They got ‘long Covid.’ It cost them dearly. Large numbers of Americans are trying — and failing — to get financial assistance as they battle lingering Covid symptoms, an NBC News investigation found. https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/got-long-covid-cost-dearly-rcna17942
Long COVID Has Become the ‘Pandemic After the Pandemic’ Lingering or new symptoms can – and will – affect many people long after infection with COVID-19, so researchers and clinicians are focusing on the causes and effective treatments. By David Levine March 10, 2022, at 9:53 a.m. Although the recent wave of infections from the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, is ebbing in much of the country, some experts have estimated that roughly 30% of Americans infected with the virus may experience what’s known as long COVID. This constellation of symptoms sometimes appears weeks after the initial infection has passed and can last for months or even years. These symptoms can be debilitating and cause major disruptions in health, work and quality of life, many patients and clinicians report. Researchers and public health specialists are hard at work trying to understand the root causes of this syndrome (more formally identified as post-acute sequelae of COVID-19, or PASC), and health systems around the country are creating programs and facilities to treat patients with long COVID. The syndrome itself is still poorly understood, but it is “sweeping in its volume” of effects, said Dr. Kristin Englund, founder and director of Cleveland Clinic’s post-COVID reCOVer Clinic, speaking at a recent virtual forum hosted by U.S. News & World Report. Englund refers to long COVID as the “pandemic after the pandemic.” She said that the syndrome encompasses a wide variety of either new, returning or ongoing symptoms that can last more than 28 days after the patient's initial diagnosis of COVID. Patients with long COVID can have symptoms that “can involve nearly every organ system,” Englund said, and include profound fatigue, shortness of breath with exertion, joint pain, chest pain, loss of smell or taste, diarrhea, headache and other issues, such as “brain fog,” memory impairment, insomnia, anxiety and dizziness. Most worrisome is that “75% of our patients with long COVID were never even hospitalized, and less than 10% were sick enough to be in our intensive care unit,” she said. “We've got a lot to learn about this disease.” And the urgency for answers is underscored by the large number of people impacted by the syndrome, said Dr. Philip Chan, an associate professor and infectious diseases physician at Brown University and medical director at the Rhode Island Department of Health. Chan, who is also serving as an expert advisor to Brown’s School of Public Health’s long COVID initiative, said that experts estimate up to 1.3 million people may be suffering from the syndrome and can't return to work. “Just getting a handle on how we define [it] and all the symptoms and the true scope of this problem, we have a long way to go.” Dr. Yvonne (Bonnie) Maldonado, Taube Professor of Global Health and Infectious Diseases and senior associate dean for faculty development and diversity at Stanford University, said Stanford is one of 30 centers around the country taking part in RECOVER, a multiyear study funded by the National Institutes of Health that is enrolling patients to track the effects of COVID-19 on them over time. Maldonado, who is also a professor of pediatrics (infectious diseases) and of epidemiology and population health, compared the initial response to long COVID with the early days of the HIV/AIDS pandemic: “We started off with people who were dying of really unusual opportunistic infections, and we realized that that represented a very tiny tip of the iceberg with a 10- to 12-year evolution,” Maldonado said. So long COVID researchers are “forewarned and forearmed,” she noted, “having had experiences with some of these other diseases.” Another study, from Johns Hopkins, is trying to tease out the syndrome’s causes and symptoms, and what comorbid conditions come into play. “We need to understand if those are exacerbating what we're seeing in long COVID, or if those are actually driving what we're seeing,” said Dr. Priya Duggal, professor and vice chair of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and co-lead of Johns Hopkins’ long COVID study. Health care providers are finding themselves in the position of treating patients for a syndrome that still isn’t fully understood. But “this is not unique to long COVID,” Englund noted. “In many aspects of medicine we treat patients for their symptoms before we truly understand what is the underlying cause of them.” So, “for our long COVID patients,” she said, “I need to know the symptoms that they're having.” Moving from understanding long COVID to treating it Once symptoms are fully assessed – 87% of patients say that fatigue is their leading complaint – then they can begin treatments. “Patients are evaluated in a central area, we kind of call it the hub-and-spoke wheel,” Englund said, as it utilizes different specialists who have stepped up to help. Patients realize then “that they're not alone, that they can connect with others. They can have their disease process validated,” she added. “These patients are tired of being told, ‘Oh, just get over it and get back to work.’ They want to be validated for what they have” and to “try to get back to a more normal life.” In time, panelists said, this type of multidisciplinary care will be codified and streamlined, then spread to smaller health care institutions outside the major medical centers. “That streamlined care has already been done in a very good way for HIV, and we've had 40 years of experience with that disease,” Maldonado said. “We know how to build those models.” Chan stressed that good health care begins with access to primary care as the gateway to a team approach to long COVID. Unfortunately, he said, up to 25% of Americans don't have access to primary care, especially culturally competent primary care. He noted that telemedicine, “one of the positive things” to come out of the pandemic, is a boon to reaching underserved populations. “I love telemedicine. I think it really facilitates access to health care, especially in rural settings, especially where there may not be any subspecialists,” he said. “Here in Baltimore with our long COVID clinics at Hopkins, it's also about outreach, getting out into the communities and talking about it and seeing people,” Duggal added. That means telling those affected that “it's not normal for your heart to be racing and have tachycardia, that's not a normal thing that you should be experiencing if you're a healthy individual,” she said. “So, if you are, it's important to try to get care.” Ignoring symptoms won’t fly. Two years into the pandemic, “3% to 5% of people are debilitated; they can't function in their daily life,” Duggal said. “If you can't function that means you can't work, that means you can't take care of people, that means you can't be a productive part of society, the way you were pre-COVID.” A current challenge to treating such a large number of potential long COVID patients is the stressed health care workforce. Maldonado noted that about 30% of providers are considering early retirement when there is already a deficit of about 124,000 health care workers nationwide. On top of that, the number of academic physicians who conduct important research had dropped from about 4% of physicians in the U.S. to about 1.5%, even before the pandemic. Maldonado warned that the cost of education and debt loads were most at fault for this and suggested it should be a priority to address all of these issues to continue the pace of discoveries. Assessing risks and building a “ground game” to spread awareness So, who is most at risk for long COVID? Chan said early data suggest women may be more affected than men. The reasons are unclear, but he noted that women may be more likely to be affected by autoimmune responses. Older individuals with comorbidities are more at risk to develop severe COVID, which also seems to be linked to long COVID. Similarly, certain racial and ethnic minority groups may be more at risk for COVID and “significantly disproportionately impacted by long COVID in terms of number of cases, hospitalizations, severe disease, etc.,” Chan said. “We also need to look at different diverse sexual and gender groups and how long COVID may affect those groups as well.” Several studies are underway to learn how long COVID affects the body down to the cellular level. The different variants are also being studied to see if they lead to different forms of long COVID. These are “giving us at least some hope that there's going to be a framework of initial studies that we can look at so that we can direct our treatments,” Englund said. Being vaccinated is still the best bet for avoiding COVID and the later complication of long COVID, panelists noted, so fighting vaccine misinformation is crucial. Chan said that the Rhode Island Department of Health has strived to combat misinformation, and “I'm proud to say that Rhode Island actually has one of the highest vaccination rates in the country.” He attributes the state’s success to its ground game. “You really have to go out and meet people where they're at. We've really focused on health equity. We've gone into our geographical hotspots of infection and disparities, often related, of course. We've set up vaccination sites, testing sites. We worked to build up infrastructure, we made sure that our messaging campaigns are in multiple languages.” And, he noted, they’d partnered “with the local community stakeholders, churches, trusted professionals in the communities where people live and work. We're going to have to do something very similar about long COVID.” Patients who suspect they may have long COVID should find a provider “and just let them know that you are having symptoms,” Maldonado recommended. “If they can't help you, ask them to refer you to another provider who might be able to help. Nobody has the answers right now, but there are some measures that can help at least mitigate some of the symptoms that individuals are having.” But Maldonado also warned that some individuals are pitching questionable COVID therapy kits and combinations of drugs not authorized for the uses they’re recommending. “Just be very careful about going to the Internet” to find people who are offering “cures because, at this point, unfortunately, we don't really have one,” she said. “We have ways to deal with some of the symptoms, but we don’t have a cure at this point.” That being said, she noted: “I think we're in a much more rapid state of discovery and treatment than we were for other diseases. …We do see that many people are resolving over time, so we're very hopeful; and we know this is a critical time in developing our knowledge of this disease.” https://www.usnews.com/news/health-...id-has-become-the-pandemic-after-the-pandemic ---------- wrbtrader
Yey there are millions of medically proven Long Covid cases around the globe. You better have a word with their doctors.
