Alberta Health Services (AHS) is closing down its long-COVID outpatient program that had been operating since 2021.
In a letter to patients dated Aug. 8, AHS says the program has concluded.
“Your health and well-being remain a priority, and we are committed to ensuring you receive support during the transition,” it reads.
“We understand that this change might be challenging for some and thank you for your understanding and co-operation during this transition period.”
Comments closedFor months, governmental officials around the world have appeared to want to forgo discussing the specter of long COVID. As a new review makes clear, that is wishful thinking—and the latest COVID variants may well kick long COVID into overdrive, a scenario that researchers and experts have been warning about for some time.
“I think they (government agencies) are itching to pretend that COVID is over and that long COVID does not exist,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the Clinical Epidemiology Center at Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System and lead author of the review. “It is much more pleasant to pretend as if emergency department visits and hospitalizations haven’t been rising sharply this summer.”
In a Nature Medicine review this week, Al-Aly and several other top researchers lay out a difficult truth: Long COVID has already affected an estimated 400 million people worldwide, a number the authors say is likely conservative, at an economic cost of about $1 trillion annually—equivalent to 1% of the global economy.
Comments closedConfusion and frustration.
Those are the feelings that 56-year-old Calgary grandmother Barbara Pencala was left with after she learned on Wednesday via email that Alberta Health Services (AHS) is concluding its long COVID Inter-Professional Outpatient Program (IPOP).
The temporary initiative was set up in 2021 and was never meant to be permanent, but the news came as a surprise to hundreds of program patients, many of whom took to social media to express their concerns.
Comments closedComments closedFor far too long, millions of Americans suffering from long Covid have had their symptoms dismissed or ignored — by the medical community, by the media, and by Congress. That is unacceptable and has got to change.
The legislation that we have introduced finally recognizes that long Covid is a public health emergency and provides an historic investment into research, development, and education needed to counter the effects of this terrible disease. Congress must act now to ensure treatments are developed and made available for Americans struggling with long Covid. Yes. It is time for a long Covid moonshot.
Since 2020, the condition known as long COVID-19 has become a widespread disability affecting the health and quality of life of millions of people across the globe and costing economies billions of dollars in reduced productivity of employees and an overall drop in the work force.
The intense scientific effort that long COVID sparked has resulted in more than 24,000 scientific publications, making it the most researched health condition in any four years of recorded human history.
Long COVID is a term that describes the constellation of long-term health effects caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. These range from persistent respiratory symptoms, such as shortness of breath, to debilitating fatigue or brain fog that limits people’s ability to work, and conditions such as heart failure and diabetes, which are known to last a lifetime.
Comments closedLong Covid — the name adopted for cases of prolonged symptoms after an acute bout of Covid-19 — is an umbrella diagnosis covering a broad range of clinical presentations and abnormal biological processes. Researchers haven’t yet identified a single or defining cause for some of the most debilitating symptoms associated with long Covid, which parallel those routinely seen in other post-acute infection syndromes. These include overwhelming fatigue, post-exertional malaise, cognitive deficits (often referred to as brain fog), and extreme dizziness.
Given the current gaps in knowledge, some neurologists, psychiatrists, and other clinicians in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere have suggested that an existing diagnosis known as functional neurological disorder (FND) could offer the best explanation for many cases of this devastating illness.
We strongly disagree. Although prominent news outlets such as The New Republic and Slate have promoted this perspective, it is unwarranted to view long Covid through the lens of functional neurological disorder. Despite assertions of robust evidence from those most invested in promoting it, the FND construct is based largely on speculation and assumption. Successful treatments for long Covid are much more likely to emerge from investigations into the kinds of immunological, neurological, hormonal, and vascular differences that have already been documented than from the inappropriate imposition of an often ill-fitting diagnosis onto the broad swath of people with these prolonged symptoms.
Comments closedRemember when we thought Covid was a two-week illness? So does Michael Peluso, assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
He recalls the rush to study acute Covid infection, and the crush of resulting papers. But Peluso, an HIV researcher, knew what his team excelled at: following people over the long term.
