The poop is behind a Paywall.

The proper place for all excrement, much like a pay toilet.

COVID Is Making Younger, Healthy People Debilitatingly Sick For Months. Now They’re Fighting For Recognition.


There were weeks when Hannah Davis couldn’t remember how to send a text message. On top of the extreme fatigue, racing heart rate, and difficulty breathing she experienced daily, the most terrifying part of being sick with COVID-19 for the last 21 weeks, Davis said, has also been one of the hardest to explain: losing her mind.

“I feel like I have a brain injury. I have a hard time remembering who I was,” she said. “It was hard to remember I had to feed myself a couple times a day.”

Davis, 32, is a programmer who spent her days pre-pandemic working on machine learning and artificial intelligence, often presenting to big audiences, including at the Library of Congress. That all came crashing to a halt in March, when she got sick. She had to move back in with her mom and, for 150 days, has been unable to function normally. Doctors, even sympathetic ones, had no answers. Most questioned whether her symptoms, particularly the neurological ones, were linked to COVID at all.

But Davis soon realized that she was not alone. She’s among the thousands of people across the globe — many of whom were young, active, and healthy — who have been debilitated by ongoing, unexplainable symptoms. These patients, also known as long-haulers, are crushing the popular idea that COVID is only serious for a small percentage of vulnerable people.

And after months of self-organizing on social media to document their symptoms and collect data, Davis is now part of a group that’s pushing for the medical establishment to take them seriously too.

On Friday, led by LongCovidSOS, a patient-led advocacy group in the UK, Davis and about 60 other long-haulers had a closed, invite-only meeting with top officials from the World Health Organization in the biggest recognition yet that the medical world is starting to pay attention and figure out solutions.

The growing group of long-haulers hopes that this small but significant progress — eight months into the pandemic, with almost 800,000 deaths from COVID-19 worldwide so far — will draw attention to the more than tens of millions who have survived, blurring what we understand as the difference between illness and recovery.

The long-haulers called in to the WHO meeting from places around the world — the US, the UK, India, Italy, Spain, France, Finland, Senegal, and South Africa — but they all shared largely the same story: I was young and active before this, and now I cannot seem to get better. I haven’t been able to get my doctor to believe me because I do not have a positive test result, and I need a lot of care that does not exist where I live.

Leaders from the WHO, including the director-general, said they were “very aware” of and now doing research into “long COVID,” people who attended the meeting told BuzzFeed News. But even top medical specialists acknowledged they didn’t know that so many of these symptoms were happening in younger people whose cases had been initially categorized as “mild” — meaning they were sick, but not sick enough to be hospitalized. While the meeting was a positive, validating step for Davis and the other long-haulers, conversations around testing, antibodies, and the need for rehabilitative care made it clear that there is far more work that needs to be done.

“This is not just a respiratory illness. This is a systemic illness that makes you lose connection with the world,” Davis told BuzzFeed News from her mom’s Rhode Island home, where she is now living. “And the most shocking thing to me is how long it has taken for doctors and the general public to realize this basic fact.”
David Putrino, the director of rehabilitation innovation at New York City’s Mount Sinai hospital, has been studying and caring for long-haulers at one of the nation’s only post-COVID clinics since May. He said that as important as these grassroots advocacy efforts are, they are far from enough. The CDC and the WHO need to be throwing their resources behind them, Putrino said, or else millions of people are going to be “left out in the cold.”

“It's not that we don't have capacity — we do have capacity. What we need to do is rapidly mobilize and educate people that long COVID is a real thing, and it’s going to be around for a while,” he said. “There's a lot of hurt and we are doing what we can to help, but we need a lot of people to pick up the torch and run with us.”

Davis had no idea what was happening to her back in March. She had to stop showering because there were too many steps — it was exhausting. She would stare at her fingers trying to parse a text message, wondering what they were doing. It sometimes felt, she said, like someone had suddenly turned a windshield wiper on over her brain — everything would go blank.

For 24 days, she felt completely alone. Then, she came across an op-ed by Fiona Lowenstein, another woman in New York who had started a support group to talk about recovery. The group she launched, called Body Politic, now has 7,500 members on Slack. Davis also joined several Facebook groups, with more than 17,500 long-haulers in one Facebook group and 5,000 in another.

Scrolling through Body Politic’s nearly 50 Slack channels, Davis was stunned to keep reading accounts identical to hers, but from yoga instructors in Chicago, college students in Kentucky, and a married couple from Utah in their forties.

