Long Covid is destroying careers, leaving economic distress in its wake
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The people in the article are suffering from many events at the same time, losing jobs, having financial distress, suffering from a scary illness, being locked down at home, having children locked down at home, a likely disruption of any pre-existing mental health care - many of these for the course of years.
I think it is likely that the lockdowns, loss of jobs, etc is leading a widespread increase in depression. This increase would be completely independent of whether a person had previously contracted Covid. The symptoms listed in this article are all just symptoms of clinical depression. I think the most likely hypothesis, which would at least need to be discounted to claim that there is some kind of chronic Covid symptoms lasting years, is that people who previously had Covid are more likely to be suffering depression in recent years but only at the same rate that everyone else is also more likely to be suffering depression.
Long COVID "a thing" because studies have found that it's common for at least one disease symptom to persist well beyond the initial phase of the illness.
> In this systematic review of 45 studies including 9751 participants with COVID-19, the median proportion of individuals who experienced at least 1 persistent symptom was 73%
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
> Findings suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection should not be automatically ascribed to SARS-CoV-2; a complete medical evaluation may be needed to prevent erroneously attributing symptoms to the virus.
It seems to me that we basically don’t know anything about Long COVID, up to and including its potential existence.
Symptoms included in your quoted stat include "any symptom", "generalized discomfort", depression, anxiety, headache, and a bunch of other that aren't even symptoms of covid. Anxiety is evidence of long covid symptoms? This is absurd, why do you bother to go find some terrible study to quote without having read it?
To answer your follow-up question about anxiety, severe Covid-19 presentations commonly exhibit neuroinflamation that may damage the nervous system and may manifest as a variety of psychiatric disorders, including anxiety.
This is likely why the authors of the original meta included these neuropsychiatric symptoms in their analysis.
And, I suspect this isn't confined to "Long Covid". I suspect this is true of all viruses. We don't seem to recover from virii as quickly as the medical system thinks.
The NIH has acknowledged that the drug is useful for treatment of acute cases, but I don't know of any guidance for treatment of long COVID.