Good 4/25 (Post) discussion about long covid with a senator. Pretty much explains my reasons to N95, avoid going into stores if curbside's available, skip indoor dining, etc. I'm sad that we don't educate well enough in the US for more people to have been ready to withstand a trial of uncertainty and to accept the realistic pace of science at the pandemic's outset -- it could have saved so much personal and economic misery. Instead, our culture immediately collapsed into blaming, threatening, whining and panicking. We have a starved educational system which created a fault line, and we cracked.
What kinds of symptoms are we talking about when we talk about long COVID? And what are the--what's the range, and how big a health problem is this?
SEN. KAINE: Frances, you started off with two of the tough questions. The range is broad, and the scope of the problem we're still trying to determine. So let me tackle scope and then I'll tackle the range of symptoms. So, the estimates that I'm seeing suggest that anywhere between 5 and 30 percent of people who get COVID could have persistent long COVID symptoms. Now, obviously, that is a very broad range. The numbers I've seen in the United States suggest that about 80 million people had been diagnosed with COVID. But many were never diagnosed. They got COVID before there was testing, for example. So, it's--in all likelihood, the number of Americans who’ve had COVID is in excess of a hundred million. So, it could be 5 million long COVID sufferers. It could be 30 million. And we still have to do more to really figure that out.
And then the second issue that you asked is, well, what are the symptoms, and they come into different buckets. So, there's neurological symptoms. I have a nerve tingling sensation that kicked in right when I got COVID in March of 2020, and it's never gone away. Others have a loss of taste or smell, or a light sensitivity. So, it's a vision issue, or tinnitus ringing in their ear. These all seem kind of related. There's probably nothing wrong with my skin or somebody else's taste buds, but the way the brain interprets sense data kind of gets scrambled a little bit.
There's respiratory conditions that some people have. These are very serious. People who have had no past history of heart issues find that their heart rates race up and down in random and troubling ways. Pulmonary and respiratory problems are pretty common, people who got the respiratory form of COVID and they don't ever feel like they've really been able to come back to a place where they're not short of breath.
And then intense fatigue. People who were, you know, 10k or marathon runners who now have a hard time walking around the block without getting too tired. I visited with some long COVID patients in Appalachian Virginia last week and heard stories about this intense fatigue. There are other symptoms as well. But what they tell us is that just as COVID is kind of a multi-system attacker, long COVID also can just manifest itself in very, very different ways among different people.
MS. STEAD SELLERS: So, you've pinpointed a huge problem here, that we have a vast range of symptoms that affects people differently. Some estimates I've seen from the GAO, the Government Accountability Office, match with yours--I think they're saying between 7.7 million and 23 million people could already have been diagnosed. Do you expect those numbers to go up?
SEN. KAINE: I do, because I think we're--I mean, first, there are still people getting COVID. Even after vaccination, people are getting new variants of COVID. Now, we don't know yet--if you've been vaccinated, we sort of know that if you get COVID, your symptoms are likely to be milder. That's great. But what we don't necessarily know is the correlation between mild COVID symptoms and whether you get long COVID or not.
I had a very mild case of COVID in late March of 2020, into the early part of April, and I--and then I gave COVID to my wife, and she had a very mild case, too. Her symptoms had been gone within 10 days. A particular symptom that I have, this nerve tingling thing, has stayed. So, you have people with mild cases who have long COVID. And then you have people who've had very serious COVID cases, been on ventilator for months, and they have no long COVID symptoms. I think as a general rule, what we're finding is, the more serious your case of COVID, the more likely you are to have long COVID symptoms. There does seem to be a little bit of a gender bias in long COVID where about 60 percent of people who are reporting long COVID are women rather than men.
But again, Frances, I'll just say I think we're really at the front end of this, even though we've been in the research mode about long COVID for about a year now. We know the questions to ask. We're getting some data back, but there's a lot more to do to really understand this and then provide relief to people.
