Page 1603 of 1673 FirstFirst ... 1598 1599 1600 1601 1602 1603 1604 1605 1606 1607 1608 ... LastLast
Results 40,051 to 40,075 of 41810
  1. #40051
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Was UT, AK, now MT
    Posts
    13,499
    Quote Originally Posted by bodywhomper View Post
    My understanding is that monkeypox is also spread through aerosol. An enforcing reason to improve indoor ventilation standards.
    There was one study that suggested that, but the study used an aerosol generating machine to see if they could indeed aerosolize it. There was an outbreak of 70 or so cases in 2003 in the US, and one person in 2021. Thought is decline in herd immunity due to no longer utilizing small pox vaccine that has crossover efficacy for monkey pox.

  2. #40052
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    8,965
    Is this the study? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3556235/

    Have the strain been determined that’s been detected in Europe? I thought I’d read there were two strains with different case fatality rates.

  3. #40053
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Was UT, AK, now MT
    Posts
    13,499
    Quote Originally Posted by bodywhomper View Post
    Is this the study? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3556235/

    Have the strain been determined that’s been detected in Europe? I thought I’d read there were two strains with different case fatality rates.
    Yes, and I quote “viral samples were nebulized into a chamber at 20psi”…….they were not attempting to replicate the potential of a human to create monkeypox aerosol, they were testing its ability to remain infectious in a lab generated cylinder with compressed nebulized conditions over several minutes. The moron who cited this study on Twitter is an alarmist douchebag.

    And yes on different CFRs
    Click image for larger version. 

Name:	CE9D3148-1A80-4D30-BD47-D78DC606DDEE.jpeg 
Views:	78 
Size:	288.0 KB 
ID:	416824

  4. #40054
    Join Date
    Feb 2006
    Location
    SLC
    Posts
    3,485
    I went to a work conference in Orlando (5k people in an indoor event center...dumb idea, i know) and tested positive a few days after returning. Wife & kiddo got it rapidly from me (kid got conjunctivitis as a symptom, super fun there) and while this week has sucked but the worst seems to be behind us. Talking with other companies at the event, massive number of people testing positive and people were in attendance from all over the states and the world.

    Now that we are on the upswing, silver lining is that we will go into the summer feeling better about doing more things with a toddler that is too young to be vaccinated.

  5. #40055
    Join Date
    Mar 2012
    Location
    The Bull City
    Posts
    14,003
    Quote Originally Posted by mc_roon View Post
    I went to a work conference in Orlando (5k people in an indoor event center...dumb idea, i know) and tested positive a few days after returning. Wife & kiddo got it rapidly from me (kid got conjunctivitis as a symptom, super fun there) and while this week has sucked but the worst seems to be behind us. Talking with other companies at the event, massive number of people testing positive and people where in attendance from all over the states and the world.

    Now that we are on the upswing, silver lining is that we will go into the summer feeling better about doing more things with a toddler that is too young to be vaccinated.
    My company every other month "all hands" meeting just got pushed up to today from later next week. I expect them to be rolling back the plans to allow full office access to everyone and probably the annual sales teams conference scheduled next month.. Usually a big party in Vegas or someplace else like that. It was going to be in person for the first time in 3 years. Either they roll it back or add mask required for all gatherings. Can't wait to see what they have decided..
    Go that way really REALLY fast. If something gets in your way, TURN!

  6. #40056
    Join Date
    Oct 2009
    Location
    Maine Coast
    Posts
    4,681
    I have a month left from ninety days post infection. Double shot and boosted before infection. Would like to postpone second booster until Fall. Hoping things die down. Not looking forward to wearing a N95 indoors. Guessing under 5% masking here despite high infection rate

  7. #40057
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    8,965
    There is no public discourse about covid infections in my area, except for the bi-weekly update on the county dashboard (does not include a press release or anything) and from the middle school teachers at one of my kids’ schools. The teachers have been clear and concise in their messaging, which is nice. Two school districts, which encompasses most children (18 and under) in my area, still have a gag order on all staff.

    In listening to some of the middle school kids, there were two among my testing group who claimed they have had it twice already. One, who i know kinda well and is good friends with one of my sons, claimed that it took him several months both times to feel better.” That kid did all his zoom classes in the office of a local small grocery store where his mom works. The owner was a grandfather figure and often the only consistent male adult in his daily life. The owner died last summer as a result of his second (known) covid infection.

