"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing more than 100 deaths that could be attributed to long Covid by looking at death certificates from across the country over the last two years, according to two people familiar with the matter."
I wonder why it took them this long to wonder if this is real? Long Covid has been known to weaken and seriously impact the health of Covid victims for long amounts of time.
It would only seem to be logical to conclude that it could also lead to death. This is why everyone should be very scared of getting Long Covid-the chances of dying from it are higher than the original infection, I think.
This article is in the Boston Globe. Even young people have it. But the vaxx does help.
The usual. Dementia, heart, fatigue
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/09/12/opinion/landmines-long-covid-leaves-behind/?et_rid=885324108&s_campaign=globesmostpopular:newsletter&et_rid=885324108&s_campaign=globesmostpopular:newsletter
Hope spring eternal
There's recent evidence that two peptides expressed by SARS-CoV-2 can self-assemble into Amyloid plaque tissue similar to the Prion protein that is implicated in the TSE (Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy) diseases like Scrapie, Kuru, BSE (Mad Cow disease), and so on. These are very long-term neural degenerative diseases, leading to death over time-frames of decades - the last documented Kuru death was recorded in 2009, though the causal agent was identified in the '60s.
Summary: Two peptides expressed by SARS-CoV-2 (but not SARS-CoV-1) self-assemble to amyloid tissue (aka Prions) and are very significantly neurotoxic. Explains Long Covid directly as a prion-induced degenerative neural condition. Also notes that SARS2 is different from SARS1, due to the lack of documented long-term neurological effects from SARS1.
Quote: "It is also interesting that ORF10 and ORF8 are the only two coded proteins present in SARS-CoV-2 which do not have a homologue in SARS-CoV-1, perhaps suggesting a unique amyloid etiology for COVID-19. While long-term consequences from SARS-CoV-1 infection were severe, including tiredness, depression, and impaired respiration, few or zero unequivocally neurological post-viral symptoms were recorded from the (admittedly quite small) set of documented cases."
So, yes, Long Covid seems to be a death sentence in the long term. But so is birth, if timescales equal to a century or so are considered.
Life leads to death :-)
I came across this article in Daily KOS, which is full of article links about long Covid and the attendant problems associated with it. It's nothing to laugh about.
All through this pandemic, the only true measure of the severity has been deaths. When deaths were in the thousands per day, people were concerned. We are still seeing days where we have almost 100,000 cases. And it is likely a lot more, but with the shoddy testing effort, we will never know. But deaths did not really rise this time around, so nobody is concerned.
Long COVID should also be a measure of severity, though that might also be problematic to measure. They are still discovering what it can do.
Long COVID is almost certainly a thing. It just has a whole lot of ways it can present itself: blood clots, inflammation in the heart or lungs, liver or kidney disease, etc. Ask any actuary about the life expectancy of someone with any of those conditions and wait for the sad shake of the head.
It will probably take years of follow-up with COVID survivors to determine exactly how much it shortens their lives. Look at how long it took to decide that military burn pits were as dangerous as they now know they were. In that way, the anti-vaxxers will finally be useful to science, as unlikely as it feels now.
@Mary Hilton
I think that as time goes by we will have yet more and more data points that will prove this. Long Covid will become a pre-existing that will definitely shorten both lives and the quality of. I used to think that as a HCW, I might find myself without as much job security once the boomers started timing out, but long-covid will probably change all of that.
For example, researchers are finding links between chemotherapy and T2DM and other endocrine disorders. The problem with establishing this correlation is that it can take up to 10 years for these findings to show up.
I’m willing to bet it’s going to take at least another decade to fully research and understand the morbidity/mortality of long covid.
I’m convinced it’s real, but that’s just my hypothesis.
(I added a long list of long COVID symptoms and URLs in my reply to this comment.. and there are likely many more still being found)
Of course it is not a "death sentence." And yes, of course some people have and will die from long COVID. These who barely make it home have shown us that... in this very site ... many times over.. (Here's looking at you QT)
Besides nearly robbing them of their lives it robbed them of a well functioning immune system that is left vulnerable to any new infection. The people highlighted on here did not even care enough about their own health, let alone the mental and financial health of their families, to get the shot. Do you think they are returning home thinking "I better eat better, sleep more, quit smoking and drinking, lose weight and heal myself so I can get back to work and never do that to my family again?? Nah! They are often right back shit posting, whining about their medical care, suing and leaving their health in the hands of Jesus...
Why did they wait so long to decide Long COVID is real? "They" didn't. The medical community knew soon after it began in North America and the exchange of info from Italy and Britain was extensive. If you mean how to treat it, well that is another story. "They" are still trying to figure out how to treat COVID as it mutates... and they cannot be faulted for that... although many are trying.
I don't think the chances of dying from it would be nearly as high as dying from the original infection. Otherwise we'd be seeing millions of deaths now. But, yeah, you don't want to get long Covid! I had what I now know was Covid in early January 2020. It also made my AIC spike temporarily. I didn't get my energy back until mid-April 2020. I'm so glad I recovered fully though!