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> People could be experiencing these symptoms for a multitude of reasons including, but not limited to, government mandates, rules, policies, inflation, economic difficulties, isolation, remote work, etc.

But if people who have tested positive experience these symptoms at a higher rate than people who haven’t, while both populations are exposed to mandates, inflation, etc., then it is reasonable to question whether mandates, inflation, etc. are the cause or the long-term effects of COVID.

I agree, but that is not what the study in the linked article shows. It looks like they only looked at people who had previously tested positive for COVID:

> They ran an analysis of the first 509 COVID patients treated at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and, in a paper published later that year, reported that 42 percent of them experienced neurological symptoms upon contracting COVID, 63 percent upon being hospitalized, and 82 percent over the entire course of the disease.

From what I have seen, this is the same with the other long COVID studies I have seen as well as the other references in this article. Do you have an example of a study that compares long COVID symptoms of people who tested positive compared to people who never had COVID? I would be very interested in reading that.

People who tested positive have definitely had more psychological stress, simply due to knowing they tested positive, which added up to the before mentioned stress factors.

Also, people who took tests in the first place are people who were more likely to feel stressed due to the existence of this disease than people who never did any test at all.

It is possible that people who got covid have increased anxiety about long covid which leads to additional issues.

Correlation may not equal causation, but correlation does define syndromes. In medicine, a "syndrome" is any collection of findings that tend to occur together. A syndromic label says nothing about how or why the findings occur together, only that they do.

As syndromes become better understood, they can morph into a disease. For example, swollen lymph nodes in gay men was a syndrome in 1981, but as knowledge evolved, we came to know it as AIDS and then HIV.

So "long covid" is definitely a syndrome. Hopefully medical science will someday learn enough to know whether it is a disease or not.

Couldn't we just prove this by brain-scanning long covid people and brain-scanning people who don't have long covid but lived through the pandemic anyways? My understanding is that long covid actually has measurable brain scan abnormalities that anxiety, depression, or whatever can't explain...

Alas, no. Research is starting to find biomarkers for long Covid. (IIRC, it's mostly antigen presence right now).

That's part of the problem. We don't have clear biomarkers, we don't have a clear definition what it is, we don't have agreement what symptoms exactly are included, and we aren't even fully aligned on what "long" means. (>4 weeks? >6 weeks? >3 months?)

Post-exertional malaise (PEM) is probably the most agreed upon core symptom of LongCovid and is easy to test. Do a max exertion exercise two days apart, if the second one is nowhere near the first one then it’s likely you have PEM and LongCovid.

A two-day cardiopulmonary exercise test can be useful to diagnose ME/CFS regardless of whether it was caused by a SARS-CoV-2 infection or something else. But it's not definitive by itself. Maximum exercise capacity varies significantly day-to-day for the same individual based on nutrition, sleep, alcohol consumption, menstrual cycle, mental state, and other factors. In most test protocols they stop when the patient gives up, but some days people are just more willing to suffer and push through the pain to get a little farther. We can get some additional clues by looking at certain objective measures like HRV but even that isn't definitive.

Long COVID is really more of a syndrome, a rough grouping of symptoms rather that a specific condition. It's so vague and covers such a wide range of different symptoms as to be clinically useless.

People with PEM won't get anywhere close to their original score. Those who have it bad won't even be able to get out of bed.

Long Covid is ME/CFS re-branded. Some people / institutions muddy the water with other PASC organ damage but a real effort is being made to disambiguate it.

That's correct, we know that COVID can and does have an effect on the brain but we don't know the extent of what it does or how it relates to what people colloquially call Long COVID.

That said, it's always disappointing to see people push quackery like dietary fixes or claiming it's just a sociological thing. Especially the sociological angle because it isn't just limited to places like the US (where I presume people are pushing the theory for political reasons). It appears in places regardless if they did full on lockdowns or did a more light touch like in Sweden. It makes me think that nowadays people would claim Shingles is fake and made up and unrelated to Chicken Pox.

Unsurprisingly the sociological origins for long covid are being pushed very hard in Sweden. Due to the nature of public health care and very narrow opinion corridor, this also means no care at all for LC for those affected.

Virtually every qualified professional (by their opinion or their qualifications) jumped into the fight against COVID (and in some cases the fight against the fight against COVID). Long COVID is receiving a minute fraction of the attention because the risks are so much lower. Almost everyone’s gone back to their day jobs while governments, non profits, and corporations allocate resources by consensus as is done in peaceful times.

High quality disease research takes place over years and decades through hundreds to thousands of studies. We’re still looking for a cure for HIV, long COVID could be harder to treat. We have no idea.

There are two pieces here which need to be picked apart:

1) Does Long Covid exist differentially relative to others who went through the pandemic?

2) Has the medical establishment been sweeping aside a whole host of genuine complaints of unspecified origin that are now landing under "Long Covid"?

What is becoming increasingly clear is that viruses suck worse than anybody thought, and we need to start paying attention to that.

Some of this could be related to the corticosteroids (glucocorticoids) sometimes given to treat long COVID:

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/08/30/health/oral-inhaled-stero...

https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/8/e062446

This is also given to sufferers of asthma and hayfever.

Very anecdotal but the people I know who got long COVID were all doing perfectly fine until after they got COVID. So, at least the 2+ years before they got omicron didn't cause them to be depressed. They also are not affected by the economic situation and have stable jobs. None of them have any material differences in circumstances compared to before they had COVID and all of them had COVID late in the omicron wave after being fully vaccinated.

Of course, that's purely anecdotal but it does hint that there must be something else happening.

Elephant in room.

