> Between 1 January 2020 and 31 March 2022, the New York State Insurers Fund analysed more than 3,000 workers' compensation claims for COVID-19.
Hard to take this at face value; I could easily see the vast majority of these claims being grift.
People with long COVID - even if you believe it's all psychosomatic, or caused by fibromyalgia, or whatever - have had a lot of trouble accessing treatment this whole time. Even if 90% of them were somehow making it up, I think it's awful that the remaining 10% of "real" cases had to deal with so many barriers to access care. All as a part of our societal effort to pretend the virus is over.
Someone says they still have problems breathing 6 months after a moderate covid case? I’ll believe them by default.
Someone says they feel demotivated at work 6 months after a mild case? I’ll be skeptical.
What I am arguing here, is that the 3000 people who have "long covid" aren't responsible for categorizing their disease, they are sick and just want to feel better. It's the medical community's responsibility to determine if that's because "long covid" is an actual disease, or if it's a set of disparate symptoms that many people have that were kicked off by covid, or something else entirely. Just because their "government services applications paperwork" (or whatever we call that stuff) says "long covid" that does not mean that later we should say they were defrauding the goverment if we find out they were actually suffering from a major lung cancer and it just so happened to coincide with some symptoms many other people were having due to everyone getting covid around the same time and as such their doctor(s) put "long covid" down as a probable cause.
It's a logical fallacy that the OP made, and I pointed out that it is unlikely all 3000 are scammers. I am sure some percentage of those people are scammers, statistically.
Says who? My prior is that all, or at least most, of the symptoms of long covid are caused by covid. Why is your prior better than mine?
It's called the burden of proof. The person(s) making a claim is the one obligated to provide proof of it.
It’s really weird to get super skeptical of people’s claims only for a specific disease or a specific type of person.
Harvard study linking preexisting mental illness to Long Covid claims: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/depression-an...
Journal article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-dubious-origins-of-long-cov...
Overlap with fibromyalgia, which is also untestable and mainly in depressed middle age white women: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34426540/
It’s hokum.
I specifically am arguing against jumping to the "scammer" conclusion immediately and without any question. I totally forgot HN is full of medical doctors who know everything about covid and it's effects.
Whether it be astroturfing or other means originally founded by pharmaceutical companies knowing they originally did not test drugs for mitochondrial toxicity prior to Phase 1 trials, the source remains to be seen.
The fact is that people are by and large developing metabolic dysfunction earlier on, and things like antibiotics drastically accelerate the problem. Bactericidal antibiotics are widely known in research now to be seriously toxic to mitochondria and the damage they cause leads to chronic processes because mitochondria do not have effective repair mechanisms outside of copies. When they start reproducing mutated copies, the person does not get off scot-free anymore. Processed foods and air pollution and chemical exposures from foods and other things all additionally cause more dysregulation. This is all becoming way more widely known.
Some percentage of people will just not bounce back after these insults. Respiratory viruses and bacterial infections induce a large amount of oxidative stress in the human body, largely caused by your own immune system. Normally, your body has redox mechanisms to balance this out so you are fine in the end (otherwise running would cause a lot of problems really quickly!). But combining our toxic environment, toxic antibiotics that most people take (and many women take bactericidal antibiotics for UTIs!), high processed food diets leading to excessive baseline OS, you potentiate the risk for the individuals own mitochondrial machinery to be severely damaged from a high OS insult. After that, you don't bounce back. You develop chronic fatigue and severe exercise intolerance, and have much more precarious relationships with other illnesses.
This is what's happening. Depression other mental disorders are already strongly associated with metabolic dysregulation in research.
Don't blame the victims. It's likely you'll become one yourself before you're very old. Everyone is getting sicker.
mitochondria are the victims of everything detrimental to the body because they're integral to the body in general.
Likewise they are benefactors of many things beneficial to the body.
Mitochondrial function impairment is integral to most chronic disease processes. It's not really like a novel thing. It's just expected.
1. The Harvard write-up explicitly disagrees with you:
> Mental health is known to affect the outcomes of some diseases. . . In other acute respiratory tract infections, such as flu or common cold, mental health conditions are associated with greater severity and longer duration of symptoms. Previous studies have also suggested that distress is associated with chronic symptoms following Lyme disease and in chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, which have symptoms similar to those of long COVID.
2. The Wall Street Journal opinion piece was written by a medical trainee and widely ridiculed by established professionals. It was also rebutted in separate Wall Street Journal opinion pieces at https://www.wsj.com/articles/covids-lasting-effects-deserve-....
3. The PubMed abstract also explicitly disagrees with you. You said "mainly in depressed middle age[sic] white women". The linked page says "Conclusion: Our data suggest that clinical features of FM are common in patients who recovered from COVID-19 and that obesity and male gender affect the risk of developing post-COVID-19 FM." Emphasis mine.
I wonder how fast would their long COVID disappear if their sick pay was cut immediately, miraclous cure! The reason why you don't see self employed people with "long COVID".
Given that it's exceptionally hard to get on the disability rolls in the US, it's likely that those 3000 claims actually have merit.