What Long COVID Will Look Like for a Lot of People

And this appears to be ‘good’ if not best case scenario too. Bob Wachter describes his wife’s experiences with long COVID:

It feels a little realer to me because my wife has long COVID. She’s a very high functioning journalist. She got COVID about a year ago. She will say to you, “I don’t have long COVID.” If you were speaking to her now–she’s a lot smarter than I am–you would not know [she has long COVID]. But she hits a wall most days at around 1 or 2 in the afternoon, and needs to take a nap. She’ll forget appointments, when she never did before.

And when look at the spectrum of long COVID, there are people who are disabled by it, but I think more people look like her.

It just has diminished her quality of life. It’s worth thinking about that as you weigh risks and benefits.

This is not a good outcome. I don’t want to be like a person in his mid-80s decades before I reach that age.

If you’re still wearing a mask, you are not the weirdo.

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3 Responses to What Long COVID Will Look Like for a Lot of People

  1. dr2chase says:

    I do two things every working day; I check my (bicycle) commute time to work, and I check my ability to ride no-hands. Once upon a time that was for keeping track of the inevitable slide, now it is to monitor, was there a step decline? (I caught *something* on vacation in Europe, felt like a cold, but not sure. Spouse said I had too much energy for it to be Covid — two days in a row walked 4 miles in Copenhagen moist/drizzle to clear my airways — but ???)

    Meanwhile here in MA they’ve cut back sewage sampling to every other day. Really glad the air at work is measured-clean (PM 1.5-2 micrograms/cubic-meter, last I checked) and measured-fresh (550ppm), plus everyone except for (AFAIK) one denier is vaccinated, and WFH fraction is very large.

  2. sciliz says:

    Ever since I worked in the Alzheimer’s lab, I’ve been a (originally intended healthy control) participant in the brain health registry, where I do little cognitive tasks every 6 months to a year or so.

    I both really want to see what Covid did (compared to a normal aging control trajectory imputed from the dataset), and am a bit afraid to know.

  3. Pingback: You’re Not the Weirdo If You’re Still Taking Precautions Against (Long) COVID | Mike the Mad Biologist

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