covid roulette

It's Moody Monday, so it's time for a recurring reminder. As I've been warning for a long time, the risk with each new infection of SARS-CoV-2 is a very long term health impact. Now, an opinion piece in the Boston Globe from an intensive care unit physician is warning people of the same thing.

Read the good doctor's words...

While society yawns, impatient to move on from the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans still play disability roulette. About 1 in 10 of the 110,000 people who catch COVID this week in the United States, many for a second or third time, will be left lastingly ill. Even some vaccinated people; even some young, previously healthy people, after only mild cases.

No longer a mass death event, COVID-19 is an ongoing mass disability event. Every seven days, 25,000 more people join the 10 million in our country suffering memory loss, heart problems, dizziness, extreme fatigue, and more owing to the virus. Globally an estimated 65 million people have this new chronic health condition. One recent long COVID study showed organ damage in more than half of a group of outpatients one year on.

In a recent study from Sweden following long COVID patients out to two years, more than 80 percent of 185 people who met the diagnosis of long COVID at four months (and 1 in 3 of the total 460 COVID-19 patients tracked) still had ongoing cognitive, muscle, and fatigue symptoms affecting everyday life at two years. In fact, over half of those on sick leave related to long COVID four months after acute infection remained unable to return to work two years later.

- Boston Globe, 2023 May 26 (free archive copy)

It goes on, but you get the gist.

I read an article 
which noted that global deaths
“remain 5% above 
pre-covid forecasts”
so if you are looking
for a way to quantify 
the new normal 
just know that it is
5% more deadly 
than the old normal.

- Plague Poems, 2023 May 30

Lest you think I've given up the idea that infection is persistent... I have no reason to give up that particular worry. Even recent cases continue to support the idea.

As I've been saying repeatedly for at least 2 years already, "Don't get covid."