There isn’t really a consensus use of the term “long Covid”. We know that people who are critically ill suffer significant consequences long term. We can measure these consequences in reductions in their cardiac output, lung function and more. If you define “long Covid” as any long term consequence of Covid, you will clearly find it in those people.
Far more nebulous are the people who don’t have any significant measurable illnesses. I’ve had several patients who came to the ER with long Covid who never had pneumonia, had multiple negative workups, and measurably had no abnormality at all. Early on, long covid didn’t even require a positive test in reports. Do those people have long Covid simply because they feel bad? Is it actually caused by Covid somehow? It’s hard to say.
The latter is a very tricky subject. The former is expected.
Yeah, also hard to rule out long COVID with no positive test if you got sick in early 2020 given lack of testing. I think it is early days for these studies, but some of the potential problems flagged make me a bit nervous that high case counts could be setting is up for a lot of chronic illness.
I think I’m going to get a pfizer booster tomorrow. I had Moderna in January/February.
Also, my reasonably intelligent, pharmacist in a hospital, sister, who didn’t get vaccinated (no fucking clue, even her husband who flirts with deplorability got vaxed) is now quite sick with covid. She’s 40 and healthy, so hopefully she gets through unscathed, but I guess she can’t even get out of bed today.
Post-viral syndrome is not specific to covid, although like long-covid, it is ill-defined. My wife has dealt with it for a few years, and it absolutely sucks. Being exposed to just the common cold would cause a cascade of symptoms over the course of several weeks to even months, some of which mirror those described with long covid.
Joe Biden has promised to make rapid, at-home Covid testing widely available to Americans.
But in the UK, they have long been around. A British nurse explains how they changed her life - and what the US can expect when the test shortages are eventually fixed.
