Diving post Covid

[Duke Dive Medicine]

It is a great question but perhaps we get a baseline with Covid results and then extend to other respiratory illnesses. Covid has wrecked havoc, claimed many lives and many are still suffering with symptoms.

Since starting this thread, I unfortunately got Covid and whilst quite mild did knock me out for a couple of weeks. 5 or 6 weeks after the infection, I attempted a 100 km bike ride with lots of climbing.

During the course of the ride my heart rate was on average about 20 bpm higher than similar pre covid ride and I had 90 minutes at a threshold level and 49 minutes at anerobic levels with my heart rate topping out at a level I had not seen since I was in my 30's and my average speed was down by about 20%. So Covid has had an affect on my general fitness and thus I think it is right be concerned about fitness levels post covid when diving.

Luckily my fitness is returning quite quickly and whilst I have lost some speed my HR is back inline with pre covid levels

I think that's the current state - COVID is being treated as the acute, highly infective, potentially nasty illness that it is, which is why return-to-diving recommendations were drafted specifically for post-COVID. Future state is difficult if not impossible to predict but may be as @kinoons described.

Glad your recovery is going well!

Best regards,
DDM

 

[mr_v]

This this a Part 2 of the story. I started diving shortly after my symptoms went away. While I tested negative for COVID-19 using a home (rapid) test, all the symptoms pointed to COVID - sore throat, coughing, mild headache, loss of taste for a brief period. I started diving when all symptoms but cough went away. The results surprised me.

I dive CC, i.e., I expose my lungs to warm, moist gas with a high PPO2. The night before my first dive, I coughed. A lot. Almost cancelled the dive in the morning. Before getting on the loop, I asked more experienced divers about coughing in the loop or sneezing under water, as I was concerned about the loop integrity. However, I had zero coughs in the water and stayed cough free for the the rest of the day. It came back at night...

The cough remained for a week, but I went through the same process the next weekend. The results were the same. After getting off the loop, I did not cough for hours.

My experience is not a scientific experiment by any means, but I am intrigued by the idea that a rebreather can act as a healing agent.

 

[noserider]

I do not dive rebreathers but if the O2 content is higher than air could that be having a beneficial effect on your lungs at least in the short term?

 

[PirateFoxy]

It is a great question but perhaps we get a baseline with Covid results and then extend to other respiratory illnesses. Covid has wrecked havoc, claimed many lives and many are still suffering with symptoms.

Since starting this thread, I unfortunately got Covid and whilst quite mild did knock me out for a couple of weeks. 5 or 6 weeks after the infection, I attempted a 100 km bike ride with lots of climbing.

During the course of the ride my heart rate was on average about 20 bpm higher than similar pre covid ride and I had 90 minutes at a threshold level and 49 minutes at anerobic levels with my heart rate topping out at a level I had not seen since I was in my 30's and my average speed was down by about 20%. So Covid has had an affect on my general fitness and thus I think it is right be concerned about fitness levels post covid when diving.

Luckily my fitness is returning quite quickly and whilst I have lost some speed my HR is back inline with pre covid levels

Well pre-Covid, I got a GI infection of some kind that irritated my vagus nerve and caused tachycardia (like 140bpm at rest, which is more than double my normal resting heart rate, going up to 160+ if I got up and moved around) which won me a multi-day hospital stay on a monitored bed and took several months for it to settle down again, not just from the loss of conditioning from being sick, but also from anxiety that developed as a result of the experience since every time I could feel my heart rate starting to elevate, I started worrying that I was going to have the same problem again which made my heart rate go up. It was not a fun experience and given the data about possible Covid longer term effects, I don't know why people are as dismissive of the risk as they are. Especially people who want to engage in highly physical activities like diving - I don't see how you could safely dive if your heart rate is going sky high like that, for example. Or if you get lung scarring from Covid, which is a risk factor for AGE.

 

[kinoons]

The problem is right now we have no clue what the rate of post Covid long term symptoms even is. We don’t even have great numbers on who has had Covid. We’re seeing seroprevalence numbers from 60% to 95%. Then you have to consider that there is no uniform definition of what post Covid syndrome even is. Finally, before Covid any clinician would have outright rejected long term symptoms from an asymptomatic infection; now some folks are trying to include those patients.

So no idea who has had Covid (aside from damn near everyone), no definition on what long Covid actually is, a huge number of confounding variables such as depression, anxiety, changes in social ability and status, lack of care for chronic conditions, lack of preventative care, etc… and it becomes very hard to damn near impossible to tease out what is truly post viral syndrome (a real thing), post intensive care syndrome (also real) and something else.

What I do know is absolutely everyone, well 99%+, is going to eventually catch Covid. It’s as inevitable as death and taxes. If you can improve your health in the short term then do so (get vaccinated if appropriate, lose weight, stop smoking, better diet). If you’re undergoing medical treatment that will end in the not too distant future (for example chemotherapy) then avoidance is a good move for the short term. However, if you’re as healthy as you’re going to be, then returning to a normal life is the only sensible option.

 

[noserider]

Interesting analysis in the FT, particularly around the 15% ruse in heart attacks

The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker

The potential impact on heart and brain disease poses challenges to healthcare systems globally

www.ft.com

 

[hotdive global]

Thank you for sharing

 

[kinoons]

Interesting analysis in the FT, particularly around the 15% ruse in heart attacks

The growing evidence that Covid-19 is leaving people sicker

The potential impact on heart and brain disease poses challenges to healthcare systems globally

www.ft.com

Article is behind a paywall so I can’t read it.

Generally speaking when someone says there is a 15% increase in A post B you have an association, not causation.

There has been so many disruptions in people’s health, to include cardiovascular, mental, neurological, etc over the last two to three years it would be very difficult to blame any one variable (Covid) with any changes in the rate of another illness/ailment.

It took something like 30-40 years of research to prove via association alone that smoking causes lung cancer. This was because you would never randomly assign someone to a smoking group once there was a hint that it was bad for you.

Since we also won’t randomly assign people to get Covid it will take much more associative type data over a longer period of time before we can strongly suggest that Covid resulted in a 15% increase in heart attacks.