I meant to post this article here last month, but somehow started a new thread on it.
Having gone to an occ health PT clinic for about four months, I can say that a lot of the people there were either not serious about getting better, or were absolutely and completely wimpy about pain in a way that I’d frankly be embarrassed about if I were them. The kind of nonsense that parents tell their five year olds to suck it up about, and we had 40 year old people whining like that about having to do PT exercises and stuff because “it hurts!”.
I totally get where your eye rolling comes from; I suspect a lot of these other patients were expecting to tweak their shoulder and get a couple weeks off of work, not to have to take some painkillers and go do PT a few times a day.
I had my first COVID infection last summer. I now have my second cold of the year that is not COVID, and not bacterial.
It used to be that since my tonsillectomy-adenoidectomy, I have had dissertation-topic level resistence to viral upper respiratory infections. Now, my general resistence appears to have decreased. It crossed my mind that COVID could do something like measles does, where, after recovering, your immune system is on high alert to the thing you just had, but less resistent to everything else. Maybe that’s at least part of Long COVID.
I am not yet discounting Chance, Oberver Bias, Regression to the Mean, and the Law of Very Large Numbers at work here, so the results are not all in, and may not be for over a year. On top of that, my doctor says that a lot of teachers and other people who work directly with lots of young children are experiencing “new hire” rates of infection to the sorts of stuff that run through pre- & elementary schools.
New Hire syndrome is when someone new to the general field of “young children” catches lots of colds and occasionally other things, like Pink-eye, and “early childhood” diseases they managed to avoid as children themselves such as hand-foot-mouth, or Fifth disease.
Anyway, there’s a kind of grapevine theory among PCPs, clinic workers, et al., that early childhood workers, after two years of masks, anti-bacterial soaps, and gloves before touching children or their belongings, have lost the resistence they built up when they first began working, and have to develop it again.
The reason a lot of vaccines wane, while immunity gained through having an illess didn’t seem to, was that when the illness was still at large, people were re-exposed and re-exposed, and refreshed their immunity. With everyone vaccinated, and the infectious agents battened down, immunity doesn’t get refreshed.
For two years, our immunity to little kid germs didn’t get refreshed.
Just a thought. Maybe paranoia, and IANAD. However, a lot of us could be in for a year of lots of non-COVID coughs, runny noses, and itchy eyes.
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Having gone to an occ health PT clinic for about four months
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I’ve been to PT a couple of times, and yeah, it’s hard. You don’t go there for minor things, and you HAVE TO DO THE HOME STUFF, or it doesn’t work, and when you go for your next appointment, it HURTS. I know this, because a work situation caused me to slack one week, and I thought, “Well, because I’m being more active, I’ll be all right.” Nope.
Airline folks also experience “newhire syndrome” dipping into and out of different disease pools all over the country from day to day. First two winters are rough and then you’re good until / unless you start working to different continents.
I’ve been doing this work for well over 30 years and I too have had a series of slow-clearing URIs / LRIs since my mild COVID back in Jun. Very uncharacteristic of me since ages ago.
Many of my cow-orkers report the same.
I suspect you’re onto something.
Believe me, I know. But generally speaking, most people don’t actually whine out loud like a lot of these people did.
I’m slogging my way through this thread, but I hadn’t had a cold for at least 10 years before catching covid and now I’ve had two in the year since. damn!
Yeah.
A very common story. As I have started telling it, I hear it back more and more. But again, hard to tease out a possible consequence of COVID itself, and an effect of two years of masking, antibacterial soaps, and gloves when touching other people’s things.
And 2+ years of most of us being much more under-exposed to flu and other viruses than normal. The bugs kept mutating, while our immune systems relaxed since they weren’t being exposed. Now were having a large-scale crash engagement between these two forces that used to be well-meshed; adversarial, but well-matched to each other. Now? Not so much. Or at least that’s my armchair theory du jour.
::waves:: back when I was 23/24 I worked with 3 to 6 year olds for a school year. They gave me fifth disease, which in adults can and did present as excruciating pain instead of a lacey rash and cold symptoms, and step throat the only time in my life I’ve ever had it.
Personally, after two and perhaps three bouts of covid, I find I really lack energy. I noticed a big drop-off in energy levels after the last bout, in July.
From How does the SARS-CoV-2 virus cause long COVID? Here are some leading theories - ABC News
An estimated 4.7 per cent of Australian adults have had symptoms for at least three months post-infection, according to a recent survey by the Australian National University.
A Swedish study published yesterday of more than 200,000 COVID-19 patients found one in 100 people who weren’t hospitalised went on to be diagnosed with long COVID.
This jumped to around one in three for patients who’d been in intensive care with the disease.
That study seems to make more sense than the VA data group that was used for so many others.
back when I was last in school I ended up doing some clinical rotation in an elementary school where I caught strep from one of the kids. OMG!
I had it for YEARS no matter how many antibiotics I took and ended up having to have my tonsils taken out when I was 40 to get rid of it.