A very interesting piece into a controversial subject.
I’ve had Covid at least 3 times and after each infection the cough has lasted for at least 10 weeks. After the second infection I’ve had an irregular heart beat (ectopics) so please take the next comment in good faith.
The pub talk is that long covid is the new bad back and doesn’t affect the self-employed so is there any data to support or refute that claim?
I’ve looked and can find certain sectors such as the civil service but no population wide demographic statistics on rates.
I suspect that may be difficult to measure, if it's anything like the populist perception about bad backs and the self employed. I recall reading something about the latter (can't find a link at present), but, if I recall correctly, the issue wasn't of different incidence / prevalance, but different consequences: the self employed are more likely to "push through" mild to moderate back pain, whereas the employed take Sick Leave, and in more severe cases the self employed find it necessary to change jobs, whereas the employed can often manage with Reasonable Adjustments.
The overlap with ME/CFS is something that doesn't seem to be investigated as rigourously as one may hope, as it is possible that failing to do so may act as a confounder. An alternative approach would be to assess all "Long COVID" cases against the ME/CFS Consensus Criteria, plus collect the "Other Symptoms", reclassify all cases which meet the ME/CFS criteria as ME/CFS cases (the majority of ME/CFS is post-viral, typically from Serious Acute Respiratory Infections - SARI - the category in which COVID lies), and then remove all cases with no Other Symptoms, resulting in (1) a metric for how much COVID has increased ME/CFS, and (2) a quanta and symptom list for the unique aspects of Long COVID (anecdotally there seem to be Cardiovascular and Respiratory cohorts over and above those purely with ME/CFS symptoms).
Much what I was thinking, Oliver. From which one could perhaps postulate that given such a doubling of ME/CFS prevalence in ~4 years, compared to ~4 decades for the previous baseline, then the risk of post-acute sequelae from SARS-COV-2 (SC2) seems to be around an order of magnitude higher than the various pre-existing viruses that led to ME/CFS previously🤔 That should, of course, be enumerated as a separate post-acute sequelae risk than the possibly unique additional SC2 morbidities (tentatively Cardiovascular and Respiratory), which I concur may present significant data acquisition challenges
A very interesting piece into a controversial subject.
I’ve had Covid at least 3 times and after each infection the cough has lasted for at least 10 weeks. After the second infection I’ve had an irregular heart beat (ectopics) so please take the next comment in good faith.
The pub talk is that long covid is the new bad back and doesn’t affect the self-employed so is there any data to support or refute that claim?
I’ve looked and can find certain sectors such as the civil service but no population wide demographic statistics on rates.
I'm not sure about employed vs self-employed. There was data quite early on that it was more common in more economically deprived quintiles (which makes sense I think because people with those jobs were perhaps less able to WFH) https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1april2021 but I haven't seen specifically the thing you are asking about
I suspect that may be difficult to measure, if it's anything like the populist perception about bad backs and the self employed. I recall reading something about the latter (can't find a link at present), but, if I recall correctly, the issue wasn't of different incidence / prevalance, but different consequences: the self employed are more likely to "push through" mild to moderate back pain, whereas the employed take Sick Leave, and in more severe cases the self employed find it necessary to change jobs, whereas the employed can often manage with Reasonable Adjustments.
The similarities with CFS/ME seem extensive, including the extreme reactiveness of the pressure groups.
The overlap with ME/CFS is something that doesn't seem to be investigated as rigourously as one may hope, as it is possible that failing to do so may act as a confounder. An alternative approach would be to assess all "Long COVID" cases against the ME/CFS Consensus Criteria, plus collect the "Other Symptoms", reclassify all cases which meet the ME/CFS criteria as ME/CFS cases (the majority of ME/CFS is post-viral, typically from Serious Acute Respiratory Infections - SARI - the category in which COVID lies), and then remove all cases with no Other Symptoms, resulting in (1) a metric for how much COVID has increased ME/CFS, and (2) a quanta and symptom list for the unique aspects of Long COVID (anecdotally there seem to be Cardiovascular and Respiratory cohorts over and above those purely with ME/CFS symptoms).
That does seem reasonable on the face of it, though I don't know how easy it would be in practice.
In terms of scale, it's maybe hard to compare because the difficulty of getting diagnoses etc,, but this page talks about 250k total prevalence of ME/CFS in the UK, so it might not be totally ridiculous to imagine that serious LC roughly doubles that https://meassociation.org.uk/medical-matters/items/prevalence-population-estimates-mecfs/ I think
Much what I was thinking, Oliver. From which one could perhaps postulate that given such a doubling of ME/CFS prevalence in ~4 years, compared to ~4 decades for the previous baseline, then the risk of post-acute sequelae from SARS-COV-2 (SC2) seems to be around an order of magnitude higher than the various pre-existing viruses that led to ME/CFS previously🤔 That should, of course, be enumerated as a separate post-acute sequelae risk than the possibly unique additional SC2 morbidities (tentatively Cardiovascular and Respiratory), which I concur may present significant data acquisition challenges