NIH will invest $1B to investigate 'long Covid'
It&#x27;s unclear whether this will generally be used to investigate (and ultimately take seriously) the documented but poorly understood chronic suffering which rarely but really affects a sliver of people who&#x27;ve recovered from various viruses.<p>The other four endemic coronaviruses, while often called &quot;common colds&quot; (and make up perhaps 1&#x2F;5 common cold cases) have all been documented having similar lingering cardiovascular effects in a similar miniscule segment of the population.  Search your favorite repository of scientific literature for &quot;{hku1|229e|oc43|nl63} cardiovascular&quot; for example - you&#x27;ll be amazed at how similar case reports are to what we&#x27;re seeing from SARS-CoV-2.<p>However, to my knowledge (and to the best I can tell from searching Google Scholar), the phrase &#x27;long Covid&#x27; has never been used to describe this phenomenon.  In fact, it seems that sufferers are often ignored.  So it is with other mysterious chronic after-effects from illness - &#x27;chronic lyme disease&#x27; is something I imagine has touched someone in each of our networks.<p>It&#x27;s obvious that this phenomenon is super rare.  However, when you have viruses (and other pathogens) which ultimately infect nearly everyone on the planet, these cases add up.  It&#x27;s not right that sufferers have been ignored these decades, and if this is a genuine effort to right that wrong, I applaud it.<p>If on the other hand it&#x27;s just another attempt to justify bizarre restrictions instead of resources to help these same sufferers, then that&#x27;s just cruel.<p>We saw a similar happening with hospital census last year: sensational media and pundit scientists (but vanishingly few actual experts) threw bombastic fits over hospitals being overcrowded, as they almost always are, especially in underserved communities, at the peak time of the year.<p>And was this a rallying cry to provide more resources for marginalized communities and the hospitals that serve them?  Seemingly not; it was instead a pathetic attempt at justifying interventions which by then were already unambiguously ineffective, like stay-at-home orders.  And now we&#x27;re not even talking about it.  These hospital systems and the communities they serve will not be helped; the conversation has moved on.<p>The best thing we can do is to take seriously the experts who have credibly drawn attention to this for the past couple of decades and continued to do so in covid times.  People like Stefan Baral, Sunetra Gupta, John Ioannidis, Monica Gandhi, Vinay Prasad, etc.<p>Subsequent pandemics may leave less room for reflection, so this is the time to get these things straightened out.