> (1) A COVID-19 infection can have long-term effects even in young people.
What is the rate of this?
What is the rate of this?
That said, it's notable that:
* They don't have a control group (makes it impossible to know what the baseline rate of these symptoms is in the population).
* They don't measure the various criteria for "organ impairment" before the participants caught covid (makes it impossible to know if the people who were found to be abnormal were abnormal before catching the virus -- there are a fair number of smokers and obese people in this sample, so this isn't an idle concern).
* They find a fairly strong association with hospitalization (i.e. the people who are sickest, end up having the most lingering symptoms).
* The people who were sickest tended to have the most pre-existing risk factors for the same outcomes being measured by the study (i.e. there's a hidden correlate).
Because of these limitations, you can't really draw any broad conclusions from this study. In general, I'd say that it shows that older / obese / unhealthy people are more likely to have both severe Covid, as well as concomitant symptoms of severe Covid.
To some of your other points, the high end leagues are quite well medically documented, and the individuals are quite healthy.
That said, it also appears for some individuals, initial “long term” damage (ongoing heart or liver problems three months after recovery) may be less or gone some six months in.
Seems answers are as yet by and large unresolved. In situations where one does not yet know the actual risk, one may prefer an abundance of caution over unknown “calculated” risk given the long tail of possible effects.
I'm aware of one publication, which showed 4 athletes with heart-inflammation markers in a sample of 26 athletes:
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamacardiology/fullarticle/...
If there are others you're aware of, I'm interested in the links.
For studyi these supposed long-term effects I like to look at SARS-1 studies since we’ve had almost two decades. What we find is a few months of raidological ling abnormalities that heal, and mild cognitive deficits that linger for up to a year before disappearing completely. SARS-1 is miles worse than SARS-2 so the idea that young asymptomatic COVID-19 cases will end up with long term health problems is just completely farcical.
Unfortunately reading these studies requires a very critical lens. You showed that in your above comments but, for example, the person alleging these unproven and speculative long term impacts appears not to take that critical approach.
Generally agreed. There have been a few papers on this, and most of them were...flawed. To say the least.
This paper is the latest to suggest lurking heart problems in young healthy people, and while the sample is quite small and the observed metrics are questionable, I haven't seen anyone seriously attack the methodology. But in general, I'm skeptical of the claim as well, and I wouldn't suggest that this paper is definitive evidence of anything.
"Unfortunately reading these studies requires a very critical lens. You showed that in your above comments but, for example, the person alleging these unproven and speculative long term impacts appears not to take that critical approach."
100% agreed. It's been a general problem with all of these Covid-related pre-prints. Terrible, flawed studies get picked up by the media and credulously reported. By the time the flaws are found by serious researchers, the media is on to the next headline, never taking time to correct the record.
> Symptoms might take a long time to fade; a study posted on the preprint server medRxiv in August followed up on people who had been hospitalized, and found that even a month after being discharged, more than 70% were reporting shortness of breath and 13.5% were still using oxygen at home.
> One study of 143 people with COVID-19 discharged from a hospital in Rome found that 53% had reported fatigue and 43% had shortness of breath an average of 2 months after their symptoms started. A study of patients in China showed that 25% had abnormal lung function after 3 months, and that 16% were still fatigued.
SARS-2 radiological abnormalities resolve in months and this is for hospitalized cases which are by definition more severe than your usual cases.
There is really no evidence of what you claim.
We’re now 7 months into the major part of this pandemic and people are still stuck citing the fears we all had in April.
very haphazard but at least will give you pointers to most of the studies
> Evidence from people infected with other coronaviruses suggests that the damage will linger for some. A study published in February recorded long-term lung harm from SARS, which is caused by SARS-CoV-1. Between 2003 and 2018, Peixun Zhang at Peking University People’s Hospital in Beijing and his colleagues tracked the health of 71 people who had been hospitalized with SARS. Even after 15 years, 4.6% still had visible lesions on their lungs, and 38% had reduced diffusion capacity, meaning that their lungs were poor at transferring oxygen into the blood and removing carbon dioxide from it.