Anyone else just think it’s great that life is back to “normal”?

[curiousitygotthebetterofme]

After two years of covid restrictions, I mean.

Was just watching Glastonbury and looking at the big crowds of people there, it’s hard to believe we have had so many restrictions over the last two years.

This time in 2020 and even this time last year I never thought we’d get back to this level of normality, well at least not for an extremely long time so I just think it’s wonderful to see everyone back together and enjoying themselves again

@tobee im well aware about all that :(

Not immunosuppressed but my own chronic illness means I really can’t afford to get LC/covid either. Well not unless I’m happy for a life from my bed.

So I get the frustration. I get the need to have access to new vaccines. I get the anger at a government who is happy to ‘let the bodies pile high’.

Im just finding it easier to fight that way iyswim.

”we know HEPA filters work” - You’re missing my point. Which is: do they work well enough in a particular place where you want to use them (buses, apparently) to make up for the various costs of installing them? Which is a question you seem to think we don’t have the time and money to answer.

But if we don’t have the time and money to check if X thing is worth doing, we certainly don’t have the time and money to spend a fortune on doing X thing anyway.

Do you really think it will cost more to have proper ventilation and HEPA filters in place??

well, yes. If putting in all that ventilation costs a fortune (which it will) and then it doesn’t do much to reduce cases of long covid (which it might not), then yes it would be more expensive overall. Honestly - don’t you think it’s worth at least finding out? Making the case based on evidence, rather than “who knows but I reckon it might do so let’s spend eighty squillion quid doing it anyway”?

I'm I'm a constant fluctuatance with this

On one hand I am loving the normality, seeing my friends, going to events, seeing family, going on holiday.

On the other hand I have had covid twice in about 6 weeks and fuck me I am wiped out, spend half the time feeling like I can't breath. It's not been just a cold for me, more of a bad virus like flu or glandular fever. And the after effects are rough. I am scared of being in a constant state of catching it and being ill.

But at least I suppose I have things to look forward to when I am feeling rough.

well, yes. If putting in all that ventilation costs a fortune (which it will) and then it doesn’t do much to reduce cases of long covid (which it might not), then yes it would be more expensive overall. Honestly - don’t you think it’s worth at least finding out? Making the case based on evidence, rather than “who knows but I reckon it might do so let’s spend eighty squillion quid doing it anyway”?

Yeah I was sort of assuming there were at least models or something of that sort.

@GoldenOmber you are missing my point too.

It has already been tried out at a country level in Japan. Ventilation, and HEPA filters.
You can have a look both at their number of cases and number of deaths to see that that approach is working. LC cases will automatically be down if the number of cases is down. It's that simple.

We just do NOT have the time to do whatever number of trials for every single situation incl whether it works specifically on reducing LC etc...
If it reduces the number of cases and the risk of catching covid, it will reduce the LC cases.

And we know that HEPA filters reduces the level of infection.

twitter.com/HuffmanLabDU/status/1408793299184402435?s=20&t=u-4JhUDMuxzFJO36Sn_Stg
theconversation.com/covid-19-has-spurred-investments-in-air-filtration-for-k-12-schools-but-these-technologies-arent-an-instant-fix-165947

So why asking for even more trials etc... 'to prove they work' whilst we have at least 4 waves of covid a year so the risk of catching covid 4 times a year each time with increase risk of being even more unwell each time?

well, yes. If putting in all that ventilation costs a fortune (which it will) and then it doesn’t do much to reduce cases of long covid (which it might not), then yes it would be more expensive overall.

There are a lot of 'could' there...
Don't you think its worth investing in a technology that will help avoid ALL airborne diseases (incl the flu, monkey pox and a lot of other illnesses much less severe) just like we clesan our tap water? I mean ensuring that tap water is clean is costing money too doesn't it?

Fwiw re cost, if we have 500.000 people who suffer from long covid and receive PIP/ESA/LWA at £400 a month (low estimate), in a year we will have spent £2.4 billion pounds in just one year. If we could avoid the same number of people getting LC again (which wil happen if we don't do anything) I'd say it would be plenty to ensure good ventilation.
(Calculations of course don't take nto account the cost to the NHS for example or the cost to the economy)

It has already been tried out at a country level in Japan. Ventilation, and HEPA filters.