You're debating with a quack. He doesn't understand that a growing number of young people were infected with Covid and then recovered. They are now having mystery illnesses like chronic fatigue, dementia, strokes, heart disease, kidney disease, and so on...within months after recovering from Covid. Illnesses and diseases that a young person doesn't get but are getting them as if they were elderly...it's problematic. Insurance companies are still trying to define what is Long Covid and how to provide insurance about it. Globally, Covid insurance claims are UP an astounding $5.5 Billion Dollars in 2021 alone...these were not life insurance claims as in death. These are claims by people, many months after their Covid illness, that are suffering from other debilitating illnesses that they did not have prior to their Covid illness. For example, a not vaccinated 25-year-old healthy athlete that had blood tests and brain scans...results show they're in great condition. They then become infected with Covid... resulting in only a mild illness and recovery. Within months, the still not vaccinated athlete starts to have multiple mini-strokes after recovering from Covid. As for the medical community, they do not have a definition yet as to what constitutes post-COVID syndrome. What constitutes long-term COVID: is it symptoms for three months, or for six months?” As well, there is “not one set of symptoms” for everyone. My guess is the medical community and insurance companies will just classify Long Covid as a normal part of other illnesses and diseases (e.g. see the above young athlete as a Stroke victim and not as Long Covid). In my thread @ https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/covid-19-science-news.365258/ I am getting into the science of Covid-19 and it includes Long Covid complications. There is an interesting statistic that compares not vaccinated people with Covid-19 complications to vaccinated complications involving the J&J vaccines... This is new data because they're now getting the research results with millions of hospitalized patients and millions of people that were infected but didn't require hospitalization...comparing it all with vaccinated people. ---------- Yet, remember this statistic... Compare the neurological complications of COVID-19 directly to vaccination: Risk of neurological complications from COVID-19: between 40% and 80% of people who have symptomatic COVID-19. This means at least 400,000 per million people with symptomatic COVID-19 experience neurological issues Risk of TTS from vaccination: two per million people who receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. This means 0.0002% of people who get vaccinated with J&J experience TTS I'm not sure why the above stats only mentions J&J vaccine when similar stats occurs for all the other vaccines. ---------- wrbtrader
Quarter of UK employers cite long COVID as driving absences - survey LONDON, Feb 8 (Reuters) - A quarter of British employers have cited long COVID as a main cause of long-term sickness absences, a survey by a professional body found on Tuesday, adding that it raised questions over how workers with the condition were being supported in their jobs. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is leading a strategy for the country to live with COVID, lifting restrictions as booster shots and the lower severity of the Omicron variant weaken the link between cases and death. However, Britain is still averaging around 80,000 cases each day, and mild cases of COVID-19 can still lead to debilitating long COVID and associated symptoms of fatigue, memory issues and brain fog. read more The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that 26% of employers now include long COVID as a main cause of long-term sickness absence, in a survey of 804 organizations that represent more than 4.3 million employees. The CIPD said that 46% of the organizations had employees that had experienced long COVID, and that employers should do more to support workers with the condition. "Long COVID remains a growing issue that employers need to be aware of, and they should take appropriate steps to support employees with the condition," said Rachel Suff, senior policy adviser for employment relations at the CIPD. Britain has reported nearly 18 million COVID-19 cases overall, and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates that at the start of 2022, 1.3 million people were living with self-reported symptoms of long COVID. The CIPD said that a fifth of employers didn't know whether their workers were experiencing ongoing symptoms following COVID infection, and only 19% provided guidance for employees about managing health conditions while at work. "There's a risk that those who experience ongoing long COVID symptoms may not get the support they need in the workplace and could even fall out of work," Suff said. https://www.reuters.com/world/the-g...ong-covid-driving-absences-survey-2022-02-08/ ---------- wrbtrader
