“Brain fog, fatigue, and difficulty in concentrating so this is something we really need to seriously look at because it very well might be a post-viral syndrome associated with COVID-19,” Fauci said. Symptoms that are highly suggestive of ME/CFS, Fauci added. Even though some prominent health care experts have publicly acknowledged the connection.Īnthony Fauci, MD, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and President Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, said at a press conference in July 2020, that “there is no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a post-viral syndrome that really in many respects can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus….”
The organization worries that this fact about long COVID might have been lost in the maelstrom of data besieging health care experts and the public during the pandemic. The only difference is that we are seeing this happen now in real time on a massive scale.”
“Long COVID is not a new phenomenon-there are millions of Americans who got sick with a virus and never recovered before the pandemic, and developed ME/CFS. “This comes as no surprise to the ME/CFS community,” Adriane Tillman, the editor at #MEAction, an advocacy organization for people with ME/CFS, writes in an email to Infection Control Today ® ( ICT ®). More than eight million Americans will possibly develop long COVID, tripling the number of people with ME/CFS, according to a study published January 18 in Frontiers in Medicine. Long COVID presents with symptoms very similar to myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), and an advocacy group for those with ME/CFS wants the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other federal agencies to consider the two conditions linked-and that the battle against one should also be the battle against the other.Ī study published last July in The Lancet concludes that individuals suffering from long COVID contend with symptoms associated with ME/CFS, such as fatigue, foggy mind, exertional malaise, and orthostatic intolerance. In fact, evidence that individuals would suffer symptoms weeks, months or even years after they’ve gotten COVID-19 and then “recovered” had been known for decades.