    Quote Originally Posted by Trackhead View Post
    Yes, and I quote “viral samples were nebulized into a chamber at 20psi”…….they were not attempting to replicate the potential of a human to create monkeypox aerosol, they were testing its ability to remain infectious in a lab generated cylinder with compressed nebulized conditions over several minutes. The moron who cited this study on Twitter is an alarmist douchebag.
    So what’s the “best” route for infection? Orgies?

  8. #40058
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    the Low Sierra
    Posts
    17,818
    Click image for larger version. 

Name:	Image1652990666.833892.jpg 
Views:	74 
Size:	335.5 KB 
ID:	416872
    I didn't believe in reincarnation when I was your age either.

  9. #40059
    Join Date
    Oct 2003
    Location
    Aspen
    Posts
    9,421
    Quote Originally Posted by bodywhomper View Post
    Is this the study? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3556235/

    Have the strain been determined that’s been detected in Europe? I thought I’d read there were two strains with different case fatality rates.
    It appears to be the strain with a 1% CFR.

    1 case in Boston and 1 in NYC now.

  10. #40060
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    8,965
    the new cdc report on long covid. Several major limitations, but interesting to see their overall results (ugh): https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/...cid=mm7121e1_w

    1/5 of those infected with Covid (18-64 years) “experienced at least one incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19”.

    1/4 of those infected with Covid over 64 “experienced at least one incident condition that might be attributable to previous COVID-19”

    Data from mar 2020-nov 2021. N for infected was ~353,000. N for control was ~1.6M.

  11. #40061
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Posts
    2,748
    for the week ending June third (2022)

    > 100,000 new cases,

    > 1,500 more dead with covid

    > One million dead in the us of a.

    ( source. cdc.gov )


    I hope you have a great weekend...

    skiJ

  12. #40062
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
    Location
    In the swamp
    Posts
    11,124

    Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

    Somehow I went with my daughter, wife and her team/parents to a STEM competition with 8000 people in Iowa last week, stayed in the dorms, ate at the cafeterias, had large events at the bball stadium and various classrooms, a big closing party at the track and field house and no one on our team got Covid. It had to be circulating freely, as there was barely anyone wearing masks. We wore them but not all the time, just the large, crowded events. Maybe I had it and didn’t know?

  13. #40063
    Join Date
    Apr 2021
    Posts
    2,839
    Quote Originally Posted by altacoup View Post
    Worst sore throat of my life, never has a fever but felt feverish sweaty and cold. Can’t imagine how bad it would’ve been if I wasn’t vaxed.
    Ditto. I tested positive couple days ago and have been watering my throat nonstop.

  14. #40064
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Posts
    8,318
    Anyone have reliable info on breathing exercises during recovery? I've been looking around because my wife is just past 2 weeks in and lately seems to be heading toward pneumonia (based on her past experience).

    She's going to see a doc later today, but the Googles seem filled with either reliable sources saying obvious things (drink water, get vaccinated etc) or "The Top 10 Breathing Exercises for Fighting COVID-19" from click baiters. So I figure TGR can't do any worse than that. TIA

  15. #40065
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    Last Best City in the Last Best Place
    Posts
    7,270
    Sobering article about long Covid in our paper today. I have some mutual acquaintances with this guy and have read lots of his stories over the years. Sucks.

    ***

    Aaron Teasdale used to climb 6,000-meter peaks. Long COVID has made getting out of bed feel harder.

    Since the poorly understood second act of the COVID-19 pandemic struck him last February, the Missoula-based adventurer and travel writer's forays outdoors rarely get farther than the Mount Jumbo Saddle trailhead, where he parks his van and sits with the view. Many days, he doesn't have the stamina or concentration to make the drive. Bikers and hikers pass behind him, and a meadow of arrowleaf balsamroot ripples across the hillside. Snow-dusted Bitterroot Mountains cap the view.

    “When I look up at Lolo Peak and the sub-peak in front of it, I can see dozens of lines I’ve skied,” said Teasdale, 50. “I can look down the Bitterroots and see Mount Sweeney and St. Mary Peak and all those peaks and ridges I’ve skied — from right here, with the naked eye.”

    April 2022 dropped some of the best spring snow backcountry skiers had ever seen. On the day of this interview, a friend asked to borrow Teasdale’s avalanche beacon for a run on Lolo Peak. He could barely walk down the driveway to hand it over.

    “At least I can park in places like this and look out over the world and look at the blooming balsamroot and listen to the returning birds and it’s beautiful,” Teasdale said. “I love being able to look at the mountains. Sometimes it’s hard, because they’re a reminder of who I used to be and what I used to do.”

