Doctor|Special interest in Long Covid,POTS,ME/CFS&MCAS| neuroscientist🧠Long Covid kids champion|WHN expert advisor|long Covid clinic🏴Views my own
1/ 11🧵 Covid is a vascular disease 🩸. We need to stop thinking of it primarily as a lung 🫁 disease. I hear lung Doctors says ‘we don’t see much on the chest X-rays in
#longcovid
’. The rheumatologists say ‘we don’t see raised inflammation on the blood tests in
#LongCovid
’
Clinical pearls for
#LongCovid
1. Find the clots. They are there. If not PE or DVT there are Microclots. 100% of all long Covid patients tested so far have them.
🧵 1/ Someone posted today about
#COVID19
being a cold and we should all just catch it and take paracetamol. So I thought I would tell you all about my experience with the new Ba.5 variant.Suffice to say I did not have a cold. I should start off by saying I do not have
#LongCovid
2022- the year we discovered Covid can persist in tonsils, the brain, the lymph nodes, the heart, generally anywhere.
The year we found out that mild infection can cause 2% loss of grey matter in the brain.
And it wasn’t front page news.
And we carried on regardless.
1/ I want to try and explain why the current ‘living with Covid’ is not really the best way to be living with it.
🔵nearly everyone I know who went to Xmas meals or parties is sick. The pay off for meeting people&doing nice things is being sick.
🔵 This is not freedom…read on
1/ I wrote a post 8 weeks ago when I had
#COVID19
and it went viral. 🦠
8 weeks on and I have Covid AGAIN.
EIGHT weeks between infections.
The 3rd in a year.
March 22, June 22, August 22.
Each infection as grim as the last. Where is the immunity? What is the plan?
1/ The people I see are so incredibly sick. Please don’t listen to mainstream media, your pals or someone random on here.
There is a drive to pretend that Covid is not on the rise again and causing mass disablement- mainly of young people.
1/ Confused about
#covid
?
Not surprised!
We have 2 new strains at once that are different from those seen previously.
One in particular- BA 2.86- the people who sequence think is not omicron but a brand new variant- Pi.
It seems Sars-CoV-2 has made a genetic leap…
1/
#LongCovid
a case study we should learn from
- 14 years old. Covid October 2020. Develops a fast heart rate and chest pain. 🫀
- 7 MONTHS later is admitted to hospital for investigations.
- what follows is a stream of normal results
➡️bloods/CT chest/cardiac MRI/ECG…
🧵1/My sister caught Covid when she visited the UK 8 weeks ago. Since returning to Australia she&the kids have had:
-tonsillitis
-Then another virus
-The kids then got hand,foot&mouth
-Now they all have metapneumovirus. Respiratory centres in oz are doing viral swabs for these…
1/I’ve followed a young lady with lymphoma on SM for 2 years years.Through shielding. Through treatments.She went into hospital for life changing treatment a month ago.
She got Covid.
She never left.
She was 30.
These are the vulnerable whose lives we are so careless with.
If you feel reassured right now that you don’t see people wearing masks, think of it like this:
Those of us who know the risks of indoor Covid transmission have just stopped going to anything indoors.
We are too tired of it all 3.5 years in.
It’s falsely reassuring.
1/ 🧵What if ‘living with Covid’ literally means living with it inside you for a long time? 🦠🤔
This year has produced several studies around viral persistence that really have not had enough airtime.
These could have far reaching consequences
I will summarise..
Went to hairdressers in FFP3- hairdresser chilled.
Went to hospital appointment in a mask.
Doctors&nurses ‘why are you wearing a mask’ *judged*
Hairdresser- ‘I get it, if you get sick you can’t work&look after others’.
How can the hairdresser get it better than medics?
17/ I would not advise being laissez faire about catching Ba.5. Despite what some random said on Twitter, Covid is not ‘just a cold’ for everyone. Covid is a nasty piece of work that increases your risk of heart attacks, strokes and clots up to 12 months after infection.
How mild can the mildest of mild omicron Covid be?
So mild it killed 600 people in the Uk last week ( and just about every week in the past year) and disables 1/10 who get it with long Covid.
But it’s ‘mild’
It causes inflammation in blood vessels&the brain but it’s ‘mild’.
