Covid: It's That Bad

It's so wild to hear that people don't know this.
I:
Fainted while watching TV on the couch.
Had a blood pressure of 80/40.
Have been to the ER twice.
Had long-running (over two years) chest pain, heart pounding, weight loss, vision differences, dizziness, shortness of breath.
Was so sick with those issues I was bed bound for months.
After I started feeling a little better, overdid it and put myself back to bed for a week. Twice. With easy shit like rearranging the canned goods cabinet.
Lost a tooth. (White lie, actually. I'm scheduled to have it extracted early February.)
Still have lingering heart pounding and dizziness on a not-infrequent basis.
All from covid.
I'm fortunate to be mostly recovered. It sucks that there are so many who haven't recovered to speak of.
- That's fucked, buddy. One can only wonder at the uncalculated costs of everyone who had it that bad.
  
  If we knew the costs, we could charge the republican senators a share directly.
- starting to wonder if my heart irregularities are from COVID. I get a ridiculously strong pulse after just a 1 mile walk with my dog.
- I don't mean to be rude but a blood pressure of 80/40 is perfectly fine? Typo?
  
  Well, I can assure you I wasn't fine when that 80/40 was measured. 120/80 is considered normal. (And that's right about usual for me. Googling just now, I saw something about them apparently updating the guidelines to 120/70, but that's not that different.) Elite athletes can have resting blood pressures more like 100/something, I think. But I'm no athlete. And having low blood pressure will absolutely render one light-headed, unconscious, or dead. Depending just how low it gets and how long it stays that way. It's not a "lower is better" thing.
  I mentioned passing out while watching TV. As soon as I regained consciousness and was still very light-headed, an ambulance was called for me. There were two EMTs. One distracted me while the other took my blood pressure. And took it again. And took it again. And finally asked the other EMT to check, so he took it and was like "no, I think you're getting the right numbers, TootSweet's BP is just low."
  When they handed me off to the ER staff at the hospital, he told them he was pretty sure that BP reading wasn't just a bad measurement because I had a lot of "palor" (paleness) at the time.
  So, it's probably a reasonable assumption that my BP was a fair amount lower than 80/40 a few minutes before and that 80/40 was taken on the way back up. And the EMTs acted as if 80/40 was not normal or healthy.
  Honestly, I largely only mentioned the 80/40 because it was the only test I was given where I got an abnormal result. An ECG, an EEG, EKGs, chest x-rays, Holter monitors, a stress test, a full brain MRI, a calcium score CT scan, multiple rounds of bloodwork (I'm probably forgetting some) -- all those came back "normal" while I was having some of my worst symptoms.
  I finally got a doctor who reviewed the results of all those above tests and told me "your nervous system is kindof oversensitive." I had to ask him if he'd just given me a diagnosis of "dysautonomia" and he admittied that "that's not an incorrect term to use for it."
  So I guess I've got a half-hearted diagnosis of sorts. Ha! I doubt it's in my chart, though. (I hope you're somewhere more civilized than the U.S.. Medical costs is not at all the only problem with medical care in the U.S..) Much better than my previous doctor who told me it was anxiety. (It wasn't/isn't anxiety.) My previous doctor also swore he'd seen proof that COVID came from a Chinese laboratory, so there's that.
  I'm rambling, but in short, not a typo and 80/40 is not somewhere you want to be, I assure you.
  
  Anything under 90/60 is considered low. It isn't always an issue, but it's not surprising they were fainting, having dizzy spells, etc. with BP that low.
  
  What units is that perfectly fine in?
  120/80 is perfectly fine, 60/40 is twice less and can't be perfectly fine, 80/40 is much closer to the latter.
  Edit: can't find anything regarding what exactly low pressure shouldn't be. Everywhere it says "lower than 120/80" is good. Like okay 0/0 also seems healthy ¯(ツ)/¯

People look at me strangely, but I don't go in anywhere without a mask, still. I don't eat in restaurants, I don't go to indoor family gatherings without a mask.
It's a big sacrifice but I'm not willing to live with long COVID and brain fog.
- My heart goes out to you friend. I'm with you; masking is still better than the alternative.
  
  Hang in there
- As someone with long covid, it is fucking hell. The extreme fatigue, muscle soreness, lengthened healing times of wounds or new sicknesses or physical exertion have made life hardly bearable. I just straight up don't have the energy or mental capacity to do anything I used to love and enjoy.
  It's endlessly depressing, even though I know I am keeping myself out of clinical depression after learning how to deal with depressive issues more proactively now.
  I wish I just wore an n95 whenever I was around people now, but I know I never would have done so unless I knew how truly awful long covid is.
  
