months, starting in January, long before COVID started.
The comparable time-frame was short and it's only a very rough comparison - 'everything' about policies in nations, rates of infection (time of onset) would have been different.
Since then, we have much more data, and we know unambiguously that children get and spread COVID.
That 'people at protests' were or were not super-spreading is besides the point unless you're trying to suggest that 'COVID does not spread' at all? Those events took place outdoors during the summer among healthy people. Since September, with colder weather and more indoor activity (and the start of school), the growth of COVID has been quite spectacular.
550 000 Americans have died from COVID. It's affected everyone.
But all of this is moot: COVID is dangerous not because of individual effects, but because of how rapidly it spreads.
The thing that makes COVID a pandemic is the easy by which it gets into the population.
Because one group is much less likely to die is not hugely important if they serve as vectors for the disease which kills others.
From an epidemiological perspective, kids spread it almost like adults, and therefore 'are a cause' almost like adults. It's great they don't die, but that's only 1/2 of the story.
We have to make sure to keep children from getting infected, just as we do adults.
In short: children should be vaccinated, we may do them last but we can't ignore the population and assume 'it will be fine because they won't die'.
If you take a look at the BLM riots in the US, a lot of people were wearing masks. It's a contrast to several Trump events, where a lot of supporters famously got infected. That's not to mention the huge spike and spreading after spring break 2020..
I get the sense that you're trolling tbh.
Edit: Let us assume you're not.
"[Trump rallies gauged to] have led to more than 30,000 additional cases and at least 700 additional deaths."
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-10-31/super-sprea...
"We demonstrate that cities which had [BLM] protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not,” reads the report called, “Black lives matter protests, social distancing and COVID-19.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/report-blm-protests-have-n...
The CDC states that schools are not particularly bad, and the worst scenario are small, informal gatherings cf. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/covid-19-spreads-easily-expert...
These 3 articles suggest that it comes down to behavior. So if we assume that the Swedish studies are correct, they would reflect how schools deal with protocols. I think it's fair to assume a different result e.g. outside Sweden or Scandinavia.
It's also premature to say whether this still applies wrt the new variants from Brazil, GB and South Africa.
And no I just think lockdowns have done far more harm than good. This paper is a meta-analysis of 54 prior studies that involved a total of 77,758 subjects reporting secondary transmissions in households. Conclusion: Asymptomatic people are not a factor for spreading Covid: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33315116/
FYI that study has been cited a few times by the CDC even.
So yeah all this masking and social distancing has really not been needed. If you have symptoms then stay home should have been the guidance.
[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/critics-slam-letter-...
It is not true that kids don't get covid. It is not true that kids don't spread covid.
Also you didn’t read the report: “Closing of schools had no measurable effect on the number of cases of covid- 19 among children”. They are not major vectors of transmission for COVID.
As far as this odd celebration of a clearly failed national policy, just remember:
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
The fact that Sweden guessed right on schools and wrong on everyone else really should be guiding you to the opposite intuition here.
including better adherence in school environments to other mitigation strategies like mask wearing and distancing; schools are better organized and MUCH more rule-compliant than society at large!
which for Sweden is clearly not true, they didn’t even wear masks in school. And I never said kids don’t get COVID I said schools aren’t major drivers of transmission. Feel free to continue misreading what I wrote though.
"...hospitalisation rate of 0-9 year olds are 181 out of 17004 confirmed cases and 10-19 yo 180 out of 36065 confirmed. 23% of those had an underlying disease."
Edit: The intensive care numbers are 11 and 15 for the two groups with 4 and 3 with an underlying disease.
Aside from antibodies, (citation needed).
I caught COVID recently, and my symptoms were incredibly mild. I like to think that keeping my immune system healthy and exposed to all of the stuff it would normally see played a role in that.
Hospitalization by definition is considered severe.
"research suggests that people who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are at their most contagious in the 24 to 48 hours before they experience symptoms." [1]
[1] https://medical.mit.edu/covid-19-updates/2020/10/exposed-to-...
The World Bank estimates 150 million will be pushed into extreme poverty due to COVID-related lockdowns:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/10/07/c...
Education has also been severely disrupted:
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/children-cannot-afford...
Your suggestion that you can safely just quarantine and not be a risk to others is flat out wrong because you are at your most contagious 24-48 hours before you have symptoms.
Also you may not have immunity after you sheltered and recovered.
