Posted on 07/31/2022 11:58:20 AM PDT by BenLurkin
More than two years after Georgia Linders first got sick with COVID, her heart still races at random times.
She's often exhausted. She can't digest certain foods.
Most days, she runs a fever, and when her temperature gets up past a certain point, her brain feels like goo, she says.
These are commonly reported symptoms of long COVID.
Linders really noticed problems with her brain when she returned to work in the spring and summer of 2020. Her job required her to be on phone calls all day, coordinating with health clinics that service the military. It was a lot of multitasking, something she excelled at before COVID.
After COVID, the brain fog and fatigue slowed her down immensely. In the fall of 2020, she was put on probation. After 30 days, she thought her performance had improved. She'd certainly felt busy.
"But my supervisor brought up my productivity, which was like a quarter of what my coworkers were doing," she says.
It was demoralizing. Her symptoms worsened. She was given another 90-day probation, but she decided to take medical leave. On June 2, 2021, Linders was terminated.
She filed a discrimination complaint with the government, but it was dismissed. She could have sued but wasn't making enough money to hire a lawyer.
As the number of people with post-COVID symptoms soars, researchers and the government are trying to get a handle on how big an impact long COVID is having on the U.S. workforce. It's a pressing question, given the fragile state of the economy. For more than a year, employers have faced staffing problems, with jobs going unfilled month after month.
Now, millions of people may be sidelined from their jobs due to long COVID. Katie Bach, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution, drew on survey data from the Census Bureau, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis and the Lancet to come up with what she says is a conservative estimate: 4 million full-time equivalent workers out of work because of long COVID.
"That is just a shocking number," says Bach. "That's 2.4% of the U.S. working population."
Long COVID can be a disability under federal law The Biden administration has already taken some steps to try to protect workers and keep them on the job, issuing guidance that makes clear that long COVID can be a disability and relevant laws would apply. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, for example, employers must offer accommodations to workers with disabilities unless doing so presents an undue burden.
Linders now she thinks back to what she should have asked for after her return to work. She was already working from home due to the pandemic, but perhaps she could have been given a lighter workload. Maybe her supervisor could have held off on disciplinary action.
"Maybe I wouldn't have gotten as sick as I got, because I wouldn't have been pushing myself to do the things that I knew couldn't do, but I kept trying and trying," she says.
Dr. Monica Verduzco-Gutierrez, professor of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has seen COVID play out in similar ways in other patients.
"If someone has to go back 100% when they start feeling a little bit better, they are going to crash and burn fast," she says.
The problem with coming up with accommodations for long COVID is that there are so many unknowns. The duration and severity of symptoms varies wildly from person to person.
Gutierrez finds herself stumped by questions on disability forms that ask how long an individual might be out or how long their illness may last.
"This is a new condition," she says. "We don't know."
Accommodations in the workplace might include flexibility in where someone works, extended leave, or a new role in a different department. The goal is to get workers on a path back, says Roberta Etcheverry, CEO of Diversified Management Group, a disability management consulting firm.
But with long COVID, it's difficult to measure whether an employee is in fact on a path back.
"This isn't a sprain or strain where somebody turns an ankle and we know in x amount of months, they're going to be at this point," she says. "It's not — somebody was helping move a patient, and they hurt their back, and they can't do that kind of work anymore. They need to do something else."
With long COVID, symptoms come and go, and new symptoms may arise.
The Labor Department is urging employers not to rule out accommodations for employees who don't get an official long COVID diagnosis.
"Rather than determining whether an employee has a disability, your focus should be on the employee's limitations and whether there are effective accommodations that would enable the employee to perform essential job functions," the Labor Department says in its long COVID guide for employers.
Accommodations may be harder to come by in some jobs Still, not all employers have the means to offer the kind of accommodation an employee may need given their symptoms.
Bilal Qizilbash believes he would have been fired long ago had he not been the boss of his own company.
"Majority of my team has no idea that I'm working from bed most of the time," says Qizilbash, a COVID long hauler who suffers chronic pain that he compares to wasp stings.
As the CEO of a small business that manufactures health supplements, Qizilbash says he tries to be compassionate and at the same time, ruthlessly efficient. Having one employee whose productivity is severely compromised could end up negatively impacting the whole company, he says.
In other professions, it may be challenging to find accommodations that work, no matter how generous.