    What Teasdale used to do earned him 11 Lowell Thomas journalism awards for adventure travel, environmental travel and investigative reporting. Much of that involved exploring places at serious personal risk – both the North Pole and South Pole were on this spring's itinerary for a book about extreme endurance trekking. When the COVID pandemic got rolling two years ago, he approached the disease the same way, rigorously following national guidance on how to avoid and prevent infection.


    The message focused on how to keep people from dying, and how to keep hospital systems from crashing. And the answers were getting vaccinated and using social controls like quarantines and masking to curb the spread of the virus.

    But what if the big risk wasn’t death or system collapse, but debilitating illness? Last week, the United States logged its millionth dead COVID victim. In the same two years of this pandemic, 8 million people have contracted long COVID and become shadows of their former selves. According to the World Health Organization, one of every five of the 500 million COVID sufferers may develop long COVID.

    That’s got Teasdale and many others wondering if our COVID response made a major error. For someone with a career based on doing risky things, that might sound contradictory. What’s the risk-management difference between a 1-in-10 chance of catching a bad disease and a 1-in-10 chance of catastrophic injury skiing Lolo Peak solo?

    “That’s like setting up to ski a line on Lolo Peak, and I’ve checked my boots and made sure my skis are sharp and my bindings work — but nobody told me about avalanche danger,” Teasdale said. “My risk calculation was incomplete, and it missed the biggest potential threat.”

    'Everything since that day has been illness'
    In April, Teasdale warned his friends in a social media post that he suffered from long COVID. Still, seeing him slowly walk down a sidewalk, dark glasses shielding his eyes — he looked two-dimensional, like a paper drawing of himself.

    “Holiday travel got me,” Teasdale said. “On the spectrum of pandemic preparedness, I was 110% careful through the whole thing, much to the annoyance of many people.”

    Teasdale had an emergency-room doctor friend who’d gone through hell in the last couple years dealing with hospital COVID cases. Yet last Christmas, that friend was telling Teasdale to relax — the threat had passed.

    His family started debating a holiday get-together. They’d been separated two years. Some members still refused to get vaccinated. Omicron variant infections were rising.

    But the news kept repeating that omicron was milder than previous variants, and the vaccination should provide adequate protection.

    “We decided to mitigate the risks,” he said. “We were vaxxed and boosted at the start of December. We should have been at peak boost. We tested before we traveled. We got a sleeper car from West Glacier so we wouldn’t be around other passengers. A couple evangelical relatives wouldn’t even test, and we told them they couldn’t come. These were aunts and uncles who’d gathered together since I was a baby — and we said no, you can’t go. We were all afraid of bringing COVID to one of the grandparents.”

    Then on the way back, there was a glitch with a ticket. He had them on his phone, and the app didn’t work. It was 10 p.m. in downtown St. Paul, his son and wife were already on board and he was getting upset. The conductor said he’d get it sorted out and asked Teasdale to wait in a room on the car with four other train employees.

    The men all wore masks, but had them slipped down below their noses. Teasdale was together with them in a small room for 20 minutes.

    “They were jovial and friendly and clearly meant well,” Teasdale said. “And they clearly gave me COVID.”

    “I almost didn’t get on the train. I was wondering about making a stink about not wearing masks. In the first year, I would have taken that stand. I was that guy on airplanes, who’d tell other people to pull their masks up. But it had been two years. Everyone was relaxing. We’re in the clear. I let my guard down that one time in the train room. That’s my only possible exposure.”

    Symptoms started showing up 72 hours later — the exact incubation period for omicron. It started with a tickle in the throat on New Year’s Day.

    “My wife and I went skiing,” Teasdale said. “When there’s snow, I ski almost every day until July. We went up Spring Gulch from my house. It’s about a 7.5-mile ski. On the last mile I was dragging. I felt my throat more.”

    Teasdale took a rapid home test, which read negative. So did the next day’s. He assumed he’d picked up a case of strep throat. Then he saw an article about home tests frequently failing to detect omicron infections.

    “You have that moment of — Oh shit, I got it,” he said. “Two years and it finally got me.”

    The day-5 test came back positive. He was sick for two weeks, with a headache, fever, night sweats and a violently sore throat. Around the third week of January, his symptoms seemed to let up. He started taking half-mile walks. Then one day he pulled on his cross-country boots and went for a ski.

    “It was just two flat miles,” Teasdale said. “I had to stop frequently to catch my breath, leaning on the poles. But there were these bursts of wonderful feeling as I was gliding on skis.

