> if such a thing truly exists…
It exists.
Sounds like NIH got hijacked by a bunch of people who believed otherwise and required proof of pathobiology first.
It exists.
Sounds like NIH got hijacked by a bunch of people who believed otherwise and required proof of pathobiology first.
Like, why? Can you share any more information? Some reasons on why you're convinced of that statement? Or do you consider yourself so important that you expect your opinions to be taken as real arguments, as facts, as something self-evident?
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects/...
What I don't believe is that this kind of syndrome is specific to Covid, I suspect it holds for every serious virus you get infected with. The only difference this time is that the medical community is watching.
The fact that Epstein-Barr is causative with MS and HPV is causative with cervical cancer shows that the damage that even fairly mild virii do persists for a very long time.
Any claim that a virus doesn't cause persistent damage simply means you haven't looked very hard.
Of the dozens of people in my extended family that are 50+yo, few of whom were covid cautious, zero of them have reported symptoms resembling long covid. My parents are elderly as are all of the people they know. Zero of their friends have reported long covid, but they did know a couple of folks that died of it.
(Actually considering I've known about post-viral ME/CFS since sometime in the early-90s that makes it going on nearly 30 years of knowing about it. And I'm deeply uninterested in wasting my life debating about it with internet strangers.)
My experience is heavily biased towards people at risk for long covid. I live in TX surrounded by people who weren't too serious about covid. I have friends that got covid 3-4 times. I know people with actual measurable lung damage that have long term consequences in that sense, but I know _zero_ people with anything resembling "long covid". No one I know knows anyone who has long covid. I believe it exists because a wide range of other viruses have occasional mysterious long term effects, but what I don't believe is that it's possible for it to be anywhere close to as common as it's purported to be(figures like 10-30% of those infected were thrown around by news outlets back when I was paying attention). My personal bet is that the majority of peoples' symptoms are psychogenic with a small minority experiencing physiological effects worth studying.
You state that you don't know anyone who has long COVID one way or the other and then state that it must all be "psychogenic".
If it were that common to have fake long COVID you'd think you would know someone who was faking it.
Instead you have no experience with it and you're making sweeping pronouncements about it.
Yes, the studies finding 10-30% rates of long COVID were flawed, but they were usually of people who were hospitalized and they may have included the people you know who actually had lung damage.
And 3 million people can have long COVID and you might not know one of them since that is an incidence of 1-in-100 and even if someone you knew had it, it might not be so totally disabling that they couldn't keep up appearances and hide it from you.