Can someone remind me what wave this is? 🦠 Because having spent all day at work dealing with Covid (where most of my receptionists are off work with Covid) now most of my family have Covid. This cannot be an effective strategy.
#COVID19
#OmicronBA
@stkirsch
This is in very bad taste, sir. Stop posting pictures of other people without their permission. You do you and let them do them. You don’t know the reason they wear a mask. They could be having chemotherapy for all you know (many chemo patients wore masks long before Covid).
20/ I’m not sure how much clearer I can say this. I did not have a cold. I had a virus that affected my neurological system. Mask up (FFP2 or above) and test before meeting up with people. Open windows and doors if inside. Ask yourself why we have all been left to catch it.
1/Covid is a cold?
This 47 year old went into cardiac arrest 2 days after feeling generally unwell.
Covid destroyed his heart. Not the virus invading it,no.
It made this patients OWN platelets clump together&block micro vessels.
Platelets hyper activated& destroyed his heart
We wear seatbelts in cars so if we crash we don’t go head first out the window. 🚘 We accept it is to protect us.
We have an airborne virus.🦠
Masks can cut covid cases by over 50%. Ergo can cut illness, hospitalisation,long Covid.
Why are we not wearing them like a seatbelt?
1/🧠 LONG COVID BRAIN 🧠
28
#LongCovid
patients with neurological symptoms
PET brain scan
Result: ALL showed hypometabolism in multiple brain areas.
This is what it looks like
(blue areas are areas of hypometabolism)
1/ Thank you. I have been saying over and over that
#Covid_19
is a thrombotic vasculitis. Now can we start counting the blood clots, heart and attacks and the stroke post-Covid so we can see how bad this is? And GPs- please rule out PE for patients with shortness of breath 🙏🏻
Please can all papers on
#COVID
stop referring to the lung disease as ‘pneumonia’. It is a pulmonary vasculopathy (disease of the lung blood vessels). Airways not inflamed. Distribution = vascular. Clots and abnormal blood vessels are primary, not a ‘complication’ of ‘pneumonia’.
1/Ventilation in schools works✅
Study
complete replacement of the air in a classroom 2.4 times an hour reduced Covid infections by 40%.
four air replacements per hour Infections lowered by 66.8%
🟢Lowered 82.5% with six air replacements
Study March 2022
And we have done-NOTHING
1/ 11🧵 Covid is a vascular disease 🩸. We need to stop thinking of it primarily as a lung 🫁 disease. I hear lung Doctors says ‘we don’t see much on the chest X-rays in
#longcovid
’. The rheumatologists say ‘we don’t see raised inflammation on the blood tests in
#LongCovid
’
1/What’s this? Striking NEW data? That Covid is a vascular virus?
That it’s caused an increase in deaths from heart attacks in young people?
Did someone say vascular inflammation?
We already know this. And we did nothing.
1/ 11🧵 Covid is a vascular disease 🩸. We need to stop thinking of it primarily as a lung 🫁 disease. I hear lung Doctors says ‘we don’t see much on the chest X-rays in
#longcovid
’. The rheumatologists say ‘we don’t see raised inflammation on the blood tests in
#LongCovid
’
1/This doctor was infected twice with Covid in 4 weeks.
The same happened to me- 5 weeks apart. To my son. To several of my doctor friends.
We are in a new phase of Covid- tens of subvariants circulating-different enough to be infected with more than one at once actually.
Damn it. It has been ONE MONTH SINCE LAST INFECTION.
To nitwits out there who say, “Aha! So masks don’t work.” Masks work. Meetings/groups of unmasked people put those of us being responsible at risk.
500 patients coming for
#COVID19
vaccine & flu shots next week.
#MaskUp
Stop telling people with
#LongCovid
they are just deconditioned, anxious or have a functional disorder. ❌
They have inflammation in multiple parts of the body including the brain&lining of the blood vessels🩸
Just stop.Their lives are hard enough on a daily basis.
The end.
7. Don’t tell people exercise will cure it. It won’t. It didn’t cure
#MECFS
and it won’t cure long Covid.
74% of patients felt worse with exercise in this study
13. don’t think because you felt ok after one infection that this will be the case after 5 infections. (We can’t get long term immunity to this virus no matter what anyone on Twitter says).
