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Comment by Eelongate | Hacker News Reader

When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place. And anecdotally, every last person I personally know that claims long covid is a person I already knew to be a hypochondriac.

I do believe some people will have lingering respiratory problems, as is the case for all viral respiratory illnesses. But I don't think there is much more to it than that, and I think most of the complaints come from the sort of people who always think they have the latest trendy affliction.

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> When people claiming to suffer from long covid are tested for antibodies, a substantial portion of them are revealed to have never had covid in the first place.

Source?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

As a counterpoint, I can find this meta-study:

https://evidence.nihr.ac.uk/themedreview/living-with-covid19...

> There is a widespread perception that people either die, get admitted to hospital or recover after two weeks. It is increasingly clear that for some people there is a distinct pathway of ongoing effects. There is an urgent need to better understand the symptom journey and the clinical risks that underlie that. People, their families and healthcare professionals need realistic expectations about what to expect.

It appears that this is from October 2020 with some links updated in January 2021. So, it's nearly a year old. My citation is from November 2021. Surely we've learned a significant amount about COVID in 2021.

Of course, these days, anyone can link to a "study" about anything that says anything you want it to say.

I mean, i just took that study from the Wikipedia page on long covid.

What you linked may be valid, but so far has zero citations and various critical discussion going on in the comments. Is this already published at all or is it a preprint?

I don't have enough time or knowledge to assess the validity of the claims, but based on that, the study I found on Wikipedia seems more trustworthy to me.

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