I wonder about this myself. Is there any objective test for "long covid"? Like, do these people ring up positive for covid on a spit test? Or is every new case of hard-to-diagnose-probably-autoimmune-malaise now just classified as "long covid"?
I don't doubt there is such a thing as "long covid"... it's just, long drawn out post-viral illness isn't a new thing. I once took two months to recover from the flu. In my twenties! It was just an awful year, my immune system was tanked, and that year's flu was a doozy. Just about any virus going around will do that to a certain percentage of infectees, given the right circumstances, same as you get people who suffer a very very long time, or even repeated bouts of chronic illness, from epstein-barr, strep, bordetella (found endemically in a huge percentage of chronic bronchitis sufferers), and other fairly common pathogens. If you just look back at older biographies, it's quite common for people to get ill with something and then take months to recover, if they ever fully recover. There used to be really stringent rules for what to feed people who were recovering from illness (clear broths, a boiled egg every day...), because recovery was serious business. Now if you can't go back to work in 3 days that's abnormal?
So I'd like to know if "long-covid" is something really new, different, and specific to covid, or if it's just the same old post-infection extended illness that's always happened to some people. Is it more with covid? Do we know it's actually covid causing it? Or is it the same deal as "the flu knocked the stuffing out of me and I haven't been right for a month!"... because I haven't actually slowed down and taken the required time for my body to properly recover from a serious illness, but instead chugged nyquil and went back to work. I'm not sure what to make of it, because it's hard to get any specifics.
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I don't doubt there is such a thing as "long covid"... it's just, long drawn out post-viral illness isn't a new thing. I once took two months to recover from the flu. In my twenties! It was just an awful year, my immune system was tanked, and that year's flu was a doozy. Just about any virus going around will do that to a certain percentage of infectees, given the right circumstances, same as you get people who suffer a very very long time, or even repeated bouts of chronic illness, from epstein-barr, strep, bordetella (found endemically in a huge percentage of chronic bronchitis sufferers), and other fairly common pathogens. If you just look back at older biographies, it's quite common for people to get ill with something and then take months to recover, if they ever fully recover. There used to be really stringent rules for what to feed people who were recovering from illness (clear broths, a boiled egg every day...), because recovery was serious business. Now if you can't go back to work in 3 days that's abnormal?
So I'd like to know if "long-covid" is something really new, different, and specific to covid, or if it's just the same old post-infection extended illness that's always happened to some people. Is it more with covid? Do we know it's actually covid causing it? Or is it the same deal as "the flu knocked the stuffing out of me and I haven't been right for a month!"... because I haven't actually slowed down and taken the required time for my body to properly recover from a serious illness, but instead chugged nyquil and went back to work. I'm not sure what to make of it, because it's hard to get any specifics.