The coupling to depression is unsurprising. I don't think I know anyone with long term pain (even under management) who isn't battling the black dog.
So a trivial take away is that for above 15% increase in self reporting as long-term sick, pre- to post-covid, we've also scored increased needs for mental health treatment alongside debilitating multiple symptom diseases and musculo-skeletal pain.
Twice the cost burdens compared to simple illness increase because longterm.
This during a time of chronic under-funding of the NHS, backlogged waiting lists, staff leaving in droves, strikes.
> The coupling to depression is unsurprising. I don't think I know anyone with long term pain (even under management) who isn't battling the black dog.
I have Crohn's and Syringomyelia (won that lottery eh) and yeah, that fucking black dog is always sat at the end of the drive watching.
Strongly disagree. They are good at fixing a lot of things but my list of things that medicine is not good at treating are auto-immune issues, post-viral conditions and long-term pain from a variety of sources.
Tell that to the two herniated discs in my spine :(
No good long term prognosis, they can't be replaced and the only things to be done only postpone further problems (steroid injections) or cause critical ones later down the line (disc fusion).
Try AXA1125 (BCAA + Glutamine + NAC + Arginine) for mitochondrial dysfunction. The regimen consisting of 400mg DCA + 100mg B1 Hcl + CoQ10 and Acetyl L-Carnitine got 45% of ME/CFS patients back on track (55% had other comorbidities that interferred with the effect) in some study. Lactoferrin + Iron (bisglycinate/liposomal) and diphenhydramine could help restoring gut and alleviate neurological issues from spike protein. I battled it for 2.5 years as well, people have no idea how bad it could be (felt like I was 90 year old just before death). The only remaining symptom now is occasional severe vertigo in raining weather. Good luck!
Spike protein looks like iron transport inhibitor hepcidin (discovered fairly recently) and it's speculated it inhibits iron uptake by cells and prevents cells from moving excess iron out so one could end up with cellular-level anemia or its opposite. Lactoferrin regulates cell iron, acting as a homeostasis agent and I added more iron as my hemoglobin was around the bottom of the normal range.
Take care - I hope you get to improve. My wife got covid back in March 2020 and was pretty ill, then fell into full long covid (back before anyone knew what it was). She was totally wiped out (I have posts on my account detailing it if you are interested), but is finally back working and living again - so please know the recovery is possible for some. She's still not where she'd like to be, but is vastly improved from her worst.
Unfortunately she has had it 3 more times since the first, but lucky they have passed her fairly smoothly. On my more recent infection I've started to get joint pain on my left side - which is fun - I'm only 43 and suddenly see why old people wince when they get up or climb down something. Sure will pass, but this virus sure is weird.
Lemme put it this way. It highly resembles fibromyalgia. Most doctors in America won't recognize fibromyalgia because in a lot of cases there is no treatment and there is no way in hell industry is going to adapt to having sick people in it, nor is disability going to recognize it. Even if they did recognize it the US disability system is a lot closer to eugenics then it is a social service.
Stay safe out there. We have to work together to help each other out on this one and related matters.
It's a pretty dumb life move to collect disability if you don't need it. I mean, you are condemning yourself to poverty and being one bad thing away from death.
Crohns is diagnosed via a biopsy iirc, it's not a diagnosis of exclusion like IBS is. Crohns is also horrific. so I wonder if you just view your friends poor health as a typical "no one wants to work anymore" way like most people do with disabled people. Fibromyalgia is somewhat a diagnosis of exclusion, but decent doctors can mostly figure it out these days. The hard thing is discerning whether it's ME CFS or not.
Unsurprising. There's a poor economic argument for funding healthcare in the UK, other than it being used as a political football to win votes. The result is decades of underfunding and then massive tranches of funding to make headlines which has to be spent immediately and therefore gets squandered on "transformation initiatives" without a focus on health outcomes.
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.
This implies that around 1.3% of the UK working population are out of action due to covid, and a lot more than that must be struggling but still able to work.
The collective reality denial around Covid is by far the most bizarre and dystopian thing I've ever seen.
Not just because it's objectively ridiculous to minimise an illness which has a 10% chance of doing lasting damage with unknown long-term consequences.
