Long COVID Stemmed From Mild Cases Of COVID-19 In Most People, According To A New Multicountry Study

[osprey]

I suspect that, like many other conditions, there is a continuum of disease and disability associated with long COVID. Some people are uncomfortable or suffer minor inconveniences, some are seriously disabled, and a whole lot of people sit somewhere in between.

[lynndee]

Did the article say the symptoms described were “diagnostic criteria”? No. Just that these symptoms have been observed in numbers that indicate further study, which is being done. And it’s clearly early yet.

If I were you, I’d acknowledge I gave an unthinking response and bow out gracefully. We all have to do it at one time or another.

[txlawyer]

@osprey

I suspect that, like many other conditions, there is a continuum of disease and disability associated with long COVID.

Completely agreed, with the proviso that a lot of what is getting attributed as long covid is either just normal stress or the stress of having been knocked down for a week or three. I have no doubt that the virus itself causes lingering symptoms in some percentage of people.

[gtomkins]

It is possible that many, if not all, auto-immune diseases are triggered by past infections. The idea is that the immune reaction to the pathogen somehow triggers a breakdown in the tolerance the body had to one of its own proteins before the exposure to the pathogen forced it to a heightened immune reaction. The difficulty proving any such associations is that the pathogen itself is long gone by the time the autoimmune disease is recognized, even if it was some pathogen we know about that did the triggering – not that even pathogens we know about always produce any symptoms during a challenge to the immune system, much less a distinct syndrome allowing individual pathogens to be recognized, even if they are in that presumably tiny group we have discovered and catalogued.

COVID presents an opportunity to understand this process much better, because we did a much better job of identifying people who had COVID infections, even the minimally symptomatic, and even the asymptomatic, than we have done for any other pathogen. It would have been even better for this purpose of understanding long-term sequelae to infections had we been even more systematic in contact tracing and testing, but even with our failure to be more complete in those efforts, we still have better evidence from this infection that we have observed cross over to Homo sapiens than we have for any other pathogen. A pathogen that’s been around in humans for a while has inherently muddied the waters of any causal connection between infection and later autoimmune disease.

If we can finally trace a solid connection between this pathogen, COVID, and any component of long COVID that turns out to be based on autoimmunity, this is likely to help understand long COVID better and therefore treat it more successfully, but also has great potential to shed light on how the evil trick is done for many if not all of our autoimmune diseases

[txlawyer]

@lynndee

You don’t think people are capable of noticing differences in their health status?

Do I think that self-reporting bias is real? Fucking-A yes, self-reporting bias is real. Combine that bias with vague and inconsequential questions like “Have you felt tired after having covid?” and you’ve got some bloody obvious deficiencies in the resulting surveys. Everybody has felt tired in the last 90 days, regardless of covid status.

[geographyjones]

Good point. In fact I’m currently feeling a bit of fatigue. /s

[txlawyer]

@texastoast

Again, you obviously haven’t had any problems, or you are in generally bad health and don’t realize other people don’t feel that way normally.

Again you miss my point that the data is crap. My point is not that long covid does not exist.

[Hatmama]

@becca656

because it makes them look bad and hurts their feelings.

Listening to Hakeem Jeffries’ “alphabet speech” really set the tone for me. And watching the shocked (I say, SHOCKED) faces of the GQP looking down because their “fee-fees” were hurt, made me laugh even more…

Hakeem Jeffries just made history—and gave a helluva speech

[rascal_crone]

@dave48

So we now have tens of millions of people who have non-specific but disabling symptoms that are nearly impossible to quantify objectively and for which there probably won’t ever be any effective treatment.

nor disability support from the government

[txlawyer]

@lynndee

Did the article say the symptoms described were “diagnostic criteria”? No. Just that these symptoms have been observed in numbers that indicate further study, which is being done.

Does the article say that space aliens are real? No, just that some people report being rectally probed by space aliens in numbers that indicate further study, which is being done (by nutjobs).

Long covid is real. It indicates further study. It does not indicate breathlessly (ha!) innumerate reporting that lots of people have totally bog-ordinary symptoms of being bog-ordinary people after having come down with covid. I mean, really:

While our study focused on the three most common symptoms associated with long COVID that affect daily functioning, the condition can also include symptoms like loss of smell and taste, insomnia, gastrointestinal problems and headaches, among others.

I have never, to my knowledge, gotten a case of covid. But I’ve had at least two of those symptoms in the last 90 days. That’s the fundamental problem with this study. It makes no attempt to distinguish correlation of ordinary life from causation of anything by the covid virus.

@lynndee

If I were you,

Stop right there.

[becca656]

He pretty much covered the entire panoply of ills infecting the GQP.