But what you mean here is “Japan have done things with ventilation”, rather than “Japan has put HEPA filters on all its buses”, presumably?

Again, I am NOT saying ventilation is pointless. I am saying that the cost of putting in ventilation in a particular way in a particular place might outweigh the benefits.

So like, maybe it doesn’t work so well in buses because it costs a fortune, and it means bus companies pass the prices on to customers and close down routes, and people aren’t usually on buses for long enough for it to make much difference. And maybe it works really well in offices, where people are in one place for longer. But you can’t put it in offices because you’ve just wasted £119 million putting HEPA filters on buses, and now you have no money left for the offices, ooops.

Or maybe it works sort of well in classrooms but not hugely well, and it costs a fortune. And there’s another ventilation system we could do instead which works a bit less well for the virus, but works much much better at reducing air pollution, and is cheaper. So maybe we should do that instead? Except we can’t, because we’ve already spent the money on the first system before looking at how well it works.

It would be irresponsible to spend billions of pounds based on nothing more than “Japan does ventilation-y stuff and I bet that’s what’s behind their low cases, so it must be worth it.”

Also, and I know this is going to sound very cynical, but a lot of people have made a lot of money during the pandemics. Some of it in pretty shady ways. If Delboy Trotter turns up trying to sell us a ventilation system that will cost hundreds of millions of pounds, I’m going to want to check it will actually do what he’s claiming.

@GoldenOmber

Yep lots of people have made a huge amount of money during the pandemic when they shouldn't have. It's not because what they were (supposed to) do was wrong. Needing PPE or a track and trace system was a good idea. It's the way the government decided to give contracts etc... that was utterly worng (and illegal btw). A whole different situation.

If you have an issue with Japan, I'd suggest you read about their approach, why they did that (tip: it wasnt to protect people as such! It was all about the economy) and what the result.
If you just get stuck at 'I need a high level proof that using ventilation in a classroom/in a bus/ in a restaurant/ in an open plan office etc etc etc for each of those situations, you will never get to the end and will have billions of pounds trying to prove stuff we already know. We'd be better spend that money on actually doing something.

I don’t ‘have an issue with Japan’. I just think that if you’re going to spend billions of pounds on something, it needs a proper analysis of whether the costs outweigh the benefits that goes a bit beyond “Japan does ventilation stuff, Google it.”

You seem to be of the view that ventilation works, therefore anything with ‘ventilation’ in its name must all work just the same. And there is no difference between ventilation systems, doesn’t matter what they are or how they work, doesn’t matter where you’re using them, the benefits are all the same and the costs are all the same and it’s definitely worth it.

But nothing is ever as simple as that. Sometimes things don’t work. Or they work in one situation, but they don’t work so well in another (like enclosed GP consultation room vs moving bus). Or they do work, but at such a huge cost it’s not worth doing it (if HEPA filters in buses reduced long covid rates by 0.1% but made bus travel so expensive most people couldn’t afford it any more, that would not be worth it). Or they actually make things worse than if we hadn’t had them (if your ventilation system is pulling all the air from the edges of the room to the middle, that might make it spread covid even better than having nothing.) The world is complicated. That’s why we do experiments and trials and cost-benefit analysis to work out the best thing to do.

Yes OP I am loving life being back to normal (ish) but as I'm CEV I always have a 'what if...' thing going on, especially as I fall into the wider CEV group who haven't been given the 4th/5th jab (ie not the most immunosuppressed group). I've not caught covid yet despite being in contact multiple times, even in my own home. But I've kind of resigned myself and decided I want to live life, so I'm socialising as normal and off to a festival in a few weeks, and can't wait. I guess I'm taking my life into my hands but covid is always going to be here and we do have to live with it, much as I hate that phrase!

