Can long covid be considered post-viral fatigue? I remember being knocked out with Mononucleosis years ago and being tired out for over a month afterwards. Or is long Covid something entirely different?
It is my wholly-uninformed WAG hypothesis that lots of sorts of infections cause long-term changes and problems—we just don't usually make the connection between the illness and the later trouble.
Like, if I had to bet money on it, I'd wager that "long flu" and even "long cold" are real things that happen at least sometimes, but just haven't gotten much attention (and, to be fair, they might also be less common, or less-commonly-as-severe, if they are real).
There's a link between EBV and multiple sclerosis!
Also, n=1, but I had a bout of bacterial laryngitis a few weeks ago (was briefly intubated for elective surgery—apparently this is a common side effect) and I'm still feeling a little breathless/cough-y despite having hacked up every last bit of phlegm and finished a full course of antibiotics. Doesn't seem shocking that my lungs would take a bit to recover, even if the bacteria in question have already cleared out.
A cursory google suggests that post-viral fatigue from COVID is expected to last a few weeks. Long COVID can last months; I know at least one person who still has long COVID symptoms from an infection that occurred in April 2020.
Long covid is generally defined as >4 weeks. There are subdefinitions for different lengths. However, a lot of long covid may be a form a post-viral fatigue. That doesn't discount it's importance, though. It's a lot more common than with a cold or flu.
Anecdotally, for people I know, it would take six weeks to half a year to resolve.
I'd be very surprised if it helped. There's pretty good evidence that long covid isn't caused by persistent virus.
My own speculation is that it's autoimmune, simple due to having it seen resolved when people were vaccinated. However, "anecdote" is not the plural of "data," and it just as well be unrelated.
There are wonky changes to organs during covid, which many doctors speculate are the root cause.
In either case, I'm unaware of any mainstream theories where paxlovid would be likely to help.
Last I heard — massive caveats that was a while ago, and I'm not medically trained so I don't have a useful anti-BS filter for anything medical — is that it does seem to be a form of post viral fatigue/ME/CFS.
Like, if I had to bet money on it, I'd wager that "long flu" and even "long cold" are real things that happen at least sometimes, but just haven't gotten much attention (and, to be fair, they might also be less common, or less-commonly-as-severe, if they are real).