A new investigation led by researchers from the University College London and Dartmouth College suggests 14% of Americans had long COVID by the end of 2022. The details of the investigation are published in PLOS One.
Moreover, Americans who report having experienced long COVID said they also experienced more anxiety, low mood, and difficulty with memory.
All data was based on 461,550 respondents to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, conducted from June 2022 to December 2022. Researchers compared survey answers among those who said they have had long COVID, those who said they have had COVID-19 but no lingering symptoms, and those who had never had COVID-19.
Things are going great!
Rates of disability are not decreasing or levelling off, so I doubt the new variants are less dangerous in this regard, but I guess we'll see.
Please take care of yourselves, everyone. Covid is still going, still a threat, and can still kill or disable you and your loved ones. Please, do everything you can- wear a mask- an N95 or a KN95, filter your air with a hepa filter, ventilate your air, socialize carefully, get the vaccine, try to work remotely or at least away from other people if you can, use a nasal spray, avoid crowds. I know that not everyone can do these things but please do as many as you can. Assume that you and people around you are asymptomatically infectious, and take precautions as if that's the case.
Don't give up. Even a single case prevented is worth it. Even if you are exposed, if you can be exposed to a lower viral load that will be better- so precautions count. Think of your loved ones, your friends, yourself, your communities. You are protecting everyone each time you take protective steps. The government has failed us utterly and now it's time to take matters into our own hands and slow this down as much as possible. The fewer people infected means that fewer variants develop. Fewer variants mean that future vaccines are more likely to protect us.
Getting disabled can happen to anyone. No matter your age or level of health, getting covid can make things worse. Some people get permanent conditions from covid, like heart problems, diabetes, and autoimmune diseases. Please, do everything you can to protect yourself. Good health is temporary, and sometimes when you lose it it never comes back. If you can save yourself from a getting a permanent disability, you should.
Yes. I've been helping a close friend through this since early 2020. You don't want to get disabled. Not only does losing your health suck, but you will become completely depentent on a government that would rather see you dead, any friends or family that decide not to abandon you, and a healthcare system that's designed to take all the money you get from disability.
It's an absolute nightmare, and one of the reasons I am trying to get everyone I know to avoid covid.
I'm glad you're helping your friend. We need to be there for each other since our social structures, government, and "health""care" system won't do it otherwise. It seems like a lot of people are unaware of how close they are to disaster when it comes to how bad things are for disabled people in this evil system.
I'm actually getting pretty paranoid about COVID since I've been in close contact with people who have had it, but I've never gotten it in all this time. So sometimes I wonder if I somehow missed it or was asymptomatic or something, and it's gonna come back to bite me with delayed symptoms later. Not a fun feeling
There's a frothing, enraged lunatic locked away in my subconscious that's incapable of coping with the absolute wildness of Let It Rip and all the ways it's fucking humanity. They pass notes with the Climate Change guy, the Jakarta Method guy, the Palestine guy, etc...
I might draw that, it makes me think of the Calvin's subconscious strips
I'm in a similar boat. We've probably been getting microdosed the entire time. No idea if that means it's doing damage or not though, or if thats confined to breakthrough cases.
The evidence seems to be that the less covid you are exposed to, the better odds you have avoiding a serious health outcome. what exactly those odds are, no one really knows yet.
2020 as a year sucked, but I was extremely proud of how people in my life, including me, stepped up and handled Covid. I also really enjoyed moving home and spending time with my sister and family for the first substantial period of time in years.
2021 was tough since that’s when the vaccines came out, which should’ve been a good thing, but since our response to Covid this whole time has been just wait for the vaccines, immediately everyone throws caution to the wind. My family was still pretty cautious which was good.
2022 I started noticing no one around me was taking precautions. My family, without telling me, dropped a ton of precautions. They were still doing more than most, but it was literally the barest of minimums. I start to notice like mid 2022 that I don’t feel safe around my family with the level of precaution they’re taking.
