A term that has been popping up in recents days is Long-Covid and I thought I'd do a little research into the topic. The first article I came across was in The Bristol Cable of December 4th 2020:
There are an estimated 60,000 people in the UK with Long-Covid, where symptoms last longer than 12 weeks. NHS England have said that long-lasting symptoms include “breathing difficulties, enduring tiredness, reduced muscle function, impaired ability to perform vital everyday tasks, and mental health problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression”.
The NHS is set to open 40 Long–Covid clinics across the country, eight in the south west, and the Your Covid Recovery website offers support to people with long-term symptoms. We now know that the people most susceptible to it are women, older people, and people who have more symptoms in the first week of illness.More recently, two separate studies have found damage to organs months after patients first contracted coronavirus. Data from 200 young and previously healthy people found impairment to an organ in 78% of patients four months after originally getting coronavirus. One in four of the participants had two or more organs affected.
On September 27th 2020, The Gothamist carried this report about NewYorkers:
It’s unclear exactly how many New Yorkers suffer from long-term post-COVID-19 symptoms, but a picture of what the long-haul population looks like is starting to come into view. According to McCarthy, “20 to 50 [years old] is the range we’re most commonly seeing at the Center. Thirties and 40s, even more so. And it’s mostly formerly healthy people.”
Among the most alarming post-COVID-19 symptoms being reported are brain fog and fatigue so intense that people are no longer able to work, often leaving them in financial and emotional distress. Those who spoke to Gothamist about brain fog said they had difficulty focusing, struggled to engage with complex material and would forget common words.
Dr. Dayna McCarthy, a rehabilitation medicine specialist who sees patients at Mount Sinai’s Center for Post-COVID Care, told Gothamist in a recent interview:
McCarthy and her colleagues at Mount Sinai the wide-ranging symptoms people experience after contracting COVID-19 resemble a condition known as dysautonomia, or damage to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates such involuntary functions as breathing, heart rate, and digestion. Dysautonomia can develop on its own or can be triggered by the immune system’s response to another disease.
In another article in Inside Edition, a Dr. Christian Sandrock who works with patients at UC Davis Health’s Post-COVID-19 Clinic in Sacramento, said:
He has seen people who still don’t have a sense of taste or smell months later, people with chest pain and shortness of breath, decreased exercise tolerance, among many other things. Why people are having such persistent symptoms a long time after their infection has resolved is something that doctors are still trying to figure out, Sandrock said.
“We think it's probably two things. One is with the loss of taste and smell and some of the other effects, the virus can infect your nerve cells and cause those to die,” Sandrock said. “The other, which is really the bigger effect, is that when the virus replicates and spreads, it can actually cause what we call endothelial damage. So the lining of your blood vessels get damaged and they're now irregular and they become a focal point for clotting.”
But, Sandrock said what many people may be experiencing is microvascular clots, which are so small that they don’t show up on testing.
“So, if you can imagine you have that clotting in your brain and your brain has diminished blood flow, so now you notice you have a brain fog or you have some depression or some psychiatric changes,” he said. “Same thing in your heart. You're having diminished blood flow in your heart, so you get chest pain when you walk a short distance.”
The Mayo Clinic lists these long term Covid-19 problems in an article dated November 17th 2020:
Organ damage caused by COVID-19
Although COVID-19 is seen as a disease that primarily affects the lungs, it can damage many other organs as well. This organ damage may increase the risk of long-term health problems. Organs that may be affected by COVID-19 include:
Heart. Imaging tests taken months after recovery from COVID-19 have shown lasting damage to the heart muscle, even in people who experienced only mild COVID-19 symptoms. This may increase the risk of heart failure or other heart complications in the future.
Lungs. The type of pneumonia often associated with COVID-19 can cause long-standing damage to the tiny air sacs (alveoli) in the lungs. The resulting scar tissue can lead to long-term breathing problems.
Brain. Even in young people, COVID-19 can cause strokes, seizures and Guillain-Barre syndrome — a condition that causes temporary paralysis. COVID-19 may also increase the risk of developing Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.
Blood clots and blood vessel problems
COVID-19 can make blood cells more likely to clump up and form clots. While large clots can cause heart attacks and strokes, much of the heart damage caused by COVID-19 is believed to stem from very small clots that block tiny blood vessels (capillaries) in the heart muscle.
Other parts of the body affected by blood clots include the lungs, legs, liver and kidneys. COVID-19 can also weaken blood vessels and cause them to leak, which contributes to potentially long-lasting problems with the liver and kidneys.
Problems with mood and fatigue
People who have severe symptoms of COVID-19 often have to be treated in a hospital's intensive care unit, with mechanical assistance such as ventilators to breathe. Simply surviving this experience can make a person more likely to later develop post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression and anxiety.
Because it's difficult to predict long-term outcomes from the new COVID-19 virus, scientists are looking at the long-term effects seen in related viruses, such as the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
Many people who have recovered from SARS have gone on to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, a complex disorder characterised by extreme fatigue that worsens with physical or mental activity, but doesn't improve with rest. The same may be true for people who have had COVID-19.
Many long-term COVID-19 effects still unknown
Much is still unknown about how COVID-19 will affect people over time. However, researchers recommend that doctors closely monitor people who have had COVID-19 to see how their organs are functioning after recovery.