    “Then I got home and took my boots off and collapsed on a couch by the door. I was just crushed. That was the shortest ski I’ve done in decades, on Saturday the 21st. Everything since that day has been illness.”

    Teasdale expected to pull out of his sickness, not plunge deeper. But in February his condition got scary.

    “I tried to walk from the house to the foot of the driveway and realized I didn’t know if I could make it back to the house,” he said. “It took a long time to walk that 60 feet.”

    He got an Apple watch to monitor his heart rate and blood-oxygen levels. A healthy person’s oxygen level hangs between 100 and 95, and a heartbeat around 50 or 60 beats per minute. An athletic person like Teasdale may have a resting heart rate of 38.

    On one of those driveway walks, a neighbor noticed him looking particularly stressed. Teasdale’s watch said his heart was pounding 130 beats a minute, and his blood-oxygen was at 77.

    Beyond that, the world got oppressive. He needed noise-canceling headphones because whispers sounded ragged and painful. Even in bed, he wore eyeshades and darkened the room to lower the stress. His wife put felt bumpers on all the cabinet doors and drawers, because the thunk of their closing hurt.

    “I had no context for those feelings,” Teasdale said. “Was it pain in the technical sense? My nervous system reacted like it was being physically struck by sounds. I couldn’t look at my phone. It was like it was vibrating aggressively — Oh God, put it away.

    “My wife wondered every day if this was the day to bring me to the emergency room. Even my ER doctor friend in New Mexico was telling me it might be time to go. But I was so sensitive that the idea of getting into a car and going to a bright ER room was my worst nightmare. I knew it would hurt to do that. And I also knew they had no answers in the ER.”

  16. #40066
    Join Date
    Dec 2010
    Location
    Last Best City in the Last Best Place
    Posts
    7,270
    (continued)

    Millions of Americans
    Teasdale’s post-COVID symptoms match a condition called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. It typically afflicts people recovering from a viral infection like SARS, Epstein-Barr or West Nile disease. While it’s considered neurological, it seems to invade the body from every portal: causing brain fog, sensitivity to light and sound, but also racing hearts, dropping oxygen levels, muscular aches, coordination issues — Teasdale simply feels like his body is going haywire.

    In January, the journal Infection Control Today compiled other research forecasting more than 8 million Americans would develop long COVID. That’s at least three times the number of people currently diagnosed with ME/CFS (pre-COVID). The journal quoted #MEACTION editor Adriane Tilman feeling unsurprised.

    “Long COVID is not a new phenomenon — there are millions of Americans who got sick with a virus and never recovered before the pandemic, and developed ME/CFS,” Tilman told ICT. “The only difference is that we are seeing this happen now in real time on a massive scale.”

    That scale may envelop the ME/CFS community itself. In the same article, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Director Walter Koroshetz said that in the past cases of ME/CFS developed out of a post-infectious illness: “(The) only difference here is that we know what virus is driving it in large numbers of persons.”

    The ME/CFS community started raising alarms about the potential for chronic fatigue after-effects in May 2020 — two months after pandemic lockdowns started in the United States. They already had decades of research linking viral infections with the secondary health impacts.

    “Coronavirus leading to more cases of ME will happen for sure, unfortunately,” Dr. Alain Moreau of Université de Montréal wrote in the 2020 advisory. “We need to be ready for the next wave.”

    Vaccines have proved effective at preventing deaths and extreme immediate complications from COVID infections. But a recent study by the federal Veteran’s Administration looked at more than 30,000 COVID victims and found a neutral response for long COVID — the chance someone would get long COVID was even whether they had the vaccine or not.

    And for an inanimate disease, it seems to have a vindictive personality. Most ME/CFS sufferers will start feeling better, take a longer daily walk or talk to a few more friends, and 24 hours later get flattened so hard they can’t lift a fork of dinner to their mouths. The process has a name: post-exertional malaise or PEM. Teasdale can feel it coming on after an interview runs over 90 minutes. His wife says he “looks PEM-y.”

    PEM reactions worry Teasdale most when he hears about others trying to shake off long COVID. The temptation to get your life back, to apply positive thinking and goal-setting, often on doctors’ advice, results in a viral bait-and-switch, like accidentally throwing a bucket of gas on a fire when you thought you grabbed water.

    That feeling of your body perking up like a cell phone with 1% left on its battery — flaring to life then fading to black before anything can get done — has rearranged Teasdale’s relationship with hope.