However, this thread just reminds me of all the stuff that made me feel like such a horrible burden in the last couple of years. All the 'we locked down for people like you and wrecked everything else so it's basically your fault', the whole vulnerable people not mattering as much because they were going to die anyway. There's still a load of that thinking at large right here and it still feels crappy to people like me. Now added into that is those who are denying long covid and calling people with long covid hypochondriacs or attention seekers. There are several people with LC here on this thread and it's appalling how they have been minimised and shouted down.

Covid is on the up right now and hospital admissions are going up. We can't just pretend it's not. Those who say to people like me, oh you're vulnerable to flu, norovirus etc etc too are just avoiding the fact that those things are not in such high circulation. Yes, I'm vulnerable to everything, but covid is the thing that I'm most likely to get at the moment due to its prevalence.

Still, I've decided for me that I want to do things that might put me at risk. And I'll just have to accept the fallout if I do get sick I guess. I don't really think anyone is being selfish here, but I do think that the old rhetoric about the annoying vulnerable should have no place anymore.

@Madhairday I could have written every word. Well said.

Oh I am so tired of this foot dragging mentality. It is this luddite-ism that has held us back all the way through COVID.

The costs of increasing ventilation in many settings is actually quite low and we have enough air data to know what works.

Sometimes situations arise that warrant speculative spending. COVID is definitely one of those times. The spending on ventilation would be, in public spending terms, not much. Not even the cost of one Trident submarine for one year could make a huge difference.

“What is the evidence base here” and “are the benefits worth the harms” seem like fairly basic questions to be asking about anything, really. And your previous suggestion was to keep windows on all buses fixed open, which did not suggest to me you have really thought them through.

I really don’t get this mentality that finding evidence and doing cost-benefit analyses are a pointless waste of time. How do you think medicine and science and technology have ever progressed? I’m very glad that we did not decide on covid vaccines and treatments by calling research scientists Luddites and telling them we couldn’t waste time with clinical trials.

I think it is a great shame that the definition of Long Covid is so broad.

I'm familiar with still feeling tired and run down after various nasty virus infections. I think it's normal. My GP sent me away when I was still tired and coughing 8 weeks after a particularly fierce 'cold', saying that I might expect to feel better after 12 weeks. I wasn't myself for about a year after flu years ago when I was younger and generally fitter.

But now, even reporting tiredness 4 weeks after a Covid infection is counted as Long Covid, which, as that's not particularly unusual after a nasty virus infection, leads people to be inclined to dismiss the concept of Long Covid, to the detriment of people who are suffering severe symptoms months later.

I have two friends who are still suffering post viral syndrome after having flu in 2017, so, while I hope Long Covid attracting more attention will benefit others with PVS, I'm not optimisitic.

Agreed.

ONS might have good reason for the long covid definition they use, I don't know. But people who are concerned about LC just don't help themselves by insisting on using the 2 million figure with no caveats and putting their fingers in their ears when people point out what it actually means, either because they don't want to admit they didn't bother reading below the headline or because they've got attached to the idea of 1 in 5 having it and are unwilling to let it go.

People know that feeling rough for a month or two after a nasty virus or having a cough that doesn't shift for ages without it having a long term significant impact on your health is common, and it's a normal part of the human experience. It will have happened to a great many of us, perhaps a majority, long before Covid 19. That's why trying to gloss over the reality that headline figures like 2 million in the UK include hundreds of thousands of people like this is so counterproductive.

People know that feeling rough for a month or two after a nasty virus or having a cough that doesn't shift for ages without it having a long term significant impact on your health is common, and it's a normal part of the human experience.

A few things there

• if it’s normal to feel rough after a nasty virus is common, fair enough. But then that means accepting covid IS a nasty virus not just like a bad cold. I think that’s why I would always talk about the 1 in 5. Not because I believe 2 million people are now disabled but because it shows covid is not like a cold.
• Many people refuse the label LC because they know well they are likely to be shut down. You might have people who still go to work, haven’t seen their GP but are in constant pain since they got covid. I know a few of them like this. But they got a ‘well it’s normal to feel rough after a virus’ enough times to have learnt to not bother mentioning how crap they feel. Or ‘you need to move more’ or ‘stop worrying about it. It will go away’ etc etc. Basically their experience is being dismissed.
• For half a million people, LC means being unable to hold a full time job anymore. Or to work at all. That, for me, means people have been disabled by covid. Great of some of those people recover enough to be back at work after a year. But again, I’d say it’s not part of ‘normal experience’ to have to stop work or significantly reduced the number if hours you do after a virus.

