It makes sense for a lot of people in the US to be scared of COVID, it is a dangerous, infectious disease after all.
there is active research on the topic but no conclusive evidence that it's any more than a form of negative hawthorne effect and/or hypochondriasis.
>The authors mined electronic health records identif[ying] 353,164 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 between March 2020 and November 2021. They then matched each COVID-19 patient in a ratio of one to five with 1,640,776 control patients. All of the survivors and controls were monitored for at least a month and up to a year. Overall, 38.2 percent of COVID-19 survivors developed a post-COVID condition, compared with 16 percent of uninfected controls.
(Also note that the “post-COVID conditions” include things as minor as a persistent cough.)
The real headline should be "More than 1-in-5 COVID cases serious enough to be noted in medical records may result in long-term symptoms, greatly ranging in severity."
Upwards of 60% of the US had been infected with COVID as of April 2022 [0]. If serious long-COVID symptoms indeed occurred in upwards of 20% of COVID cases, that would mean >12% of Americans are currently suffering from debilitating long-term illness, which would be obvious on a societal level. We simply do not see this.
[0] https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20220426/almost-60-percent-i...
and a science writer is often writing about science far afield of their narrow education/research. the author of this very article is the "automotive editor" at ars, not a marine biologist, or anything close to it.
"expert" is a normative (aka political) nominative, not a descriptive one.
The author has a PhD in Pharmacology. Biology is an integral part of Pharmacology.
Not to mention that if you click through the author's article history, the most recent three pages of articles he's written (over 100 articles) are exclusively about cars, not science. (Ok, one exception, looks like he wrote an article about Disney's Obi-Wan series.)
While I wouldn't say he has no domain knowledge at all, I don't think it's fair to say he has "expertise in marine biology". And he doesn't even write about stuff related to his credentialed field, at least not recently.
At the risk of committing the sin of No True Scotsman, perhaps these people don't really have the expertise they claim.
I would expect a journalist who has actual, real expertise in a particular field to be able to sort out the junk from the newsworthy, at least most of the time. If not, then I don't think their expertise really exists. Sure, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, but I would expect people with real expertise to be at least mostly reliable.
Equating the two is just nihilism or solipsism, as if there's no reality, just people saying things.
> they're not in this business for commonwealth, objective truth-seeking.
This is an attempted attack on motives, and again, not on any real substance.
> "Ars Technica is pretty good, partly because so many of their writers are experts with advanced degrees."
passes the test for "real substance"?
read both, and any other favored news service. read a small sample of their coverage and their self-serving motives jump right out of the page and slaps you silly like a rubber chicken. it's that obvious. and it is their problem, by association, since you're trying to make a (unsubstantiated) claim on reputation.
that's not to dismiss the threat of covid, but to merely put it in perspective. people at risk (elderly, or with co-morbidities) should get vaccinated and perhaps take other precautions. but none of that fearmongering did any good, and in fact, did a lot of bad, by sowing division rather than fostering unity.
There is some evidence. But as you said, it's a novel disease and still being studied.
https://www.bcm.edu/news/what-eegs-tell-us-about-covid-19-an...
Some of the EEG alterations found in COVID-19 patients may indicate damage to the brain that might not be able to be repaired after recovering from the disease.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de...
However. This is a long way from where things started.
*> that's not to dismiss the threat of covid’
Actually, I think what you’re doing is worse. As a doctor I’m happy to treat current covid as something we need to live with and get on with, but you’re actually dismissing the prior threat of COVID as well. Dismissing all the people who did die. Dismissing the 140,000 children who were orphaned in the US alone. Dismissing the real contribution of COVID to actual deaths - your distinction of ‘deaths from covid to deaths with covid’ is meaningless when excess mortality clearly shows that without the impact of covid the US population would be 1m higher than it is today.
The fact that you choose to see the COVID information as having sowed division speaks more to the bizarre information landscape you have in the US. Many other countries found the last couple of years intensely frustrating but managed to forge a sense of national spirit in fighting it, and as a result have significantly lower excess deaths, significantly less orphaned children, and significantly lower societal scars to bounce back from.
no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it". every single person on earth will get covid at some point. at best, we've delayed that point a little bit for some people, not to mention some shifting of mortality. note that liver disease and chirrosis deaths rose last year - why aren't we making video montages and pouring one out for them, or their orphaned children, again?
>no country has "significantly lower"-ed anything. at most, we have slightly different diffusion curves, but mortality and morbidity rates are going to be pretty similar regardless of how we were "fighting it".
This is simply not true. Countries that avoided early surges, avoided overrunning hospitals and were able to get their populations vaccinated and dealing with lower virulence covid strains have had lower overall deaths over the 2 and a half years of the pandemic.
Australia for example, had largely flat excess deaths in 2020 & 2021 (actually a reduction in 2020, due to no covid, reduced travel, no flu season). Australia started dealing with the actual burden of COVID in late 2021 and 2022, and has seen 10,000 COVID deaths so far. Excess deaths in 2022 is 17.5% above average for the year to end of May. [0, 1].
If the US had of been able to pull together, instead of, as you have, variously dismissing it as 'nothing more than the flu', 'no more important than Cancer and Heart disease deaths', or moving the goal posts and declaring that, essentially, the area under the curve will be the same but the timing will be different (which is at conflict with earlier points) - ie if the US had of been able to pull an Australia (or one of many other countries that didn't just totally shit the bed and hide their heads in the sand) than COVID deaths, scaled for population, could have been in the 150-200k range.
Or, to put it another way, if Australia had of shit the bed as badly as the US did, then Aus would have had 60,000 deaths.
[0] https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/measuring-australias-excess-... [1] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...
Unless they all would have died at that time regardless, in the absence of COVID, isn't this a distinction without relevance?
"with covid" is the same. that's why co-morbidities are almost universally indicated in covid deaths. it's because the people dying of covid are pretty unhealthy already, and covid is not the primary cause of death, but a contributing one, often a minor contributor at that.
the distinction is also important because it has multi-faceted follow-on effects. in terms of treatment, a doctor could otherwise have focused more on treating a co-morbidity than covid. a researcher might focus more on other ailments than covid. the public might have been less fearful and tribal. public health guidance might have been different. it has lots of relevance actually.
Add in how overly sensitive the tests were, especially pcr, testing for the virus and not for actual proof of infection... It's all a joke.