    “We don’t traffic in hope here,” Teasdale said. “Because hope hurts. Hope is actually the thing that causes me the most pain, when it doesn’t work out. So you know, I can have all the positive thoughts in the world I want. But the reality is there’s something going on inside my body. Whether it’s something with my mitochondria, whether it’s vestiges of the virus in my organs, or brain, we don’t know. But it’s neurological. It’s cardiovascular. It’s pulmonary. And positive thinking doesn’t change that.”

    For people with post-viral ME/CFS, the recovery rate after six months is about 5%. No cures exist yet. Some people have found occasional relief with mild stimulants like Ritalin, usually at much lower doses than prescribed for attention-deficit disorder. Diets designed to reduce inflammation also offer some help.

    For many sufferers, that means a lifetime of long-term disability. Long COVID doesn’t qualify for workers compensation coverage.

    Will to live
    A few years ago, Teasdale climbed Huayna Potosi, a 19,974-foot peak in Bolivia. Anyone who’s tried trekking above 10,000 feet knows the confounding exhaustion of exerting at altitude. The body feels leaden. The head hurts and can’t think straight. Yet some third part of a dedicated climber, some soul or will to live, keeps pushing one foot in front of the other until you’re straddling a knife-edge summit, legs dangling off either side, barely noticing the sense of accomplishment or joy that will only crystalize days later, in contrast to everyday existence.

    “As long as I’m alive, I’ve got to get better,” Teasdale said. “I’ve got to get myself back. I am going to do that. Positivity, to me, means I’m positive I’m going to do everything I can to heal. And I’m positive I’m going to live as well as I can and contribute as much as I can to the world with whatever energy is available to me. I’m positive of that.

    “But I’m not positive that I’m going to heal. Because most people with this illness don’t heal. And that’s the sad truth.”

  17. #40067
    Join Date
    Jan 2008
    Location
    truckee
    Posts
    23,115
    Quote Originally Posted by jono View Post
    Anyone have reliable info on breathing exercises during recovery? I've been looking around because my wife is just past 2 weeks in and lately seems to be heading toward pneumonia (based on her past experience).

    She's going to see a doc later today, but the Googles seem filled with either reliable sources saying obvious things (drink water, get vaccinated etc) or "The Top 10 Breathing Exercises for Fighting COVID-19" from click baiters. So I figure TGR can't do any worse than that. TIA
    Incentive spirometer, 10 inhalations every hour while awake. The idea is to get the ball and disc as high as possible and hold it there as long as possible to expand the lungs. Slow deep steady inhalations work better than short, forceful breaths Note that it works on inhalation, not exhalation. Cheap and effective.

  18. #40068
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
    Location
    In the swamp
    Posts
    11,124
    ^extremely sobering. My worst fear related to long Covid.

  19. #40069
    Join Date
    Nov 2005
    Posts
    8,318
    Quote Originally Posted by old goat View Post
    Incentive spirometer, 10 inhalations every hour while awake. The idea is to get the ball and disc as high as possible and hold it there as long as possible to expand the lungs. Slow deep steady inhalations work better than short, forceful breaths Note that it works on inhalation, not exhalation. Cheap and effective.
    Thanks doc! Just saw your PM and dug that out of the cupboard it's been in for almost 5 years (gotta remember to stop calling it the aspirometer!). Still had 3800 marked. She's pulling 2000-2500.

    Grabbed a pulse oximeter on the way home and that's 96-98; xray was clear. They put her on Singulair and Pepcid.

    She's mainly been noticing fatigue increasing and the shortness of breath may track that, but she's suddenly sensitive to inhaling alcohols, too. Felt well enough to ride bikes (briefly) and work a couple of days last week but days 15/16 went "PEMy," to borrow from yeahman's scary article. Her rate of speech has picked up since using that, though. I'll be setting an alarm for it, I think. Thanks again!

  20. #40070
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
    Posts
    8,965
    Jon O, I hope it soon resolves for her.

  21. #40071
    Join Date
    Jan 2004
    Location
    the Low Sierra
    Posts
    17,818
    I can ask an RT tomorrow morning

    I’ll get back to you
    I didn't believe in reincarnation when I was your age either.

  22. #40072
    Join Date
    Apr 2021
    Posts
    2,839
    Quote Originally Posted by yeahman View Post
    it seems to invade the body from every portal: causing brain fog, sensitivity to light and sound, but also racing hearts, dropping oxygen levels, muscular aches, coordination issues — Teasdale simply feels like his body is going haywire.
    So these are my symptoms a week later after getting COVID. Is this a strong sign I'm going to start having long COVID? Only symptom I don't know if I have or not is dropped oxygen levels because I can't measure it.

