Long COVID Very Real

Those idiots who claim it is not a real medical condition must be ignored

There are two parts to this article.

First, are the powerful words of a victim. She got screwed by the huge Intermountin Health organization when it recently closed its long COVID effort, stranding thousands of long COVID victims.

Here are recently reported heartfelt words of a patient and nurse who could not get good health care for her long COVID condition:

 “this was very discouraging to try and get in with IHC doctors. I went into IMC ER because I was in so much pain and couldn’t walk or bend my knees, legs, feet, wrists, and fingers and my blood pressure was off the chart high and I felt like I was dying and they didn’t do much besides give me prednisone and sleeping-anxiety meds and tell me it’s in my head and to go home and let it run its course and I will eventually maybe get better.” 

But of course long COVID is not just in a person’s head; it is a serious and real medical disease or condition. It ruins the quality of life of its victims. It does not just go away.

As to IHC: it is a $7 billion healthcare juggernaut in the Intermountain West region of the United States, which covers Utah, eastern Nevada as well as Idaho, and affiliates elsewhere.  Presently IHC provides a range of ambulatory and acute health services along with other medical services via 225 clinics and 25 hospitals across Utah, Idaho, and Nevada.

Second, there is new research from Yale that has confirmed long COVID victims have unique immunity signatures. Here is what has recently been said.

“It seemed like, using machine learning, that this profile of long COVID was distinctive. In fact, if you just looked at the immune signatures, you could predict the group who had long COVID, who was reporting long COVID, as a result of the way these immune signatures looked.

Then there was one really intriguing finding: low cortisol levels were reported more commonly in those with long COVID. And in fact, it was associated with disease severity, raising the possibility that this could be used as a screen or as a potential strong mechanism. Of course, cortisol is very strongly related to stress response, so it was a bit puzzling to see this finding.”

“Lots of questions remain, but the important thing is that this supports the idea that people who are complaining of long COVID actually have physiologic issues. Many of their other tests have been normal -- that's because our tests within clinical practice are insensitive to pick this up. But using this expanded array of tests, thousands of tests, reflecting the immune system function and producing these immune signatures, we can see differences.”