Long COVID Patients Are Waiting Months for Care, and the Problem May Only Get Worse By Jamie Ducharme Updated: February 3, 2022 11:12 AM EST | Originally published: February 3, 2022 7:00 AM EST In March 2020, Laura Fitton, a 50-year-old entrepreneur in Massachusetts, had a high fever, sore throat, gastrointestinal issues, and loss of taste. But at the time, few of those symptoms were linked to COVID-19, so Fitton wasn’t eligible for a test. It took seven more months of persistent symptoms—including brain fog, swollen joints, fast heart rate, chills, and fatigue—for a doctor to order an antibody test. Although the test came back negative—perhaps because of how much time had passed since she had gotten sick—Fitton was relieved that a doctor was finally exploring the possibility of Long COVID, a little-understood condition in which people suffer symptoms long after their acute infection passes. Two years after her initial illness, getting care is still a battle. She must wait until July for a simple screening call with a Long COVID clinic in Boston, and until this October for a neurologist to walk through the results of tests he ran on her in November 2021. In the meantime, she’s mostly on her own to manage her symptoms, which are still present but have improved significantly since she got vaccinated last year. “I can’t imagine what this is like for somebody who’s in the condition I was in,” she says, “and is just getting stonewalled everywhere.” So many people are suffering from Long COVID that treatment centers can’t keep up. In many ways, that’s understandable: the diagnosis did not exist before 2020. New York City’s Mount Sinai Health System was one of the first places in the country to launch a post-COVID-19 recovery center, in May 2020. By early 2021, many top U.S. hospitals, including the Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic, and Massachusetts General Hospital, had taken notice and opened their own practices. There is now at least one Long COVID treatment clinic in almost every U.S. state, according to a directory kept by Survivor Corps, a COVID-19 and Long COVID patient-support group. TIME Illustration. Viral cell icon: Getty Images As many Americans begin to wonder if there’s a light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, new clinics are continuing to open across the country, an acknowledgment that Long COVID symptoms won’t disappear even if the pandemic fades. After treating long-haulers—the name sometimes given to people who have Long COVID—virtually throughout the pandemic, cardiopulmonary physical therapist Noah Greenspan opened a brick-and-mortar pulmonary-rehab center in New York City in December (after previously opening one in 2020) because, he says... “We need action, not lip service,” to solve the Long COVID problem. Indiana’s Parkview Health also opened a clinic for pediatric Long COVID patients in December, and Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Nebraska opened a recovery center the same month. Even with this progress, medical care has not kept pace with the overwhelming needs of patients, given how many people report months-long waits for care or can’t find it at all. With research about Long COVID and its treatment still in its early stages, there is no guarantee of recovery even for those lucky enough to get into a specialty clinic. “I’m pleased to see the growth of the post-COVID care centers,” says Diana Berrent, who founded Survivor Corps after testing positive for COVID-19 in March 2020. But “I’ve yet to see where they are really moving the needle in terms of actually getting people better.” Read More: Omicron Could Be the Beginning of the End of the COVID-19 Pandemic It’s not clear how many Long COVID patients there are in the U.S. In 2020, researchers estimated that between 10% and 30% of people with COVID-19 would develop long-term symptoms. That percentage is probably lower among people who have been infected after being vaccinated, given that studies have shown that being vaccinated significantly reduces the odds of developing Long COVID. The U.K. has a better understanding of the scope of the problem. According to data published in January by the U.K. government, about 1.3 million people there said they were living with Long COVID as of December 2021. Estimates vary for the U.S., but authors of a paper published in August 2021 in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that at least 15 million people in the U.S. would have Long COVID by the pandemic’s end. However, that was published before the emergence of the highly contagious Omicron variant, which has already produced a record-shattering number of cases—some of which are likely to develop into Long COVID. Amber Rausch’s blood pressure is taken during Long COVID testing Rebecca Stumpf for TIME The U.S. healthcare system can barely keep up. Because people with Long COVID have reported more than 200 distinct symptoms, they often require care from