Comment by PathOfEclipse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PathOfEclipse | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't care to further argue with you.

If you can't be bothered to make a good argument, then why make one at all? Also, I want to know, what kind of religious world view leads people like yourself to make evidence-less statements with an air of authority and then dig in your heel no matter how much evidence contradicts you?

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/docsum?fil...

Sorry. Linking to 15,000 publications doesn't count as providing a reference. Did that work for you in school?

>https://academic.oup.com/nar/article/51/D1/D1512/6814452

Linking to "300,000" articles also doesn't count as providing a reference, by the way. Let me know what school you went to so I can make sure my kids avoid that one.

> The placebo includes ritonavir, which does not have an effect on the virus, but will help ensure people don’t know whether they are in the Paxlovid or placebo group.

I think his point was that it was a poor choice of placebo.

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmatrelvir/ritonavir

"Ritonavir is not active against or thought to directly contribute to the antiviral activity of the medication against SARS-CoV-2."

I'm sure you can pick up that there is a difference between "we know for sure it has no relevant impact to the study" and "we think it doesn't have any relevant impact to the study."

I highly doubt you read through the relevant bits and instead jumped to argue further:

> One particular instance is the long-term symptoms experienced by a significant percentage of COVID-19 survivors, a condition named long COVID by the patients affected (4). Some survivors of acute COVID-19 began reporting symptoms lasting much longer than the amount of time then reported for clinical recovery. Long COVID has caused skepticisms and slow responses, and to date, there is no effective treatment (5). In contrast, there is now substantial evidence that a significant percentage of COVID-19 survivors experiencing ongoing multisystemic symptoms (6–8), including respiratory issues (9), cardiovascular disease (10), cognitive impairment (11) and profound fatigue (12).

> LitCovid has so far accumulated almost 10 000 long COVID articles (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/coronavirus/docsum?fil...) and nearly 70% of them do not mention long COVID by name in the title or abstract. We have further collected over 800 synonymous terms for long COVID and shared with the community.

This specific HN thread is a very well done publication. There are a number of prestigious institutions researching long covid and have published in nature, science, cell, jama, and more. Use the tool I just linked so you can confirm that. Perhaps you can stop with the ad hominem.

> I highly doubt you read through the relevant bits and instead jumped to argue further:

What do the relevant bits you cited have to do with you providing evidence that the research on long covid is high-quality or conclusive? I guess I should define conclusive while I'm here:

1) conclusively defines and scopes long COVID symptoms and disambiguates those symptoms from symptoms of other conditions.

2) conclusively determines the cause(s) of long COVID.

3) conclusively determines a treatment.

We already know, even from your links, that there is little to nothing for 2) or 3), and we can argue that 1) still isn't well-defined to this day.

Here's another direct reference for you from June of this year: https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/long-covid-symptoms

Begin Quote:

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines Long COVID as “the continuation or development of new symptoms 3 months after the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection, with these symptoms lasting for at least 2 months with no other explanation.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adds that Long COVID includes a wide range of ongoing health problems that can last weeks, months, or years. The condition can affect any part of the body, and serious cases may affect multiple body systems, including the heart, lungs, kidneys, skin, and brain.

End Quote.

If the definition of symptoms includes any "new symptom" after 3 months "with no other explanation" and if it includes a "wide range of ongoing health problems", then it's pretty clear no one has conclusively scoped out what long COVID is and what it is not. "Oh, I see you're sick and we can't come up with a reason why. Let's chalk it up long COVID!"

And, of course, the best quote: "Long COVID, the condition where symptoms that surface after recovering from COVID-19 linger for weeks, months, or even years, is still a mystery to doctors and researchers.".

So there you have it. Thousands of research articles, no conclusive set of symptoms, no conclusive causes, no conclusive treatments, and still a mystery to researchers.

Go read my upvoted comment on this post. It gives you insights into #1 and #2. #3 doesn't exist. That's why there's over 800(400 long covid, 400 covid) clinical trials going on right now for it.

Well, here's your first link: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

It says nothing remotely conclusive about 1), 2), or 3). It literally only says "Here's some hypotheses. We need more research."

And I think I'm done wasting my time with you. I've given you ample opportunity come up with something even a tiny fraction as definitive as the references I've given you and you've failed multiple times in a row.

Good luck! Science isn't definitive by the way. Wishing you the best.

Early on in the AIDS epidemic, what did we know from your 1) 2) 3)?

We had no effective treatments. 3) is gone.

We didn't know about HIV yet, or the link to AIDS. 2) is gone.

AIDS makes you susceptible to a ton of infections that healthy people normally don't get, so the list of possible symptoms was large - and we couldn't disambiguate those symptoms from other conditions - they were those other conditions. Isn't that 1) gone?

Thank goodness we kept researching. And concerns about long-term health impact of AIDS were well-founded, weren't they?

I also think you're forgetting that we can measure things about populations, and correlate conditions with people who have had a known COVID diagnosis. Then, when symptoms are more common, even years later, in the people who have had COVID, if you want us to say "people who have had a known COVID diagnosis" all of the time, we could... Or maybe it's okay to just say "Long COVID."

Clinical practice is not epidemiology is not actuarial science.

I think you're (rightly?) disappointed that we don't have the Long COVID Manual for clinical practitioners. But people who study epidemics are for sure seeing a thing, and it's measurable. And it has long-term impacts on human health.

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