If you think healthcare is expensive now, wait until ALL those with COVID-19 start getting sick as they age, after the Banana Republicans trash the “preexisting condition” healthcare provision in the PPACA, and insurance companies return to “cherry picking” and denials.
Won’t that be more fun than a barrelful of monkeys?!
COVID-19’s Long-Term Harms: What We Don’t Know Yet Could Hurt Us
Infectious diseases have afflicted humans for hundreds of thousands of years, shaping communities and cultures. The ways pathogens affect human health have been studied extensively for decades. We have learned that any given microorganism can be protean, or capable of changing, in its manifestations — from patients who experience no symptoms at all, to those who become acutely ill yet recover fully, to those who suffer chronic infection and live with the ever-present threat of deteriorating health.
In stark contrast, we have coexisted only one year with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), and are still learning the diverse ways this novel virus affects human health. During the first week of December, the National Institutes of 
Health convened a two-day workshop involving public health officials, medical researchers, and patients dedicated to discussing the post-acute health consequences of COVID-19. One of the primary goals of the meeting — to provide a definition for the long-term sequelae, or health consequences and symptoms, following acute COVID-19 — proved elusive. Variably termed “chronic COVID,” “long haulers” and “long COVID” by physicians, patients and the media, whatever you call it, the protracted symptom complex following COVID-19, seemingly affecting all organ systems, has emerged as an unanticipated, devastating outcome of the pandemic.
The earliest data out of Europe and the United States painted a concerning picture: The majority of hospitalized patients remained symptomatic weeks or months after their acute illness, the most common symptoms being fatigue and shortness of breath in approximately half of patients studied. Even patients who were never hospitalized had persistent symptoms several weeks later. Over ensuing months, the full gamut of persistent symptoms emerged, ranging from chronic fatigue, sleep disturbance, cognitive impairment, fast heart rates and exercise intolerance. The exact incidence of these symptoms and their time-course Read the rest of this entry »
