Setting the record straight: There is no 'Covid heart'

The general Internet has a tendency to consider individual papers authoritative summaries of the general state of a field. And single studies rarely have that predictive power. For instance, one might read a single paper about a single study that says "Doubling of rectal cancer risk occurs if red meat is consumed right after sugar intake", and most Internet commentary will attempt to show this as incontrovertible truth. However, few such studies actually last or survive replication.

i.e. most Internet commentary over-weights single study results, with near binary probability of truth measures: either something is almost certain or almost never.

Would prefer a place where I can discuss with people who are less stridently enthusiastic about these papers, and where long membership retains historical prediction performance (I don't mind people disregarding my future predictions if my current predictions are poor) with appropriate windowing to permit learning.

This is actually related to the stuff I'm referring to in my cousin comment. Existence proofs are not evidence of certain behaviour. An analogous situation might be "If you see a car slow down approaching a pedestrian crossing with a Stop sign it is likely to stop". Most pedestrians will consider this statement true (as evinced by how they behave - placing themselves in range of bodily harm). However, many pedestrians know that at least one car has not behaved in this manner. Responding to someone who agrees with that statement with "Cars certainly do blow through stop signs even if they're slowing down. Here are some news articles of that happening" only marginally moves the evidence-o-meter.

Some things need empirical understanding. "Related counter-examples" do not set the likelihood of the statement to zero, but only downgrade it somewhat.

Personally, I've found my performance on COVID predictions pretty decent. My biggest failure was that I believed outdoor masking was necessary, and it currently looks like that is not the case.

We shall see if Long COVID is any sort of true long-term disease that is particularly unique or merely the identification of other symptoms that previously went untested simply because most illnesses go untested.

And of course I have no problem with anyone sounding small alarms on small studies. A sufficient number of independent such instances is how we identify common patterns. I, obviously, weight each individual such instance low but corroboration increases likelihood. Still, we'll see. Currently, my method of acquiring knowledge outperforms public CDC statements about the disease¹, so I'm at least better at this than they are.

¹ Assuming, perhaps naïvely, that they prioritize dissemination of truth over public health objectives that may temporarily be better met through carefully told untruths.