from Hacker News

Long Covid destroys teenage lungs in ways doctors never saw

by lnyan on 6/21/25, 2:14 PM with 31 comments

• by TimorousBestie on 6/21/25, 2:48 PM

  My cardiovascular health has never recovered from COVID, it’s been very depressing to go from low blood pressure and decent VO2 max to. . the opposite. Interval training has helped a little, but I dunno, I think it’s just gone.

  Wish everyone had taken it more seriously.

• by herodotus on 6/21/25, 2:47 PM

  I wish articles like this would cite their sources. Here are two possible sources:

  https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/10.1148/radiol.241596 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38940402/

• by PaulKeeble on 6/21/25, 3:11 PM

  Covid is a vascular disease, its transmitted and caught through the air and our lungs but it does more vascular and organ damage. What is happening in teenagers isn't all that different to adults where Long Covid is a complete multisystem assault on the body impacting every organ and the blood itself and the problems extend far beyond just the lung structural changes.

  For a while they assumed children were not as impacted but the prevalence numbers now suggest they are impacted by Long Covid at about the same rate as adults. Given our history with these types of diseases and things that look like this, ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia and chronic Lyme unfortunately its likely a lifelong disease.

  We badly need a serious worldwide effort to research understanding and treating this disease because at its worst children (and adults) are locked by their bodies in bed, needing darkness and silence unable to chew their own food let alone do anything else. The level of suffering that is currently being ignored is horrific and the doctors have zero tools to help.

• by raffael_de on 6/21/25, 3:49 PM

  The linked article/web-site has "very low quality source of information" boldly written all over it. It contains no source what so ever ...

• by orionsbelt on 6/21/25, 4:27 PM

  Is long COVID mostly a thing for early COVID (which was much more dangerous and often lethal) or is it something that is still happening with the latest circulating COVIDs which seem to be about as dangerous as a cold?

• by padjo on 6/21/25, 2:54 PM

  Is there anything to be said for more ivermectin…

• by 0xbadcafebee on 6/21/25, 2:54 PM

  A comment was flagged and killed so I can't reply to it. But these questions are common and important to reply to in order to improve science literacy

  > Long covid or the vaccine? Is there any way to tell the difference anymore?

  Yes, 2 ways:

  1) If you didn't take the vaccine, it's long COVID

  2) If you got the vaccine, complications are rare and present in specific ways.

  On 2) the long covid-like symptoms are clumped into a group called PVS (post-vaccination syndrome). The minor symptoms of PVS resolve within a few weeks, and the long-term effects are so rare that they're having trouble studying it to try to determine the cause. So we don't know whether or not the vaccine alone causes those reactions or why. But we do know it's very rare, whereas long COVID from not getting the vaccine is much less rare. OTOH, getting the vaccine actually resolves long COVID symptoms (we know this because long COVID predates the vaccine, and long COVID sufferers reported their symptoms abating once getting the vaccine, and in data from other studies).

  Defunding/dismantling the NIH is not helping us find answers. If you want to "know the truth", call your representatives and ask them to invest more in NIH research and studies around COVID symptoms.