Many large medical centres are opening specialised clinics to provide care for people who have persistent symptoms or related illnesses after they recover from COVID-19.
It's important to remember that most people who have COVID-19 recover quickly. But the potentially long-lasting problems from COVID-19 make it even more important to reduce the spread of the disease by following precautions such as wearing masks, avoiding crowds and keeping hands clean.
It seems to me unlikely that a virus can produce such a wide range of possible damage. The loss of taste and smell suggests to me that the nasal swab has damaged the olfactory centre and possibly perforated the blood-brain barrier which would then lead to a wide range of unpleasant effects. I would presume that all of these "long-haulers" received a nasal swab initially in order for them to be diagnosed. The question that needs to be asked is whether it is COVID-19 or damage from the nasal swab that is causing these long-term problems.
Here is a link to BitChute video that is discussing Long-Covid. Professor Jay Bhattacharya who is being interviewed makes the point that there is no balanced science where COVID-19 is concerned. A focus on worse case scenarios and resultant hysterical media coverage obscure any scientific objectivity. Such reporting attracts money. In Britain, as we read earlier, forty Long-Covid clinics opened at the end of 2020 to treat long-haul patients. The hysteria is good for the vaccine business as well of course.
Here is a link to BitChute video in which a young Finnish man is discussing the COVID-19 symptoms that he experiencing 100 days after infection.
The much beloved Guardian carries this December 13th 2020 story replete with helpful diagrams (Figures 1 and 2):
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Figure 1 |
Dramatic levels of “friendly fire” from the immune system may drive severe Covid-19 disease and leave patients with “long Covid” – when medical problems persist for a significant time after the virus has been beaten – scientists have said.Researchers at Yale University found that Covid-19 patients had large numbers of misguided antibodies in their blood that targeted the organs, tissues and the immune system itself, rather than fighting off the invading virus.The scientists compared immune responses in patients and uninfected people and discovered scores of aberrant antibodies in the former. These blocked antiviral defences, wiped out helpful immune cells, and attacked the body on multiple fronts, from the brain, blood vessels and liver to connective tissue and the gastrointestinal tract.Further tests revealed that the more “autoantibodies” patients had in their blood, the worse their disease. The Covid-19 patients had more antibodies that had turned on them than people with lupus, an autoimmune disease caused by similar wayward antibodies.
It would be interesting to find out how many of these long haul sufferers had earlier flu vaccinations or other treatments that may have compromised or confused their immune systems. It's been suggested that people suffering from asthma are particularly affected. The article mentions that "Long Covid is thought to affect about 10% of 18- to 49-year-olds, rising to one in five among the over-70s."
Of course, the lockdowns and mask wearing haven't improved anybody's health. Figure 3 shows what someone posted on Minds:
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Figure 3 |
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Figure 4 |
Atopy refers to the genetic tendency to develop allergic diseases such as allergic rhinitis, asthma and atopic dermatitis (eczema). Atopy is typically associated with heightened immune responses to common allergens, especially inhaled allergens and food allergens.
Scientists believe these cytokines are evidence of an immune response called a cytokine storm, where the body starts to attack its own cells and tissues rather than just fighting off the virus. Cytokine storms are known to happen in autoimmune diseases like juvenile arthritis.
The articles further explains that:
One of the great mysteries of the new coronavirus is why it causes only mild disease in most people, but turns fatal for others. In many cases, it seems the worst damage may be driven by a deranged immune response to the infection, rather than the virus itself. In many of the sickest patients with COVID-19, their blood is teeming with high levels of immune system proteins called cytokines. Scientists believe these cytokines are evidence of an immune response called a cytokine storm, where the body starts to attack its own cells and tissues rather than just fighting off the virus. Cytokine storms are known to happen in autoimmune diseases like juvenile arthritis. They also occur during certain kinds of cancer treatment, and can be triggered by infections, like the flu. One study of patients who died of H1N1 influenza, for example, found that 81% had features of a cytokine storm. Though the virus that causes COVID-19 has been circulating for only a few months, early research shows that like other infections, it, too, may cause this kind of catastrophic immune problem, and researchers say the size of the storm it triggers is gale-force.
While this article is not about Long-Covid, it seems that even those who initially display only mild symptoms when infected can go on to develop autoimmune reactions that may last weeks and months. It's also been pointed out that the common flu has produced such reactions in the past but little interest was shown in pursuing the matter. Now, with such an intense focus on Covid-19, the same phenomenon is being considered a unique feature of the current virus. There's no doubt that people in the 30 to 40 year age group were victims of the escalation in the number of vaccines administered to babies and children in the 1990s. The upsurge in autism, autoimmune disorders, allergies, ADHD and so forth amongst this cohort has made them especially susceptible to cytokine storms as a reaction to viruses or vaccinations.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or CFS has been around for quite some time and Long-Covid mimics many of its symptoms. A long time CFS sufferer remarked recently that only now, with the growing recognition of Long-Covid, was a CFS-like malady been taken seriously by mainstream medicine. Maybe the flu-CFS link was there all along but it's only been noticed now due to the intense scrutiny given to the effects of Covid-19.
The Last American Vagabond cites prolonged mask-wearing as the contributing or even causative factor in Long-Covid or Long-Haul Covid as he calls it. Here is a link to his BitChute video:
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