2023 has been my bleakest year on record. My family is still taking bare minimum precautions, but it’s clearly just because they know I’m worried. Not that it matters since I mostly stay in my room anyway to minimize my time around them, or mask in the house if they just came back from a trip. My dad’s disdain for me is just barely concealed. Another fun part of the pandemic is watching him just go full fash because he couldn’t get a haircut from March-sept 2020. I don’t know what to do or where to go, there are no precautions anywhere. Everyone who is still active and going out just seem sad, like they’re telling themselves they should be having fun, and they’re acting like they’re having fun, but it’s all just a sad imitation of the way they all remember life pre-2020, they haven’t yet figured out that time has moved on and they’re clinging to that which no longer exists. Then there’s me and all the people in my Covid cautious groups, stressed and depressed to the point we’re not sure what’s the long Covid and what’s the effects of living through collapse, telling ourselves well at least we know what’s going on as if that matters as we slowly waste away. I dread what 2024 will bring, and I can’t believe it but if we must have a pandemic, I miss 2020.
I honestly don"t even know what could be long covid for me and what's ADHD+ mounting stressors+ aging at this point.
This is so fucking real. As someone who already deals with ADHD, excessive stress, & depression - what do I even do now? With the potential for permanent effects from long COVID it feels impossible to address some of this shit
Had? I wonder how 'had' it's gonna be after a couple more rounds of infections.
Doesn't look great, tbh.
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Here's what social security was predicting before the pandemic.
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It's all fucked. I'd be weary of comparing those sets of data though. Here it's fine, we both know what's up, but when I was looking into the Data for the Civilian Labor Force with Disability graph I found that SSDI applications had not increased to match the disability spike the Current Population Survey is recording. Which to me, means people are basically just out there suffering with this shit without applying for or getting any help or anything. Hell, they're probably still out there trying to work through this shit doing gig work or something. I also wouldn't be surprised if the undocumented immigrant population was getting hit particularly hard by all this given their inability to apply for benefits but stuck on the front lines of "essential" workers.
It just feels like living through a zombie apocalypse. Trying for months to get my young children the updated vaccines has been enough to finally convince me of something I’ve known deep down since April 2020. COVID-19 is not a respiratory illness. It is a viral induced psychomyopathy. Like the humble toxoplasmosis infection that makes people love cats and reject basic hygiene. Or the ophicordycep fungus that convinces ants to go to a nice breezy branch before the fungus erupts from its head. Or rabies which makes you afraid of water and want to bite people. If you’ve had it, I’m sorry, but it is too late for you. COVID-19 will inextricably drive you to spread it. But it’ll be subtle. Maybe you’ll “forget” to wash your hands despite always being very diligent about it. Or you’ll keep trying to invite people over even though you hate hosting. Maybe you’ll get super into NFTs or something and somehow that further proliferates COVID. It’s enough to make me want to mail [REDACTED] to federal buildings.
investigate Fort Detrick
Six months later: Police say shooting by Fort Detrick sailor was targeted, motive still unknown
It would have been nice if every country investigated incidents of abnormal pneumonia outbreaks that occured in 2019, like the ones that occured around Fort Detrick.
How do I tell if its that or my usual seasonal affective disorder compounded by a god awful year?
They are starting to figure out the biomarkers for longcovid, so if you can see a doctor who isn't dismissing longcovid as an attitude problem they might be able to run tests. My coworker had bloodwork done and the doctor said it was long covid, one of them was a low white blood cell count, and the other was related to blood sugar/insulin response, showing elevated blood sugar despite them not having anything to eat for half a day. It's been a year since their infection, which happened just over a year after their last vaccination.
If your heart starts racing out of nowhere, your blood pressure swings wildly up and down, or you get winded or have to rest for a long time after doing simple physically active things that you had no problem doing before a covid infection, that's usually a sign. This fucking virus can infect every part of the body, so it's probably going to be hard to diagnose all the issues it can cause.
Thank you! That's really helpful. I need to look into it. I've just been getting so exhausted lately but this time of year is always hard on me
Here's an article about the latest info on some of the progress researchers are making, if you are interested: Scientists edge closer to finding a biomarker for long Covid, which could lead to better tests and treatments