If we don’t want kids getting mumps, measles,rubella, polio, diphtheria, meningitis B/C/AWY, hepatitis B, tetanus,pneumococcus,
whooping cough, haemophilus,flu,HPV and even rotavirus, why are we so chill about repeated
#COVID19
infections….
13/ this was not a respiratory virus for my son and I- it was essentially a viral meningitis (fever, neck pain and stiffness and dislike of bright light)
11. Don’t dismiss chest pain. This shouldn’t even have to be said but unfortunately does.
19% of long Covid patients in the coverscan study had myocarditisAlmost 1 in 5. Treat it. It’s not anxiety.
4/ How do we achieve that lower level of Covid in society?
🔵 good public health measures.
Free PCR testing 🏥
Lateral flow before meeting up
Staying home with viral symptoms! 🦠
N95 masks 😷
Air filtration in every indoor setting
Anti-virals to be more accessible 💊
5/ why do I say that? We now know that the blood tests we do in the NHS only show a tiny % of the immune system. We are testing the wrong markers. In studies Interleukins and cytokines ARE raised.
#Covid_19
causes inflammation. No mystery.
12. Try not to catch Covid yourself - you have between 1 in 10 and 1 in 20 chance each infection.
Damage is likely to be cumulative. It affects all the organs as every organ has a blood supply.
10. Advise them on pacing, which is a way of using what energy is available without crashing.
Familiarise yourself with post-exertional malaise- you are you are going to be seeing a LOT of it over the next few years. See
@LongCOVIDPhysio
Never thought I’d see a photo like this.
Hospitals overrun in China with children with a feverish respiratory illness.
No information on which one.
Sat doing schoolwork on IV drips.
2023 you have not let me down.
If it’s spreading in China, it’s already here.
Students keep doing homework while getting IV fluids, in a hospotal.
China has entered the high season for respiratory diseases, with surging cases of mycoplasma pneumonia and influenza flu, most of the patients are children, masks recommended again in public spaces.
Covid-19🧠
Brain cells FUSING together
Virus then hides behind it
In 10% of experiments the neuronal activity stops altogether.
No wonder patients appear like they have dementia.
Protect your brain until a solution is found to this mess
Have circled the fused cells in black
Sydney scientists think they've discovered what causes the debilitating symptoms of long COVID - and their research is being recognised around the world.
@MarkWBurrows
#9News
MORE:
7/ Long Covid patients are not crazy.
They are not psychologically unwell.
We must take emerging evidence and apply it.
Find.the.clots
And remember- Covid makes kids sick too.
‘Listen to your patient, they are telling you the answer’.
If you ever wanted to read a mixed message this is it.
End of global health emergency but someone dying every 3 minutes& 10% of infections lead to long Covid.
We shouldn’t forget those lost-yet we will keep on losing people- deaths which could be preventable.
@DrTedros
"It is therefore with great hope that I declare
#COVID19
over as a global health emergency.
However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.
Last week, COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes – and that’s just the deaths we know about"-
@DrTedros
8/ why is it not on the front pages of the newspapers? Why hasn’t our health secretary mentioned it? Why doesn’t your Doctor know about it? Why don’t they know that ‘normal’ bloods in Covid don’t test the whole immune system and for microclots? These would be good questions⭐️ ✅
Are we actually seeing mass amnesia of what happened in the last 3 years? Even people forgetting Covid infections? What’s going on?
IT’S HAPPENED BEFORE
Spanish flu.
How did we not predict this?
#PandemicAmnesia
This has gone too far now.
A 27% rise in childhood diabetes is significant.
To infer that lockdowns and this apparent new phenomenon of immunity debt is responsible is just taking Covid minimising too far.
Covid-19 is a risk factor for type 1 diabetes
11/11 ‘Medical science has proven time and again that when the resources are provided, great progress in the treatment, cure, and prevention of disease can occur.’
Michael J. Fox
6/ this is not ‘zero Covid’
🔵 there is a place between zero Covid and letting it rip that allows more freedom ✔️
🔵 one day this pandemic WILL end. It has not ended yet just because we have stopped testing or counting it.
If you do one thing today, listen to cardiologist Dr Rae Duncan on
#COVID19
#LongCovid
&what Covid could be doing to our children.
It is heartfelt and genuine from someone who has seen the devastating effects of long Covid.