In South Florida, Karyn Bishof was a new recruit with the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue team in 2020 when she contracted COVID, likely at a training, she says. She comes from a family of firefighters, and it was her lifelong dream to follow suit. She was excelling in her training and receiving high marks when she got sick, she says. Now long COVID has left her with profound brain fog, fatigue, light-headedness and a slew of other symptoms incompatible with fighting fires.
In other professions, it may be challenging to find accommodations that work, no matter how generous.
In South Florida, Karyn Bishof was a new recruit with the Palm Beach Gardens Fire Rescue team in 2020 when she contracted COVID, likely at a training, she says. She comes from a family of firefighters, and it was her lifelong dream to follow suit. She was excelling in her training and receiving high marks when she got sick, she says. Now long COVID has left her with profound brain fog, fatigue, light-headedness and a slew of other symptoms incompatible with fighting fires.
"I couldn't run into a burning building if I can't regulate my temperature," she says. "If I can't control having hypertension, I can't lift up a patient or I'm going to pass out."
The city of Palm Beach Gardens told NPR Bishof was terminated from her job for not meeting performance-related probationary standards. Bishof recently filed a discrimination lawsuit against the city and has become an advocate for COVID long haulers.
The Labor Department is crowdsourcing ideas for how to keep workers employed Taryn Williams, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Disability Employment Policy, wants to hear from workers and employers. Through the middle of August, the Labor Department is holding an online dialogue, asking for input on policies that may help with workplace challenges arising from long COVID.
"We want to be responsive," says Williams. "We're considering how can we support these workers in what is a transformative time in their life."
She says the government has encountered situations in the past when there was a sudden rise in the number of people needing accommodations at work. Significant numbers of service members returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with traumatic brain injuries, for example. Williams says such times have led to shifts in disability policy in the U.S.
From her home in La Crosse, Wisconsin, Linders has contributed a number of comments to the Labor Department's online dialogue. Like Bishof, she also spends a lot of time helping other COVID long haulers navigate what she's been through, including qualifying for Social Security disability insurance.
Her advocacy helps her feel as if she's contributing something to society, even if it's not the life she wanted.
“I became suspicious that this was a cover for vaccine injuries.”
I saw a piece on doctor’s substack where he says since there’s no diagnostic or billing code for a vaxx injury, they all use the code for “long covid” instead.
At this time, it’s purely anecdotal to state my belief that the virus CAN use the body as a host.
The questions are numerous, the studies glaringly lacking.
But the evidence is overwhelming, including residual loss of smell & taste, which in multiple people connected to my SIL have been cured by various approaches, including antivirals.
Thus, given my own prior (years ago) experience of having symptoms of a concussion from a mere 5mph crash which I later related to a precarious state of systemic inflammation, I believe ‘long-covid’ to be a real malady.
This, of course, in contrast to those who support the jabs and deny that adverse events or compromised health are more common than ‘rare’.
@ 82 this thread has been helpful, and your input included.
“Long covid” is an imaginary disease.
This woman may have other issues, but
I beg to differ. Stupidly got mModerna two doses injections, three months later Covid (antigen test negative), and then six months, refusing any injection boosters , got Covid a second time, (antigen test negative, seology test positive) and besides immediate illness, promptly lost all taste and smell. That was last September, and continues to this day. Gatorades, coffee, tea, corn oil, all taste the same. Bleach, vinegar, lemon juice, orange juice, milk, all smell the same.
Currently, whiffs of lavender, vanilla, salt, for all of five seconds max in an hour.
Odors of horse urine or cat pee in my head for hours, tinnitus raging to the max, and multiple episodes of vertigo monthly.
Sure, it’s all in my head, just like I’m an astronaut. Who’s claustrophobic.
Bless your heart. Couldn’t think of any other nice thing to say.
1. Gender breakdowns??
2. Did they % injected.??
In all seriousness I pose the question:
Have you considered treating yourself for the virus? Or have you and it failed?
My SIL lost all smell (a buddy of his as well). They both followed my suggestion to eradicate the virus from their noses and both now have normal smell/taste. It validated my hypothesis that the virus is capable of going latent in certain tissues in the body, but not necessarily without effect.
Myself, I’ve encountered what I finally determined to be symptoms of pancreatitis and believe it to be related to my 2nd round of the virus (no, I am not jabbed).