  23. #40073
    Join Date
    Jan 2005
    Location
    Access to Granlibakken
    Posts
    11,184
    While I am a Dr, I’m not a doctor, but sounds like it’s way premature for you to get anxious about that.

    The WHO surveyed a panel consisting of patients, patient-researchers, medical experts, and WHO staff to arrive at a clinical case definition for post-COVID-19.

    They define it as, a condition that “occurs in individuals with a history of probable or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection, usually 3 months from the onset of COVID-19 with symptoms that last for at least 2 months and cannot be explained by an alternative diagnosis.”
    Btw the simple oxygen level sensors are like $20 and somewhat useful for monitoring changes. My readings were as low as 88% (vs 95% as a nominal target for healthy person living at this altitude) and I didn’t stress much about the absolute level but used it it monitor my improvement.
    Know of a pair of Fischer Ranger 107Ti 189s (new or used) for sale? PM me.

  24. #40074
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Posts
    2,748
    Quote Originally Posted by yeahman View Post
    Sobering article about long Covid in our paper today. I have some mutual acquaintances with this guy and have read lots of his stories over the years. Sucks.

    ***

    Aaron Teasdale used to climb 6,000-meter peaks. Long COVID has made getting out of bed feel harder.

    Since the poorly understood second act of the COVID-19 pandemic struck him last February, the Missoula-based adventurer and travel writer's forays outdoors rarely get farther than the Mount Jumbo Saddle trailhead, where he parks his van and sits with the view. Many days, he doesn't have the stamina or concentration to make the drive. Bikers and hikers pass behind him, and a meadow of arrowleaf balsamroot ripples across the hillside. Snow-dusted Bitterroot Mountains cap the view.

    “When I look up at Lolo Peak and the sub-peak in front of it, I can see dozens of lines I’ve skied,” said Teasdale, 50. “I can look down the Bitterroots and see Mount Sweeney and St. Mary Peak and all those peaks and ridges I’ve skied — from right here, with the naked eye.”

    April 2022 dropped some of the best spring snow backcountry skiers had ever seen. On the day of this interview, a friend asked to borrow Teasdale’s avalanche beacon for a run on Lolo Peak. He could barely walk down the driveway to hand it over.

    “At least I can park in places like this and look out over the world and look at the blooming balsamroot and listen to the returning birds and it’s beautiful,” Teasdale said. “I love being able to look at the mountains. Sometimes it’s hard, because they’re a reminder of who I used to be and what I used to do.”

    What Teasdale used to do earned him 11 Lowell Thomas journalism awards for adventure travel, environmental travel and investigative reporting. Much of that involved exploring places at serious personal risk – both the North Pole and South Pole were on this spring's itinerary for a book about extreme endurance trekking. When the COVID pandemic got rolling two years ago, he approached the disease the same way, rigorously following national guidance on how to avoid and prevent infection.


    The message focused on how to keep people from dying, and how to keep hospital systems from crashing. And the answers were getting vaccinated and using social controls like quarantines and masking to curb the spread of the virus.

    But what if the big risk wasn’t death or system collapse, but debilitating illness? Last week, the United States logged its millionth dead COVID victim. In the same two years of this pandemic, 8 million people have contracted long COVID and become shadows of their former selves. According to the World Health Organization, one of every five of the 500 million COVID sufferers may develop long COVID.

    That’s got Teasdale and many others wondering if our COVID response made a major error. For someone with a career based on doing risky things, that might sound contradictory. What’s the risk-management difference between a 1-in-10 chance of catching a bad disease and a 1-in-10 chance of catastrophic injury skiing Lolo Peak solo?

    “That’s like setting up to ski a line on Lolo Peak, and I’ve checked my boots and made sure my skis are sharp and my bindings work — but nobody told me about avalanche danger,” Teasdale said. “My risk calculation was incomplete, and it missed the biggest potential threat.”

    'Everything since that day has been illness'
    In April, Teasdale warned his friends in a social media post that he suffered from long COVID. Still, seeing him slowly walk down a sidewalk, dark glasses shielding his eyes — he looked two-dimensional, like a paper drawing of himself.

    “Holiday travel got me,” Teasdale said. “On the spectrum of pandemic preparedness, I was 110% careful through the whole thing, much to the annoyance of many people.”