  I'm there with you. If you haven't already, look into the treatments for mast cell activation disorder, it has a lot of overlap. In fact, I'm convinced they're largely the same thing. I'm popping pills like candy nowadays but I'm finally on the upswing.
- It’s not even that big of a sacrifice honestly. Wearing a mask is pretty trivial. Restaurants have outdoor tables. The indoor-only ones that don’t but are still worth going to tend to seat less than 15 people so I occasionally deem it worth the risk.
  Long Covid seems way, way worse than a mask. When we have a cure for that I’ll drop it, but until then it’s not even that inconvenient.
  Plus, you don’t even have to get the worst symptoms for it to affect you. A couple people I know lost their taste and smell in 2020/2021 and have yet to regain it. That, I think, ruins restaurants more than sitting outside.
- I was told over and over again that wearing a mask is the most tiny, unnoticeable thing in the world. Literally the easiest thing you can do
  Well, did you?
  
  The sacrifice isn’t really wearing a mask. It’s avoiding the get togethers and in person events and having people forget about you and move on with their lives while you’re still cautious. You could argue that these are small things too, but it’s a pretty big change for most people, and while they claimed this was a “big sacrifice” that’s just a figure of speech… They didn’t claim it was something they couldn’t do or weren’t willing to do, just that it sucks… Which it does.
  
  There is a difference between you doing it when everyone is and you doing it when almost no one is.

If you haven't done so, check out PhysicsGirl on YouTube. Good science channel, then she got covid right after her wedding.
EDIT: Link to video.

What's up with this site's domain? Ok Doomer? Who is that?
- Sure, but my question is more like "who are you that I should trust your perspective?" Particularly when you seem to admit having a bias towards a "doomer" perspective. Like, I wouldn't want to take an article seriously when the title is "We need more police, and that's okay" from theauthoritarian.com

Long Covid is so scary, but one thing that worries me is, if you get Covid and you don't get Long Covid, is that it, you're never going to get it ever, OR is it just a matter of time before most of us or we're all eventually suffering from Long Covid over the course of multiple waves? Why is it affecting some people differently than others? I've had Covid two or three times now and each time I was only out of it a week or two, otherwise no apparent long-term damage that I'm aware of, but will that always be the case?
- The risk of long covid is cumulative so every infection increases your chance. But also just having covid increases your risk of heart attacks and strokes for up to a year https://nyulangone.org/news/study-helps-explain-how-covid-19-heightens-risk-heart-attack-stroke
- Covid messes up your immune system so even if you don't get long covid, you get other opportunistic infections, plus nice stuff like heart attacks. Of course if you die of such a heart attack, it's not counted as a covid death. So the damage of covid is way underestimated.
- What scares me are those cases where people have psychotic breaks. I read one where a construction worker in a hospital unscrewed some metal bar and started a small rampage. What if that happened to me? I start attacking my family.

I caught it for the first time a few months ago, relatively fit/healthy guy and it gave me the whammy for a full week (I could barely move, didn't want to eat at all, sweats, dizziness) I've never felt that bad in my life. Thankfully, no long covid here, aside from randomly coughing to clear up something left in my lungs once a day, but it put a 2-3 week sized hole in my life, it can show up with a vengeance, no joke.
- I got COVID after taking all precautions because my father didn't wear a mask and took it home. I was sick for a month. I only left my bed to use the bathroom or eat. I literally slept the rest of the time. I probably should have gone to the hospital because I could hardly stay awake even just to eat. I remember waking up one day, and just knowing that I was recovering.
  Recovery was hell. I couldn't taste, or smell anything. I had awful flu like symptoms. I was lethargic and I could hardly walk. It took two weeks to feel functional, and for three months my sense of taste was completely fucked.
  
  The masks don't really do much to prevent getting covid. Their main purpose was to stop people from spreading their covid.
- My wife is fully vaxxed and got it two months ago. Young and healthy. She was in bed for a solid 9 days. Meanwhile I am hardly the picture of health and I never got it. This disease is so freaken nuts.
- Hopefully you didn't lose your sense of smell / taste as this is a sign of brain damage. Who knows what kind of illness people will start to develop 3-4 years down the line. It won't be pretty.
  
  Hopefully you didn’t lose your sense of smell / taste as this is a sign of brain damage.
  You got a source for that one?