Excerpts below.
via
@YouTube
5. Assess for mast cell activation syndrome. Some will says it’s not real. It’s real. Check for dermatographism. Ask about alcohol intolerance, new allergies, new rashes, urticaria. Etc etc
10/ Hopefully this thread might convince you Covid is more than a cold. That Covid causes vascular complications.That doing the usual tests won’t show you the problem. That when you apply cutting edge science to medicine you find answers.
#MedTwitter
#LongCovid
#MECFS
#TeamClots
‘Mask-wearing is the single most effective public health measure at tackling Covid, according to the first global study of its kind, which found that the measure was linked to a 53% fall in the incidence of the disease.‘ half the Covid=more freedom.
People are being told by healthcare providers:
‘I don’t believe in long Covid or ME/CFS- Just so you know’
It is not a belief system like a religion
There is scientific&medical evidence for both
It is gaslighting to tell someone their experience, backed by science, is invalid
16/ I feel my son and I have had a lucky escape from long term issues (again). If we have all resigned to catching Covid every few months how many times does it take to develop long Covid? We know risk goes up with reinfections.
21/ final point- omicron wave dec- April added 600,000 Long Covid sufferers. You may think it will never happen to you but that’s human nature. It’s happened to over 2 million people in the UK already. 1 in 6 middle aged patients get long Covid
Now that we have ascertained we CAN’T get herd immunity- what is the plan? The inquiry has shown what the plan was- let the vulnerable die- but no plan for the 4/5/6 infections we would have by 2023.
How many infections are YOU willing to get before you get angry?
1/ 🧵 What’s in a name? ‘Long Covid’ ‘post-acute Covid syndrome’. What does that make you think of? Tiredness?
#longcovid
is covid related THROMBOTIC VASCULITIS. Sounds serious, right? ✅ 🤷🏻♀️
2/ the reason I’m clarifying I don’t have long Covid (or any family members) is people always assume any doctor who cares about long Covid has it. Not true.
1/🧵 a ‘trifecta’ theory of
#longcovid
⭐️ Viral persistence 🦠
⭐️ Microclots
⭐️ Runaway immune system
These are the 3 main leading theories in long Covid. There is evidence for them all. Are they all linked and is there a unifying theory?
8/ I can tell you as someone who treats long Covid (as best I can)
🔴 if you get
#LongCovid
(1 in 10 to 1 in 20 chance with each infection) the cavalry is NOT coming. ❌
When your sick pay runs out if you don’t have insurance or family to help, you will lose it all.
6/ Now to more exciting stuff. Covid causes micro clots 🩸 with amyloid. Yes amyloid. They block capillaries and reduce oxygenation. Here is a photo of a patient’s blood before Covid and afterwards when they got
#LongCovid
showing new microclots
Everything to do with long Covid is about loss.
Loss of health
Loss of work
Loss of friends
Loss of quality of life
Listen to people who have it and acknowledge the loss.
I’m tired of pretending everything is fine so my friends don’t get sick of me. I just lost EVERYTHING at 25. I haven’t really walked or been outside in 6 months, haven’t watched a movie or worked and I’m in always in unbearable pain. And everyone is tired of hearing about it.
5/That would be MORE freedom than we have now✔️
🔵 not having a pay off of being sick after a night out
🔵 protecting our future health. Remember Covid damages blood vessels. Every part of our body needs a blood supply. 🩸
🔵Reducing chances of long Covid
6/ The reason her team did the SPECT was because they had read this study. ⬇️👏
How would she be now if they had stopped at the normal results. This is where we seem to be stopping in the UK.
The paper is here
22/ This articles outlines the stark reality of long Covid. 1 in 5 were unable to work and 45% needed reduced work schedules. Risk of long Covid was 10-30%.
3/ so back to the story of Ba.5. We all had Covid 12 weeks ago. I knew reinfection could happen soon but even I was surprised to get it again so quickly. Day 1 my 9 year old son complained of a painful stiff neck. I took his temperature&it was 38.8. First thought was meningitis…
9/ I have seen countless people
🔴 lose their jobs to long Covid (yes self employed too)
Long Covid is not mind over matter. It is a multisystem vasculitis.