So they adapted their HIV research infrastructure to study Covid patients. The LIINC program, short for “Long-term Impact of Infection with Novel Coronavirus,” started in San Francisco at the very beginning of the pandemic. By April 2020, the team was already seeing patients come in with lingering illness and effects of Covid — in those early days still unnamed and unpublicized as long Covid. They planned to follow people’s progress for three months after they were infected with the virus.
Comments closedKaylee Byers is an assistant professor in the faculty of health sciences and senior scientist at the Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics and Society at Simon Fraser University. Julia Smith is an assistant professor in the faculty. Kayli Jamieson is a master’s student in communication and a research assistant for the Pacific Institute. Rackeb Tesfaye is director of knowledge mobilization at the institute. This article was originally published by the Conversation.
We are living through a mass-disabling event: Over 200 million people worldwide have long COVID. In Canada, one in nine people have experienced long COVID symptoms, and this is likely an underestimate.
Occurring weeks to months after a COVID-19 infection, this multi-system chronic illness has led to what some have called “the shadow pandemic.” Although millions are navigating this new illness, four years into the pandemic both patients and their caregivers continue to face challenges accessing the information and care they need.
Most Canadians have had COVID, and at least one in five have been infected more than once. These trends are troubling because evidence suggests that the risk of acquiring long COVID increases with reinfection.
Image description: A stylized image of a SARS-CoV-2 virus particle, depicted with bright red colours. Illustration by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.
Today a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine presents a number of conclusions about long-COVID diagnosis, symptoms, and impact on daily function, including that the condition can cause more than 200 symptoms, and that a positive COVID-19 test is not necessary to make a long-COVID diagnosis.
The findings are meant to guide the Social Security Administration (SSA) and are published one week before the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is set to offer a new single definition of long COVID that can be used across US governmental groups as a way to streamline treating the condition in the years to come.
“This report offers a comprehensive review of the evidence base for how Long COVID may impact a patient’s ability to engage in normal activities, such as going to work, attending school, or taking care of their families,” said Victor J. Dzau, MD, president of the National Academy of Medicine, in a National Academies press release. “Its findings will be useful to anyone attempting to understand how Long COVID may affect the millions of people in the U.S. who have reported symptoms.”
Comments closedEven as national institutions struggle to coordinate meaningful trials for possible long COVID treatments, researchers continue to tally the damage. New findings suggest that the disease’s reach isn’t merely long—it’s still growing.
Three years after their initial bouts with COVID-19, patients who’d once been hospitalized with the virus remained at “significantly elevated” risk of death or worsening health from long COVID complications, according to a paper published May 30 in Nature Medicine.
Even among those whose initial cases didn’t require a hospital stay, the threat of long COVID and several of its associated issues remained real, the researchers found. And cumulatively, at three years, long COVID results in 91 disability-adjusted life years (DALY) per 1,000 people—DALYs being a measure of years lost to poor health or premature death. That is a higher incidence than either heart disease or cancer.
Comments closedThis May, Opera Mariposa is rallying the community to support people with chronic and post-viral illnesses. From May 1 to June 1, 2024, the disability-led indie arts company is presenting their 2024 Benefit + Awareness Month: an all-digital charity extravaganza featuring music, art, prizes, and special events benefiting the ME | FM Society of BC.
The initiative honours the International Awareness Month for chronic neuro-immune diseases, and it showcases disabled and chronically ill artists from around the world. Proceeds aid people and families affected by myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME or ME/CFS), fibromyalgia, and long COVID – a group of complex chronic illnesses that are surging due to long-term health impacts from COVID-19.
Comments closedToday, researchers from the University of Minnesota published evidence that the common diabetes drug metformin decreases the amount of SARS-CoV-2 in the body and helps reduce the risk of rebound symptoms if given early in the course of non-severe illness.
The study, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases, suggests metformin may also help prevent long COVID.
The researchers tested metformin against a placebo in 999 adults infected with COVID-19. More than 50% of the study enrollees were vaccinated, and treatment took place when the Omicron variant was the most dominant strain in the United States.
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