I have lasting issues from a mild 2020 infection. My heart scares me the most these days.
- Long COVID is a bitch. I wake up every night coughing my lungs out for about 15 minutes. And I'm one of the lucky ones when it comes to Long COVID.
  
  Yup. Can't get a solid nights sleep since the last time I got covid months ago. I get this too. It's awful.
- My lungs are completely fucked since I had covod in 2021. I can't go up three steps without being seriously short of breath. I struggle to breathe every day. It's exhausting.

I know someone who has an advanced degree and had a pretty impressive career. I don't think he will ever be able to work a normal job again. He got it in the early days and the hospital told him not to come. Yes, brain damage.
- I wasn't blaming anyone

I caught it earlier this year at the peak effectiveness of my booster, so it was extremely mild. I still had a nasty cough for nearly 2 months after I recovered, and my memory is noticably worse.

To people who say it's oVeRbLoWn CoNsPiRaCy
Every viral disease may leave long term consequences, including the common flu. So can COVID. But we as a society got quite good at handling common flu. Also most people don't contract it that often and if they do it's a cause for medical attention. Meanwhile people are getting infected with COVID 3-4 times within 4 years and no one bats an eye besides "yeah, you're not lucky". So we were forced into pretending that going through a potentially heavily debilitating disease every 1-2 years is a perfectly normal thing and those who eventually "find out" are either just unfortunate or straight up lying.
Sadly facts don't care about our feelings and social setups. The endgame (that is max percentage of affected people) is at the level of 50% of the entire population with long covid at all times because the damage from subsequent infections accumulates. I just don't remember if the timescale for this was 10 or 20 years of unmitigated spread of the virus (that is: what we have now)
Meanwhile the new mutations are not really less severe. Only vaccinations make it so we're not seeing death rates of 2020 until today. And sooner or later one or another mutated form will evade all immunity, wheteher it emerges tomorrow or in 5 years.
Fun times ahead and, oh, remind me how well are health care systems faring right now when "the pandemic has ended"? Yeah, thought so. And these people are first in line to be affected so it won't be getting better. If anythong COVID is the one topic where doomerism is perfectly justified as we don't even try to pretend we're doing something like we are with climate.
- Absolutely hilarious move to say: "The end game is X but I forget when". Trust me guys it'll happen. I am very smart.

Anecdotally this statistic is just not right, or the hardships of long covid hits people very differently. Most people I know (hundreds) have had covid several times at this point. I know one person who believes to have long covid in a debilitating way.
- I've had long COVID symptons (reduced sense of smell, instantly tired, heart going on a gallop for no or not much reason) for 6 to 7 months after my COVID infection, after which point those symptons suddenly cleared up. At the start I did hospital visits to have my heart checked out and everything, but nothing wrong could be found. I have no trouble believing that some people will never recover.
  
  I’m going on 2+ years at this point. Was in the best shape of my life when I was infected. I haven’t been able to properly exercise ever since (without severe repercussions that last several days). My bloodwork, which was previously fantastic, is all over the place now. Outrageously high cholesterol, iron levels, inflammation markers. It’s hard having hope for the future when I don’t see an end in sight.
  
  Sure, I have no doubt about some people being affected in this way. But the scale that the article is talking about is just absurd, to be honest.
- 10% does seem crazy high. But it's also possible that some long covid effects go noticed. Also totally anecdotally, but I heard multiple people say they just don't feel as fit now doing cardio, myself included. Is it we're just older or did we get slight lung damage? Or worse, heart damage. Our bodies are really surprisingly sturdy and able to keep up with damage for a long time.
  I know 2 people with severe complications from long covid. And I don't know that many people. So how many around me are living with mild long covid complications and don't realize it?
- This is why anecdotes are not informative when trying to understand statistics. You almost certainly don't have a close relationship with hundreds of people that would involve informing you of lingering COVID symptoms nor do you have a random sampling of acquaintances (age, ethnicity, and vaccination status affect how common it is).
  https://www.webmd.com/covid/news/20230526/one-in-ten-people-omicron-long-covid
  
  I mean, fair, but also: if the implication is that vaccination is the key to reducing covid symptoms - no shit? Also, the article you link mentions 10 percent rate of omicron cases leading to long covid (not mentioning how vaccination rates play into it), so...
  Assuming I have a 100 close ties (I have significantly more), and just one of these exhibiting publicly that they have long covid seems highly unlikely. According to the below link, 60% of the US population has caught omicron. The probability of only one of my sixty close ties having long covid is ~1.2%. So...
  https://www.statnews.com/2022/04/26/with-omicron-nearly-60-percent-in-us-infected-covid/
- The people who have experienced long-term effects are extremely vocal online but it's hard to imagine that it is as common as 1 in 10 given how many people have had covid.
  I am extremely curious to see if they find a genotype or something which is an indicator for people being vulnerable to long-covid. It's possible that it will end up being a similar situation for ME/CFS where we have no specific biological markers which differentiate people who suffer from it (aside from the symptoms).
  