But because so much of it is coming from doctors and health workers.
And it's active, aggressive, hostile, reality denial, which attacks simple and effective common sense measures like public/medical masking, air filtration, and so on.
There's this unfortunate mean streak that plagues this country when it comes to people's ability to work and how much they earn, even if it's due to health. YouGov recently did a survey asking about what people should be able to have based on their income, and yeah. God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits (which we ought to use a better term for).
It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
> since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
Yeah, it worked that way when we were all in it together. Life presents struggles for everybody, but it became apparent post-COVID that this concept is lost on the more-vocal elements of the disabled demographic. The struggle is only real for them.
You literally get free money from the government and special benefits as members of a protected class. Your wages can't be garnished. You can stall the eviction process. You get reserved, preferential parking. You can force businesses to make accommodations for just about anything. You optionally work 15 hours a week and have nothing but free time after that, but you don't have time to hear about anybody else's problems-- but we're expected to hear about how much worse your problems are, for hours, every time we cross paths. I'm living paycheck to paycheck and facing a layoff; I don't know what my family is going to do if that happens, because AI will be doing my job before I can recover, and I can't take out any more student loans to retrain. Tell me more about your chronic Lyme though.
The fucking best part--here's the real kicker--is when you stick your neck out by offering to help someone like this. "You're facing homelessness? Shit, that won't do...come live with me! Say, you're eating a lot of our food, incurring bandwidth overages and running the AC during peak hours-- do you think you could help pitch in for some of the bills?" That always goes over well. You're not allowed to ask anything of the disabled; god forbid anybody think they're able (pun intended) to do or help with anything.
It's like Seven Samurai come to life-- yeah, the marauders are bad guys, but there's an even worse villain in that story.
And then:
> God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits
You're already getting something nice. It's called "a low-risk lifestyle and income you didn't have to work for." FFS. Assemble the Hague over the fact that people might get upset that you're driving a Lexus to your EEOC hearing for a part-time position at Ralph's while your neighbor was trying to resuscitate their 2002 Kia so they could race to get to work at the call center on time, get verbally abused by customers at some shit customer service job for 8+ hours and hopefully retain the privilege of doing it all over again tomorrow before she, too, is replaced by AI. Tell her how hard you have it with your fibromyalgia.
It's been said that high school bullies inevitably end up on the disability payroll after failing at everything else. In my experience, this checks out. The only people I know collecting it can only ever be described as abusive (in or out of high school), and the people I know with obvious disabilities (everything from amputation to PCOS to Downs) would be offended to be labeled as such. Makes one wonder what the goal of someone going out of their way to identify as vulnerable might be, since that tactic does not lend itself to survival in nature unless you're a predator feigning distress.
Reality is that only severe measures like lockdowns are effective at containing the spread of respiratory illnesses (and even then it’s debatable how effective), and most people have accepted the risks so they don’t have to go through that again.
Nah, widespread air filtration would cut down a number of infections, as would masking in healthcare settings. But to the parent’s point, these are not implemented because of lack of efficacy, but because they’re contrary to the (false) narrative of “Mission Accomplished.” If we reacted to water-borne illnesses in the way we’ve done to COVID, we’d have cholera everywhere and kids still being crippled by polio.
Yes. I do not understand why we were apparently willing to create huge, lasting, economic and societal damage via lockdowns, but my kids school won’t pony up the few thousand for air filtration.
I was referring to the 'Swiss cheese' model, and GP argues that ventilation is a substitute for lockdowns, it isn't. But both are better than either and either is better than none.
Cholera and Polio were much more severe illnesses than Covid and water is much easier to treat than air. I’m not sure where you’re getting the mission accomplished attitude but from what I can tell it’s simply an acknowledgement that the risks have reduced to an acceptable level, and the costs of doing anything much different are too high.
I'm continually surprised by the parallels between Polio and COVID and yet the common understanding puts them in two very separate categories.
> Polio is a viral infection that used to be common in the UK but is now rare.
> Most people who had polio would have fought off the infection without even realising they were infected.
> Some people with polio would have had paralysis, muscle weakness and shrinking of the muscles. But usually these problems would have either gone away over the following weeks or months, or remained the same for years afterwards.
