The coupling to depression is unsurprising. I don't think I know anyone with long term pain (even under management) who isn't battling the black dog.
So a trivial take away is that for above 15% increase in self reporting as long-term sick, pre- to post-covid, we've also scored increased needs for mental health treatment alongside debilitating multiple symptom diseases and musculo-skeletal pain.
Twice the cost burdens compared to simple illness increase because longterm.
This during a time of chronic under-funding of the NHS, backlogged waiting lists, staff leaving in droves, strikes.
> The coupling to depression is unsurprising. I don't think I know anyone with long term pain (even under management) who isn't battling the black dog.
I have Crohn's and Syringomyelia (won that lottery eh) and yeah, that fucking black dog is always sat at the end of the drive watching.
Strongly disagree. They are good at fixing a lot of things but my list of things that medicine is not good at treating are auto-immune issues, post-viral conditions and long-term pain from a variety of sources.
Tell that to the two herniated discs in my spine :(
No good long term prognosis, they can't be replaced and the only things to be done only postpone further problems (steroid injections) or cause critical ones later down the line (disc fusion).
Try AXA1125 (BCAA + Glutamine + NAC + Arginine) for mitochondrial dysfunction. The regimen consisting of 400mg DCA + 100mg B1 Hcl + CoQ10 and Acetyl L-Carnitine got 45% of ME/CFS patients back on track (55% had other comorbidities that interferred with the effect) in some study. Lactoferrin + Iron (bisglycinate/liposomal) and diphenhydramine could help restoring gut and alleviate neurological issues from spike protein. I battled it for 2.5 years as well, people have no idea how bad it could be (felt like I was 90 year old just before death). The only remaining symptom now is occasional severe vertigo in raining weather. Good luck!
Take care - I hope you get to improve. My wife got covid back in March 2020 and was pretty ill, then fell into full long covid (back before anyone knew what it was). She was totally wiped out (I have posts on my account detailing it if you are interested), but is finally back working and living again - so please know the recovery is possible for some. She's still not where she'd like to be, but is vastly improved from her worst.
Lemme put it this way. It highly resembles fibromyalgia. Most doctors in America won't recognize fibromyalgia because in a lot of cases there is no treatment and there is no way in hell industry is going to adapt to having sick people in it, nor is disability going to recognize it. Even if they did recognize it the US disability system is a lot closer to eugenics then it is a social service.
Stay safe out there. We have to work together to help each other out on this one and related matters.
Unsurprising. There's a poor economic argument for funding healthcare in the UK, other than it being used as a political football to win votes. The result is decades of underfunding and then massive tranches of funding to make headlines which has to be spent immediately and therefore gets squandered on "transformation initiatives" without a focus on health outcomes.
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.
This implies that around 1.3% of the UK working population are out of action due to covid, and a lot more than that must be struggling but still able to work.
The collective reality denial around Covid is by far the most bizarre and dystopian thing I've ever seen.
Not just because it's objectively ridiculous to minimise an illness which has a 10% chance of doing lasting damage with unknown long-term consequences.
But because so much of it is coming from doctors and health workers.
And it's active, aggressive, hostile, reality denial, which attacks simple and effective common sense measures like public/medical masking, air filtration, and so on.
There's this unfortunate mean streak that plagues this country when it comes to people's ability to work and how much they earn, even if it's due to health. YouGov recently did a survey asking about what people should be able to have based on their income, and yeah. God forbid you have something nice while on minimum wage or benefits (which we ought to use a better term for).
It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
Reality is that only severe measures like lockdowns are effective at containing the spread of respiratory illnesses (and even then it’s debatable how effective), and most people have accepted the risks so they don’t have to go through that again.
I recently asked at work why the co2 detectors disappeared from meeting rooms and office spaces and I was told "it's no longer legal". I was not told "it's no longer mandatory". I was told "it's no longer legal". By the same PM who thought vaccine or infection prevented any further infection. edit: western continental Europe, not Missouri.
What bothers me is that the co2 presence hardly impedes work. I think it's still useful to have one to say "hey, too much co2 is eating our attention span, let's open the windows a bit". But clearly they removed it as a performative act ("there is no covid anymore"). And I am also pretty sure they also removed it because the denial/minimalist crowd sees it as an "in-your-face" symbol that covid is real/still a problem and that crowd was the most vocal at my workplace and the people who took covid seriously were seen as trouble makers when asking for masking in office. Or something.
What is your estimate for what percentage of any population is going to be able to function well in society?
There are a huge number of people who due to short and long term conditions and disabilities need society to support them to some degree or another. This is the human condition and I think society as a whole hasn't ever grasped that.
I think it's important to be careful with that claim. Firstly, plenty of this is related to increases in NHS waiting times and decreases in quality of care (which could fairly be said to be "due to covid") which mean people are off work for longer than they would otherwise be for conditions that are not directly related to having had a covid infection.
Secondly, there are a many other factors that could affect this - the "cost of living crisis" could mean that people feel more pressure to work despite ill health (although this would pull the numbers in the other direction).
Also, if I use the working age population(ages 16-64) of 42.1 million in 2021 as a denominator, and remove an increase of 40,000 that the article says should be expected from changing demographics, I get 0.422/42.1 = 1.0%
The proportion of working people has been falling for decades. We have taken a deeply moralistic and political approach to this fact of life: people are arbitrarily divided into the deserving and undeserving. Meanwhile the remaining workers are worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily (leading to everything from depression to physical illnesses to poverty to low social mobility). It's time to get real on this and move to things like UBI that eliminate the need to "pick losers".
