I caught this in the Dec 2023/Jan 2024 Covid wave, in a densely-packed Bay Area tech office. I only returned to near-full mental clarity in Jan 2026 - two years later. It's an insidious illness that needs more visibility. Poorly ventilated offices full of sick colleagues in close proximity are ideal conditions for transmitting airborne diseases, and it's far too easy to develop a debilitating chronic illness this way. There should be minimum clean-air standards for open offices to protect workers.
I had a long process with this that mostly manifested as exercise intolerance and general inflammation/discomfort, and sleep struggles. I made no progress for 2 years, lost most of my muscle (I had been very active before) and started thinking "is this how it's going to be forever?". After not finding anything promising from traditional medicine or supplements, I finally made some dramatic life changes. I'm fully past it now (with persistent lifestyle changes), but I really had to rethink my relationship with food.
Ended up doing a paleo diet, avoiding stressors (some of which are not obvious like just being on your phone scrolling, bad posture/circulation/sitting for too long), improving sleep hygiene, and ramping up consistent cardio exercise, with an emphasis on getting up to 4x/week zone 5 cardio without triggering intolerance.
Since then I've discovered a lot of other things that are great for overall health, like HRV-reset breathing and long-duration water fasts (around 3 days is optimal for me). I imagine those would have been very helpful if I had tried them earlier. A water fast is a complete metabolic and inflammatory reset of the body, and it's not as hard as you might think.
Hopefully most affected folks have recovered and are living normal lives by now, but if not, there are things you can do! It seems like the more challenging those things are, the more efficacious.
Having gone through this too, I also had to accept that a lot (not all!) of it was in my head and made worse by it. When I convinced myself that “this will pass” and “this slow steady plan will get me out of this eventually” was when I finally saw regular progress (progress, not immediate relief).
I'm glad that this was the case for you, but presenting it as an universal truth is extremely cruel and harmful to people for whom it is not, and you should be really careful with phrasing. Statements like these is why people's symptoms are not being taken seriously.
Maybe a bit of a strange take, but after having dealt with chronic illness personally and talked with a lot of others with chronic illness, I don't think classifying chronic illness by symptoms will help with curing, and in fact I don't think categorizing works at all for chronic illness. We've been trying to classify chronic illnesses for so long, and yet in most cases no pattern emerges.
This has led me to conclude that perhaps in most cases chronic illness is an emergent behavior from a complex system, namely our body. Now tbh this is kind of a cheap take, because it's not that hard to conclude. But gosh darn it, we're programmers and we deal with complex systems all the time! What I want to see is a complete quantitative mapping of human metabolism, so that we can see all the in-between steps, not just the surface levels. That way curing chronic illness is more about comparing metabolite levels against known pathways and seeing what's regulated incorrectly. There's just not enough introspective capability currently.
My vision is some day a person who's been chronically ill can walk into a clinic, take a blood test, and with mass spectrometry get the level of the around 1800 different intermediate metabolites. That gets mapped to a known good metabolic graph, and it's optimized to find what in-between step is off kilter. They're then prescribed a drug that resets the bad state, and it 6 weeks they're back to normal.
I also doubt that AI will substantially help either. It still doesn't bring any more introspection capability, and if we can't figure out why someone is sick, I have little faith that a predictive AI can figure it out either.
people are doing this for ME/CFS patients, and trying stuff, and ... it's not easy at all. But the signs at least are pointing toward something coherent.
Yes, it's many variants from a disease, but still, like cancer we can tackle them one by one.
Before you can investigate the causes of an illness, you have to define it. Otherwise, you’re chasing an ever-shifting cloud of ambiguous symptoms, any of which could have different causes. The article opens with this admission, so I’m not stating anything new here.
The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a few people who never had a confirmed case at all) includes their set of symptoms in the communal diagnosis. Thus, if you dig into these studies, you always find that the syndrome is a wide-ranging and variable constellation of symptoms, making it impossible for a study to have any systematic legitimacy. Moreover, the results of any particular study are more strongly influenced by the inclusion criterion (if there even is one) than by any other factor.
It’s perfectly possible to evaluate treatments in this situation, and would be a better use of resources - pick symptoms, make an inclusion criteria, and run a randomized trial of existing drugs or therapies. But this is likely to fail, and it’s much, much easier to write papers with unprovable theories and retrospective analysis.
