From Wildfire Today,
https://wildfiretoday.com/2021/01/27...fter-covid-19/ discusses long term impact from mild to moderate cases of covid in fire fighters.
Fire Engineering is a reputable publication that has always done well at cutting through the BS and getting useful information out to the industry. They hosted an online conference to discuss what they're seeing in fire fighters who got infected, and how to evaluate when they're good to go back to work. The video is 91 minutes long, and I haven't watched the whole thing yet. Wildfire Today posted the following excerpt:
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If you can’t spare 91 minutes, at least watch Dr. Tim Harris, Chief Medical Officer at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, Denton, Texas explain how the disease affects firefighters, from 9:40 to about 19:00. I transcribed some of the highlights from that section:
The difficulty with this disease is, with your young and vibrant workforce, you probably will have either mild or asymptomatic disease. Even within that mild or asymptomatic cohort, we’re seeing 30 to 50 percent of people with long term residual issues that when you stress them physiologically or mentally you’re going to see some degree of impairment.
The primary impairment is because the ace receptors on your lung and heart, we’re seeing people with lung fibrosis. You can’t breathe. The scarring is permanent, irreversible, and can only be treated with a lung transplant… But the cardiac impairment, 30 percent of athletes that develop COVID have long term cardiomyopathy — you develop heart muscle damage where the heart can’t pump as hard as it normally does so you develop systolic heart failure, or you have arrhythmia.
The other one that is also somewhat worrisome is the neurological impairment. And that goes to judgment. And judgment is very important in your job. You don’t want these people entering a structure fire with an impairment, whether it’s cardiac, pulmonary, or neurological… You want the brains, heart, and lung working so they can do their job.
Testing positive for the coronavirus could mean the end of a firefighter’s career. We don’t know what all of the long term effects are going to be, but irreversible lung damage is occurring now in some patients.
Much of the discussion was about, “How do we know what the path back to work is, are we looking at the right data,” said Russel Burnham a PA-C who treats firefighters at Front Line Mobile Health. “Asking ‘Are you OK’, is not the best method to determine if someone is fully recovered.”"
So, medical and science PFers: do these numbers look plausible? Does his stated mechanism sound right?