Thread by @elisaperego78

Patients started to report not recovering in March, April, May 2020. The first patient-made names and hashtag like #apresJ20, #longhaulers and #LongCovid emerged to draw attention to prolonged covid illness. In June 2020, Long Covid was now trending on social media 🧵

https://twitter.com/loscharlos/status/1518992847218876424

By July 2020, #LongCovid was being discussed extensively on both social media and in the press, in countries like the UK. On 21 August 2020, advocates and patient-researchers met with the @WHO, obtaining open recognition of the disease. Between late spring and early autumn 2020 ~

patient-researchers and advocates were publishing the first papers and reports in the world on prolonged covid symptoms and #LongCovid. These included surveys, blogs/opinion pieces in medical journals, and the first peer-reviewed publications. From these papers 🧵

it was evident #LongCovid was a huge problem. The supposedly "mild", "short" respiratory disease in the "young" and "healthy" was a killer: a multi-system, prolonged disease that could cause life-threatening symptoms even in the "non-hospitalized": many should have been!

In September 2020, co-authors and I wrote that the costs of #LongCovid were to be "unphantomable": too high to be easily comprehensible. Huge. This was especially clear in a society that was still not reckoning with the huge costs of not suppressing SARS-CoV-2 spread.

In summer 2020, a paper from Carfi et al. showed that a significant percentage of hospitalized patients in a Rome hospital still had symptoms ~2 months from discharge, while Puntmann et al. had shown cardiac involvement in a significant percentage of even "mild" covid patients.

While these papers were based on relatively small samples, they complemented the pictures patients (many of whom could not receive medical attention in collapsed healthcare systems) had been reported for months: a killer disease, which featured major cardiovascular symptoms.

We now perfectly know the reality of SARS-CoV-2 infection | covid | #LongCovid is a tragic one. An estimated 100 to 200 millions (at minimum) are likely affected. There is an increased risk of death after SARS-CoV-2 infection. There is damage to multiple organs.

Policy makers, in addition to patients, have known this since 2020. We have to remember the disease was recognized by @WHO itself in 2020. Other health bodies soon followed. We need to be crystal clear about the dangers of this disease.