I know someone's case who got it 3 times. The first 2 times full recover in no time. The third one took couple of months and now feels tired all the time, lost all sense of taste and smell, swollen tongue, body pain of sitting still due to the compression of muscles.
This person told me it was sure it was related to COVID because there was nothing before or after it and that was the only thing that happened.
Kinda sucks to thing that everytime it might be a chance for that or worse
I had covid 7 or 8 times lol. Basically 2-3 times a year from Jan 2022 until spring of 2025. Luckily there have been seemingly no long-term effects for me, and it's been over a year since I last tested positive.
Covid almost killed me. I distinctly remember feeling near death when the hospital attempted a last-ditch effort with a transfusion. I don’t remember all of the details, but I know that someone, somewhere, saved my life. And I’ve done fuck all with that gift — it’s been almost five years.
Personally, the only long Covid symptom I know of is that I have a coughing fit after every meal (and sometimes during). Some foods seem to lead to worse fits, but anything other than liquid will make me cough to some degree. Sometimes, it’s to the point that I see stars and nearly pass out.
All in all, I got off easy with Covid. It could have been worse.
25 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 47.8 ms ] threadEnded up doing a paleo diet, avoiding stressors (some of which are not obvious like just being on your phone scrolling, bad posture/circulation/sitting for too long), improving sleep hygiene, and ramping up consistent cardio exercise, with an emphasis on getting up to 4x/week zone 5 cardio without triggering intolerance.
Since then I've discovered a lot of other things that are great for overall health, like HRV-reset breathing and long-duration water fasts (around 3 days is optimal for me). I imagine those would have been very helpful if I had tried them earlier. A water fast is a complete metabolic and inflammatory reset of the body, and it's not as hard as you might think.
Hopefully most affected folks have recovered and are living normal lives by now, but if not, there are things you can do! It seems like the more challenging those things are, the more efficacious.
This has led me to conclude that perhaps in most cases chronic illness is an emergent behavior from a complex system, namely our body. Now tbh this is kind of a cheap take, because it's not that hard to conclude. But gosh darn it, we're programmers and we deal with complex systems all the time! What I want to see is a complete quantitative mapping of human metabolism, so that we can see all the in-between steps, not just the surface levels. That way curing chronic illness is more about comparing metabolite levels against known pathways and seeing what's regulated incorrectly. There's just not enough introspective capability currently.
My vision is some day a person who's been chronically ill can walk into a clinic, take a blood test, and with mass spectrometry get the level of the around 1800 different intermediate metabolites. That gets mapped to a known good metabolic graph, and it's optimized to find what in-between step is off kilter. They're then prescribed a drug that resets the bad state, and it 6 weeks they're back to normal.
I also doubt that AI will substantially help either. It still doesn't bring any more introspection capability, and if we can't figure out why someone is sick, I have little faith that a predictive AI can figure it out either.
Yes, it's many variants from a disease, but still, like cancer we can tackle them one by one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldg2AdVnlOs
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-46965-1
If it would be easy already data from 2016 would have "solved" it, right?
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1607571113
The problem with “Long Covid” as it exists today is that there’s no such definition. Literally anyone who had Covid once and feels bad today (and quite a few people who never had a confirmed case at all) includes their set of symptoms in the communal diagnosis. Thus, if you dig into these studies, you always find that the syndrome is a wide-ranging and variable constellation of symptoms, making it impossible for a study to have any systematic legitimacy. Moreover, the results of any particular study are more strongly influenced by the inclusion criterion (if there even is one) than by any other factor.
It’s perfectly possible to evaluate treatments in this situation, and would be a better use of resources - pick symptoms, make an inclusion criteria, and run a randomized trial of existing drugs or therapies. But this is likely to fail, and it’s much, much easier to write papers with unprovable theories and retrospective analysis.
This person told me it was sure it was related to COVID because there was nothing before or after it and that was the only thing that happened.
Kinda sucks to thing that everytime it might be a chance for that or worse
Long COVID may be fueled by inflammation and tiny clots (2026)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/01/260107225532.h...
Personally, the only long Covid symptom I know of is that I have a coughing fit after every meal (and sometimes during). Some foods seem to lead to worse fits, but anything other than liquid will make me cough to some degree. Sometimes, it’s to the point that I see stars and nearly pass out.
All in all, I got off easy with Covid. It could have been worse.