#also maskless omen | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

olena · 2 years

Text

Long COVID Experts: U.S. Government Needs to Do More | Time

For many people who are done with the pandemic and the caution that came with it, a maskless supermarket may seem like a sign of progress. But for those with an intimate understanding of Long COVID, it feels like a bad omen.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel is used to feeling like the only person in the country who still cares about COVID-19. He ignores the side-eye he gets for wearing an N95 mask at parties—a self-imposed policy that makes him “look odd” but kept him safe after a recent work dinner turned into a superspreader event. The oncologist, bioethicist, and professor at the University of Pennsylvania provides each of his students with an N95 and runs four HEPA air filters during lectures. He rolls down the windows when he gets in an Uber and goes hungry on planes so he can wear his mask the whole time. He’s given up one of his favorite pastimes—dining at restaurants—even now that many people don’t think twice about eating indoors.

Emanuel, 65, takes these precautions even though he’s vaccinated and boosted and thus well protected against severe COVID-19. The acute disease doesn’t scare him much—but what could come after does.

“The only thing that’s preventing me from leading a normal life is the risk that I’ll get Long COVID,” Emanuel says. “I can’t say why people aren’t [reacting like] their hair’s on fire. This is a serious, serious illness.”

...

By the CDC’s own estimate from June, one in five U.S. adults with a known prior case of COVID-19 had symptoms of Long COVID. Having COVID-19 also raises a person’s risk of developing chronic conditions including heart disease, asthma, and diabetes,

...

Long COVID can take many forms, including exhaustion, cognitive dysfunction, neurological issues, and chronic pain. People can develop it whether they’re young or old, sick or healthy, vaccinated or not. And while some people get better in a matter of months, recent studies and many patient experiences show symptoms can last years. There is no known cure for Long COVID, and the only way to prevent it is not to get infected at all.

...

Many Americans welcomed the return to normalcy. But to McCone, 32, that approach is “a crime against humanity,” given what we now know about Long COVID.

...

McCone got sick in March 2020. COVID-19 knocked him flat. ... More than two years later, McCone barely leaves the house, except for medical appointments. He still has severe fatigue, chest pain, shortness of breath, and nervous system dysfunction. He can’t work because of his symptoms, and his partner has become his caretaker. His symptoms got even worse after catching COVID-19 again in September 2021, so he’s “petrified” of getting reinfected—a fear he wishes more people shared.

...

Hannah Davis, a machine learning expert who began researching Long COVID after her own diagnosis, also got sick in March 2020. Davis has testified about Long COVID before Congress and advised federal health officials about the condition. She says those experiences have shown her that health officials understand that Long COVID is a substantial problem, and that, while vaccines reduce the risk of developing it—by some amount between 15% and 50%, studies suggest—they are not failsafe. The U.K.’s Office for National Statistics recently reported that roughly 4.5% of triple-vaccinated adults developed Long COVID after being infected by Omicron. But the government doesn’t seem to want to dwell on these scary stats, Davis says. “It really looks like it’s being hidden intentionally,” she says.

Davis believes that’s because the Biden Administration leaned heavily on vaccines as a ticket out of the pandemic and is wary of walking back that messaging now,

...

Some Long COVID advocates and scientists have called for an initiative like Operation Warp Speed—the Trump Administration program that quickly yielded multiple effective COVID-19 vaccines—for Long COVID treatments. But the NIH hasn’t built anything of the sort...

Dr. Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and a prolific parser of COVID-19 research on Twitter, says the NIH is doing good research on the underlying science of Long COVID, but he’d like to see more trials focused on treatments. “You need to do both, because we can’t wait another year or two for the biology to be better defined,” Topol says. (The NIH says it will begin treatment-focused trials this fall...

...

A tremendous amount of Long COVID research has been published in the last two years, most coming out of independent laboratories, Putrino says. From this work, scientists have found multiple possible explanations for Long COVID symptoms: SARS-CoV-2 virus lingering in the body, abnormal immune system activity, reactivation of other viruses previously lying dormant, tiny blood clots throughout the body, and more. These disparate findings suggest that there may be different root causes or subtypes of Long COVID, which means all patients might not respond to the same therapy. But each one suggests a possible path to treatment worth testing sooner rather than later, Topol says.

...

Journalist and author Katie Hafner, 64, was one of the unlucky people to develop Long COVID after being vaccinated and boosted. She got infected in May and was left with significant fatigue and brain fog. Her Long COVID symptoms were on the milder end of the spectrum and have improved with time, but Hafner says she can still manage only a few hours of work per day and has to carefully monitor her physical and mental energy levels. Her anxiety has also escalated since getting sick.

Hafner’s husband is Dr. Robert Wachter, chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, ...

[Who, by the way, publicly shamed her: https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1522799251914313728

She got sick shortly after.

Now Bob says:

“If it turns out that it markedly increases the rates of some of the biggest medical hazards we have in life”—including organ failure, heart disease, and dementia, as research currently suggests— “the toll of that over years and years will be tremendous,” Wachter says. “I don’t think [the CDC has] done a good job explaining that at all.”

...

Experts say there is more that can be done, even before new therapies are discovered or developed. To slow transmission and thus lower rates of Long COVID, Topol says the CDC should tell people to isolate for longer than five days after getting infected and campaign harder for people to get booster shots. Emanuel, meanwhile, would like to see better communication about which masks protect wearers from infection; respirators like N95s are more effective than surgical or cloth masks, but many people still walk around in droopy blue surgical masks. Public indoor spaces, like restaurants and schools, should also have enforceable requirements for ventilation and air filtration, given the virus’ ability to spread in the air.

...

A return to mask mandates would also be a good step, Davis says. But even if none of those changes are enacted, she says the government should at least emphasize how common Long COVID appears to be and that it can affect vaccinated people. She fears many vaccinated people think they’re in the clear and can’t get Long COVID, because the Administration has sung the shots’ praises so much. “We’re just drowning in this sea of misinformation that is not only causing people to poorly think about their own risk, but also putting other people at risk,” Davis says.

Those with Long COVID often say they feel like they’re screaming into the void, trying to get through to people who either aren’t aware of or don’t care about the condition and the possibility it could affect them, too.

#covid #long covid #time magazine #the pandemic is not over

2 notes · View notes