🔴 lose their houses
🔴 lose their families (if they don’t believe them)
🔴 lose their previously Perfect health
23/ This graph shows how public health measures are better than vaccines alone in reducing the R number yet they have all been abandoned. I for one never want to experience again what I did in the last 2 weeks.
Wow.
The paxlovid long Covid trial is so so important.
Participants getting Covid during it from staff NOT wearing masks is a serious threat to the study. I just don’t understand this.
Can anyone feed back to them?
Doctors like me need these results for our patients 🥲
There has been many amazing
#LongCovid
studies recently I’ve just been mulling them over.
🏆 long covid patients get muscle NECROSIS with exercise.
N-protein in the muscles but ALSO controls.
We are going to find viral persistence everywhere, aren’t we?
No one wants to say it
60% long Covid patients had evidence of inflammation, including neutrophil activation.
The researchers said the inflammatory markers identified in long-COVID patients are similar to those observed in autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.
9/
#LongCovid
is a post viral illness. Therefore it has not surprised me today to see the pre-print showing the same microclots in
#MECFS
This will not show up in blood tests done currently for
#MECFS
or
#LongCovid
resulting in ‘but your bloods are normal’
There are 100,000 NHS beds
3750 flu patients
9500 Covid patients
9500 staff off sick with Covid
Yet it’s being reported flu has caused the NHS meltdown?
And slipped in that flu is due to immunity debt?
Spin
Covid is what has decimated our already struggling NHS.
Washington faces first outbreak of a deadly fungal infection that's on the rise in the U.S.
4 people in Washington state have tested positive this month for a rare fungal infection that can be deadly.
It's the state's first known outbreak of the fungus
Edited to add- to anyone who seems confused about why I keep getting it I SEE COVID PATIENTS day in and day out all winter and all summer. And the government are NOT protecting us.
No time for trolls today.
7/ around day 10 I developed numbness and tingling down my left arm. I still could not move my neck. I went to sleep and woke up with distorted vision in my left eye. Couldn’t read anything as bits of text missing.
All a virus wants to do is get into your cells, take over the machinery, make more of itself, destroy your cells in the process and move on to the next cell. Your immune system has to work hard to clear up the mess
There is not such thing as a viral infection being a good Thing
5/ the hit by a bus feeling went on for a few days and then my neck also became sore and stiff. Faintly positive lat flow day 5. I actually could not move my neck at all. Temperature was up and felt generally miserable. NO cold symptoms whatsoever.
1/ If you haven’t seen this data from the study of Covid reinfections I am sharing again with tags. Reinfections have worse health outcomes. The paper this is from is by
@zalaly
Visual by
@Wikisteff
In my opinion the most important data in the pandemic
2/ IF one person in every 30 has Covid& they don’t have to test or isolate- if you go to a restaurant or a pub the chances are there is someone with Covid there.🦠
🔵 result is the pay off of being sick after having fun 🏥
Addendum- new variants. We don’t know how mild/lethal they might be.
The more people have Covid, the more it mutates, the more variants we have. Viral soup and luck of the draw which variants take hold.
🔵let’s not have regrets if we get a worse variant that it was avoidable 😢
So…staff wearing masks in the NHS now is just ‘strongly recommended’. Pray tell how the clinically vulnerable can safely access healthcare? Lots of very upset patients and I’m not surprised. Surely this is the least we can do? I know not all will agree but I’m disappointed.
Not good reading about Ba 2.86 (pirola) and also EG 5.1 ( Eris)
All vaccine Sera tested showed NO neutralising activity.
Monoclonal antibodies didn’t work at all.
Literally the tools we have been told to rely on for living with Covid, in the lab, do not appear to work.
BREAKING🔔 A new study from G2P-Japan🇯🇵 is out! The preprint will be out so soon, but first we show our results on BA.2.86 - transmissibility, infectivity and immune resistance. This would be the 4th non-peer-reviewed🗒, but includes some new stuff. Please retweet/repost🔥 1/
4/ did a lateral flow test and was faintly positive so called off a trip to a&e. I was aching all over- hit by a bus type aching all over. But negative on lat flow.
1/ The vagus nerve, Enteric nervous system, Covid&other viruses
- I am especially blown away by how many
#LongCovid
and
#MECFS
patients have autonomic dysfunction or
#pots
In fact it’s so striking I rarely see anyone with post-exertional malaise without POTS
🔴 test for POTS