  We have scientific studies so you don't need to just go with whatever you imagine reality is. Long COVID isn't necessarily a life altering debilitation, it's symptoms lasting 3 or more months. Often they clear up, but sometimes they don't.
- The only person I know who got long covid was unvaccinated, not sure if that affects the likelihood in any way of it sticking around.
  I had it twice, and the first time it was a fairly simple thing that went over quickly and the second was a really bad flu-like deal. Though my A/C was out in summertime so it could have just been because of the 90 degree heat in my house or something, idk.

Got COVID from my cousin during Christmas, still feeling terrible.
He went to the doctor and they didn't even test him. they just assumed it was the flu and gave him Tamiflu.
Tested myself after I got it and came up positive for COVID. It seems that our medical professionals are complicit in the cover-up of diagnoses. Once it left the news people just assumed it was gone.
- I don't think that at all.
  People are now just accepting that COVID is part of our lives. It's only a risk if you're extremely elderly, obese or otherwise particularly infirm, in which case, you're also vulnerable to bad flu's, not just COVID.
  COVID is not something that can be beaten. No amount of lockdowns or vaccines will eliminate it. You'd only be postponing the inevitable. Permanent lockdown would obviously be an unsustainable idea, even if it was a popular one and vaccinating COVID is like vaccinating flu, it's impossible to keep up!
  What is even the point of testing for COVID anymore? If you have bad symptoms, stay at home what ever sort of flu, cough or cold it might be!
  
  Realistically if everyone (literally everyone) were given n95's used them, and washed their hands any time they touch something someone else touched without touching their faces: we actually could beat things like COVID and the flu.
  What makes it unrealistic is that people aren't that far removed from monkeys, and behave like it.
  
  I feel like you haven't thought this through. My cousin is young so he has very low risk of having serious side effects from his COVID. The thing is we had elderly grandparents at Christmas as well, one of which with stage 4 cancer.
  There is a point to testing for COVID. If we don't test for it we have no idea how much it is spreading.
  I used to get the flu once every 10 years, roughly. I've been getting COVID nearly every single winter.
  There are relatively young people who are completely bedridden from long COVID. I've never heard of someone having years of their lives taken from them because of the flu.
  Ever since I first got COVID I have had a irregular heartbeats and periods of extremely low energy
  I find it funny you're creating a false dichotomy of either locking people in their homes for eternity or being free. We all had a chance to stop this in its tracks, nearly everyone around me was completely unable to sacrifice one summer of vacations. I know people who literally went on vacation knowing they had COVID, breaking state laws in the process.
  If you didn't lose anybody to COVID that's great for you, but a lot of us did.
  A lot of people believed our president at the time who said that it was nothing more than the flu, similar to what you are saying today.
  I believe there should be legal repercussions for those who have spread that misinformation, leading to needless death

At the school I work at, not 1 teacher uses masks in classes / meetings. Only if they suspect they have covid or the flu.
Many times, I see them sniffling (or with other signs of flu / cold) and they are in closed spaces without any mask.
Makes my blood fucking boil.
Mostly because I keep hearing them criticizing students, for how uneducated and stupid they are, but then they are the ones setting these examples.
Smh
- People can sniffle plenty and not have the flu or another illness. Once you have become an adult, and pay attention, it is really easy to tell the difference. I frequently get allergic response to various things. Even when medicated, there is still a slow trickle.
  Maybe you should trust people, he probably knows of if it is allergies or the flu more than you do.
  
  I guess what you're saying makes sense. But some of those times, they complained about headaches and fever. I mean, it is easy to spot when someone is actually sick vs. someone has allergies. Regardless, in my country, it is not the "season" of allergies.
- You see teachers call kids stupid?
  
  Almost every single day.
  They complain about students, but then I see them doing the same shit.

I'm no musician, writer, scientist or athlete. I'm just a regular ole shitbag who has worked far too hard to make something of his life while the economy ruined the value of what i worked for and life has gone nothing but backwards.
The fuck should i care what covid does to this shithole.
- The point of these articles is a call to action, not a request of sympathy.
  
  People seem to have reached their covid limit out here in the real world though.