> Post-polio syndrome is where some of these symptoms develop or get worse many years or decades after the original polio infection.
> but because they’re contrary to the (false) narrative of “Mission Accomplished.”
I don't think you understand the cost of installing and maintaining that level of air filtration in every single public and office buildings on a world scale
The R0 of Omicron (BA.5) is estimated to be around 18.6. Unless you live alone in the woods, you're going to pass it on to many people if you catch it, probably before you realise you even had it.
No double standard. Parent to mine edited his comment but he left extra colored remarks at the end. I don’t agree or disagree with the original comment. Just thought it was poor taste for the now removed remarks he left.
World Wars? My knowledge of history is admittedly lacking but the only thing my common perception can come up with is wars, has humanity ever been able to come together on a global scale like that for anything other than war and the aftermath alliance forming?
I don’t disagree with you but the comment I responded to which has now been edited was pretty rude with some additional remarks. I don’t have any skin in the original opinion, I just thought the additional remarks he left were pretty mean.
I recently asked at work why the co2 detectors disappeared from meeting rooms and office spaces and I was told "it's no longer legal". I was not told "it's no longer mandatory". I was told "it's no longer legal". By the same PM who thought vaccine or infection prevented any further infection. edit: western continental Europe, not Missouri.
What bothers me is that the co2 presence hardly impedes work. I think it's still useful to have one to say "hey, too much co2 is eating our attention span, let's open the windows a bit". But clearly they removed it as a performative act ("there is no covid anymore"). And I am also pretty sure they also removed it because the denial/minimalist crowd sees it as an "in-your-face" symbol that covid is real/still a problem and that crowd was the most vocal at my workplace and the people who took covid seriously were seen as trouble makers when asking for masking in office. Or something.
What is your estimate for what percentage of any population is going to be able to function well in society?
There are a huge number of people who due to short and long term conditions and disabilities need society to support them to some degree or another. This is the human condition and I think society as a whole hasn't ever grasped that.
I think it's important to be careful with that claim. Firstly, plenty of this is related to increases in NHS waiting times and decreases in quality of care (which could fairly be said to be "due to covid") which mean people are off work for longer than they would otherwise be for conditions that are not directly related to having had a covid infection.
Secondly, there are a many other factors that could affect this - the "cost of living crisis" could mean that people feel more pressure to work despite ill health (although this would pull the numbers in the other direction).
Also, if I use the working age population(ages 16-64) of 42.1 million in 2021 as a denominator, and remove an increase of 40,000 that the article says should be expected from changing demographics, I get 0.422/42.1 = 1.0%
The proportion of working people has been falling for decades. We have taken a deeply moralistic and political approach to this fact of life: people are arbitrarily divided into the deserving and undeserving. Meanwhile the remaining workers are worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily (leading to everything from depression to physical illnesses to poverty to low social mobility). It's time to get real on this and move to things like UBI that eliminate the need to "pick losers".
I also think that UBI would be generally a good thing, at least because it would help trim down the size of the bureaucracy administering the benefits.
But if it's a given that the proportion of working people is going down, it's not clear to me why UBI would be any help with "the remaining workers being worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily". UBI has to come from somewhere. And by removing the "moralistic approach", it's likely that some people who work tough jobs making a pittance would probably just stop.
There are a few reasons. Firstly people getting a pittance now for job X would also get ubi, so they'd be better off.
And second, when that crappy job ceases to exist, they'd have something to fall back on (the UK where I am has basically no benefits for people who lose their jobs).
If they quit, I am content for the free market to increase wages or otherwise make those jobs better.
Separately if like to see shorter working hours (and so more people working). But that's not a ubi change.
> There are a few reasons. Firstly people getting a pittance now for job X would also get ubi, so they'd be better off.
Sure, but the value proposition of the shitty job would be lower, which would help decide in favor of stopping it altogether.
But this doesn't show how those still working would be under any less pressure, and especially less taxation.
The only way this could be improved I can imagine is by n-order effects. Some of the people who stop working would pick up some other activity that they enjoy, which would, directly or indirectly, produce some kind of riches, at least for them, at best that could be spread around society. But I don't think this can be reliably approximated beforehand.