I'll agree with you that the response was pretty terrible though.
The links I provided give some indication of the poverty and educational disruption this causes, but unfortunately it's hard for people to admit that mass-quarantines were and continue to be wrong, because this issue has been politicized.
Maybe you're right, and quarantine after contraction of illness was not a fully effective method of transmission control, but just the elderly isolating, instead of every one, was, and is a much more proportionate and sensible way to deal with a pandemic that only the elderly are highly vulnerable to.
This seems to be a big part of your reasoning but I don't think this is true. Yes, risk does skew there. But there are large numbers of non-elderly people who have been severely affected.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
> Long Covid appears to be more prevalent in women and in young people (including children) than might have been expected from acute Covid19 mortality;
That's not "very low" and you shouldn't insert your own conclusions on unnamed resources.
> Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
Still, not "very low"...
People who haven't been hospitalized aren't likely to end up in these statistics, regardless of whether they have long-term problems or not. It's harder to study them.
*Even flu can cause scary effects like temporary paralysis in children
It might not be directly life-threatening (I would like to be able to smell smoke again, though), but blowing off peoples' reports of issues that severely reduce their quality of life is toxic.
That's too big of a % in my personal sphere to not consider any chance of "very low"
Edit: perhaps read his comment again.
His conclusion is not definitive, it's his opinion based on some not linked sources:
> that means the risk of long-term symptoms is very low for them.
NHS mentions the following on long covid after actual research : https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one.
By all common sense. That is not a "very low" risk for long covid.
Anecdotes are not useless, though they can be misleading. There are always exceptions to rules/trends.
OP didn't try to refrain people from providing opposing views or evidence that actually contradict his statements, he just asked to avoid that common fallacy.
If you want something on long covid, here it is from NHS ( UK):
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev...
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
> Long Covid appears to be more prevalent in women and in young people (including children) than might have been expected from acute Covid19 mortality;
That's not "very low"
> Data from one study shows that of more than 3,000 adults ages 18 to 34 who contracted COVID-19 and became sick enough to require hospital care, 21% ended up in intensive care, 10% were placed on a breathing machine and 2.7% died.
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/news/nihr-publishes-second-themed-rev... ( NHS about long Covid )
> For those admitted to hospital, between 50-89% had at least one enduring symptom after two months. Of those not admitted to hospital, 20-30% experience at least one enduring symptom around one month later and at least 10% three months later;
With any common sense. That is definitely not a "very low" risk.
And it's obvious the actual research I added doesn't suggests it either.
The rate of infection is highest among 'younger people' and though their rates of hospitalization are lower, there's still quite a few people.
And that they may have had 'other complications' like 'obesity' or 'asthma' is almost besides the point.
10% of those admissions is going to be, overall, a potentially serious health issue, affecting quite a lot of people.
We have yet to determine what all of that amounts to and how severe it will be, but it can't be dismissed.
Additionally, young people without chronic diseases excludes some young people. Your original comment didn't exclude them and made the wrong association.
Chances of dying because of a thunder strike or in an airplane accident is very low.
Having long term covid issues as a young person is not.
In a number of countries, health ministers are complaining that the broad public is no longer observing restrictions, and the ruling party may even feel pressure to roll back restrictions because internal polling finds they could cost it reelection. If a voting public is unconcerned enough with those uncontroversially at-risk groups that have not yet been vaccinated, you cannot expect much sympathy for those relatively few examples of less at-risk demographics who end up with long-term symptoms, even if their risk is somewhat higher than a “thunder strike or an airplane accident”.
"Very low" minimizes the risk people associate with it and it's not appropriate for things that:
- needs more research
- current research doesn't support it's usage
In the context of assessing personal risk factors of readers in the midst of a global pandemic. I think it's kinda irresponsible.
If one reads the actual studies about "long COVID" (and not sensationalistic media reports that leave all the nuances out), they often emphasize that severity of post-COVID symptoms correlates quite neatly with severity of illness. Because younger people rarely have severe illness, that means the risk of long-term symptoms is very low for them. Not zero, of course, but low as with many other common illnesses for which major societal restrictions are not imposed.
People might be tempted to jump in with "But my friend who got COVID...!", but please don't, this is irresponsible in a scientific context. All those people before COVID who claimed to have chronic Lyme disease, doctors tell us, likely didn't, and long-COVID self-reporting and anecdotes is the same thing.