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Here is the study https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

The study has this line which caught my attention:

> The incidence of any psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis was 18·1% (95% CI 17·6–18·6), including 5·8% (5·2–6·4) that were a first diagnosis.

So only 5.8% of people got a first diagnosis, and the remainder of the 18% were people who had been previously diagnosed with one of these conditions.

This seems to contradict what is written in the linked article:

> In the three months following testing positive for COVID-19, 1 in 5 survivors were recorded as having a first time diagnosis of anxiety, depression or insomnia.

So it seems like the linked article has a bit of hyperbole in it.

The abstract says it’s “reoccurrence” so the r implication is that these cases had been previusy cured. It’s technically correct to include this as incidence. Even so, the new cases are statistically significant.

EDIT I can only presume this is all stress related. From the people I know that got COVID they found it a fairly tough experience.

Not to mention you have to tell all of your friends aand family that you were in contact with that you may have given them covid. Thats been a huge anxiety trigger for my friends that have gone through it. Can you imagine the guilt if someone you gave it to dies from it?

I know someone who's had to go into quarantine 3 times already because their coworkers have tested positive, luckily they themselves didn't contract it any of those times, but just the stress now of having been in quarantine for over a month during this, having to take time off work, worrying about whether they brought it home to their family hasn't been good on their mental state. This person's been real down for months.

>The article provides no link to the actual study.

They say that the study is in the Lancet Psychiatry. If you highlight "Lancet Psychiatry," right click, and search Google, this study is on the front of the site. Put in some effort FFS.

>Without any link to the study, this is meaningless information. This article is implying the virus directly caused those symptoms. [...] There's no mention of the effects a possible quarantine may have on one's mental health.

They consulted a medical expert on the matter. If you'd have read a bit more of the article you would have come across this quote from an actual psychiatrist:

“This is likely due to a combination of the psychological stressors associated with this particular pandemic and the physical effects of the illness.”

Oh, so the article actually does mention the effects that the quarantine might have on mental health. Did you just not read it? You could also have read the study, which does indeed suggest that the virus itself could be causing these problems:

"Rates of insomnia diagnosis were also markedly elevated, in agreement with predictions that circadian disturbances will follow COVID-19 infection."

You also conveniently left out that rates of diagnosis for dementia are elevated in Covid-19 patients, which is very unlikely to be caused by acute stress.

>Why is this assumed to be something the virus is directly causing as a symptom rather than looking into anything else?

Again, it's NOT just assumed that this is the case, and in the case of dementia, there's no evidence that the quarantine is even possibly a factor.

Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet.

You are correct about independent research and verification, however they dropped the ball by not linking the cited paper.

> They say that the study is in the Lancet Psychiatry. If you highlight "Lancet Psychiatry," right click, and search Google, this study is on the front of the site. Put in some effort FFS.

Don't really think this is how citing sources works. "Find them yourself" isn't a valid citation strategy.

You could argue that mentioning Lancet Psychiatry is a citation. But to be fair the parent's reply is overly confrontational

Lancet publishes hundreds of papers per year. It's like citing google as a citation. You can definitely find it in there but that doesn't make it the right way of working.

This is a very good point. I just moved to a region with a strong and effective quarantine. I had already been seeing almost no people inside where I was so I figured I could handle it.

Way harder than I expected, especially around days 7-10. And covid patients are sick while doing it.

I’m fine, I’m pretty resilient. But I could see how if someone was already vulnerable that experience could tip them over. And I was able to walk in a yard so it was easier than a lot of people have it.

It'd also be worth comparing it to the population as a whole which I'm sure is also seeing an increase in things like "anxiety, depression and insomnia."

The paper compares to a group of people diagnosed with influenza (and a number of other things), as a control. For the flu, they find that 13.3% of these people had the same symptoms (vs. 18.8% in the covid cohort; ratio = 1.41). This is in Table 3.

Table 2 shows you the similar analysis, but just for first-time diagnoses, and these are 5.8% (covid) vs. 2.8% (influenza) for a ratio of 2.07. So while there do appear to be differences in the groups, focusing on the absolute percentage in the covid cohort alone is a misleading and fear-mongering way to interpret the results.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

That would imply 1 in 10 non-COVID patients had a first time diagnosis of these things in a 3 month period. Sounds pretty high to me.

Edit: but perhaps believable given the pandemic and lockdowns

> you're put into isolation and quarantine for a minimum of 14 days

Many countries have the same measures in place if you come into contact with someone who later tests positive, and then require a negative test before you are 'released', so it should be easy to study how much an affect quarantine alone has.

Providing no links to anything except for other articles by the same publisher seems to be par for the journalism course these days.