Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Parafault t1_iqo0wnm wrote

Reply to comment by Tanagashi in Effect of COVID-19 Vaccines on Reducing the Risk of Long COVID by mightx

Aren’t long covid rates like 20% total? So even if you’re vaccinated/boosted you still have a 16% chance of getting long covid? If so that sounds awfully high, and I’m surprised more people aren’t talking about it. 16% of the population having a debilitating and incurable medical condition sounds insane - and it gets even worse if you think about repeat COVID infections potentially increasing the risk. I wonder if that means the entire world will eventually develop long covid via repeat infections over several years?

39

itsastickup t1_iqoa97w wrote

Depends on how you define it. In the UK's official definition:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1007511/S1327_Short_Long_COVID_report.pdf

...it's ANY symptom beyond 12 weeks. But peopled being crippled was only at 2% and targeted the same vulnerable people who were liable to die, the old and those with co-morbidities. Again, very very rare for younger healthy people.

My brother has had long-covid for a year because his sense of smell is compromised.

12

Sure_arlo t1_iqr1um3 wrote

I wish there was a way to get true data. I am a pre op nurse and call/converse with about 20 ppls per day. Anecdotally, about 90% of patients tell me they’ve had covid, most in the last 10 months. I’ve never heard a single person tell me they have lingering symptoms. I believe long Covid exists, 100%, but I’d venture to guess that the rates are quite low.

1

rubberchain t1_iqonlws wrote

Hey, the science is still new. Things will change as the research accumulates. Look at us 2 years ago. People were straight up dead, unable to breath, crawling outside hospital doors because they were full. Thousands of people died every single day in the beginning, well over 1 million dead in the USA. I'd say 16% dealing with long covid is a bazillion times better..

2

jlambvo t1_iqpe7fr wrote

I've been curious to find any long Covid studies that focus on measurable, physiological symptoms.

I don't necessarily doubt that it's a real issue, but pretty much all the larger scale studies I've seen on long Covid rely on self-reported symptoms that are fairly vague or general, and don't appear to have high quality (or any) attempt to control for hypervigilance among the convalescent groups.

2

throwaway477638 t1_iqpzyee wrote

First, we need to clearly separate long covid from post covid or chronic covid more strictly. In reality, almost nobody is really interested in long covid. If we do so, we see that only 5-10 percent of people are really affected long term.

Second, most of these post covid issues are hard to detect as our medicinal expertise is not advanced enough. There are research groups that try reliable immune marker profiling but this only works for some portion of the post covid group. Other people try specific MRIs or PET scans. In general, if we look long enough, we find damage in any of the post covid patients but that is incredibly costly and not a viable long term strategy. But currently there is no single test (and maybe there never will be) that reliably detects post covid. The issue is that we don’t understand the original damaging process at all and even this process might not be unique. We just see a plethora of different symptoms that we cannot really make sense of.

3

anttirt t1_iqq3zwp wrote

The entire world except for China.

1