My interest hardly matters, but I’ve been most appreciative of your first-hand accounts, advocacy, etc. re: CFS. SF Chronicle had a terrific account of Covid long-hauler issues on the front page of Monday’s paper, by Nanette Asimov:
~https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/Terrifying-post-COVID-syndrome-is-next-15967894.php?cmpid=gsa-sfgate-result
One athletic first-responder got it last March. Fifty years old, now gets around with a walker. ABC news yesterday had a little boy in the same shape – just shockingly flaccid limbs – begging Doctor Fauci himself for some explanation of what’s happening to him. We don’t know, of course. Some folks say 10% of post-Covid patients encounter this syndrome, others say 30%. Somewhere in there. Maybe.
One fascinating detail from Asimov’s article: Sometimes post-Covid syndrome replays neurological echoes of previous problems, such as migraines or concussions. There’s some kind of biological meaning in such patterns, I think. Also the striking resemblances between CFS, Lyme’s Disease, and post-Covid syndrome, I think these recurrent patterns have biological significance.
Some patterns I’m aware of in all three:
- a bewildering diversity of symptoms, frustrating firm diagnosis
- non-binary, graduated symptoms such as fatigue, again frustrating diagnosis
- developing syndrome definitions (invoking Ebola’s microscopic signature: ?)
- possible links to suffusive toxins, saturating our bodies
- a lack of tests to identify the existence of the syndrome, let alone how it originated
- capricious symptom intensity: coming and going mysteriously (like some cases of MS)
The most significant link between Covid and CFS, imho, is that we’re challenged to confront biology at the nearly atomic level of elaborate proteinaceous interactions. There’s a place where biology meets quantum physics, so biologists will need to bone up on Schrodinger’s Cat (& etc.) to get a feeling for how stuff works at incomprehensibly small scales. Counter-intuitive, but compelling.
