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Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

For the vast majority of cases, a long COVID diagnosis is extremely short on rigor. The best evidence available suggests most cases of "long COVID" are misattribution:

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

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I’ve seen it compared to the gulf war syndrome which happened to returning soldiers, a similar thing they spent forever looking for a cause (gas attacks etc) and never finding a physical cause. They determined it’s something that happens to people after a widespread traumatic event. Like a minor version of PTSD.

I’d love to see a study that took long COVID people and got them to do daily cardio exercise, go outside into nature, and sleep better (ie not over sleeping) and seeing if the symptoms improve vs a placebo group that sits inside all day reading doomer posts about COVID on Twitter/Facebook.

This sentiment (which is unfortunately rampant) is incredibly ignorant of the actual disease and infantilizes it's victims. I'd LOVE to see people who espouse this idea- go and do some more research about the disease they clearly don't have, and have not experienced first-hand.

Is it that we over-diagnose long COVID? Or that we under-diagnose post viral fatigue more generally?

I remember a close family member having a nasty viral infection aged 32/33 - not exactly old and frail - and they left it a very different person in terms of energy and general health. It really did take a year or so to clear up.

We over diagnose. It's taboo to discuss the fact that population is tumblr/twitter types, and not people that are well adjusted. It's a contagion, but it's not spread by a virus. Most people with Long COVID recover through increased exercise and improved diet. They're just depressed, which is of course a real illness, but it's more to do with burn out from social media hysteria.

Any mention of this on HN results in immediate downvote brigade.

You get down voted because there are thousands of people suffering from real physical symptoms of this - like clots and tachycardia - and you are waving away the symptoms as a mental illness.

What a joke; I hope no one ever does that to you.

Should we not be Trusting the Science? This paper is The Science.

You aren't wrong, but "the science" figured out that Epstein-Barr was connected to multiple sclerosis _last year_. Maybe some skepticism that things aren't settled is warranted - especially with something so new.

> real physical symptoms of this - like clots and tachycardia

I think what GP was talking about when saying overdiagnoses was LC diagnoses where no physical symptoms are present.

"It can't be depression because my wife has it. You need to do more research, please subscribe to doomerist facebook groups to read all about it."

We've both been downvoted to oblivion, which at this point means we're right. COVID really broke a lot of people mentally

The evidence seems to suggest that people often get sick without a clear cause, and due to widespread fear about COVID, the sickness is often being misattributed to long COVID when that happens.

Not necessarily the best or the latest evidence...

See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41579-022-00846-2

With a totally straight face,

“With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work7, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages”

And I thought it was the Fed!

So this line needs a lot of context due to the nature of academia. It's best not to read much into it. What ends up happening is that you do some research, type it all up into a paper and then your advisor makes you add something to connect your results to the "real world." And because it's a study on virology not economics the author will just speculate on some stuff that'll later be used for marketing fodder or grant writing to say the university is working on important things. Which they are, but important work doesn't sell. Important work that laypeople recognize as important sells. And when you want government money connecting it to jobs -- ooo boy.

Sigh, That's not a study that's an article reviewing other cherry picked articles. It doesn't really mean all that much tbh. You would have to review what this review is reviewing.

Long covid is still not properly defined and is more of a blanket term of feeling like shit after virus infection

List includes https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/covid-19/long-term-effects-of-...

* extreme tiredness (fatigue) * feeling short of breath * loss of smell * muscle aches

OR.

* problems with your memory and concentration ("brain fog") * chest pain or tightness * difficulty sleeping (insomnia) * heart palpitations * dizziness * pins and needles * joint pain * depression and anxiety * tinnitus, earaches * feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite * a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste * rashes

Many of these symptoms are simply post viral fatigue https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619#what-is-it. Post-viral syndrome may cause additional symptoms, such as:

* confusion * trouble concentrating * headaches * aches and pains in the muscles * stiff joints * a sore throat * swollen lymph nodes Which was considered perfectly normal before the big C.

Maybe long covid is a thing, but it really needs proper definition then.

How sick I am of the Covid nutters. If you want research money for something it seems to be just enough to slap some covid label or other and a cheque will be written no questions asked.

Also nature is falling from grace as a top notch elite non-partisan publisher as they have definitely turned partisan in the last few years, they still had the courage to publish the devastating outcome of their political agenda though

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01537-5.

I've got 3 friends with brain fog symptoms after 3 years of a COVID infection.

I myself take 6 months to have my brain work like before after contact with someone with COVID.

Wym "maybe long covid is a thing"? Didn't the deaths show the response to COVID is extremely varied already? I'm happy you didn't have it but I bet you know someone that does.

I agree Nature is admittedly dodgy to the left if the issue is political (climate change models, the infamous proximal Origins) but I honestly don't see long COVID being one.

Correlation doesn't equate to causation. Sub-optimal health is pervasive. Misattributing it to long COVID—as the evidence suggests is what's happening—is entirely plausible.

The 10% claim of that review is based on this study:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

This study does not control for psychosocial factors, like the impact of anxiety and social isolation emanating from a positive COVID diagnosis.

So this is another example of the lack of rigor seen in claims about long COVID.

Obviously it's potentially very different across species but we've found what appears to be a way COVID-19 damages dogs that exhibited no ordinary symptoms of disease, in what I think was every dog infected in the study. So perhaps a human would show no symptoms after infection but still have damage from infection via a similar route.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/29/11/23-0804_article

A study from 2021 using data from early that year is going to be woefully out of date by now.

The strains in 2020 were by far the most dangerous, both due to the inherent virulence of the strains and the much lower levels of pre-existing immunity in those who were infected compared to more recent times.

COVID seems to have become a conflict line between the left and the right, where the left wants it to be seen as more dangerous to justify the government shutdowns of businesses and restrictions on freedom of movement and association, and the right wants to expose those government controls as unjustified and disproportionate.

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