action level where I am is like 10 UN-excused absences. you call in for your kid being sick, that’s excused. same for Dr appt, or court, or something on the list of valid excuses. after 5 days in a row you might need a Dr note. but it takes a lot to get the visits.
COVID…the gift that keeps on giving, for some.
“Akilah Johnson is a national reporter exploring the effect of racism and social inequality on health for The Washington Post.” She is inclined to write articles that support her position, and disregard things she comes across that don’t fit the narrative.
Long Covid sucks, but so does the article. Medical responses to Long Covid were/are inadequate across the board. The lengthy anecdotal stories are there to drive emotional responses about racism. This article does not provide any evidence of systemic racism.
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So long covid is unbiasedly biased like all Healthcare issues?
Possibly less so, in that white people also face pretty significant obstacles. I tried to get into a long Covid clinic but they had long since stopped taking new patients. It paid to be on the leading edge.
Summary from chatgpt:
Is this going to affect std/ltd rates?
So far we are not seeing an increase.
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Increases in measles and whooping cough are almost certainly from reduced vaccination rates. The other stuff is less clear.
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Seems like the expected outcome - masks and social distancing suppressed everything, not just COVID, so we should end up with a temporary period of higher rates for those things as immunity levels are reestablished to longer term levels.
When covid was in full swing in the UK, many of us pointed out that people were too focused on mortality rates (which primarily affected the over 60s) and not enough attention was being paid to morbidity (driven by long covid) of the working population.
We are now seeing material increases in the number of people that are “economically inactive” due to health issues, which in turn is affecting labour productivity.
Its a vicious cycle in actuarial terms, because the less productive your labour force is, the worse the long-term actuarial position gets in terms of pensions and healthcare, which will invariably result in budgetary problems.
Not sure how much this affects the US, but in the UK due to the tax structure and the NHS, this has become a serious problem.
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I asked our live-in Goddaughter who has something from long COVID to do some chores yesterday.
She hopped on it but didn’t finish them. She said that after walking up and down the stairs a couple of times with a trash bag, etc., her heart was fluttering at over 100 BPM and she needed to lay down for a while and might try to finish them today, or could do tomorrow. She has a heart rate monitor on most of the time and keeps a journal of what triggered episodes.
It sucks. I fully believe her - helps to have an invisible disability myself. But just light housework, taking trash out, she had an episode. She said sometimes just driving in the dark or other stressful situations can cause her heart to freak out, which it never used to do.
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my daughter too - POTS.
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The wave of missed cancer diagnoses during the pandemic due to lack of timely healthcare access is about to hit the UK in the form of later stage cancers (which the NHS definitely can’t cope with right now)
I suspect that trend will be mirrored in a few other countries.
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Huh, i feel like we’ve already seen that. I know of two people who died of cancer who might not have if they’d seen a doctor when their symptoms first emerged. But routine care has been back to normal for a couple of years now.
I’ve had a couple of mammograms, a colonoscopy, and other routine screening tests since the pandemic, and none were especially hard to schedule.
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Was catching up with an old friend at brunch recently. She told me about her husband’s issue with long COVID. He’s been out of work for 2 years due to it, takes a daily COPD medication and some kind of heart/blood pressure medication, has a CPAP machine, and gets easily fatigued every day. Sounds horrid.
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One piece of good news for children with long covid.
About 70% will recover over 2 years