<
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/health/2024/08/24/dispatch-the-long-covid-frontline>
"In September 2020, the United Kingdom government commissioned the British
Academy – the national academy for the humanities and social sciences – to
explore the long-term effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.
What they got in March 2021 was a report titled “The Covid Decade”. Even then,
in the frenzied panic of that first year of a global health crisis, the British
Academy foresaw that this acute and early phase would have a very long tail.
One strand of that tail was long Covid, which the report’s authors warned would
“complicate the process of declaring an ‘end’ to a pandemic such as this,
because for some it will continue”.
“It seemed to be a very sensible thing that everybody should have paid
attention to,” says clinical psychologist Andrew Baillie, a professor of allied
health at the University of Sydney. Instead, Australia threw enormous amounts
of money and effort into that acute phase of the pandemic and seemingly now has
little left – financially, socially and politically – for the persistent,
perplexing and devastating problem of long Covid, which has cost the Australian
economy an estimated $9.6 billion in lost productivity.
For Baillie, who also convenes the Long-COVID Australia Collaboration, the
current situation with long Covid represents the worst of what he feared would
happen. He says Australia is now in a sort of “acquiescence phase” marked by
poor data collection, disjointed health responses, a lack of support for those
with the condition, and health system attitudes that are frustratingly similar
to those experienced by people with chronic fatigue syndrome.
There have been some gains, however, particularly in the research space. That
acute phase of the pandemic, in which the majority of humans on the planet were
infected, provided an unprecedented amount of data on how the SARS-CoV-2 virus
affected the body.
In Australia and around the world, scientists have been mining that data for
information about the smaller subset of people for whom the pandemic has
continued in frustrating, debilitating and mysterious ways. Their research
efforts are shedding important light on the many mechanisms that seem to
underpin long Covid, providing hope for prevention, treatment or even cure.
The first and perhaps most important challenge for researchers is defining long
Covid precisely enough to capture everyone that does have it, while excluding
those whose symptoms are the result of other illnesses or events."
Via Violet Blue’s
Pandemic Roundup: August 29, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pandemic-roundup-110995269
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
