Stress can cause a lot of symptoms. Long Covid or Long Pandemic Stress, not surprising symptoms overlap. Which makes it worse as you can get 'Long Covid' without getting infected, simply from the stress around the whole long ongoing situation.
Stress and anxiety can cause high blood pressure, which can cause all kinds of other symptoms. Stress affects sleep patterns
https://www.healthline.com/health-news/chronic-stress-can-lead-to-higher-blood-pressure-heres-how-to-reduce-it
Replace job stress with pandemic stress and
https://www.webmd.com/hypertension-high-blood-pressure/news/20190429/job-stress-poor-sleep-hypertension-a-deadly-trio
In a study of nearly 2,000 workers with high blood pressure who were followed for almost 18 years, those who reported having both a stressful job and poor sleep were three times more likely to die from heart disease than those who slept well and didn't have a trying job, the investigators found.
It doesn't really matter if you get Covid or not to still get long term effects from the pandemic. Countries keep managing the pandemic poorly with mixed messaging and letting cases rise until full lock downs are needed again. Then on top scare everyone with Omicron, add knee jerk reactions to cancel flights (too late, it's already detected all over the world)
Imo it would be better to find a stable state people can get used to instead of lock down -> re-opening -> lock down, masks, no masks, masks again. Humans are creatures of habit, changes in routine and uncertainty causes more stress, as well as seeing cases rise rapidly again and again.
Hopefully things settle down next year, it's still going to be a rough winter first.