Now, what would be absolutely priceless is for the entire Dem caucus to carry that alphabet around with them. As the GQP pushes its agenda through the House, the Dem caucus should clarify that that isn’t what we stand for - A vs. B., whichever of the 26 items is appropriate for the situation. So, on Immigration, for instance, Inclusion over isolation; Reason over racism. I mean, pick one, pick 'em all. The GQP should have its face rubbed in it at every opportunity.

Oh, and then the Dems vote, united, against whatever travesty is put before them.

[cub_calloway]

@theghostofeustacetilley

again, ReaD the stUDy that the ArticLE is baSed on.

Conclusions and Relevance This study presents modeled estimates of the proportion of individuals with at least 1 of 3 self-reported Long COVID symptom clusters (persistent fatigue with bodily pain or mood swings; cognitive problems; or ongoing respiratory problems) 3 months after symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Without denying the existence of poorly understood long term chronic sequelae of covid infection, I think @txlawyer is justified in his remark that the data is extremely fuzzy.

[Hatmama]

“Medical gaslighting” is a recognized problem in making diagnoses, and has been know for over a century. It is no surprise that women and POC are affected by this more than others. Veterans are affected by this as well. Look at the decades the military denied Agent Orange caused illnesses, and how “Gulf War Illness” has been denied, because of a suppposed lack of diagnostic criteria.

There are a lot of reasons for this failure in good diagnostic practice, beyond sheer bias or malice.

The mysteries of long-covid will be with us for years, just as there has been for so many other poorly understood, and often difficult to diagnose and treat common illnesses – early MS, Parkinson’s Disease, auto-immune diseases in general, Gulf War Illness, for example.

[dave_mb]

@txlawyer

Vague symptoms that sound suspiciously like “adult life” for 60 days or so. Okay.

My sister got long Covid and within a period of weeks developed asthma, diabetes, serious fatigue and brain fog.

I’ve had asthma for 30 years. She never had asthma before. She didn’t have diabetes or any of the other symptoms before. Everything is a challenge for her now.

[txlawyer]

@dave48

So we now have tens of millions of people who have non-specific but disabling symptoms that are nearly impossible to quantify objectively and for which there probably won’t ever be any effective treatment.

True! But equally true both before and after November 2019.

Correlation and causation are not the same thing.

[Hatmama]

Thank you! Well said.

[txlawyer]

@dave_mb

My sister got long Covid and within a period of weeks developed asthma, diabetes, serious fatigue and brain fog.

That sounds like it’s likely attributable to covid.

But by now, half the country or more have had covid. All subsequent health conditions are not “long covid.”

ETA: All kinds of illnesses lead to additional health problems. There’s not necessarily anything particularly unique about covid in that respect. If your sister – peace be upon her – had come down with malaria instead of covid, would you think there was anything uniquely unusual about the pathogen if she subsequently developed asthma, diabetes, fatigue, and brain fog?

[cub_calloway]

Totally agree there’s far too much gaslighting of sufferers by the medical profession.

However, that does not preclude the existence of grant-related research gaslighting. I’m not consistently reading enough of the literature to assert that with certainty regarding this individual paper, but I’ve certainly seen some egregious examples before.

[sao]

If you read the article, it was a meta-study. The selected studies included:

“There were data from 54 studies (44 published studies and 10 collaborating cohort studies) and 2 medical record databases for individuals who had symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Data from the study populations ranged from a full account of all cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the Faroe Islands to cases identified at health facilities, volunteers reporting symptoms in an app, and individuals enrolled in medical insurance. Individuals with Long COVID had new-onset or persisting symptoms 3 months after onset of symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection and COVID-19 that were not preexisting.”

You note that a number of the constituent studies had medical evaluation of the cases. The self-reporting on an app was probably V-safe data. I’d assume that the researchers would have noticed if there were significantly more cases in the self-reporting cohorts, although its reasonable to assume there are subclinical cases — people who are tired, but not too tired to do their daily activities.

I find it annoying when people poke holes in scientific reports without reading them. I mean, this was not an on-line survey. It looked to me like a serious attempt to answer an important question and, given that it was published in JAMA, I’m pretty sure that others with expertise in epidemiology, statistics and research design agree.

[txlawyer]

@sao

I find it annoying when people poke holes in scientific reports without reading them.

I confess that I read the story, not the report. I can only assume that the authors intended people to read the one without also reading the other. The story is vague and unpersuasive. It defines the condition as “things that affect tons of people” + “IDK” without any causal connection to the actual virus.

That lots of people get depressed after getting covid doesn’t mean depression is long covid. It’s readily explicable as the consequence of getting knocked on your ass for 1-3 weeks, and the authors of the story don’t appear to make any attempt to distinguish it from non-viral causes.