clinicians in multiple specialties, from pulmonology and neurology to gastroenterology and psychiatry. Stanford’s Post-Acute COVID-19 Syndrome Clinic, for example, tries to use its slim staff most efficiently through a hub-and-spoke model, explains co-director Dr. Linda Geng. Each patient is examined by one of the clinic’s staff physicians and, if necessary, is then referred to a specialist. The clinic analyzes five or six new patients each week, Geng says—but it has a months-long waitlist. To see more patients, the clinic would need not only more physicians, but also more nurses, medical assistants, and billing coordinators, Geng says. That’s no small order, given the personnel shortages that have plagued the industry since before the pandemic. In 2019, the U.S. had an estimated 20,000 fewer doctors than necessary to meet demand. Now, after mass resignations and with rampant staffing issues because of Omicron, hiring extra health care workers is even more challenging. Long waits are also partly due to the criteria many clinics require new patients to meet. Many care centers treat only people who had a laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis. But many people with lingering symptoms—particularly those who got sick in the spring of 2020, before tests were widely available—never got a positive COVID-19 result. Dr. Brad Nieset, a family-medicine physician, runs one of Montana’s only Long COVID treatment clinics, Benefis Health System’s Post-COVID-19 Recovery Program. He does not require a positive test result from his patients. “No matter what, they called me because there’s a problem,” he says. The clinic has treated about 600 people so far and currently has a waitlist about a month long. To help triage the requests, Nieset begins with a telehealth consultation. Then, when patients come into the clinic—sometimes driving from hundreds of miles away—his team performs a comprehensive physical and mental assessment to decide who can be treated by a primary-care provider, and who needs care from specialists. Long COVID clinics must rely heavily on primary care to meet surging demand, says Dr. Gavin Yamey, associate director for policy at the Duke University Global Health Institute. There aren’t enough specialists, and many people can’t afford their services anyway. “It begins in primary care,” Yamey says. “There needs to be awareness and recognition of the condition, and health care providers need to understand what the care pathway looks like.” The problem is, nobody fully understands how to cure Long COVID. In that regard, it’s similar to other mysterious and complex chronic illnesses like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), chronic Lyme disease, and fibromyalgia. “To be frank,” Geng says, “we don’t have a curative therapy.” Still, people have recovered from Long COVID. Some, like Fitton, improve after vaccination, although experts aren’t sure why it happens; others have damage to a specific organ or an underlying illness that is fairly straightforward to treat; and others simply get better with time. Read More: Can Breakthrough Infections Lead to Long COVID? For an Unlucky Few, Yes Amber and Mike Rausch, both of whom are 53 and in treatment for Long COVID at the Benefis clinic in Montana, are two such success stories. Both husband and wife caught COVID-19 in late 2020 and experienced symptoms well into 2021: complete exhaustion for Mike and brain fog and excruciating headaches for Amber. Dr. Brad Nieset talks with Mike and Amber Rausch after completing testing for Long COVID symptoms They were relieved when Mike was referred to the Benefis clinic in the summer of 2021. Starting with Mike’s initial screening call, Amber says, they felt comforted by learning that “we know so much more about COVID and long-haul symptoms than we did at the beginning of the pandemic,” she says. “I just remember [Nieset] giving us so much hope that day.” Nieset’s team noticed during intake screenings that Mike had significant lung damage and started him on nighttime oxygen and a home breathing device called a nebulizer. “I feel 10 times better,” Mike says. “I don’t think I’m quite back to pre-COVID, but I’m 90, 95% there.” Amber also recently started with a slew of assessments, from chest X-rays to cognitive, breathing, and physical-fitness tests, to find the root cause of her symptoms. Like her husband, she has improved with overnight supplemental oxygen. But other patients remain sick for no clear reason, says Dr. Luis Ostrosky-Zeichner, a leader of UTHealth’s post-COVID-19 recovery program in Texas. (The clinic has about 900 current patients and still has a waitlist.) “These patients are sick and they’re symptomatic and we need to take care of them,” Ostrosky-Zeichner says. “But we need to get to the bottom of why are they here?” Read More: A Year Into the Pandemic, Long COVID Is Still Burdening Patients—and Their Caregivers The U.S. National Institutes of Health has earmarked more than $1 billion for Long COVID research, but it could be years before those studies produce actionable results. “Consolidating the way we study these patients would be useful,” Ostrosky-Zeichner says. “We need a systematic way to approach this, with a national registry.” There are some efforts to share treatment guidelines among physicians. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has interim guidance for treating patients with Long COVID, and several medical groups, like the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, have released Long COVID treatment guidelines. Mike Rausch takes a neurocognitive test to measure brain fog This type of collaboration is also useful to patients navigating their new condition. One of Fitton’s biggest complaints is that Long COVID experts don’t always share their knowledge publicly, leaving patients on their own unless they can get into a specialty clinic. “Nobody seems to know what to tell me to do,” Fitton says. “I feel like answers are out there, and I’m just having to do my own advocacy.” Despite efforts to share best practices, some doctors still don’t believe their patients have Long COVID, which presents another barrier to treatment. Jackie Olvera, 38, experienced debilitating symptoms, including tremors and paralysis episodes, months after being hospitalized with COVID-19 in January 2021. But Olvera says that when she suggested to her doctor that she might have Long COVID, she was dismissed. “She told me to stop blaming COVID for all my symptoms,” Olvera says. “She told me that the only thing that was wrong with me was that I needed to lose weight and exercise.” Later, Olvera found a physician who agreed she had Long COVID and enrolled her in a specialty clinic near her home in California. The initial doctor’s reaction wasn’t only an obstacle to treatment. Olvera says the doctor also slowed down the application process when she sought disability benefits. Although Olvera did ultimately get disability benefits, they expired at the end of January. She has also been too sick to work and is currently without health insurance, which means she can’t afford many treatments, visits to her Long COVID clinic, or her nearly $10,000 in medical bills. Although she still struggles with reduced mobility, chronic pain, and fatigue, Olvera plans to return to her hospitality job to regain health insurance. The ordeal has been taxing mentally as well as physically. “I was feeling like I wasn’t getting anywhere,” Olvera says. “I was just feeling so broken, so left out, and [doctors] weren’t listening.” There have been times when she considered suicide, she says—something that research suggests is alarmingly common among Long COVID patients. Up to 28% of people experience depression symptoms at least 12 weeks after their initial COVID-19 diagnosis, according to one recent paper published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. Survivor Corps also reports that almost 20% of its members have considered suicide, and Berrent says the group is “fielding suicide threats on a daily basis.” Some preliminary research suggests that because the virus that causes COVID-19 can affect the brain, it could have psychological side effects. But the simple fact of having Long COVID can also take a psychological toll. Nieset, from the Montana Long COVID clinic, says some of his patients feel guilty that they survived when so many people haven’t. Others struggle to find acceptance from doctors and loved ones or have a hard time adjusting to their new realities, which can look very different from before they got sick. Many people are too ill to work, or even to leave their homes for long stretches of time. Trying to resolve a complex, hard-to-treat illness can be stressful and isolating. Whatever the cause, Nieset says Long COVID patients need mental—not just physical—support. “I’ve never seen a phenomenon in medicine where I’ve actually heard patients talking the way [people in the] military would, dealing with PTSD and different things,” Nieset says. Duke’s Yamey stresses that while Long COVID is a health condition, it also needs holistic solutions. “It’s not just about the health issues,” he says. “There are also issues around employment and the need for social support and sick pay and making sure that people can access disability benefits. You need to take a truly psychosocial and biomedical approach.” For patients who have experienced compassionate Long COVID care, like Amber and Mike Rausch, the payoff can be huge. For a while, the couple thought they might never feel well enough to enjoy activities they loved like kayaking, biking, and hiking, which led to some “dark days,” Amber says. Now they’re getting back to many of those hobbies and feeling hopeful about the future. “If I could do anything,” Mike says, “it’s to ensure that the news gets out that this is treatable, and you can feel better.” https://time.com/6144427/long-covid-treatments-health-care-wait/ ---------- wrbtrader