This is pretty unconscionable. @OxfordHealthNHS is recommending yoga, dancing, and cognitive behavioral therapy for post- #COVID19 patients who continue to have symptoms, when we don’t even understand #COVID19 let alone the sequelae it causes. https://www.oxfordhealth.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/OH-011.20-Coronavirus-and-fatigue-v2.pdf

It conflates what happens to “most of us” after a flu with the complete unknown of what happens after a NOVEL VIRUS.

It assumes these sequelae may be due to mental health problems instead of, say, brain or organ damage.

It recommends graded exercise to a population who may have lung damage, a population in which it has never been trialed.

And based its recommendations on the (frankly, historically abominable abuse) of patients with #mecfs and evidence from that patient population which has been thoroughly debunked https://www.virology.ws/2018/06/19/trial-by-error-an-open-letter-to-the-lancet-two-years-on/

If past is prologue, a subset of patients with #COVID19 will experience lingering and in some cases, lifelong symptoms. We know this from past outbreaks of coronaviruses and a wide range of completely unrelated infections: https://twitter.com/jenbrea/status/1238988538844033024

It is really important that we BOTH treat these patients as a unique population with its own challenges AND understand how they relate to all the other populations who have also experienced post-infectious sequelae after a range of infections.

We should both lump and split.

What we absolutely must not do is psychologize post- #COVID19 patients, treat them with a confused mis-mash of pseudoscience, fall back on age-old tropes where we laud the "strong" who "won" the #COVID19 "war" through shear force of will and blame those who did not fully recover.

Illness is still not a metaphor. Ableism is not a public health policy. Victim-blaming is not medicine. Wishful thinking is not science. Incuriosity is a choice.

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1978/01/26/illness-as-metaphor/

While human nature has not changed and neither have our systems, we have all the lessons, wisdom, language, and community-organizing to do better this time, for these patients.

We must.