I also think that UBI would be generally a good thing, at least because it would help trim down the size of the bureaucracy administering the benefits.
But if it's a given that the proportion of working people is going down, it's not clear to me why UBI would be any help with "the remaining workers being worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily". UBI has to come from somewhere. And by removing the "moralistic approach", it's likely that some people who work tough jobs making a pittance would probably just stop.
There are a few reasons. Firstly people getting a pittance now for job X would also get ubi, so they'd be better off.
And second, when that crappy job ceases to exist, they'd have something to fall back on (the UK where I am has basically no benefits for people who lose their jobs).
If they quit, I am content for the free market to increase wages or otherwise make those jobs better.
Separately if like to see shorter working hours (and so more people working). But that's not a ubi change.
No thanks. I am absolutely unwilling to pay higher taxes to provide UBI for people who are capable of working but choose not to. There's nothing moralistic about expecting healthy adults to pull their own weight.
The trend started before COVID, but it hasn't been normalised for demographics.
The average 60 year old is inevitably sicker than the average 20 year old, and there's an increasing proportion of the former in the UK workforce.
Not to say there isn't a real problem here - the UK isn't doing a great job either on healthcare or, to my mind even more importantly, preventative medicine and public health, but you need to control variables to get a robust conclusion.
Hard to say how this will evolve with constant re-infections. My guess: not good. Also, persistent immune activation / persistent infection will wear people down for those that get it. Stay tuned for the next few years!
Our immune systems are constantly being activated by some of the hundreds of different endemic respiratory viruses. There's nothing special about SARS-CoV-2 in that regard. It's just one more.
> An important contribution to long-term sickness volumes has come from the large number of "baby boomers" (those born between 1946 and 1964) approaching retirement.
The lack of age breakdown in these statistics is disappointing, its not clear how much of these trends can be attributed to an ageing population.
Interestingly enough in Switzerland, the 15-24 age category just became the age group with the highest number of sick days per year, when it used to be the oldest age group before the pandemic.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/record-level-of-sick-da...
Readit News
So a trivial take away is that for above 15% increase in self reporting as long-term sick, pre- to post-covid, we've also scored increased needs for mental health treatment alongside debilitating multiple symptom diseases and musculo-skeletal pain.
Twice the cost burdens compared to simple illness increase because longterm.
This during a time of chronic under-funding of the NHS, backlogged waiting lists, staff leaving in droves, strikes.
Makes you laugh, eh?
I have Crohn's and Syringomyelia (won that lottery eh) and yeah, that fucking black dog is always sat at the end of the drive watching.
Edit: Sorry should have included: "and the brain"
No good long term prognosis, they can't be replaced and the only things to be done only postpone further problems (steroid injections) or cause critical ones later down the line (disc fusion).
Best of luck to you.
Stay safe out there. We have to work together to help each other out on this one and related matters.
Dead Comment
The public are being told that the UK can't afford to pay healthcare staff market rates, and so they are all leaving the NHS. The result is this dip in GDP, which IMO is more expensive.
https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-w...
Not just because it's objectively ridiculous to minimise an illness which has a 10% chance of doing lasting damage with unknown long-term consequences.
But because so much of it is coming from doctors and health workers.
And it's active, aggressive, hostile, reality denial, which attacks simple and effective common sense measures like public/medical masking, air filtration, and so on.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/society/articles-reports/2023/08...
It's sad how during the pandemic the public zeitgeist was all about public health, taking care of your mental health, and having more empathy for one another (once toilet roll was back on the shelves), and since we've returned to normality it's back to outright hostility for those who're struggling.
What bothers me is that the co2 presence hardly impedes work. I think it's still useful to have one to say "hey, too much co2 is eating our attention span, let's open the windows a bit". But clearly they removed it as a performative act ("there is no covid anymore"). And I am also pretty sure they also removed it because the denial/minimalist crowd sees it as an "in-your-face" symbol that covid is real/still a problem and that crowd was the most vocal at my workplace and the people who took covid seriously were seen as trouble makers when asking for masking in office. Or something.
Deleted Comment
There are a huge number of people who due to short and long term conditions and disabilities need society to support them to some degree or another. This is the human condition and I think society as a whole hasn't ever grasped that.
Secondly, there are a many other factors that could affect this - the "cost of living crisis" could mean that people feel more pressure to work despite ill health (although this would pull the numbers in the other direction).
Also, if I use the working age population(ages 16-64) of 42.1 million in 2021 as a denominator, and remove an increase of 40,000 that the article says should be expected from changing demographics, I get 0.422/42.1 = 1.0%
But if it's a given that the proportion of working people is going down, it's not clear to me why UBI would be any help with "the remaining workers being worked harder and longer than ever before and taxed more heavily". UBI has to come from somewhere. And by removing the "moralistic approach", it's likely that some people who work tough jobs making a pittance would probably just stop.
And second, when that crappy job ceases to exist, they'd have something to fall back on (the UK where I am has basically no benefits for people who lose their jobs).
If they quit, I am content for the free market to increase wages or otherwise make those jobs better.
Separately if like to see shorter working hours (and so more people working). But that's not a ubi change.
The average 60 year old is inevitably sicker than the average 20 year old, and there's an increasing proportion of the former in the UK workforce.
Not to say there isn't a real problem here - the UK isn't doing a great job either on healthcare or, to my mind even more importantly, preventative medicine and public health, but you need to control variables to get a robust conclusion.
Deleted Comment
The lack of age breakdown in these statistics is disappointing, its not clear how much of these trends can be attributed to an ageing population.
I understand, I also get mentally challenged when I cross Switzerland, especially in front of the Gothard tunnel.