No thanks. I am absolutely unwilling to pay higher taxes to provide UBI for people who are capable of working but choose not to. There's nothing moralistic about expecting healthy adults to pull their own weight.
The trend started before COVID, but it hasn't been normalised for demographics.
The average 60 year old is inevitably sicker than the average 20 year old, and there's an increasing proportion of the former in the UK workforce.
Not to say there isn't a real problem here - the UK isn't doing a great job either on healthcare or, to my mind even more importantly, preventative medicine and public health, but you need to control variables to get a robust conclusion.
Hard to say how this will evolve with constant re-infections. My guess: not good. Also, persistent immune activation / persistent infection will wear people down for those that get it. Stay tuned for the next few years!
There are many possibilities I guess. There are other events where the timing also matches up really well. Does the disability curve have another inflection point around the time the Delta wave disappeared?
> Dr. Anthony Leonardi is a lightning rod for debate. If he’s right, this pandemic poses a greater threat than widely assumed.
Almost a year after this article, given what we see in the population, I'd say the results speak for themselves. Unless you're going to tell me that there is a massive coverup happening globally that is hiding the morgue trucks and cooling wagons we saw in the early pandemic.
I mean it's not preposterous to hold the "soft" conspiracy view here. All cause excess mortality is up like 8-10% compared to pre-covid. There are powerful economic and political incentives to not attribute that to covid, even if it is the cause.
And the conclusion he's drawing can't be dismissed after merely one year, we'll see what's up after a decade of infections. We're still very early in this shit actually and caution is warranted confidence is not.
Our immune systems are constantly being activated by some of the hundreds of different endemic respiratory viruses. There's nothing special about SARS-CoV-2 in that regard. It's just one more.
> An important contribution to long-term sickness volumes has come from the large number of "baby boomers" (those born between 1946 and 1964) approaching retirement.
The lack of age breakdown in these statistics is disappointing, its not clear how much of these trends can be attributed to an ageing population.
Interestingly enough in Switzerland, the 15-24 age category just became the age group with the highest number of sick days per year, when it used to be the oldest age group before the pandemic.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/record-level-of-sick-da...
By and large, by now, mask mandates were dropped everywhere.
There never was a reason to do this. Aside from politics, of course.
This, as this study shows has massive costs in the quality of life for many and affects the economy but no. We can't have mask mandates.
I am now wearing a Cleanspace Halo when on public transit or indoors. If y'all can't be bothered to keep the air clean I will make my own. fine But what of the many who can't afford one or find it ridiculous to wear one? Because it is ridiculous to basically constantly cosplay as Darth Vader (badly), no question about that. But what can one do?
You're protecting yourself, so where's the problem? Proposing government mandated mask wearing for everyone for the rest of our lives is absolutely insane.
No more so than any other item of clothing, the rules on which vary wildly by era and culture.
Why are women's, and only women's, nipples banned on Facebook and in many cases in public? Usual answer is to protect minors, but the biological purpose of the milk-producing glands they're attached to and after which the taxonomic class of "mammal" is named… is to feed infants. Banning male nipples would be less weird.
When the first Labour MP went to Westminster, he was criticised for the wrong kind of hat.
Used to be illegal for women to wear men's clothes in France (until 2013 technically if not in practice); and Florida is apparently considering treating the opposite as an inherently sexual act.
While face masks do have non-zero impact in some cases, that impact is much rarer and smaller than the discourse around it would imply — fursuiters can dance in much more restricted facewear.
> Proposing government mandated mask wearing for everyone for the rest of our lives is absolutely insane.
why? We have gotten accustomed to seatbelts despite cries about restricting freedoms, wrinkling clothes etc. "no shirt, no shoes, no service" is also common and extremely few people rally against it. At airports we absolutely debase ourselves despite it is known the current security measures are just security theatre. (Boycotting this would be trivial: if everyone opted out of full body scanners the entire system would collapse in hours.) Meanwhile N95 masks are proven to be effective against infecting others. In other words, you need to give some reason to this besides the emotional absolutely insane.
Agree about the effects on health and the economy, but I think there's more to consider than that.