Acquiring some ‘horsepaste’ or the like is high on my list, but I’m trying to ascertain if anyone has self-treated with antivirals for ‘long-covid’, since I’m reluctant to order pills from an overseas supplier.
Have routinely used ivermectin paste, which shortened the illness episodes. The second time Covid , i had no ivermectin available for two days when needed. I have used courses of ivermectin when known exposure has occurred (spouse, weeks later, daughter).
I think my immune system is screwed up. More accurately, i think my inflammatory responses are changed since the mRNA injections. Have a knee that was severely injured in 1995, stable, low level inflammation when minor injuries. Two weeks after the second Moderna injection, knee was dramatically swollen and pain after a minor two hour road trip driving. Then noticed other inflammatory responses were more significant and more dramatic, with minimal cause.
The loss of taste and smell is an oddity, but the vertigo is dangerous. ENT and GP physicians say, “just wait it out, it should improve with time”. As if.
The Moderna injections are something, but they are not vaccines.
The people with whom I’ve interacted prior have all been unjabbed and simply exposed to one or more mutations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; I’ve never interacted with anyone who cited the jab and consequent symptoms, so my thoughts on ‘long covid’ have been muted and, frankly, quite private to-date.
Your description serves to reinforce my suspicions that it was a mistake on my part to be dismissive of claims of the jabs’ chemistry causing heavy metal poisoning symptoms and possible relevance to either nano particles, graphene oxide, or both.
I’ll give you the same advice I give others FIRST: If you haven’t already, begin a health diary. Detailed! Then begin working backwards overlapping your jab date. I suspect that you will collate a list of symptoms which - taken alone - might be quite revealing. It was this method which resulted in my own health approach and eventual reversal of 60 individual health symptoms. However - and thankfully - that poor health long preceded the jab and I was prepared to go postal before being jabbed. In the absence of my own symptoms, I must suggest that your approach ought to be academic, if it hasn’t been already.
If it was me, I’d be undertaking a full detox, cleanse and chelation regimen and then evaluate. Unfortunately nobody medically licensed without notoriety would touch this, but hopefully your username prescribes a safe approach to such a lengthy, complicated regimen of multiple therapies ‘monitored by a peer’.
Not sure but I do know that he was given antibiotics and steroids. Previously, the steroids he was given for the arthritis didn’t eliminate the arthritis.
Millions have been vaxxed. I have a feeling that if the person in the story was unvaxxed they would have highlighted it. “Long covid” is likely vax side effects.
Could long covid just be depressed and lazy? Why yes it could. A “diagnosis” could also put you on the disability “I no longer have to work” list.
She's the saddest person in America.....
The best explanation I’ve seen for cures for long covid is something like slices of swiss cheese.
You lay down multiple slices of swiss cheese where each slice represents a mechanism that fights off covid/long covid.
Each layer has a hole in it where the bugs get through.
But the holes don’t line up.
So somewhere in the stack of cheese slices (where each slice represents some drug/supplement/intervention)—the virus is stopped.
The bad symptoms go away.
A recently popular drug for covid and long covid suffers is
paxlovid
What do you think of this list of interventions for long covid. https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-recover-long-covid-treatment/
Thank you for informative post!
One thing that was noticed early on was that people with auto immune diseases had histamine problems that looked exactly like the issues faced by people with long covid —who also had auto immune diseases.
Therefor one recommendation was to zero out histamines in the diet and take an anti histamine.
This gal, middle-aged, no comorbidities, great sense of humor/a positive person, not given to depression or any other psych malady.
I believe it will be found that the CCP virus scarred the lung tissue of certain individuals.
I'm reading your reccs closely, as I'm 'falling back' on D3 - 10,000 IU/day for 3 mnths with Vit K.
I will look closely at your suggestions. Please ping me when the book is available.
It may be psychological in some cases, for instance when one is eyeing $$ for disability, etc.
but it is most definitely real.
OH, and she was vaxxed 2x.
Victor Davis Hanson, who I respect immensely has Long Covid
One thing that was noticed early on was that people with auto immune diseases had histamine problems that looked exactly like the issues faced by people with long covid —who also had auto immune diseases.
Therefor one recommendation was to zero out histamines in the diet and take an anti histamine.
______________
What are dietary histamines?
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