March 22nd - 2

 Some exerts from Vox today ring horribly familiar.

"Even with growing awareness about long Covid, patients with chronic “medically unexplained” symptoms — that don’t correspond to problematic blood tests or imaging — are still too often minimized and dismissed by health professionals. It’s a frustrating blind spot in health care"

“It has always been [and] is the case that patients who get sick experience high levels of symptoms like those described by long-Covid patients,” she said. “We have just done a terrible job of acknowledging [and] treating them.” Megan Hosey, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation

What is now coming into focus: the true spectrum of long-Covid symptoms. A recent preprint (non-peer-reviewed) paper, from a Covid-19 patient-led research collaborative, surveyed 3,762 patients from 56 countries who were sick for at least four weeks. They documented an array of 205 symptoms involving 10 organ systems, from tremors, tingling and skin burning, to sleep disturbances, nausea, chest tightness, and hearing loss.  

Most common were fatigue, cognitive dysfunction, and post-exertional malaise, defined as a “worsening or relapse of symptoms after physical or mental activity” during Covid-19 recovery. More than 90 percent of those in the study hadn’t been admitted to a hospital.

One in five reported severe symptoms persisting after six months.

The nagging symptoms, though unnerving, aren’t unprecedented. Chronic symptoms, especially fatigue, have lingered after the typical recovery periods for viruses as varied as West Nile, Polio, Dengue, Zika, seasonal flu, and H1N1 as well as the new coronavirus’s cousins MERS and SARS-1. Run-of-the-mill strep throat can develop into rheumatic fever, which causes similarly painful and stubborn after-effects as long Covid.

“I saw a lot of people saying they’d been to a bunch of different doctors. They know they had Covid. [The doctors told them] they didn’t know how to help them or that it was all in their head and that they probably needed to see a psychiatrist.”

Other pathogens already lurking in the body prior to a coronavirus infection might also exacerbate symptoms. For example, viruses in the herpes family — such as Epstein-Barr (the cause of mono) or varicella zoster (the cause of chickenpox and shingles) — stay dormant in the body forever. Under normal conditions, the immune system can keep them in check. But when we’re under stress or fighting off another disease, the herpes viruses may activate again. In this case, part of what’s causing the long-Covid symptoms could be the body’s immune response to non-coronavirus pathogens that have reawakened.  

Well. That all sounds very familiar doesn't it ?