A new investigation led by researchers from the University College London and Dartmouth College suggests 14% of Americans had long COVID by the end of 2022. The details of the investigation are published in PLOS One.
Moreover, Americans who report having experienced long COVID said they also experienced more anxiety, low mood, and difficulty with memory.
All data was based on 461,550 respondents to the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, conducted from June 2022 to December 2022. Researchers compared survey answers among those who said they have had long COVID, those who said they have had COVID-19 but no lingering symptoms, and those who had never had COVID-19.
Things are going great!
Rates of disability are not decreasing or levelling off, so I doubt the new variants are less dangerous in this regard, but I guess we’ll see.
They are starting to figure out the biomarkers for longcovid, so if you can see a doctor who isn’t dismissing longcovid as an attitude problem they might be able to run tests. My coworker had bloodwork done and the doctor said it was long covid, one of them was a low white blood cell count, and the other was related to blood sugar/insulin response, showing elevated blood sugar despite them not having anything to eat for half a day. It’s been a year since their infection, which happened just over a year after their last vaccination.
If your heart starts racing out of nowhere, your blood pressure swings wildly up and down, or you get winded or have to rest for a long time after doing simple physically active things that you had no problem doing before a covid infection, that’s usually a sign. This fucking virus can infect every part of the body, so it’s probably going to be hard to diagnose all the issues it can cause.