Long Covid

70 million people are estimated to be living with Long Covid, but understand data only exists from developed countries. People are not getting well and coming out of this group, but new people are joining all the time in huge numbers. The only thing stopping this number increasing until everyone is ill is wishful thinking.

Long Covid is now defined as including any condition lasting more than 3 months from infection. People who say they have Long Covid are typically using the term to describe a more specific condition, albeit one with a huge range of possible symptoms. People with Long Covid generally never recovered from one of their infections, they are mainly describing an auto-immune condition, their bodies no longer convert energy properly - when they exert themselves their bodies don’t recover like someone without this problem causing Post Extertional Malaise, this is what people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) experience. People with ME and Long Covid cannot live a normal life, they pay a huge price for taking part in normal social activities, their doctors try to get them to improve their fitness with Graduated Exercise Therapy (GET) despite it being proved this is dangerous and can cause permanent muscle damage. Most people with Long Covid also have significant neurological problems. They self describe this as ‘brain fog’ which does not convey the seriousness of the injury.

Hundreds of thousands of adults have had to give up their jobs, tens of thousands of children (all just UK) are unable to attend school.

People with Long Covid have the added, also devastating, emotional toll of close and even immediate friends and family distancing themselves and not making the effort to properly understand Long Covid, asking if they are feeling better every time they meet, saying how terrible it is for them before saying they are heading off to a packed restaurant, or refusing to comply with requests for basic mitigations ahead of a planned get together.

People with Long Covid withdraw from society so are not visible, this means society concludes ‘everyone is fine’. When you meet someone with Long Covid they are putting every ounce of energy they have into appearing happy and looking nice (or appearing to be OK so they don’t lose their job). Also claims that 10% or more of all infections result in Long Covid don’t correlate with our day to day experience - everyone is getting Covid, clearly not 10% are severely ill, this is just fear mongering. The disconnect arises because of the huge range of illness covered by the term but also by the normalisation of a much higher level of general illness within the population. Also by the fact that they falsely believe they have recovered.

The biggest thing not understood by most people is that the risk of developing Long Covid increases with each reinfection. Pretty much everyone has had Covid, ‘recovered’ and on that basis concluded that for them Covid is not a major worry. This is just wishful thinking not aligned with any of the science.