god FUCKING dammit

[solarbird]

Something I kept harping on and people kept blowing off is that at least 20% of pre-vaccine asymptomatic COVID-19 patients had long-term organ damage. It was more on Twitter other places where I'm more politically active these days, but still - remember that? Remember?

Oh look, it's the chickens:

"Hundreds of thousands of Americans have sought medical care for post-COVID health problems that they had not been diagnosed with before becoming infected with the coronavirus, according to the largest study to date of long-term symptoms in COVID-19 patients.

...

"Post-COVID health problems were common even among people who had not gotten sick from the virus at all, the study found. While nearly half of patients who were hospitalized for COVID-19 experienced subsequent medical issues, so did 27% of people who had mild or moderate symptoms and 19% of people who said they were asymptomatic."

This is another part of the Trump/Republican/fascist legacy. The aftermath of this will last decades.

Comments

[kathmandu]

Yup. The numbers were not clear for a long time, what with people not getting before-and-after MRIs, but we knew there were some. Drove me up the wall that people kept saying "Well, I'm asymptomatic, so..." they didn't think they needed to isolate, or that it could be a problem.

I'm expecting a big chunk of current children will grow up to have asthma, from childhood covid-related lung damage.

[dewline]

And the US is still resistant to running its health care system sanely, isn't it? Still stuck in that "for-profit or else" model?

[solarbird]

Nothing's changed. Not for the better, anyway.

[solarbird]

They've been clear enough for months. Clear enough to know that 20% was a reasonable floor, and that the other options were worse, not better.

I'm so tired of screaming the truth and being ignored.

Decades, and the impact still hasn't begun to be measured

[librarygeek]

I've been saying 20-35% of those infected with COVID have organ damage, and it's the *cardiac* damage that has me one small step from total panic attack.

I was born with congenital heart disease among other medical conditions, and had open heart surgery in 2017 for the repairs that surgery could do. I know very well, from experience, that the USA is *not* accommodating of variable disability limitations.

By anything ANYONE considers important, we don't even have sufficient handicapped parking for all the people with newly acquired disabilities, let alone the rest of any accomodations or assistance people will need.

There was an American executive who killed himself because of the stress associated with COVID acquired tinnitus. I've been living with THAT since a childhood fever forty years ago.

Emotionally Complex Reactions are running through the online handicapped or disabled community:

1) We told you so.
2) There isn't enough support now, for those disabled people who were recognized before the pandemic.
3) Too many people were saying we "deserved" our disabilities, or that we weren't "trying" hard enough. Now many people who minimized these problems, have these problems, TOO.
4) We BLEEPING told those people ridiculing us, "You aren't strong enough to survive like the people you're calling weak. Now who's weak?!?"

One measure of a civilization is how they treat those without 100% ability. I don't know if the United States of America has EVER been civilized.

Send cheerful memes, I'm stuck between cynicism and depression lately.

As a society, we may eventually envy those who died during COVID, because survival with the approximate rate of disability is going to get extremely difficult for the entire culture.