BuzzFeed News spoke with more than 100 of these long-haulers who described a set of similar symptoms: Their hearts would race and palpate. They got winded walking up stairs and were unable to stand for long periods of time. Though fatigue was common, many people also said they couldn’t sleep. They had relentless fevers, violent diarrhea, and throbbing headaches. The tips of their fingers and toes often burned intensely, like they got plugged into an electrical socket. Some women described having extremely heavy periods — or no periods at all — and having their hair fall out in clumps. And, like Davis, most of them were trying to figure out what was going on with their bodies while navigating what they call a “brain fog,” a mix between short-term memory loss and an inability to focus.

Most notably, the vast majority of long-haulers described visiting doctors with no answers to give — or worse, who suggested that their symptoms could possibly be linked to anxiety or depression instead of COVID.

But Davis and several other Body Politic members with backgrounds in data, science, and medicine saw a way to counter that doubt: harnessing the anecdotes in the group to gather data and force change. They formed their own research group and began organizing patients’ daily symptoms. It was a “coping strategy,” she said, to sift through information and search for answers.

On May 11, they published the first extensive report detailing the volatile and often unpredictable recovery process, based on the experiences of 640 people. The findings were trailblazing and “a huge shock to the narrative of what COVID actually was,” Davis said, and caught the attention of reporters and prestigious medical journals. It also made clear that testing systems were failing: Only a quarter of the respondents tested positive — nearly half were never able to get a test — but they still all reported experiencing about 60 of the same persistent symptoms. They are aiming to publish another report soon highlighting what long-haulers’ symptoms look like after six months.

“The group is like an open book of patient-written history of the virus,” said Lowenstein, Body Politic’s founder. She calls the group “a headquarters for patient advocacy efforts.”

“You can see how the symptoms have morphed over time and how diverse the patient experience is,” Lowenstein said, describing how people have been joining the group in geographic waves. “In the beginning of the summer, a bunch of people from Brazil were messaging me. Then I started hearing from more people in India and Mexico.”

A small handful of scientists have started collecting data on the longer-term effects of COVID too. A study out of Germany found that 78 out of 100 patients — most of whom recovered at home — had heart complications two months later. An Italian study found that 87% of hospitalized patients still had a variety of symptoms after two months.

Putrino has been studying and treating the long COVID cases since May. He’s been in contact with about 90,000 people in almost 100 countries who are all reporting nearly the same spate of serious, post-viral symptoms that knock their autonomic nervous systems out of whack. Their average age is about 38, he said, and they’re mainly women. Before COVID, many of them were vibrant, active, “and breezing through life,” he said. Now, they can’t work and often need help with basic tasks, like feeding themselves.

“It feels like your body is rebelling against you and, to add insult to injury, it’s an unpredictable war,” he said. “This should be enough to make everyone pause and think, Yeah, I am young and healthy, but can I afford to be out of action for six months? Because that is what we are seeing.”

Months into their advocacy efforts, the murky long-term effects of COVID are getting the attention of the biggest health agencies in the world. In July, the CDC acknowledged that a significant chunk of COVID patients — 35% — do not recover after three weeks, even if their cases were considered too mild for hospitalization. Last week, the patient-led research team met with the health agency, which hopes to start its own investigation, in a meeting Davis called “incredibly validating.”

Friday’s meeting with the WHO was Davis and the other long-hauler advocates’ biggest move yet.

For one and a half hours, the long-haulers shared their testimonies with top officials, including Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and the WHO’s technical lead for coronavirus response, Maria Van Kerkhove, who asked questions. The WHO officials agreed to have periodic meetings with the representatives in the future and are putting together a pamphlet on what is known about the long-term effects of COVID-19.

MORE AT THE LINK: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/a...lers-who-coronavirus

Oh, horse shit.

"Long COVID"

"Long-haulers"

The fact that they've assigned labels to this is a huge clue. Another specialty victim's group. "Notice me! Pity me! Pamper me! Pay me! I'm specialer than other special people!"

Cut the shit. Shake off your "Deep Bullshit" and go back to work or school or whatever you were doing, you special, special hypochondriacs and con artists. Buncha phonies. I should have guessed this kind of thing was inevitable: "I've got COVID- FOREVER!!!"

Sure you do. Sure.

