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bamboozled

Does "long Covid" actually exist, can one get a blood test, scan or something like that done to have it diagnosed?

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Yes, there are clear biological markers related to reported symptoms of Long COVID.

Increases in exhausted immune T cells and lower levels of cortisol.

Also, patient reported outcomes alone are sufficient to identify Long COVID patients with ~90% accuracy.

https://twitter.com/VirusesImmunity/status/15573941922251571...

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.08.09.22278592v...

Take this paper with a huge grain of salt. They went on a fishing expedition, then pointed an ML model at the data and reported some clusters. This is...questionable methodology. ML models will find a way to draw a discriminatory boundary for almost any classification problem.

On the other hand, there was this paper [1][2] from the NIH, which was a well-controlled, pre-registered cohort study, did pretty much every clinical test imaginable (about 150 different measurements per person), and found no measurable differences between "long covid" people and controls. This is a much better study, and rebuts the claim.

[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/98885...

[2] https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905

People with Long COVID May Still Have Spike Proteins in Their Blood

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-long-...

Let's be 100% clear: this is all speculation. I take no side on any of it, except to say that the evidence is bad, and what little good evidence there is doesn't support the hyperbolic claims of prevalence, nor does it support the claims of any particular mechanism or theory of what "long covid" is (if anything at all).

The federal reserve believes it exists and is a big enough threat to the labor force (and economy) of the nation that we need take action. They released this paper a few weeks ago: https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/long...

It seems pretty serious and real when the real money and power institutions in the country are getting concerned.

> It seems pretty serious and real when the real money and power institutions in the country are getting concerned.

Beware this sort of reasoning, especially after Havana Syndrome.

>It seems pretty serious and real when the real money and power institutions in the country are getting concerned.

or it's a convenient scapegoat to cover for their mismanagement of the economy as we deal with massive inflation and, by most common definitions, a recession

They're looking at the percent of people who have dropped out of the workforce for disability. It was steadily decreasing up until the pandemic and has now leveled out and might be increasing. That's bad at a macro level. Less people working, less output from the economy years from now. They weren't looking at the GDP right now or other recession indicators.

My blood pressure increased by 50% since getting covid 6 months ago and hasn’t come down since.

It’s been stable all my life and shot up in the span of a month.

If someone lives an unhealthy life and is regularly sick. Then they get covid and they recover. Yet symptoms continue mainly because they got sick with something else. Then it's long covid?

Long covid should be trivial to prove by analyzing the antivaxxer crowd.

What percentage of the antivaxxer crowd have long covid? Is it 0%?

No. Anecdotally, a lot of the people I know with long COVID were robustly healthy pre-COVID. One dude swam a mile every day, no drugs, no drink, no smoking, normal blood pressure. Now has continuous brain fog and can’t walk up stairs without wheezing.

Speculating about the antivax crowd is unhelpful. Many of them died. Some of them are lying and did get vaxxed.

I'm pretty convinced it's not a thing, or at least it's not COVID-specific.

People are attributing every ache, pain, sniffle, fatigue, and other symptom to "long covid" when they are more likely the random things we all experience from time to time, or they are among the people who have long recoveries from severe respiratory virus infections.

Long covid, like ME/CFS and fibromyalgia, is not well understood - that does not mean that it does not exist, and suggesting that it does not is hurtful to the millions of people currently suffering with the condition.

I don't think that suggesting that a possible affliction X is actually psychological or caused by something else is inherently harmful. It could just as easily lead to people getting the right treatment.

When speaking generally, that suggestion may be acceptable. The previous comment, however, specifically mentioned long covid. Biomarkers for long covid are known. Both patient experience and biological research confirm that long covid isn't psychological.

"Blood abnormalities found in people with Long Covid - Study implicates lack of key hormone, battle-weary immune cells, and reawakened viruses," https://www.science.org/content/article/blood-abnormalities-...

"Fewer microclots = less severe acute symptoms," https://twitter.com/resiapretorius/status/156015016679088128...

> The previous comment, however, specifically mentioned long covid. Biomarkers for long covid are known.

Biomarkers for long covid are NOT "known". The Iwasaki paper discussed in this article is methodologically questionable (if not poor), and this much better, well-controlled cohort study from the NIH found the exact opposite -- no indication of significant differences across about 150 different clinical markers:

https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-4905

If I'm being maximally generous to Iwasaki's group, the best I can say is that they've advanced a hypothesis that needs to be verified by others, using better methods, with better controls. We're a long, long way from "known biomarkers".

> Both patient experience and biological research confirm that long covid isn't psychological.

There is no such research to "confirm" this claim, and "patient experience" is not evidence. It's an assertion. In fact, one good study out of France found that "self-reported COVID-19 infection was associated with most persistent physical symptoms, whereas laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection was associated only with anosmia.":

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

About all you can say about "long covid" is that most of the existing research is of terrible quality, and the little that is well-controlled and high-quality doesn't confirm the most hyperbolic claims. If it is something other than psychosomatic illness, we don't know what it is, or how to diagnose it objectively.

That's what people say about my mental illness as well.

Also, In March I went into a bad psychosis, came out of it with Klonopin. The next day I did not feel well, took my temp that night; 99. Next day test COVID positive. Today my previous poor fatigue is even worse and my mood has been more unstable than ever.

I do not thing that me wanting to kill myself after walking a mile is something you all experience from time to time so shhhhhhhh.....

Do you have any data to back this opinion up?

Belief in having had COVID is more strongly associated with long COVID symptoms than actually having had COVID, as confirmed by antibody tests: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/27877...

Does the vaccine cause long COVID in some people?

Does people faking having long covid mean that no one has long COVID?

Can people have these symptoms from another disorder like ME/CFS for EBV infection?

Those are questions for you to research. The person you were replying to just asked for a piece of evidence and was offered one, they aren't the spokesperson for the anti-psychosomatic illness society. When you find the answers, you tell us.

Those are questions you should’ve considered before making your previous statement. I was just helping you think.

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