It's also quite possible that the covid infection itself didn't cause those symptoms, but the experience of getting sick, having to quarantine, telling people you have a disease everyone is afraid of, etc. causes mental stress that leads to persistent depression and anxiety.

Ha listen to you denying something tens of millions of people are suffering with is even real.

It's taking out athletes, professional athletes, left and right.

There are multiple studies showing severe mitochondria dysfunction for months, years afterwards.

It's even identical to the years after the original SARS in 2003.

But yeah, must not be real because you read some papers.

I guess one person at a time has to experience it for themselves but then it's too late because there's no actual cure like ME-CFS, your life quality just sucks for whatever time you have left.

They didn’t deny long covid is real. They explained that this particular study is shit science because it didn’t control for these very basic confounding factors.

>If your state of mind and anxiety about things are included as “long COVID” symptoms, it makes sense that the peace of mind offered to people who get vaccinated would put them in a better head space to not experience these symptoms regardless of how effective the vaccines are.

Correlation does not equal causation.

No, but when a certain set of symptoms are expected in a certain situation, it does not make sense to invent a new hypothetical disease without having any proof of it except for those very symptoms.

Long COVID is not a "new hypothetical disease" but a collection of various post COVID symptoms that have strong correlations (hi!) with pre-existing non-psychological conditions. The fact that these disparate health issues are grouped into this neat-sounding category is unfortunate I agree, but also is a consequence of you know, millions and millions of people with issues all at once.

This post completely blows off & tells people who keep feeling something that they are wrong & unjustified, that since we're not fully sure we can believe them & it's not worth regarding their cases as real.

I not humbly disagree. I dont see how we could ever even begin to be a society if we allow mistrust & rejection of possibilities to be the primary shaper of our opinions & positions. The refusal to regard here is actively harmful.

> I read some of the “Long COVID” studies a while back, and they all included things like anxiety, depression, and mental state weeks or months after testing positive for COVID. Linking this to COVID is an example of bad science.

Yo, what? Excuse you? You're going to disregard people's reports & assessments, call it bad science, just throw up correlation does not equal causation qed & pretend like the job is done? People feel like shit, have incredibly fuzzy brain states for a while after covid. Even those who physically (aerobically) recover still doubt how healed their are, are anxious because the brain still feels behind. Maybe some of this anxiety you disregard is because they are never sure if they ever will really truly ever recover; this has felt like shit to me and Im never sure Im back to who I was before this ordeal. That seems widely reported, real to me & I'd expect some familiarity with thay from others. That feeling of brain fog is real, that worrying & anxiety is real although perhaps not directly entirely attributable, but a serious & clear & inarguable & concerning secondary effect that we frankly dont have a ton of good data to help people fully through. Even if we did have the data, people are still allowed to be afraid. Afraid of flying, afraid of escallators, afraid their bloody mind is scrambled & not really recovering like it should be.

Sorry comrade but science aint always so simple & clear & direct. Finding out can be hard. Just because the facts dont conveniently line up to make sometbing clear right away doesnt give you license to disresged, to ignore possibly real information. There's a word for argumentation that tries to make information in general less believed, less real: disinformation. Please dont border so close to being actively denialist of possoble validity.

Look, it might be annoying, but if it weren't for that kind of attitude they'd have already discovered all the science and written all of the software a few thousand years ago in Babylon and we'd be out of work.

> This post completely blows off & tells people who keep feeling something that they are wrong & unjustified, that since we're not fully sure we can believe them & it's not worth regarding their cases as real.

No, it does not. It's just saying that anxiety and depression are completely normal reactions to the global pandemic crisis. If someone is claiming that "long" COVID is a thing, they need to have better evidence than "people are depressed and anxious".

The rest of your post is written in a confrontational attitude that I don't even want to read.

> The rest of your post is written in a confrontational attitude that I don't even want to read.

That's a shame. I felt the same way when I started reading your post, but I did finish it. That's how I know you'd benefit from reading a little further - they go on to explain what you're missing.

> It's just saying that anxiety and depression are completely normal reactions to the global pandemic crisis.

You forgot "mental state" in that list of things the person said were almost certainly not covid & shouldnt be believed or trusted as being a part of long covid.

> The rest of your post is written in a confrontational attitude that I don't even want to read.

The original @fsociety999 parent was "confrontational" against reports & beliefs that are widely reported & I dont want to read that disinformation & cruel hot take skepticism either. But I did & I responded, because it matters & even the bad, especially the bad, needs addressing. My post is far from perfect & saintly & I absolutely could do better, but this was actively disdainful posting making up preffered causes & excuses to disregard what seems like quite possibly real & evident meaning.

I came here to read and basically make this comment.

The GP was very dismissive - or at least cast FUD on the whole notion.

We are in this place where we are the best experts about our own body, yet at the same time that experience and knowledge is being cast doubt on because ... why exactly? Why is it so hard to take people seriously?

Other comments in here seem to be basically like "well you were fragile/brain weird before so whatever I guess".

Just remember, every person who is struggling after a bout of COVID and not feeling right... that is a person, that could be your friend, parent, sibling, loved one...

Ultimately the proper response imo is "that is really concerning and we should do more research" rather than "well this happens after every illness". Which is "true" but also not really true, simply because long covid is way more prevalent than lingering symptoms after EB, the flu, colds, etc.

That was already happening before COVID.

I'm not surprised that people are more depressed and anxious after 2 years of no fun, no social interaction and being locked up in their homes.

Calling it "long COVID" is just another piece of disinformation trying to make COVID look bigger than what it is.

Also covering narrative of "great" and "safe" experimental vaccines.