Sixty symptoms! Sixty! Puh-lease

It's just too good of a victim schtick to let go. Career coronavirus. Sure. Bite my ass.

Fabricating more BS to try to keep the panic alive.

speaking of BS. It either is, or is not a concern. Marching over a concern does not provide any special immunity.

Waiting for someone to start selling COVID-Strong t-shirts to support the cause, or just to make a few bucks from these fools.

what a great idea.....

quote:

Originally posted by feersum dreadnaught:
speaking of BS. It either is, or is not a concern. Marching over a concern does not provide any special immunity.

And communism has taken many more. We need more people attending Trump speeches so we can stamp it out.

https://movieweb.com/disney-wo...s-social-distancing/

Stormtroopers Used to Enforce Social Distancing at Disney World
Disney Springs opened up last week and it has been crowded, so Stormtroopers from the Star Wars franchise have been called in to help with social distancing.

KEVIN BURWICK — May 29, 2020 in MOVIE NEWS



"Disney Springs now has Stormtroopers from the Star Wars franchise on patrol to make sure everybody is following the social distancing safety measures. It's a friendly reminder and it helps to keep people feeling comfortable with coming outside of their homes during this time. That's the exact opposite of the way these guys are portrayed on the big screen, but whatever it takes to make people feel like things are getting back to normal works. So far, the results have been nothing but positive, which should make Kylo Ren proud, or maybe even more angry than he was before."

This was three months ago. Why can't I remember it?

Maybe they flashy-thing-ed me.

Sorry, Hannah, but I call bullshit! You could not send a text message? That had to be a personal disaster of horrific proportion. And unable to text but you spent months "self organizing"? And moving in with Mom for 150 days? Did Mom wear a mask? Was she socially distanced from you the entire time?
And you were ok with exposing Mom to your highly contagious self? Right.

________________________________________________________________________________________

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
COVID Is Making Younger, Healthy People Debilitatingly Sick For Months. Now They’re Fighting For Recognition.


There were weeks when Hannah Davis couldn’t remember how to send a text message. On top of the extreme fatigue, racing heart rate, and difficulty breathing she experienced daily, the most terrifying part of being sick with COVID-19 for the last 21 weeks, Davis said, has also been one of the hardest to explain: losing her mind.

“I feel like I have a brain injury. I have a hard time remembering who I was,” she said. “It was hard to remember I had to feed myself a couple times a day.”

Davis, 32, is a programmer who spent her days pre-pandemic working on machine learning and artificial intelligence, often presenting to big audiences, including at the Library of Congress. That all came crashing to a halt in March, when she got sick. She had to move back in with her mom and, for 150 days, has been unable to function normally. Doctors, even sympathetic ones, had no answers. Most questioned whether her symptoms, particularly the neurological ones, were linked to COVID at all. ...

https://jbhandleyblog.com/home.../lockdownlunacythree

Jeffrey A. Tucker of the American Institute for Economic Research put it best in his excellent essay on July 10 titled, When will the Madness End?:

“I’m a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. I’ve been treating this in individuals as a specialist. It’s hard enough to contain these problems in normal times. What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population. It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.”

The age gradient is striking. The young attach higher probabilities to people like themselves contracting Covid-19, of being hospitalized conditional on infection, and of dying conditional on infection. Arguably, young respondents have a lifestyle that exposes them to wider networks, and this may explain why they feel more likely to be infected. But their assessment of health risks conditional on infection are puzzling in light of the evidence that Covid-19 is significantly less severe for younger people…Third, and crucially, young people, as compared to older people, report substantially higher mortality rates for every age group. Young people are more pessimistic than older people not only about their own mortality risk but also about everyone else’s mortality risk.

Daniel Horowitz wrote a great article about this survey titled, New study: Millennials think their risk from COVID-19 is exponentially more than the true threat. He writes:

Perhaps the most destructive element of lockdown is the panic and fear that such severe measures help confirm, in this case, wrongly so, in the minds of the young and impressionable. As the paper concludes, “Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.” In other words, we need to flatten the fear.

It is important to understand the differences between outright malingering and psychiatric disorders.

