Thread by @BlakeMMurdoch

Long Covid & other SARS-COV-2 sequelae are underreported in the US.

1. ~55% of Americans believe they've had covid

2. IMHE estimates 98% of Americans have actually had covid

People who don't believe they've had covid won't attribute new health conditions to it. /1 🧵

About 5% of ALL US adults have activity limitations from their long COVID. This is obviously only counting people in the 55% who believe that they have had COVID. That means the real number will certainly be more. /2

We have a crisis of unawareness of covid due to multiple factors. There is also some level of disbelief and an unwillingness to distinguish it from other viruses. We need updated easy to access tests, and we need to encourage testing. /3

In the US there is politicization of health and beliefs about the body and self. We saw this earlier in the pandemic when people going on ventilators in ICU for covid would refuse to believe they had it. Some of that politicization is relevant here, if a secondary explanation. /4

We need more scientific research into people who don't believe they have ever had covid but who have had new onset health conditions since the pandemic began. It's absolutely crucial to show all the ways covid is doing harm, and discover the extent of it. /5

If we can't show the true toll of COVID with science many of its sequelae will be ignored & lumped into other categories that ultimately will result in a failure to address the underlying cause. This is what is happening to people with Long Covid and other sequelae every day. /6

Sources:

CDC Pulse Survey:
cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/p…

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation:
healthdata.org/sites/default/…

/7

This is a correction thread because I erroneously misinterpreted the CDC survey's info on the original thread after misreading another post about it. I apologize for that and corrected my error within an hour.

The message here remains extremely important.

/8

Many seem fixated on the 98% number I used. Sure, maybe that estimate is inaccurate, but certainly not by more than 20%, meaning we still have a large problem with health condition attribution. I actually would find it unsurprising if only 6.5 million the US haven't had covid. /9