Bluesky

Damn, the fuck. I was vaguely aware that it was bad, but not that it was that bad.

No one asked for your fAcTs! Now get out of here and let us get back to making shit up!!

This is the type of thing where the vast majority will recover within 6-12 months and often a small percent will have ongoing chronic symptoms. But we're learning a lot about post virus chronic symptoms which also seem to happen with other virus but it was harder to tell since it was a baseline normal.

https://www.unmc.edu/healthsecurity/transmission/2023/04/18/long-covid-like-symptoms-can-happen-after-the-flu-too-heres-how-to-prevent-both/

For 12 weeks, researchers followed nearly 2,200 adults who had been diagnosed with lab-confirmed COVID, and nearly 1,000 adults who had been diagnosed with lab-confirmed flu. Of those who experienced Omicron, a fifth (21%) had ongoing symptoms at 12 weeks, and 4% reported symptoms that had a moderate or severe impact on daily living.

When it came to those who had experienced the flu, the numbers were almost identical, with 23% reporting ongoing symptoms at 12 weeks, and 4% reporting moderate or severe impacts on daily living.

But there’s a reason why long COVID is having an outsized impact on the healthcare system, researchers from Queensland Health said in a news release: the sheer volume of COVID infections.

There have been more than 11 million lab-confirmed COVID infections over Australia in the last three years, according to the World Health Organization—a number that is likely a massive undercount.

By comparison, Australia only recorded only a little more than 225,000 lab-confirmed cases of flu last year.

“In our highly vaccinated population, the public health impact of long COVID does not appear to result from any unique property of SARS-CoV-2,” Dr. John Gerrard, Queensland’s chief health officer, said in the release. “Rather, the impact results from the sheer number of people infected over a short period of time.”