I’m a practicing psychiatrist who specializes in anxiety disorders, paranoid delusions, and irrational fear. I’ve been treating this in individuals as a specialist. It’s hard enough to contain these problems in normal times. What’s happening now is a spread of this serious medical condition to the whole population. It can happen with anything but here we see a primal fear of disease turning into mass panic. It seems almost deliberate. It is tragic. Once this starts, it could take years to repair the psychological damage.” (Quote from above article}


I can tell you the mental health aspect of COVID has not been addressed.

quote:

Experience has shown that communities faced with epidemics or other adverse events respond best and with the least anxiety when the normal social functioning of the community is least disrupted.” In other words, we need to flatten the fear.

These tyrant governors and mayors, along with their media lapdogs and others, have done just the opposite. They have deliberately and methodically caused and increased fear for their political gain. I hate every one of them.

So, people who have not tested positive with COVID19 think they have it, and it is causing myriad symptoms that are not present in known severe cases?

Sounds like a coincidence, or their "harmless" recreational drug use has increased dramatically during the lockdown, or it's just another ailment or autoimmune disease.

A friend had some of these symptoms - loss of hair, weight gain, headaches - and was recently diagnosed with a Thyroid condition.

Personally, over the past year and a half I have experienced some of this too - brain fog, headaches/eye pain, neck pain, mild chest pain, ear pain, joint pain, and numbness in my left hand small fingers. All this seemed to really happen after a particularly bad head cold in early March 2019 while I was on a business trip to North Carolina during pine pollen season. And I was even in China in January 2019 - Chongqing (SW), Beijing, and Dalian (NE).

So far the cause has not been identified. So far, I have seen my GP, an ENT specialist, Neurologist, Ophthalmologist, Chiropractor, and an Allergy specialist. Also had a sinus and eye socket CT scan, a physical with full blood workup, and a Celiac disease test (negative). No one has found anything, except that I have allergies to shellfish and dust mites, and the symptoms are not severe. It's more of an annoyance as I feel like I'm running at 75% of normal. I haven't been to any doctor since mid March due to the shutdowns and reductions in elective visits.

Maybe next I'll try a orthopedist or an arthritis specialist since I'm 48 and things just start going wrong as you get older. Seriously, I felt fine until I turned 47 and then things started going noticeably downhill.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Try to find someone who specializes in autoimmune disorders. I know several people who have similar ailments who turned out to have Lyme Disease or a rare autoimmune disorder. I see that you live in Indiana. I would try one of the major medical center in Indianapolis or Chicago. These folks are ALWAYS intereested in patients with ailments such as yours. I would not bother with orthopedists they are basically bone mechanics, not diagnosticians.

Good news in my county: the total number of deaths has decreased from 109 to 108. Yes, new deaths yesterday were reported to be -1.

The panic seems to be if not over, then at least significantly reduced. How much longer can the charade be kept up? I know the standard answer and I can't help but laugh at every Biden commercial that tells me Joe has a plan for the VID. Seriously, the guy's late to the party on this, it's over. I saw a couple reports of reinfection, but I don't believe that'll be enough to stretch this out another couple of months. People I've talked to are done. Even Karen is tired of it.

My younger son went to Texas to get a job as a software engineer in the hottest job market in 20 years. Poof! It all disappeared but there he was stuck in Texas, and his usual anxiety went through the roof. And he was afraid to come home because he might bring us the Covid, he thought.

Don’t know what else he was doing there, but he was just admitted to the hospital with DKA—was not a known diabetic before, but HbA1C was 12!!

Now he’s having to deal with the anxiety of being a diabetic, and maybe some new neurological symptoms in addition.

I’m on my way to see him today.
ZSMichael, you’re not in Texas by any chance?

Regarding the "long haulers". A couple of months ago, one of my wife's old classmates posted on Facebook that his wife had tested positive. His first wife had died of ALS and he was livid that his current wife had the covid because he "didn't want to lose another one". He ranted on FB that people who don't wear masks are murderers, etc., eventually deleting the post.

Well, his wife decided to chronicle her life with the covid so she started posting on FB everyday, listing her symptoms and how she felt. Obviously, she wasn't ready to die if she was posting on FB everyday. After a month, she couldn't figure why she still felt so bad. She went to the doctor and tested negative for covid. It turns out that the covid reactivated her dormant Epstein-Barr (mononucleosis) which had been accounting for all her symptoms for at least the previous 2-3 weeks.

So did they ever say they were sorry for attacking folks or for chronicling her now incorrect covid sypmtoms? Nope, of course not. In fact, several people praised her for her courage to post her battle with the "beast" even though the beast was actually mono! They were definitely enjoying the victimhood.