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“I never thought I would have seven months of my life wiped out by this virus. It’s just gone. Evaporated,” he said.
I feel the same way. Except I never had COVID, at least as far as I know. But my life has been stopped just the same. I rarely get out, and we'll probably be having another lockdown again here. Granted I'm living in one of the worst hotspots in Europe.
I know the measures are necessary and I follow them but they are incredibly tough especially on those of us living alone. We have to come up with some kind of some solution to get our lives back even if the vaccines don't work. This can't go on for years, it's just too depressing. I'm suffering from many of the mentioned symptoms too, caused by depression. It'll eventually cost lots of lives too.
He brought out 3 people and had them tell their stories.
He does not talk of numbers, of percentages.
He does not talk about how it could be PTSD or physical.[1]
He does not talk about long haulers who test negative for Covid, sometimes multiple times [2] or about how it could be anxiety at play.
Long haul covid is a thing. A very very rare thing. By parading these people onto the stage in the name of "awareness" he has done nothing but project fear into the world. What does it gain?
I ask you what does one do with the information from the press conference?
What do we do with the information now that we're aware?
There is nothing we can do but we will certainly be more afraid now.
Self promotion, under the guise of safety and awareness, that results in promoting fear in the general population is the main driver of this continuing mass insanity.
[1] -
https://www.uclahealth.org/brain-fog-following-covid-19-reco...
[2] -
https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/26/long-haulers-dilemma-man...
#2: Says quite the opposite of what you claim.
It details a story of someone accused of faking COVID19, ending with: "Finally, after contacting a Stanford Blood Center program seeking donations of plasma from recovered patients, Talkington took an antibody test — and it was positive, indicating that she had previously been infected with the coronavirus. 'It was very emotional to finally have validation, I sat down and cried for an hour,' said Talkington. The positive antibody test also cleared the way for her to get a cardiology referral, she said."
There's little accurate statistics about how common or rare it is, but most point to pretty common. Anecdotally, plenty of in my extended circle who got COVID19 had extended symptoms. Non-anecdotally, Wikipedia cites studies:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Covid
It looks to be about 2.2% of COVID19 are hit with long COVID. Studies show between 1/3 and a majority of people hospitalized for COVID19 show long COVID. That's not very very rare. That's hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions worldwide.
There is also increasing evidence around mechanisms.
I'm not sure why the denialism about COVID19. "It's just a flu." "It will be gone by Easter."
Yes, it's a serious disease.
And yes, there are plenty of ways to keep safe, so once we know that, there's a lot we can do. Staying safe ain't rocket science.
I've learned so much about the flu through this. Covid can rarely cause strokes, but so can the flu. The risk is 7x during covid, so it's significant, but there's way more flu going around. This year there may be more strokes due to Covid than flu, but there's been millions of flu strokes in the last decade, which I was pretty surprised by.
There actually isn't more flu than Covid. This year, so far, flu is quite exceptionally rare. The social distancing measures for Covid work for flu too.
Australia is down from 61,000 confirmed cases of flu last year, to just around a hundred confirmed cases. It's too early to tell in the Northern Hemisphere, but so far, things look really promising.
We just might have a winter without the normal sniffles of colds on flus.