The very big danger is here is to end up ignoring people who have ended up with a much poorer quality of life due to covid. Whether it’s pain, tiredness, diabetes, tinnitus, etc…. We’ve done that before with people with ME/CFS. Do we really want to do the same with LC?

I have no idea what normal looks like any more.

Re tiredness, the issue with LC isn’t that much tiredness but PEM (post exertion malaise). Basically doing anything can make you feel much worse for days afterwards. Unlike healthy people who will feel td, it’s harder to do things but they recover to their baseline (even if it’s low) after a good night of sleep.

What the doing anything means will be different from one person to the next. For some it will be getting out of bed and sitting in a chair. For others, it will be walking a few hundred meters.

Having experienced fatigue and PEM, they are very different feeling and you cannot compare let’s say feeling tired from EBV and the feeling associated with PEM, however bad the tiredness form EBV is.

Its very hard to explain and I suspect, as some doctors are finding out for themselves, that few people will understand unless they’ve experienced it themselves.

((Hugs))

Its shit isn’t it?

The point is that throwing numbers like 2 million in the UK and 1 in 5 around, the sort of figure that can only be arrived at either by meaninglessly wide definitions or not remotely rigorous data sets, risks doing the very thing you worry about here. The number we should be making a fuss about is the nearly 350,000 people in the UK who report that long covid symptoms are limiting their day to day activities a lot. And the 13% of the headline figure whose symptoms have lasted over two years. Not pretending that anyone whose cough hasn't lifted on day 29 belongs in the same category. It's exceptionally bleeding obvious that 20% of the population don't have long covid in any meaningful sense of the term, so the pretence that this is actually happening is damaging.

I accept that some people won't use the term long covid because they feel it has a connotation, although tbf the ONS figure is arrived at via symptoms rather than the use of that label so it isn't relevant here, but this is an innate limit of using self reported stats really. Same with the inevitable swinging of the lead. But it's the best we have at the moment. We do need better. We won't arrive at that without a sensible definition of long covid.

Are the 500.000 people who, according to the ONS, are now unable to work full time (or work at all) following covid also a meaningless number?

Half a million people ending up at least partially disabled is meaningless then.

OK…..

I imagine you would say the same thing about people with ME/CFS, Lyme, fibromyalgia etc…

I always find it funny (and enraging) to hear from people who were talking about numbers being meaningless, LC not been that bad, all in the head and really are those symptoms real and not just normal stuff from a virus like any other virus, who suddenly got covid and LC. So many doctors for example who were so dismissive until they got it themselves and now are saying ‘you what. It’s really bad. Now I get it and I probably shouldn’t have been that dismissive’.

That would be a problem with your imagination then. Nobody else is responsible for your bizarre logic fails other than you.

But on the subject of the ONS specifically (the 1 in 5 stat people like to throw around has no credibility at all and should be ignored, whereas the ONS is worthy of discussion) anything that takes a more granular look is positive. Which bit specifically are you referencing with the 500,000 and where is it?

Incidentally, you may have missed me posting that according to the ONS, I've actually got long covid. I am one of the two million. And I fall very much on the minor, lingering end. There's nothing like people using your minor symptoms to try and pretend that millions of people are too disabled to work because of long covid, either through ignorance or deliberate intent to mislead, to make you realise how important it is that they're countered. Nothing positive is going to come from self indulgent exaggeration on this issue, however satisfying it might feel.

Glad to see people living life. Wasn't worth any restrictions, made more mess than it was worth

@ApplesandBunions where on earth did you get that I said millions are suffering from severe symptoms with LC? I haven’t. I only mentioned the 400.000 from the ONS study.

i also haven’t mentioned the 1 in 5. I was responding to Goose comment about the fact she didn’t see that many people affected by LC around her.

This thread is utterly bizarre.