The health stuff isn't even so clear cut. Consider the psychological and social effects of mandating that people cover their faces. It's very valuable to be able to connect on the human level and to do so with a sense of freedom.
What about every single other risk we accept as humans alive on earth. This is just a kinda new one, why do you draw the line specifically at the airborne virus?
Because this one is novel, we do not yet know how to cure the severe disability it causes and the disease is currently very widespread. And we have a really simple way to severely restricts its spread: wear an N95/FFP2 mask. That simple?
So what. Every virus was "novel" at some point. This one is nothing special. Most any severe infection can potentially cause post-viral fatigue syndrome in susceptible patients. That is hardly a valid reason for turning yourself into a paranoid germaphobe.
You are missing on the current rate of covid infections which is very hard to know because there's no systemic testing any more and many people are asymptomatic. Last time the UK published this data in March, approximately 1 in 40 in the population tested positive and so the number of infected must be significantly higher. No other airborne pathogen is present in multiple percentages of the population.
Also, the problem here is the generalization "any severe infection" -- many otherwise healthy, young people with a reasonably mild acute phase have developed debilitating long Covid symptoms.
I'm saying that covering our faces is also a health risk with long term effects in an already increasingly alienated society, and that we should weigh up the risks of long term regulations which diminish the most basic aspects of human contact.
In my experience not wanting to mask unless there is a meaningful sense of risk is a phenomenon equally strong in India (for example) and so I do not believe it has to do with the western propaganda.
If you visited India after the first wave, most people masked, enforced by the police - as they should have. Soon after the 2nd wave (which was bad but resulted in near-endemicity(?)) - after vaccines where widely available and well accepted in India -and to this day, you will see a vast vast majority in India don't mask. A visible minority mask everywhere and are not looked down upon or derided because of it. There is no meaningful propaganda either way right now.
> There is no meaningful propaganda either way right now.
In Europe, in some places, there is and it's sometimes more or less subtle. Local supermarket I go to has a sign "masking is no longer mandatory but it's okay to wear a mask if it makes you feel safer". Which is not how masks are supposed to work (we were told to mask to protect others) and it shouldn't be about feelings.
Meanwhile the cleaning cart station (that sprinkles cart bars with soap/disinfectant) is collecting dust in a corner. I think it would have been nice to keep that from the covid period. But no, we have to erase memories of it.
I think the "mask to protect others" message was a mistake. If you mask to protect yourself you can use a mask with an exhalation value, which is more comfortable. I suspect a lot of opposition to masks is from people who only tried valveless masks. And protecting yourself still indirectly protects others, because you can't infect others unless you are infected.
> Which is not how masks are supposed to work (we were told to mask to protect others)
A well fitting N95 / FFP2, or better, respirator mask protects the wearer to a large extent, even if others don't mask. The "protect the others" message was in 2020, when mostly only surgical masks were available.
I know. But we are talking about mandatory masks here and it only ever was about surgical masks in my country and bordering countries (except Hamburg at some point apparently). The sign is referring to those masks as well, which were the most common ones in circulation. The people who wrote the sign didn't have N95/FFP2 in mind when they wrote it.
You've got to be kidding. The virus is now endemic worldwide and will never go away. I'm certainly not willing to wear a mask for the rest of my life regardless of the consequences. Time to get over the irrational germaphobia.
That is up to leadership and media. Both of which, needless to say, have by and large failed the more vulnerable members of our society. Not for the first time. Today we consider what happened around AIDS in the 80s shameful and wasteful. Does another thirty years need to pass for this to be recognized the same?
You're not going to convince the wider public to wear masks forever. They're too annoying and they curtail too much of societal activity to be feasible.
That's why even the country most dead set on their usage (China) is now giving up mask mandates.
Strong disagree; they sound risk adverse, which is fine.
I was fully expecting and not at all surprised that the mask mandate ended, as the same happened too soon a century ago with influenza.
I recognise my own near total comfort with masks is unusual.
But, despite recognising that other people don't find them entirely comfortable, I find that discomfort surprising and confusing — to me, masks are literally just a piece of clothing, no more of an issue than a hat or a shirt or trousers, and I've had more discomfort from ties and the necks of button-up shirts they go with.