    Teasdale had an emergency-room doctor friend who’d gone through hell in the last couple years dealing with hospital COVID cases. Yet last Christmas, that friend was telling Teasdale to relax — the threat had passed.

    His family started debating a holiday get-together. They’d been separated two years. Some members still refused to get vaccinated. Omicron variant infections were rising.

    But the news kept repeating that omicron was milder than previous variants, and the vaccination should provide adequate protection.

    “We decided to mitigate the risks,” he said. “We were vaxxed and boosted at the start of December. We should have been at peak boost. We tested before we traveled. We got a sleeper car from West Glacier so we wouldn’t be around other passengers. A couple evangelical relatives wouldn’t even test, and we told them they couldn’t come. These were aunts and uncles who’d gathered together since I was a baby — and we said no, you can’t go. We were all afraid of bringing COVID to one of the grandparents.”

    Then on the way back, there was a glitch with a ticket. He had them on his phone, and the app didn’t work. It was 10 p.m. in downtown St. Paul, his son and wife were already on board and he was getting upset. The conductor said he’d get it sorted out and asked Teasdale to wait in a room on the car with four other train employees.

    The men all wore masks, but had them slipped down below their noses. Teasdale was together with them in a small room for 20 minutes.

    “They were jovial and friendly and clearly meant well,” Teasdale said. “And they clearly gave me COVID.”

    “I almost didn’t get on the train. I was wondering about making a stink about not wearing masks. In the first year, I would have taken that stand. I was that guy on airplanes, who’d tell other people to pull their masks up. But it had been two years. Everyone was relaxing. We’re in the clear. I let my guard down that one time in the train room. That’s my only possible exposure.”

    Symptoms started showing up 72 hours later — the exact incubation period for omicron. It started with a tickle in the throat on New Year’s Day.

    “My wife and I went skiing,” Teasdale said. “When there’s snow, I ski almost every day until July. We went up Spring Gulch from my house. It’s about a 7.5-mile ski. On the last mile I was dragging. I felt my throat more.”

    Teasdale took a rapid home test, which read negative. So did the next day’s. He assumed he’d picked up a case of strep throat. Then he saw an article about home tests frequently failing to detect omicron infections.

    “You have that moment of — Oh shit, I got it,” he said. “Two years and it finally got me.”

    The day-5 test came back positive. He was sick for two weeks, with a headache, fever, night sweats and a violently sore throat. Around the third week of January, his symptoms seemed to let up. He started taking half-mile walks. Then one day he pulled on his cross-country boots and went for a ski.

    “It was just two flat miles,” Teasdale said. “I had to stop frequently to catch my breath, leaning on the poles. But there were these bursts of wonderful feeling as I was gliding on skis.

    “Then I got home and took my boots off and collapsed on a couch by the door. I was just crushed. That was the shortest ski I’ve done in decades, on Saturday the 21st. Everything since that day has been illness.”

    Teasdale expected to pull out of his sickness, not plunge deeper. But in February his condition got scary.

    “I tried to walk from the house to the foot of the driveway and realized I didn’t know if I could make it back to the house,” he said. “It took a long time to walk that 60 feet.”

    He got an Apple watch to monitor his heart rate and blood-oxygen levels. A healthy person’s oxygen level hangs between 100 and 95, and a heartbeat around 50 or 60 beats per minute. An athletic person like Teasdale may have a resting heart rate of 38.

    On one of those driveway walks, a neighbor noticed him looking particularly stressed. Teasdale’s watch said his heart was pounding 130 beats a minute, and his blood-oxygen was at 77.

    Beyond that, the world got oppressive. He needed noise-canceling headphones because whispers sounded ragged and painful. Even in bed, he wore eyeshades and darkened the room to lower the stress. His wife put felt bumpers on all the cabinet doors and drawers, because the thunk of their closing hurt.

    “I had no context for those feelings,” Teasdale said. “Was it pain in the technical sense? My nervous system reacted like it was being physically struck by sounds. I couldn’t look at my phone. It was like it was vibrating aggressively — Oh God, put it away.

    “My wife wondered every day if this was the day to bring me to the emergency room. Even my ER doctor friend in New Mexico was telling me it might be time to go. But I was so sensitive that the idea of getting into a car and going to a bright ER room was my worst nightmare. I knew it would hurt to do that. And I also knew they had no answers in the ER.”
    an important read deserves a page ^bump^

  25. #40075
    Join Date
    Oct 2005
    Posts
    2,748
    Quote Originally Posted by yeahman View Post
    (continued)

    Millions of Americans
    Teasdale’s post-COVID symptoms match a condition called myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. It typically afflicts people recovering from a viral infection like SARS, Epstein-Barr or West Nile disease. While it’s considered neurological, it seems to invade the body from every portal: causing brain fog, sensitivity to light and sound, but also racing hearts, dropping oxygen levels, muscular aches, coordination issues — Teasdale simply feels like his body is going haywire.

