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Comment by khazhoux | Hacker News Reader

The onus is on proving that all these disparate symptoms were caused by covid. The evidence remains (as far as I’ve seen) circumstantial.

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It's fascinating to me that we have widespread incidence of long-term health complications in people who caught a relatively new, not-deeply-understood virus, and the evidence being (as far as you've seen) circumstantial means that it must be made up, by default. Why exactly is it necessary to prove that these symptoms are COVID-related when that's the most natural conclusion? What is your alternative hypothesis that explains everything and is supported by better evidence?

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.

I‘m not part of any societal effort to pretend it’s 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.

That's a fair assessment, IMO. I believe that only a small, small minority of humans are going to be out to scam or do fraud (personal belief, obviously) and so from that lens, I hate it when people try and paint a group of people with a broad brush simply because they might believe something that is not factually correct, but in reality it's the best solution for now.

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.

> The onus is on proving that all these disparate symptoms were caused by covid.

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?

Because you can’t prove a negative. May as well claim that the symptoms are Gods Will and demand proof to the contrary.

> 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.

How can I prove to you that I have a headache? At a certain point you just have to listen to patients and trust them.

It’s really weird to get super skeptical of people’s claims only for a specific disease or a specific type of person.

My skepticism is not whether they really have foot pain or are unmotivated at work. The question is whether it was caused by a mild COVID case half a year ago.

If you're interested in winning a debate, a naive "burden of proof" analysis works. But if you're interested in aligning your beliefs with the truth, you should be using Bayesian reasoning. (Not to sound too much like Eliezer Y here.)

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