Yes, the long-haulers and COVID-19 heart damage are particularly concerning. Also there is some evidence suggesting that a large fraction hospitalized for COVID-19 end up with mental health issues even if they did not have them before. Some of that might be down to the traumatic experience but there's some reason to think COVID-19 infections cause neurological impacts.
That's definitely true too -- the rates of mental illness are something like doubled in the base population. But the frequency for people who have been sick is much higher than the general population, even accounting for the spike in overall mental illness.
For sure, this needs study too. There have been studies of those who were given treatment though and it shows a correlation. We don’t know, for sure, that COVID-19 is the direct cause of mental issues or a side effect but it’s been recorded in a sample.
I think a study of a general population sample for mental health issues with or without a prior COVID-19 diagnosis would show how varying the COVID-19 patients experiences are vs how everyone else is fairing.
I’m not a scientist or a therapist so I don’t know the exact approach to use to do the comparison but I suspect it could be done.
“And these you shall detest among the birds;a they shall not be eaten; they are detestable: the eagle, the bearded vulture, the black vulture, the kite, the falcon of any kind, every raven of any kind, the ostrich, the nighthawk, the sea gull, the hawk of any kind, the little owl, the cormorant, the short-eared owl, the barn owl, the tawny owl, the carrion vulture, the stork, the heron of any kind, the hoopoe, and the bat."
> In this study of a cohort of German patients recently recovered from COVID-19 infection, CMR revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis. These findings indicate the need for ongoing investigation of the long-term cardiovascular consequences of COVID-19.
Note that this study includes a group of COVID survivors who have recently recovered, and 2 control groups: healthy, age-matched participants, and a group of risk-factor matched control patients. It is published in JAMA Cardiology.
Obviously, this study doesn't say anything about truly long-term consequences of COVID, but that, IMO, is more because we haven't had time to reach "long-term" status yet. I would give it at least another 6 months to a year before making up my mind about the incidence of long-term consequences.
Was the same study conducted for influenza in 2017/18? I had a really bad case of flu for about two weeks and feld like I got five years older during that time.
The major problem I see is that we currently watch the whole COVID-19 under amicroscope and discover a lot of horrible things. Actually, if you are a researcher, the only way to get attention is by finding horrible things. If we had done the same for epidemics in the past, would we have found horrible things as well?
> There is one inevitable conclusion from these studies: COVID infection frequently leads to brain damage — particularly in those over 70. While sometimes the brain damage is obvious and leads to major cognitive impairment, more frequently the damage is mild, leading to difficulties with sustained attention.
> Although many people who have recovered from COVID can resume their daily lives without difficulty — even if they have some deficits in attention — there are a number of people who may experience difficulty now or later. One recently published paper from a group of German and American doctors concluded that the combination of direct effects of the virus, systemic inflammation, strokes, and damage to bodily organs (like lungs and liver) could even make COVID survivors at high risk for Alzheimer’s disease in the future. Individuals whose professions involve medical care, legal advice, financial planning, or leadership — including political leaders — may need to be carefully evaluated with formal neuropsychological testing, including measures of sustained attention, to assure that their cognition has not been compromised.
I think brain damage counts as "long-term damage," don't you?
Well, now you're being deliberately obtuse, didn't bother to read the link, or perhaps both. The link I posted above compared the symptomology of COVID-related brain damage to moderate TBI. As the American Association of Neurological Surgeons says at https://www.aans.org/Patients/Neurosurgical-Conditions-and-T... :
> Patients with moderate head injuries fare less well. Approximately 60 percent will make a positive recovery and an estimated 25 percent left with a moderate degree of disability. Death or a persistent vegetative state will be the outcome in about 7 to 10 percent of cases. The remainder of patients will have a severe degree of disability.
Lack of sleep also significantly impacts the performance on neuropsychological testing. The question is not what kind of symptoms Covid can cause, but how long they last.
