Michael Brode, MD, a board-certified internal medicine specialist and the Medical Director of UT Health Austin’s Post-COVID-19 Program, explains what long CO...

This is a pretty good video on the latest research on long covid.

Some takeaways:

CDC estimates 40 million people had long covid, and 15 million still do. 5 million people dropped out of the workforce because of it.

While studies on long covid can have huge lists of potential problems, they all fall into three main groups., the first two are better to be considered post-covid conditions and not necessarily long covid, because they are detectible. (I don’t know if these distinctions apply to the 40 million people who had long covid, or if the CDC lumps them all together.)

  1. Detectable organ or tissue damage
  2. New chronic illness after infection (diabetes, stroke, etc)
  3. Mystery symptoms!

The mystery symptoms are what they consider long covid. There are no simple tests anyone can do to confirm you have long covid. There is research into possible causes like microclots, autoimmunity, etc… but it’s still in early stages.

Even though they don’t know what exactly causes long covid there are two signs that seem to always show up:

  1. Neurologic Inflammation (decreases blood supply to the brain). It can extend down to peripheral nerves and disrupt your heart rate and other fun stuff.
  2. Exercise causes extreme fatigue due to poor oxygen utilization. It’s there, in the blood, but for some reason it’s not being absorbed or transfered to where it needs to be. Since the oxygen is not reaching the parts of the body it needs to.

The only good news is that it seems like 60% of people get better after 1-1.5 years. We’ve all got enough savings to cover a years and a half worth of expenses if we get unlucky and get bopped with long covid, right?

What frightens me are the potential blood clots. Didn’t Michael Brooks die due to a freak blood clot in his lungs or something in 2020? Didn’t Matt Christman have a stroke last year? Those both may have been unrelated to covid (maybe matt was just doing coke), who knows, but isn’t it a bit unusual for young people to get blood clots out of nowhere? When shit like this happens it’s usually several weeks to months past the acute stage, so it’s likely overlooked in a lot of cases and chalked up to "sometimes bodies just do that shrug-outta-hecks ".