The news from the UK is that 20% of symptomatic positive CV19 tests still have symptoms (not necessarily organ damage etc) at 5 weeks – here.
Another report in the Daily Trash.
Peter wrote:
The news from the UK is that 20% of symptomatic positive CV19 tests still have symptoms (not necessarily organ damage etc) at 5 weeks
Just two years ago, I had a nasty flu lasting for almost two month. There is nothing really to do about it (except being prepared and taking a vaccine up front 
) The doctor gave me D-vitamins and some “morphine coughing juice” or whatever it is called in English. Even when you get well again, the body needs time and exercise to get back to normal. I mean, although most flus are over in a week, it is not unnormal to have it longer, 2 months or more. Still, no one calls it “long flu”.
MedEwok wrote:
Having 10,000 people to perform vaccination should not be that difficult, unless one pointlessly insists all of them must be specialist doctors.
Indeed. I have volunteered, but the admin burden to complete the application is significant – they require full health records and criminal background checks – and I have not found the time for it yet, nor am I sure I want to allow them access to my medical records. It is being run by St John Ambulance which has a significant Christian tradition and ethos, and from a preliminary scan of the questions I am skeptical as to whether my background will tick enough Gutmensch boxes for them
T28 wrote:
You don’t need to vaccinate the whole population either. In Switzerland 80% of the Covid hospital intakes are in the 60-80yo (and there’s no reason to expect significant variance elsewhere in Europe).
Vaccinate that demographic and that’ll have a very significant impact on healthcare availability & general infection dynamics.
I don’t think vaccinating the elderly and vulnerable will change infection dynamics – they circulate the least.
I am viewing the vaccination effort through the lens of how can we get society and the economy back on track as quickly as possible. The government here has driven a firm message of “everybody is very vulnerable” despite the median age of a Covid death being in excess of median life expectancy, because the all-in-this-together message is very important for ensuring people support the restrictions. The (perhaps unintended) consequence of that might be that even when the vulnerable are vaccinated and deaths drop off to almost zero, we will see continued economic restrictions while the virus continues to circulate in the rest of population because, well, we are all very vulnerable…..
LeSving wrote:
although most flus are over in a week, it is not unnormal to have it longer, 2 months or more. Still, no one calls it “long flu”.
First of all: You never say never in medicine, but it is an extremely rare event that a flu is “over in a week”. Don’t mix up viral flu with a common cold…
Second: Covid is not a Flu! Just because with flu there is little such thing as “long flu” doesn’t say anything about covid. It’s like “There is no such thing as chronic flu so HIV can’t be chronic because it is transmitted by a virus, too”.
5 weeks symptoms is obviously not the right endpoint to discuss long covid or not. We do, however, see patients now that have significant symptoms 6 months after their acute phase. Would you tell them as well: “Can’t be because if you had have a flu you would be clearly completely symptom free right now”?!?
As far as I’m aware, if you suffer an acute illness it is quite usual that you don’t feel completely back to normal for quite some time.
In summer 2019 I had some very acute gastroenteritis (high fever, hallucinations, everything straight through for 48hrs, lost 7kg). Although I was ‘no longer ill’ in well under a week, it was a good 6 months before I felt completely over it.
If you take a beating, it takes time to recover…..
Graham wrote:
As far as I’m aware, if you suffer an acute illness it is quite usual that you don’t feel completely back to normal for quite some time.
That is true without any doubt. What creates concerns about long Covid with many people in the community is, however, that the cases are a little different:
If we would only talk about severe acute cases that need time to fully recover after they could finally leave ICU would not create much debate – even if that recovery takes longer than usual. As you say: That is normal!
The concerns come from reports of cases (still anecdotally, obviously, as one can not systematically talk about a long term disease that has only been around for half a year) of patients that had very mild to systematic “acute phases” where the symptoms of “long Covid” only developed over time or at least are not substantially improving.
5 weeks symptoms is obviously not the right endpoint to discuss long covid or not. We do, however, see patients now that have significant symptoms 6 months after their acute phase. Would you tell them as well: “Can’t be because if you had have a flu you would be clearly completely symptom free right now”?!?
What patients? How old were they, what kind of other complications did they have? And no, I don’t mean the exceptional “healthy and nice looking and caring 32 your old mum and nurse” that was interviewed on TV last night, the one in a million case, picked by the media to “make us feel”, to put a “face on” the long Covid victims.
There is too much drama. Too much noise.
LeSving wrote:
And no, I don’t mean the exceptional “healthy and nice looking and caring 32 your old mum and nurse” that was interviewed on TV last night, the one in a million case, picked by the media to “make us feel”, to put a “face on” the long Covid victims.There is too much drama. Too much noise.
Very true.
Unfortunately the thousands of instances of ‘person dies who was at end of life anyway and who would probably have died of the next infection they picked up’ are not as newsworthy as the sort of one-in-a-million case you describe.
In this regard, the media convinces the masses that the plural of anecdote is data.
It will be interesting to see how that pans out.
At the moment, the “cost” of containing the virus (around 10% of GDP, order of magnitude) is roughly in line with what we are usually prepared to spend as a society on an extra (healthy) year of life – 1 or 2 year’s per-capita GDP per extra life year. Which is something we could afford as a society because most life prolonging treatments are cheaper, and only few people require that level of expense, but now is a massively increased burden, so difficult to sustain.
(Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Average age of COVID death around 80, average life expectancy at 80 is around 10 years —> we spend 10% of per-capita GDP to preserve 10 years or 100% of per-capita GDP to preserve one life-year. This is order of magnitude only, so easily off by a factor of 2-3 (for , but so is the range of spend on life years saved)
If the death rate plummets, we will easily be spending 10x per capita GDP to save one year life or more, which is hugely out of proportion. There would be no real justification to keep the restrictions, but the ultra-risk-averse, everyone-must-be-protected attitude we have developed as a society will make it hard to unwind them.
Doesn’t everyone wish we all got back to talking about flying?
But this is fine; this is our “cafe” and this is all most of us have right now.