I can't speak to the UK, but in the US a lot of people claim to have long term health to access to disability benefits when the jobs disappear from their towns. The most common disabilities are ones which are the most difficult to disprove (depression, back pain). In Appalachian towns where this is more common, law practices make tons of money representing disability claims in court, getting paid by a % of the disability claim each month if they win
Are you implying those cases aren't valid health issues? It's more like people will work with chronic pain if they can, but if there's no work they'll sign up for the disability. Depression is also deeply unsurprising in the situation you're describing.
There's no need to imply anything as this very much happens.
In the late 90s the Netherlands had extremely generous disability benefits. It was so generous that a US president that visited wondered why anybody would work at all in this country?
All of a sudden, we had a full 1 million people of working age on permanent disability. And yes, the vast majority on claims of "back pain" and "depression" which both conveniently cannot be medically disproved.
You'd receive some 70-90% of your last/highest paycheck, and get this benefit for life. So you can basically retire at any age on a full work salary.
Everybody over here would know several people in their circles fully abusing this. It was widespread.
None of this is surprising. Getting money whilst not needing to work is attractive.
There's a strong financial incentive to do all kinds of crimes. That doesn't make it reasonable to go around accusing large swathes of people based solely on their demographics.
The demographics are people who are out of work and have an incentive to stay off of work. Im sure they truly believe they cannot work, especially because if they do, they lose their checks
There are clearly many people who are physically capable of doing some sort of work despite their medical conditions, but have found a sympathetic doctor who declared them to be fully disabled. In most cases this probably doesn't meet the definition of criminal fraud but it's certainly not what the program was intended for.
> An important contribution to long-term sickness volumes has come from the large number of "baby boomers" (those born between 1946 and 1964) approaching retirement.
Anecdata from my parents peer group (born early 60s, working class) indicate that at least some of these people are faking it for a soft landing into retirement.
They had a taste of retirement with furlough and they simply don't want to work any more. They don't need to, either, because asset inflation (including property inflation in suburban London) has subsidised their lifestyle for years and will continue to subsidise their retirement.
> They had a taste of retirement with furlough and they simply don't want to work any more. They don't need to, either, because property inflation in suburban London has subsidised their lifestyle for years.
I know quite a number of people doing exactly this for exactly this reason, but they are quite open about it and aren’t faking anything.
>I know quite a number of people doing exactly this for exactly this reason, but they are quite open about it and aren’t faking anything.
Same, I can think of several people I know that fit this category -- they've built enough wealth and WFH/furlough gave them a taste for what they were missing by not having retired early -- so they retired early
I just hope they actually spend some of that wealth rather than keeping it sat in savings account
I also hope they look at young people today and recognise the economic difficulties many are facing: getting on the house ladder, getting stable employment, getting above inflation pay rises
economy is crashing and not enough jobs so everyone has gone on sick benefits. It's arguably better to have a bit less income per week but have all your own time to prioritise your life/health balance than it is to be a gig economy worker with low pay and high workload. Simples.
Which metrics are you basing the assertion on that the economy is crashing?
Edit: rereading your comment it seems that you have concerns about unemployment. It seems that in both UK and US we are looking at record-low unemployment numbers. At least in the US, I know that finding workers is a real challenge right now and many businesses are only open limited hours because they cannot find staff.
I know that finding workers is a real challenge right now and many businesses are only open limited hours because they cannot find staff.
Your comment sounds eerily similar to the false "no one wants to work any more". It isn't like they are generally offering enough pay to cover basic things nor are they willing to actually treat people better to fill those jobs.
Again, US has the lowest unemployment since the 70s. I'm not doubting anyone's motivation to work. I'm wondering about the claim about a crashing economy and high unemployment.
So a trivial take away is that for above 15% increase in self reporting as long-term sick, pre- to post-covid, we've also scored increased needs for mental health treatment alongside debilitating multiple symptom diseases and musculo-skeletal pain.
Twice the cost burdens compared to simple illness increase because longterm.
This during a time of chronic under-funding of the NHS, backlogged waiting lists, staff leaving in droves, strikes.
Makes you laugh, eh?