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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

That article is terrible. It's anecdotal, a biased sample from a group of people who self-identify as "long-haulers". If you conduct a survey of a group of anti-vaccination activists, I'm sure that a high percentage will tell you that vaccines gave their child autism.

Moreover, this:

"A quarter of respondents in the Body Politic survey have tested negative, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have COVID-19."

Okay. I guess it doesn't mean that, but it means that you should be skeptical of the claims of causality.

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I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be true though. Post viral fatigue has been a thing since before COVID it just never got any attention because it affected too few people.

I had idiopathic post viral hypersomnia in graduate school, from a bad respiratory infection. For more than entire semester, I could do nothing but sleep for 12+ hours a day. On one occasion, I slept through an entire day. I even fell asleep in the student union once with my laptop in front of me. Needless to say, it wasn't there when I woke up.

No treatment was really able to help me. I was already on adderall, and, while it could keep me upright, I felt like a zombie the whole time. I ended up consulting a sleep neurologist, who basically said they could try "activating" antidepressants (I was already on one), or stimulants, which I was also already on. I don't know if modafinil was a thing yet, but I never heard them mention it.

I thought my life was over. What could I even do with my life, if I always had to sleep 12-14+ hours a day? No doctor seemed to be able to do anything, there was no specific cause, and it's such a rare condition that most people don't know it exists. That, along with the stigma that comes with invisible disabilities (and, believe me, this certainly was disabling) almost made me want to give up.

Then, I started getting better. I didn't know why I got better, but, at that point, I didn't care. I had my life back.

All in all, it was an awful experience, which I wouldn't even wish on someone I hated.

"Idiopathic" means that the cause is unknown. So when you say "idiopathic post-viral...from X", you're trying to imply something that cannot be implied. One may have happened after the other, but the "idiopathic" means "it's unlikely to have been caused by it".

Not for nothing: I had idiopathic hypersomnia in graduate school, too -- it tends to happen when you're depressed from being in graduate school. As you were already on an antidepressant, and it was a suggested treatment for your illness, it sounds like this is a more probable cause than the one that you're trying to imply.

>If you conduct a survey of a group of anti-vaccination activists, I'm sure that a high percentage will tell you that vaccines gave their child autism.

If people have vague symptoms that are uncertain and ambiguous, then their opinions on the nature of their illness are probably not terribly useful or accurate.

But if there exists a severe illness, it seems almost certain that there are some people out there who have a mild form of it that is ambiguous and uncertain because there is a spectrum.

More generally, I believe that evolution implies that diseases evolve in a manner such that people find them hard to identify. Because humans are pretty ruthless at eliminating diseases that catch their attention. HIV is an example of a virus that had gotten very close to coexisting, but then people noticed it and have been trying to wipe it out. Vague chronic problems that are blamed on the victim are inherently what everything logically has to become in the long run.

To take the argument to the extreme, even hypochondria must be a physical disorder, even though of course like cancer etc. there might be many causes that are arguably not the same.

I'm not claiming that it's impossible that there are long-term Covid symptoms. It's clearly possible: we know that it happens to a non-trivial percentage of people who are infected with influenza, and other common viruses.

What we don't know -- and what articles like this ignore -- is how common and serious the symptoms are. And asking a group of people, one-quarter of whom haven't even tested positive for the virus, to self-report everything that has them feeling crummy, is not science.

The Atlantic is not a scientific journal, but their "science writer" should at least be aware of this basic standard of evidence, and at best, avoid the temptation to spread panic based on speculation.

>is not science.

Like you say, it's the Atlantic, not a scientific journal. I prefer to say "not terribly useful or accurate" rather than "not science".

In normal times, I could care less what the Atlantic chooses to publish under the name of "science". But right now, thoughtless misinformation from media authorities is leading to panic, and it's the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater.

To me, it's the equivalent of yelling "fire" in a theater crowded with 300 million people, all of whom are on fire.

Panic does not change the facts.

Don't you believe it's a good thing to discuss facts and findings about a pandemic which already infected a few million people around the world, and changed everyone's lives?

I mean,in the US alone covid already killed nearly 190k people from a pool of around 6200k infected. Doesn't this justify having informed evidence-based discussions?

A lot of people need to have control of their lives.

One manifestation of this is when they look at people that have bad things happening to them, they come up with a list of how they can avoid that thing happening to them.

Sometimes those things are very reasonable - I'll avoid these dangerous behaviors, I'll engage in these good behaviors, I'll avoid those areas, etc. But sometimes the threats are not the kind that you can really avoid. Sometimes people respond by blaming the afflicted with having poor intrinsic attributes, as opposed to their own superior attributes. Sometimes people respond by simply disbelieving the afflicted, discounting evidence that they would have considered otherwise. Because it is simply too taxing to really consider the risk.

I don't know you from Adam, I have no idea if that's what's motivating you, but what you said reminds me of what other people say in that situation.

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