    In January, the journal Infection Control Today compiled other research forecasting more than 8 million Americans would develop long COVID. That’s at least three times the number of people currently diagnosed with ME/CFS (pre-COVID). The journal quoted #MEACTION editor Adriane Tilman feeling unsurprised.

    “Long COVID is not a new phenomenon — there are millions of Americans who got sick with a virus and never recovered before the pandemic, and developed ME/CFS,” Tilman told ICT. “The only difference is that we are seeing this happen now in real time on a massive scale.”

    That scale may envelop the ME/CFS community itself. In the same article, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke Director Walter Koroshetz said that in the past cases of ME/CFS developed out of a post-infectious illness: “(The) only difference here is that we know what virus is driving it in large numbers of persons.”

    The ME/CFS community started raising alarms about the potential for chronic fatigue after-effects in May 2020 — two months after pandemic lockdowns started in the United States. They already had decades of research linking viral infections with the secondary health impacts.

    “Coronavirus leading to more cases of ME will happen for sure, unfortunately,” Dr. Alain Moreau of Université de Montréal wrote in the 2020 advisory. “We need to be ready for the next wave.”

    Vaccines have proved effective at preventing deaths and extreme immediate complications from COVID infections. But a recent study by the federal Veteran’s Administration looked at more than 30,000 COVID victims and found a neutral response for long COVID — the chance someone would get long COVID was even whether they had the vaccine or not.

    And for an inanimate disease, it seems to have a vindictive personality. Most ME/CFS sufferers will start feeling better, take a longer daily walk or talk to a few more friends, and 24 hours later get flattened so hard they can’t lift a fork of dinner to their mouths. The process has a name: post-exertional malaise or PEM. Teasdale can feel it coming on after an interview runs over 90 minutes. His wife says he “looks PEM-y.”

    PEM reactions worry Teasdale most when he hears about others trying to shake off long COVID. The temptation to get your life back, to apply positive thinking and goal-setting, often on doctors’ advice, results in a viral bait-and-switch, like accidentally throwing a bucket of gas on a fire when you thought you grabbed water.

    That feeling of your body perking up like a cell phone with 1% left on its battery — flaring to life then fading to black before anything can get done — has rearranged Teasdale’s relationship with hope.

    “We don’t traffic in hope here,” Teasdale said. “Because hope hurts. Hope is actually the thing that causes me the most pain, when it doesn’t work out. So you know, I can have all the positive thoughts in the world I want. But the reality is there’s something going on inside my body. Whether it’s something with my mitochondria, whether it’s vestiges of the virus in my organs, or brain, we don’t know. But it’s neurological. It’s cardiovascular. It’s pulmonary. And positive thinking doesn’t change that.”

    For people with post-viral ME/CFS, the recovery rate after six months is about 5%. No cures exist yet. Some people have found occasional relief with mild stimulants like Ritalin, usually at much lower doses than prescribed for attention-deficit disorder. Diets designed to reduce inflammation also offer some help.

    For many sufferers, that means a lifetime of long-term disability. Long COVID doesn’t qualify for workers compensation coverage.

    Will to live
    A few years ago, Teasdale climbed Huayna Potosi, a 19,974-foot peak in Bolivia. Anyone who’s tried trekking above 10,000 feet knows the confounding exhaustion of exerting at altitude. The body feels leaden. The head hurts and can’t think straight. Yet some third part of a dedicated climber, some soul or will to live, keeps pushing one foot in front of the other until you’re straddling a knife-edge summit, legs dangling off either side, barely noticing the sense of accomplishment or joy that will only crystalize days later, in contrast to everyday existence.

    “As long as I’m alive, I’ve got to get better,” Teasdale said. “I’ve got to get myself back. I am going to do that. Positivity, to me, means I’m positive I’m going to do everything I can to heal. And I’m positive I’m going to live as well as I can and contribute as much as I can to the world with whatever energy is available to me. I’m positive of that.

    “But I’m not positive that I’m going to heal. Because most people with this illness don’t heal. And that’s the sad truth.”
    page ^bump^

    Thank you for posting this -
    yes, scary.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •