If only half of the people that think they have it (5%) actually have it. Doesn’t that still mean that 2.5% of all COVID cases suffers from persistent issues?
That’s still a fairly high incidence rate. At least to the extend that we can’t really ignore it.
The article states, "The ONS survey, published last week, found that 5 per cent of people who had tested positive for Covid reported at least one symptom 12 to 16 weeks after their infection."
Only 5% of all COVID cases report persistent symptoms.
And 3.4% of the general population report the same symptoms.
Edit: Comment this is in reply to originally had 50%, now changed to 5%.
Currently, India is behind the USA (#1) on total cases, UK ranks 4th, Brazil 3rd. If we look at cases/population size, UK ranks #22, but the only large country in the top 20 is the USA.
To be fair, the UK government has been fairly consistent that their target has always been to protect the NHS, not the people. As long as the hospitals aren't running beyond capacity, the UK is meeting their stated goal.
You know, I wondered for a long time about why "mad cow disease" didn't slowly manifest in a much larger percentage of the British population. But I think it did... they're just calling it Alzheimer's.
Mad cow disease is a prion disease, and as such it’s relatively easy to control it’s spread. You would mainly catch it from someone by eating them, which isn’t something we tend to do.
The prion was essentially ubiquitous in the UK's meat supply in the mid-1980s, when it was common practice to grind up the spinal and brain tissue of downed cattle into meal for other cattle. Estimates for how many ingested the prion were in the millions. But very few humans seemed to get vCJD. Instead they either got Alzheimer's or their brains melted and they joined the antivax movement.
mad cow disease has a VERY distinct marker. (it's hard to get to; but it happens in a post-mortem examination of the brain tissue). If most Alzheimer's was mad cow, I guarantee you; we'd know it. (also, symptoms are different). (also, there's really two distinct markers: the physical voids that are formed in brain tissue, which is macroscopic; you can see it with the naked eye, and the very characteristic misfolded proteins, which requires a very powerful microscope to detect).
Yeah, apologies. I’m fairly certain I read much higher numbers somewhere else before, but then found this article (through archive.is) had it’s own numbers, so I modified the comment since it frankly works either way.
Whether 25 or 2.5%, it’s still millions of people.
"Affecting approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population, hypochondria has no specific cause, but is often found in people who have had previous experience with a serious illness, especially in childhood"
(source: https://www.everydayhealth.com/anxiety/understanding-hypocho...)
Not disputing/arguing whether Long Covid exists or how bad it could be since I'm not qualified to. But just remarking that there are plenty of people out there who regularly think they're sick/have symptoms anyway.
Hypochondria generally has you believing there’s something seriously wrong with you, not that you cannot smell or taste things any more (at least in my experience with it).
Like, if you were suffering from brain fog, you’d attribute it to a brain tumor or aomething.
Well, I'm not sure what my sangha member had but she was perfectly healthy, a very active outdoors person, then she got coronavirus, and then was basically bed-ridden for about 10 months. Basically completely weak and chronically fatigued for that period. At least, I am quite sure that her long-term symptoms were due to coronavirus. I'm sure there are many false attributions though, as is bound to happen with such a public disease. For example, I know a lot of people who are convinced they had coronavirus just because they had a cold at this time or that time or whatever.
I’d feel a lot better about this if people stopped making concrete assertions about their hunches however well-informed.
For someone in his position to say long covid is overblown and usually something else without any explicit diagnosis for those cases is no more responsible than the “it’s just a flu” brigade have been since this started.
Literally everything has become so poisoned by misinformation that we can’t even present real science and reviewed data without feeling the need to represent probabilities as certainties for fear of the conspiracy mob running with it, which it seems like is happening here, and I think is even more dangerous.
The rest of us aren’t listening to the whackadoodles on Facebook, but we’re certainly paying attention to credible scientists.
I’m sure it’s infuriating for the science community that you have to clear a really high bar of evidence and critical examination of data before making an assertion, whereas Karen or Chad just write whatever stupid and demonstrably impossible nonsense they like on Facebook without a care in the world.
The morons don’t have standards. It sucks. But resorting to their tactics, even a little, is a really slippery slope.
Well, chronic fatigue syndrome is out there and has been suspected to be triggered by viral infections for long time. The community actually became quite hopeful when long covid came up that someone would finally listen. Maybe your friend has even found remedies among these long-term sufferers.
The people in CFS documentaries look as bedridden as those with long covid to me. So why does long covid get this much attention, while CFS remains obscure?
If it's really the same thing I see only upsides: once long covid gets addressed due to this much attention, CFS will get addressed too. I call it win-win.
> So why does long covid get this much attention, while CFS remains obscure?
I think it’s probably simply a numbers thing. A lot more people with long focus than other forms of CFS. Hopefully it will get a lot more attention in the present circumstances.
I can find a professor that will say: Long Covid is possible responsible for many long lasting, slumbering inflammatory conditions and may potentially be related to effects from Tinnitus to inflammatory fluid build-up anywhere in the body.
I think we still need a lot more research. Those ACE receptors express in many tissues.
Not had covid, but about 2 years ago had a Parvovirus-B19 infection which triggered a reactive arthritis, which means 2 years later I'm still having steroid injections and my joints are more or less in pain. The medical summary is basically "sucks to be you I guess" but it's a semi-common side effect of a virus infection.
So yeah, all I want to say is that virus infections are not a joke, even if you got through one "fine" it can absolutely have devastating and life long effects on you.
If we're sharing anecdotes here, I've been enjoying my chronic tinnitus for close to 20 years. It has developed after a bad flu and then never left. It's not a thing you can get used to, at least I haven't been able to.
As a guy who played very loud music for many years, I can relate. Until you said this I was sitting here in silence out in the country listening to frogs and now all I hear is that high whine. I think like a lot of other shit I just learn to tune it out.
sorry. Yeah, the parent poster did it to me. I didn't mean to pass it on. Don't worry. Put on Fugazi and smoke a joint... you won't remember this in a couple hours.
Oh-oh, I clearly have done my share of bad things for the day. Did not mean to, apologies. Nothing really triggers this thing for me anymore, as it is always there.
I have it (played percussion as a kid). I find just relaxing and acknowledging the ringing as if I was meditating, not fighting it and letting it do what it will helps it pass. It will sort of grow really loud like a wave, then as I continue relaxing will fade.
There is some newish research that suggests that tinnitus can be treated by lowering chronic inflammation. This worked in my personal experience. Going low carb weakened my admittedly moderate tinnitus to below where I rarely notice it anymore.
Yes this is very common with a bad cold. The inside of your nose can swell blocking the 'smell nerve' (olfactory nerve). This can even damage the nerve which, if you are lucky, will heal after some time.
Yeah I had about 12-18 months of fatigue and stuff like chills (was blasting my heat the next winter) after a bad influenza in early 2018. Went to the Dr thinking I had low testosterone issues or something. Went away on its own, very similar to some of the minor post-viral syndrome people are reporting with covid. I think a lot of people who haven't caught proper influenza as an adult have a broken measuring stick when it comes to what respiratory viruses can do to you.
And some viruses are worse than others. Some will hide out in your spinal cord forever and make an appearance when you're under stress. If you've ever had to watch someone go through an outbreak of shingles... holy crap that looks miserable. I had Mono when I was 15 and still get what I take to be occasional, minor resurgences of that level of total body-wide exhaustion, every five years or so for a couple days. A friend who had mono confirmed that he experienced the same. It's a particular, very identifiable feeling throughout your body - not too different from the feeling after the second and third covid shots.
There have been research developments that show that viruses can create/attach to biofilms just like bacteria, which allows the virus to survive treatment and can explain the intermittent resurgence.
I think the title is misleading. The number of long covid cases is overblown. But, and the professor agrees, long covid can be very real.
But the name `long covid` is also a little misleading. A lot of virus infections can shake up your body so you will need a long time to recover. A great example is the Epstein Barr virus: very contagious and it can take months or even years to recover from it.
> My hunch is that their owners are losing money on property investments and are desperate to get employees back in the office, who knows.
This conspiracy theory based on hunch falls with Occams Razor, as both owners and writers at newspapers likely diversify their investments like any other investor.
You must not be familiar with the intricacies of UK property ownership. Most desirable properties in London are owned by a small group of aristocratic people who really do just hold property, and things which give them political influence like newspapers. Corporate ownership of buildings is not as prevalent as, say, in New York (except in the family business sort of way).
Part of this is tradition, but also the quirks of UK property law which makes it very hard to trance ownership of property, and so these people who value their privacy prefer property over other more liquid investments they’d have to disclose.
It fits their general pattern of "anything mildly complicated that involves a government doing stuff to help the average person is a conspiracy to hurt you".
Regulations for easier trade of bananas?
Regulations to encourage recycling?
Human Rights?
Health and Safety?
Climate change plans?
New school cirriculum?
You should hate and fear all these things according to them. Because if people saw government as a way to improve everyone's lives, they'd probably use it to stop powerful people doing stuff, like poisoning people, starting wars or destroying the planet for money.
So scientists saying the best way to deal with an infectious disease is to pay people to stay home, because we're all part of a society that needs to work together to reach the best outcome for all of us, is scary to them, so they attack it like they always do.
Anything that involves international co-operation and co-ordination is anathema to those with a nationalist or isolationist leaning, because it means you have to work with foreigners to address it. Either it doesn't exist, or it's a foreigner conspiracy anyway, or somehow both at the same time.
Get back to normal, back to work peasants. Crowd onto trains and herd yourselves back into the super-expensive office blocks clustered in super-expensive cities.
Property underwrites a huge portion of investments and pensions. If we suddenly discovered that 80% of us could work from home, anywhere on the planet, why would anyone pay £1.5m for a house that would cost £400k if it were just an hour away?
The reality is exactly the opposite. The media has so overblown the risk of COVID that 41% of Democrats now believe that you have a greater than 50% chance of being hospitalized if you contract it:
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Why this matters is that an over-estimation of the risk for low-risk demographics has led to behavioral patterns that are net harmful. For example, the climate of fear around COVID has maybe reduced the very minute risk the virus poses to children (0.003% IFR, or about equivalent to the risk of dying if stung by a bee), at the cost of an unprecedented rise in childhood obesity:
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."
The response to COVID, with respect to children, is going to cause far more deaths in the long run than it mitigates.
OMG stop. In that same survey 30% of non-Democrats agreed that chances of going to the hospital are > 50%. Maybe Fox News stop scaring the sh*t out of people re COVID too. Except obviously that is not what is going on.
Well, the Democrats are even more misinformed. But yes, the media in general is scaring the shit out of people. That Democrats are the worse afflicted is secondary to that point.
You're implying that Democrats shouldn't be criticized because Republicans are worse in some other respect. Every group should be open to criticism. One group's ignorance doesn't absolve another's.
If you wanted to point to some way in which Republicans in general are worse, you could point out how anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are more prevalent among Republicans. This form of ignorance has done considerable harm.
Coronavirus's risk to children is low. It's not true that there are no mitigations for Covid: children in the UK are being vaccinated against Covid, as often happens against winter flu.
Measures to protect adults against coronavirus have not come for free for children. Mental health referrals amongst children have doubled since before the pandemic [1]. In more unintended consequences, smoking amongst young people has also surged [2].
Now that we have the vaccine in the UK, and most adults and the vulnerable are vaccinated, I'm against anything that further disrupts a normal childhood, as at this stage, measures would be causing more harm than good.
The basics are vaccinations. We have a vaccination now: this is the end game. There is nothing more we can do, unless we want to enforce children to wear masks and distance every winter flu season, which comes at a mental and developmental cost for children.
Children should not have to wear masks for 6 hours a day, and should be allowed to interact with each other normally.
Whilst being the group least at risk of coronavirus, the most has been asked from children and young people, and now is the time when we need to return to normal in society, accepting we balance freedom with risk, and that they will always accompany each other.
Do you really think it's possible to make kids socially distance? And surely the social effects of that will be much worse than any possible positive benefit for the children?
Nothing new here. 90%+ of people don't understand that either they're suffering depression from isolating from other humans, or in cases of healthcare, symptoms don't suddenly appear months after a disease or vaccine for hundreds of people like some episode of House.
The 1% of legit cases are being let down because were being dragged down by the same mass hysteria that linked vaccines and autism.
Chances are this isn't even covid related but an abnormal autoimmune response I'd bet, but given I'm only trained in statistical analysis I could be wrong.
People are always look for something to blame and given the hysteria it's not shocking they are blaming the magical bioweapon that will catch you in your sleep...
Not peer-reviewed. Only 13.5% of the children completed the 3-month online questionnaire. After 3 months, 30.3% of test-positives and 16.2% of test-negatives had 3+ symptoms. Possible response & recall bias. No control group for other respiratory infections. Did not assess whether symptoms were continuous for the entire 3 months.
Unfortunately, the media has scared the shit out of people, and they are so convinced that COVID is an extreme threat to every one, that the evidence that confirms their biases requires zero rigor, while the evidence that contradicts the consensus narrative, like ivermectin being an effective prophylaxis, requires extreme rigor.
My opinion is that both should require extreme rigor mind you.
I downvoted your comment because you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Only rigorologists can advise whether extreme rigor should be required or not.
Again vaccines autism level of jumping on the first alarmist publications.
There is no statistically significant evidence for this in large scale analyses.
Also, yes of course covid causes an immune response. It's that response that leads to pneumonic symptoms that in the elderly and at risk prove to be fatal. I fail to see how there is any point to be made over stating you get sick and your body reacts.
My statement is that the immune system isn't perfect and there are long term conditions caused by it misbehaving, and that we need to understand this more.
This is going to be one of those cases where the professor makes a well-nuanced detailed well-researched sympathetic statement, the press turns it into a headline that makes him sound like an insensitive clod, and everyone just reacts to the headline instead of the full statement, isn't it?
Some guy says it's overblown and this is ranking on HN? Personally, I know several people who are not normally complainers or full of shit who have had some wild effects for 9-12 months after a bout of covid, including visual disturbances, extreme exhaustion, and loss of focus or mental acuity. I really don't doubt my friends who've suffered this. They're not the kind of folks who think they have made-up diseases or tend to malinger.
That's not a scientific answer. Physical symptoms of stress include:
Low energy
Headaches
Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea
Aches, pains, and tense muscles
Chest pain and rapid heartbeat
Insomnia
Frequent colds and infections
Loss of sexual desire and/or ability
Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet
Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing
Clenched jaw and grinding teeth
Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID.
On top of the stress that would undoubtedly afflict a significant fraction of COVID patients, due to the massively inflated fears surrounding COVID, is the effects of physical isolation.
One of the requirements for all COVID positive cases is two weeks of total physical isolation. Numerous studies have shown that humans being physically isolated has significant negative health effects. No in person contact. No physical touch. For two weeks. All COVID positive cases, even asymptomatic ones.
There are no randomized studies, that control for factors, like the aforementioned psychological distress emanating from fear of COVID, and physical isolation, that suggests COVID causes these long-term symptoms. There are a host of potential confounding factors that could explain these correlations better than damage from the COVID infection.
Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlations is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about COVID.
I've had all those symptoms during lockdown and I know I haven't had covid. My friends who have had it describe a much, much worse experience. I suppose stress alone can cause visual hallucinations on the order of the road twisting in front of your car, but I know these people and trust their judgment that they have experienced the after effects of a brain-damaging infection.
You cannot rely on anecdotes. I know people who claim that many of their relatives suffered severe adverse effects after taking the vaccine. We do not draw scientific conclusions from anecdotes.
But: pretty much every single anecdote I've heard (online, or meatspace) tells a very consistent story. Maybe it should be studied. But I guess if some professor at a "prestigious university" says it's all psychosomatic, then I guess not.
By all means, study it. But please don't peddle unproven theories as fact, and demand policy that restricts other people's civil and economic liberties, be instituted on the basis of these speculative unproven theories.
Among the typical symptoms we have "fatigue, headaches, shortness of breath, anosmia (loss of smell), parosmia (distorted smell), muscle weakness, low fever and cognitive dysfunction".
Feeling fatigued alone does not pass off as long Covid, jus like coughing alone does not pass off as Covid.
For the sake of having a non-inflammatory discussion, please do your best to substantiate and source these sort of claim so that we avoid spreading disinformation.
> That is not true. Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:
You've said "study" but you're quoting an article from The Guardian.
Also, it seems you even failed to read your source. Your article does not refer to the incidence of long COVID-19. Your source only refers to a statistical study of the prevalence of any of the symptoms that are attributed to long COVID-19, whose goal is clearly to gather data to help understand the problem, or even if one really exists.
Also, I feel you are either misquoting or being disingenuous. The article you quoted quite clearly states that "The most common symptoms were breathing problems, abdominal symptoms, fatigue, pain and anxiety or depression."
So, a charitable interpretation of your misunderstanding of what you've quoted is that you picked up a reference to a study whose purpose is to gather initial observations on the actual incidence of long Covid, looked at the raw data and unwittingly misinterpreted correlations for consequences.
>>You've said "study" but you're quoting an article from The Guardian.
An article which describes the results of a study..
>>Also, I feel you are either misquoting or being disingenuous. The article you quoted quite clearly states that "The most common symptoms were breathing problems, abdominal symptoms, fatigue, pain and anxiety or depression."
I'm referring to the graph in that article, which shows that anxiety/depression is the most commonly cited symptom, at 15% of survey respondents:
> An article which describes the results of a study..
Presenting your own editorialized conclusions is not the same as providing a primary source.
The proof is that you've tried to pass off a study on the quantification of the real world correlation of symptoms tentatively linked to long covid as, somehow, proof of a causal relationship, even though nothing of the sort was suggested.
You're inadvertently demonstrated the need to check primary sources, and the role that tabloids play in disseminating misinformation
>>Presenting your own editorialized conclusions is not the same as providing a primary source.
This is a discussion forum. You seem to have an axe to grind with me that's motivated by more than just what I wrote. Are you this non-charitable and critical of those who are sounding the alarm about COVID? This double standard, motivated by political preconceptions, is how dissenting viewpoints are suppressed, and only one viewpoint - that of COVID hysteria - is allowed to express itself.
>>The proof is that you've tried to pass off a study on the quantification of the real world correlation of symptoms tentatively linked to long covid as, somehow, proof of a causal relationship, even though nothing of the sort was suggested.
To clarify, my criticism is of the many who are in fact taking these preliminary results, and drawing the conclusion that long-COVID is afflicting one third of all COVID patients.
So to comment on one of those symptoms: chest pain. I do experience this when resting, but I get particularly strong pain when doing any kind of exercise. If it were stress related you would expect exercise to improve symptoms not make them worse.
I would also add that while I was certainly a bit depressed by the lockdown, I live in the UK where we are no longer locked down and my mental health has improved greatly. But I am still unable to participate in vigorous exercise, and tire much much more easily than my friends. And this is despite going for regular walks during lockdown.
Finally, I would comment that post viral fatigue is a well established phenomenon for other viral diseases including flu. And has also been noted to be particularly bad in other coronaviruses like the original SARS. So it’s hardly a stretch to think that cocos might have similar effects.
>>I do experience this when resting, but I get particularly strong pain when doing any kind of exercise. If it were stress related you would expect exercise to improve symptoms not make them worse.
One study on pro-athletes found that 0.6% of cases were confirmed, after cardiac MRI, to have inflammatory heart disease post COVID infection:
This is only 1/10th as much as the percentage who report chest pain. Some caveats: these are young adults, and athletes, so probably in the lowest risk category. Other demographics could face much higher risks.
So I guess the chest pain could be a real symptom of long-COVID, but I am much more skeptical of the other symptoms (e.g. anxiety, depression, etc).
It's also worth noting that heart inflammation from infections like flu will generally subside over time.
Frankly, it's the issues that seem to stem from disruption of neurons in the prefrontal cortex that are the most worrisome. The loss of taste and smell in covid is not caused by congestion, it's caused by a viral attack in the nasal bulb, and it's generally a harbinger of visual and emotional disturbances. One could easily make the case that the drastic rise in violent incidents in public spaces across the world has not been due to the effects of local and sporadic lockdowns on psychological health, but more likely due to the partial frontal lobotomies being performed by the virus.
Where is the evidence for the disruption of neurons in the prefrontal cortex?
>>One could easily make the case that the drastic rise in violent incidents in public spaces across the world has not been due to the effects of local and sporadic lockdowns on psychological health, but more likely due to the partial frontal lobotomies being performed by the virus.
You don't think it could be a result of massive numbers of careers being destroyed, businesses going bankrupt, and people being physically isolated, as governments restrict people's economic and civil liberties?
And isn't it possible that fearful speculation of the type you're engaging in, is creating political support for the restrictions that are creating all of these adverse social effects?
How do you expect to control for the world-wide psychosocial impact of the pandemic?
It's also pretty widely known that virtually all viruses can have a post-viral syndrome so if it would be MORE surprising if there wasn't a long covid.
I've had long covid for the last 10 months, and finally seem to be coming out of it. At its worst, I would get "episodes" where my entire body would start buzzing, so extreme that it felt like I was plugged into an electric socket. I can't convey to you how extreme this was, and if anyone were to suggest that this was caused by pandemic stress, they would be liable to a stressed response from my fist.
>>How do you expect to control for the world-wide psychosocial impact of the pandemic?
You use antibody tests to find undiagnosed prior cases, where the patient was unaware they had it during their infection. Then you can compare those who had COVID, without the associated psychosocial impact and two week isolation, to those who did not, to try to determine what long-term impact COVID has.
All of those statements about stress are complete unscientific garbage, until someone comes up with a test, which can show some kind of chemical or biological marker that indicates what stress actually is, rather than some vague squishy thing that some people have and others don't.
Also: what if the stress symptoms they're feeling, are due to the body fighting long-covid?
What's "complete unscientific garbage" is taking a correlation between a dozen self-reported symptoms, and a COVID infection months before, and deducing that it proves the latter caused the former. There are numerous potential confounding factors, and no real science would dismiss these, and claim a controlled and randomized experiment is not necessary before drawing conclusions.
I know someone who, six months later is still struggling to balance, suffering with cognitive problems as well as chronic recall and speech problems. We can differentiate between Long Covid and "lockdown symptoms" because nobody suffers any of these by staying indoors more often than usual and having a reduced social life.
> Some guy says it's overblown and this is ranking on HN?
The guy quoted for said statement is a professor of medicine of a reputable university, so he does have the authority thing sorted out.
Also, I feel the quote means something different than the original interpretation. After reading the article, it seems that John Bell simply states that a) long Covid is "more complicated than people assume", and b) it's incidence is lower than initial (and conservative) estimates.
The article mentions that "half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it."
And that's pretty much it.
There is no harm in improving our understanding of the real world effects of a disease.
Oh he's got the "authority thing sorted out" eh? Like every doctor who ever claimed females who were hysterical needed to be vibrated to orgasm to cure their disease...? Or is his authority just on the limited level of chiropractors who spread antivax disinformation on YouTube? Just wondering what level of trust one should place in a man who suddenly catapults into world headlines by claiming millions of people are mistaken on experiencing symptoms of a novel virus.
> Oh he's got the "authority thing sorted out" eh?
Yes, he's no rando posting stuff on his Facebook page, nor is he a rapper or media personality. He's an expert from a reputable university that made solid contributions to the fight against COVID-19 , and he is quoting data from the Office for National Statistics. In the very least we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
Even though it's true that appeals to authority don't cut it, that does not mean you are entitled to dismiss any comment you don't like by resorting to personal attacks.
Either way, spinning the debate to try to focus it on the messenger instead of the message is not a productive or honest way to debate a subject. We should try our best to keep the signal/noise ratio up, specially in topics so prone to disinformation.
> The guy quoted for said statement is a professor of medicine of a reputable university, so he does have the authority thing sorted out.
That’s fallacious. There are loads of professors spewing bullshit, including about their field, including at Oxford. It says nothing about the validity of the point they are making. Particularly after the point has been filtered through journalists with a questionable understanding of science.
> That’s fallacious. There are loads of professors spewing bullshit,
No, not really. The fallacious bit is blindly and outright dismissing any statement, along with attacking and accusing anything a researcher says as being "spewing bullshit", just because you didn't liked hearing it.
Eve though I agree that appeals to authority are no way to get close to the truth, what we are seeing here is pure denialism and a primal anti-intellectual attitude directed towards a researcher from a reputable university just because he dared point out that initial conservative estimates might have been conservative.
To be quite clear, John Bell does not dictate the truth just because he is a professor of medicine at Oxford. But that is not the problem. The problem is actually trying to attack him just because he had the audacity to quote statistics on the real-world incidence of long Covid and state that initial estimates were off.
Sounds like the BMJ dont trust this chap and are questioning his financial interests. Therefore I would question his motives with regard to this article, he isnt very forthcoming which is usually indicative of having something to hide.
> Sounds like the BMJ dont trust this chap and are questioning his financial interests.
The article you mentioned only refers to stock portfolio and potential conflicts of interest regarding policy decisions on performing antibody tests.
The statement that was quoted in this discussion is about an entirely unrelated subject: the prevalence of long Covid. The initial claim is that the statement is supported by data from the Office for National Statistics.
If you want to question John Bell's claim regarding the prevalence of long Covid, just check if his statement is corroborated by the data. Either it's supported or not.
I question his impartiality on making statements such as this. I wonder about what he gains from making statements like this? If he was open about questions put to him in the past then I would be less suspect, but given he has hidden his financial interests related to his work then I suspect he has some hidden motivation here too.
> I question his impartiality on making statements such as this.
There is a very good way to verify the claims: check the data.
Dragging in questions regarding antibody test policies, stock portfolios, and potential conflicts of interest just sound like cheap character assassination attempts that have absolutely no relation with the prevalence of long Covid.
He doesn't present the data, he asks us to take his word for it, or the article does at least. Therefore to decide whether I can accept his word I need to know about him and his character. From initial research into him there are some queries about his behaviour, raised by an organisation that I do trust, therefore I do not accept his claim without question.
Don't accept things blindly because you agree with them (or the converse), "be a good judge of who is a good judge".
>"half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it."
That's a completely baseless statement, and there is some serious fuckery going on here, either with the article, or the supposed expert they're citing.
If we're going to throw anecdotes around, a very close relative of mine has had a severe reaction to the Covid Vaccine (AZ, I believe), and has been off work for 6 months and counting with a variety of health issues.
No, you're just throwing around disinformation. Anecdotes aside, I think your cousin made the right decision to get the vaccine. The virus would have likely done the same and worse. Unless they could have avoided it forever, the choices would be the vax or a full assault by a live replicating virus. 700,000 people have died in the US now from it. Better to live.
And who gets to define my anecdote as "disinformation"? Surely you can't be saying that any story that runs counter to a particular given narrative must be false? (FWIW, it is completely true).
How do you know the disease would be worse? This particular relative is in mental anguish, as the kind of statements that you just made are the only available opinions on whether you should get the vaccine. After 6 months of feeling like death, they are questioning the decision.
ps. Are we ever going to re-set the Covid death count at the end of a year? At approx. 300k deaths per year in the US, Covid is the 3rd-biggest killer.
If there was a vaccine for cancer, it wouldn't matter to anyone else if you got it. This is a virus. It's a public sacrifice. As brutal as it sounds, you and I and everyone we know had to line up against a wall, and some people were going to take a bullet for the team. I went in prepared to do that, rather than deluding myself that the virus wasn't real or that it was avoidable. When my uncles were in the Navy, they got pumped full of everything at once through an airgun in the bicep. This is jury duty, voting, your DMV test and your military service rolled into one. It's the price of living in an advanced society. I'm sorry for them - and I hope they recover - but they should be considered a hero. This is simply under the circumstances the only right thing to do.
And how exactly does me getting vaccinated protect someone else? I understand that you will probably be outraged by me even asking this question, but I am for real. The official messaging here in the UK has recently removed the vague suggestion that being vaccinated protects others.
If you bring out the usual line that "being vaccinated stops you having such bad symptoms and thus passing it on to others", then surely that means I would have a higher chance of being asymptomatic if I do still catch Covid, and thus not knowing if I am putting others at risk? I suppose you might tell me that's why I need to also regularly test, but then why get vaccinated?
>I'm sorry for them - and I hope they recover - but they should be considered a hero.
I think they would find your gung-ho attitude deeply upsetting, especially when they are of an age where the personal protection offered by the vaccine is significantly more relevant than any supposed benefit to others.
I have a relative who is an ICU nurse, he had effects for up to 6 months afterwards. They have always been an active, outdoors type of person, the change was obvious to all around them. Fortunately it has got better, eventually. So yeah these articles, especially from this section of the press, are more likely to be based on political ideology than medical fact.
Remember these are the same media organisations that will deny climate change and find scientists who will push that agenda for them. Just because they have a pulpit, it doesn't make them correct.
Have you considered that some of these symptoms are consequences of locking down society and preventing real human interaction for 18 months? I haven’t had COVID and I have had more depression and exhaustion in the last year than in my entire life.
Was there any place on the planet that had 18 months of uninterrupted lockdowns, preventing real human interaction? The pandemic has hit in waves, and lockdowns were usually only applied when needed.
I think you should have control of hacker news and personally curate articles. Everyone is trying to fool everyone else, high morality people like you are rare.
This is something that's hard to talk about because it's both painful for patients to hear, and legitimately controversial due to shortage of data.
There doesn't seem to be a syndrome here. There's a handful of different symptoms, and they mostly don't occur together. There's certainly long-term symptoms, and mostly correlated with disease severity. You have long-term effects of hypoxia, and long term effects of lung damage, which you see in a significant number of patients who had severe disease. The hypoxia from untreated covid infection causes all sorts of multiple organ damage. This is entirely uncontroversial and well-understood.
In addition, there is some kind of likely autoimmune response, which is sometimes triggered by covid, sometimes goes away after vaccination, and has very variable severity and duration. This is really poorly understood, and seems to be similar to CFS. It is more frequent in more severe cases, but not exclusive to them (just rare for low-severity cases).
On top of that, there's an increased level of anxiety and depression in patients, but there's not enough data here to exclude a population effect. Anxiety and depression has jumped on a population level in covid-affected regions regardless of infection status.
Now, while having any long-term effect is common, having any particular long-term effect is rare, and multiple effects coinciding is both rare and strongly correlated with disease severity. My opinion is that treating these three categories of long-term effects as a syndrome is wrong, and trying to treat them as if they're the same thing is going to lead to worse patient outcomes.
There's a huge problem with this however - "long covid" is a patient-preferred term for a reason - it gets taken seriously. Those that have done the research on CFS know that patients with CFS get ignored and shrugged at for decades, and know if they lose the "long covid" wave of interest in the biomed/research/practitioner community they're screwed for the foreseeable future. Which is why patients insist on long-term post-covid effects being seen as a syndrome, and attack anyone who questions this (I have personally been attacked verbally about expressing this opinion). And I get it. CFS patients have been left alone in the dark for far too long, just like several other poorly understood diseases that systematically get ignored, mis-treated, or patients accused of making it up (see also: fibromyalgia, depression, a number of cognitive disorders in history). "long covid" is getting a fresh look at by the medical community, and this is a source of hope that it's mean to destroy. But reality doesn't care about whether it's mean, and I believe in reality we're dealing with a number of entirely separate syndromes that need to be treated very differently from each other, and bunching them together is distorting both the conversation and the treatments.
I think a lot of the insistence on the “long covid “ terminology is just wanting acceptance that covid-19 can cause these post-viral symptoms, which a lot people still don’t accept, as demonstrated in this thread with people saying it’s just the stress of lockdown.
The medical community seems to take the problem(s) seriously, but has very little idea how to treat it. Hopefully the high profile of the problem will lead to increased research in this area over the next few years.
That's the thing. The stress of lockdown is causing its own population-level problems which are getting mixed in with this. That doesn't make the stress-related problems any less real, nor does it make the actual post-covid complications any less real. It just makes them two separate things.
I highly doubt long covid is not real. In fact I believe it can be caused by any viral infection and until now has just been blown off as chronic fatigue syndrome. Kind of a catch all for fatigue that can't be explained.
A lot of people suffer under it and a big problem is that a lot of people and doctors think it's made up or lazyness.
I hope now that there are so many cases we can get a better understanding and actually be able to properly diagnose and treat it.
I’ll have to look at the survey in more detail but incidence rates would have to be really inconsistent with that study (i.e. probably an order of magnitude lower) to indicate that long COVID is anything other than a massive and serious problem.
You'd have to control for potential confounding factors, like the psychosocial effect of COVID, and the two weeks of total physical isolation every COVID-positve case is subjected to, to even begin to start drawing the conclusion that COVID infections are causing a significant fraction of these self-reported symptoms.
Almost every symptom listed could be a result of anxiety, which in turn can be a result of the extreme fear that is now surrounding COVID.
Are people who had COVID actually more likely to have had significant periods of physical isolation in 2020 than people who didn't have COVID? I'd expect the opposite, if anything. Amin-Chowdhury et al asked about "loneliness" and found a slightly lower rate in people who had had COVID than in the control group, though the difference wasn't statistically significant.
There is some weak evidence of a higher rate of anxiety among people who've had COVID, including [0] as well as another nonzero but statistically insignificant difference from Amin-Chowdhury et al. But the difference in anxiety prevalence would only be a few percentage points (point estimates of 4.3% and 4.2% respectively), nowhere enough for that to be an underlying causal explanation for long-term symptoms that occur >20% of the time.
In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population. I think you'd really have to jump through hoops to argue that (1) some symptoms caused directly by COVID persist for a long time, (2) other symptoms caused directly by COVID reliably go away after a few weeks, but (3) people who have had COVID re-develop those same symptoms at a higher rate than the general population, months later, for reasons not caused directly by COVID.
>>Are people who had COVID actually more likely to have had significant periods of physical isolation in 2020 than people who didn't have COVID?
Any one who was diagnosed with having had COVID was prescribed to two weeks of total physical isolation, which is pretty unusual experience amongst people who did receive a COVID diagnosis. But yes it's possible that this did not have a significant impact. We wouldn't know without controlling for it.
>>In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population.
The two week physical isolation is one of many psychosocial differences between the two groups, and could affect one of many of the reported symptoms of long-COVID, some of which are much more likely to have a psychosomatic origin than loss of smell/taste, like the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptom: anxiety.
Like any infection, long-term effects in some cases are very likely. The question is how many effects, and how common they are. Without much more rigorous studies, or some of cross-comparative analysis showing that COVID infections result in a markedly more severe clinical presentation than other infections, I think it's irresponsible to start sounding the alarm about some impending public health crisis from long-COVID. The very hysteria this could rouse could result in far more harm to public health, through more physical/social isolation and greater economic decline, both of which have a documented negative impact on health.
And the harm that a climate of fear can cause is already evident, from the massive increase in childhood overweightedness/obesity during the COVID era:
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."
As a parent of two small kids, I would struggle to notice if I had "Long Covid". Most of the symptoms sound like my every day experience!
ps. In my subjective opinion, Long Covid is completely overblown. I know even fewer people that have suffered from it (0) than people who have had symptomatic Covid (2).
I know three people who continue to experience it and, again, they are not malingerers. If you've never had a debilitating disease that knocks you off your feet, it might be difficult to comprehend. Imagine having kids AND not being able to walk to the bathroom without losing your breath and getting dizzy.
True, and the social isolation has sucked. I've had the shots, and those sucked too. But I'm not concerned this is going to be a new permanent state of affairs. I think it was a one time emergency, and how one carries oneself in a crisis says a lot about a person. If or when it shows itself to be a permanent state of affairs - then the calculus of endless vaccinations and endless quarantine would change things. I have patience and a long term view of this whole situation.
I too have a long term view of this whole situation, and based on what I see of the never-ending impositions on our every day lives that have removed all trace of many things that made life pleasant, easier, and civilized, have taken steps to ensure that my family do not suffer un-necessarily.
Having a lot of these kind of symptoms when in a highly stressful environment is normal. It’s having them even when resting or doing only moderate activity that isn’t. Imagine if you didn’t have kids, got plenty of rest, etc and still felt like you do now. Then imagine what the prospect of looking after your kids would feel like if you already felt this tired when rested.
How can I imagine such a thing? Being a parent makes you do superhuman things. It's just not an option to "not feel like getting out of bed" - for all I know, the extra motivation of needing to care for my young family made me get on with life even when I did feel as bad as your hypothetical well-rested person.
If you have chronic fatigue, it’s not an option TO get out of bed. Your body physically doesn’t have energy. And if you push it, it punishes you by making you even worse.
I myself have a relatively mild case so I can still mostly do my everyday activities, but what has gone is my ability to push myself past my comfort limits. Stay up late onto get something done? Go for a 15 minute run? Previously I’d have felt a bit tired and shit the next day. Now it might leave me ill and in bed with heart pain for 3-5 days.
A parent suffers from a genetic condition, which makes that an accurate description of their lives when symptoms are bad. Very sadly, their response to the AZ vaccine has made that a daily occurance for the past 6 months.
So one professor of medicine at Oxford says that long Covid is idiopathic. As Bell is an academic professor and not a clinician in the field handling patients, or a virologist tasked with studying this particular situation, his opinions are educated but not necessarily informed enough to be authoritative. And, of course, no amount of theorizing negates the fact that a great number of people with Covid seem to be suffering from prolonged and in many cases debilitating symptoms from, well, something that didn't cause them before these people had Covid. And a great many other doctors very clearly don't share his opinion, including actual practicing doctors in hospitals and surgeries and virologists.
So as a "gotcha" political point against all these "sky is falling" liberals, it's not actually very useful. What it sounds like is right-wing contrarians looking for any authoritative figure to bolster their claims that all the sick people and dead people didn't really die or get sick and stay sick, or if they did they were already sick, so they can simply return the economy - which is the only thing they give a shit about - to making them money.
It's not actually very convincing or compelling if you're not, y'know, a free market loony or a sociopath.
The real problem isn't that one guy has an opinion.
The real problem is that there's an article about it, and this article is somehow getting massive promotion and engagement as if it's real valid science.
I've known a few of people over the years with some form of hard-to-diagnose autoimmune illness (ME/CF/...) and the hardest part seems to be getting a medical professional to take them seriously.
This is probably the #1 reason why I was so careful about avoiding the virus back when there was a lot of voices yelling "just catch the virus, you won't die". I knew the people who didn't die but just got lingering afflictions would be treated like gulf war syndrome vets.
Anecdotally have friends who have very obvious chronic health issues after catching COVID. Trouble breathing, migraines. They're young and healthy too, mid twenties to early thirties. Might be same catalyst triggering different chronic issues but it's horribly irresponsible to say this is something "overblown."
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 232 ms ] threadThat’s still a fairly high incidence rate. At least to the extend that we can’t really ignore it.
Only 5% of all COVID cases report persistent symptoms.
And 3.4% of the general population report the same symptoms.
Edit: Comment this is in reply to originally had 50%, now changed to 5%.
Right now the UK is getting something like 30,000 new cases a day.
This adds up to a lot, last time I checked the UK was only behind India on total cases.
For whatever reason the people running the UKs actions are doing the opposite of protecting people.
That's easy to verify: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
Currently, India is behind the USA (#1) on total cases, UK ranks 4th, Brazil 3rd. If we look at cases/population size, UK ranks #22, but the only large country in the top 20 is the USA.
To be fair, the UK government has been fairly consistent that their target has always been to protect the NHS, not the people. As long as the hospitals aren't running beyond capacity, the UK is meeting their stated goal.
Whether 25 or 2.5%, it’s still millions of people.
"Affecting approximately 2 to 5 percent of the population, hypochondria has no specific cause, but is often found in people who have had previous experience with a serious illness, especially in childhood" (source: https://www.everydayhealth.com/anxiety/understanding-hypocho...)
Not disputing/arguing whether Long Covid exists or how bad it could be since I'm not qualified to. But just remarking that there are plenty of people out there who regularly think they're sick/have symptoms anyway.
Like, if you were suffering from brain fog, you’d attribute it to a brain tumor or aomething.
For someone in his position to say long covid is overblown and usually something else without any explicit diagnosis for those cases is no more responsible than the “it’s just a flu” brigade have been since this started.
Literally everything has become so poisoned by misinformation that we can’t even present real science and reviewed data without feeling the need to represent probabilities as certainties for fear of the conspiracy mob running with it, which it seems like is happening here, and I think is even more dangerous.
The rest of us aren’t listening to the whackadoodles on Facebook, but we’re certainly paying attention to credible scientists.
I’m sure it’s infuriating for the science community that you have to clear a really high bar of evidence and critical examination of data before making an assertion, whereas Karen or Chad just write whatever stupid and demonstrably impossible nonsense they like on Facebook without a care in the world.
The morons don’t have standards. It sucks. But resorting to their tactics, even a little, is a really slippery slope.
The people in CFS documentaries look as bedridden as those with long covid to me. So why does long covid get this much attention, while CFS remains obscure?
I think it’s probably simply a numbers thing. A lot more people with long focus than other forms of CFS. Hopefully it will get a lot more attention in the present circumstances.
I think we still need a lot more research. Those ACE receptors express in many tissues.
She could have had a mild case, or it could be something else.
So yeah, all I want to say is that virus infections are not a joke, even if you got through one "fine" it can absolutely have devastating and life long effects on you.
https://www.audiology-worldnews.com/research/3554-is-treatab...
https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210630/could-the-mono-viru...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100205115946.h...
https://www.immunology.org/public-information/bitesized-immu...
But the name `long covid` is also a little misleading. A lot of virus infections can shake up your body so you will need a long time to recover. A great example is the Epstein Barr virus: very contagious and it can take months or even years to recover from it.
Right now there are no mitigations for Covid in UK schools.
One of the things safer schools campaigners are pointing out is the risk of long Covid (as well as hospitalisations etc).
Example of Covid in one area of the UK https://mobile.twitter.com/DmodosCutter/status/1445303921300...
My hunch is that their owners are losing money on property investments and are desperate to get employees back in the office, who knows.
This conspiracy theory based on hunch falls with Occams Razor, as both owners and writers at newspapers likely diversify their investments like any other investor.
Part of this is tradition, but also the quirks of UK property law which makes it very hard to trance ownership of property, and so these people who value their privacy prefer property over other more liquid investments they’d have to disclose.
Regulations for easier trade of bananas? Regulations to encourage recycling? Human Rights? Health and Safety? Climate change plans? New school cirriculum?
You should hate and fear all these things according to them. Because if people saw government as a way to improve everyone's lives, they'd probably use it to stop powerful people doing stuff, like poisoning people, starting wars or destroying the planet for money.
So scientists saying the best way to deal with an infectious disease is to pay people to stay home, because we're all part of a society that needs to work together to reach the best outcome for all of us, is scary to them, so they attack it like they always do.
Get back to normal, back to work peasants. Crowd onto trains and herd yourselves back into the super-expensive office blocks clustered in super-expensive cities.
Property underwrites a huge portion of investments and pensions. If we suddenly discovered that 80% of us could work from home, anywhere on the planet, why would anyone pay £1.5m for a house that would cost £400k if it were just an hour away?
J/K but the well of truth has indeed been poisoned hasn't it?
https://twitter.com/PandaTribune/status/1440192783260655618?...
>>Great clip of Bill Maher citing a survey in which 41% of Democrats said that if you catch COVID, the chances of going to the hospital are >50%... (the correct answer is between 1% - 5%) Maher says the "liberal media needs to take responsibility for scaring the sh*t out of people"
Why this matters is that an over-estimation of the risk for low-risk demographics has led to behavioral patterns that are net harmful. For example, the climate of fear around COVID has maybe reduced the very minute risk the virus poses to children (0.003% IFR, or about equivalent to the risk of dying if stung by a bee), at the cost of an unprecedented rise in childhood obesity:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."
The response to COVID, with respect to children, is going to cause far more deaths in the long run than it mitigates.
Addressing your specific points, the BLM rioters were almost exclusively Democrats, and there were hundreds of BLM riots: https://acleddata.com/acleddatanew/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
As for ivermectin, it has been used in hundreds of millions of humans, so characterizing it as "horse paste" is not accurate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivermectin#History
If you wanted to point to some way in which Republicans in general are worse, you could point out how anti-vaccine conspiracy theories are more prevalent among Republicans. This form of ignorance has done considerable harm.
Measures to protect adults against coronavirus have not come for free for children. Mental health referrals amongst children have doubled since before the pandemic [1]. In more unintended consequences, smoking amongst young people has also surged [2].
Now that we have the vaccine in the UK, and most adults and the vulnerable are vaccinated, I'm against anything that further disrupts a normal childhood, as at this stage, measures would be causing more harm than good.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/sep/23/childrens-nh... [2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-58317263
Children should not have to wear masks for 6 hours a day, and should be allowed to interact with each other normally.
Whilst being the group least at risk of coronavirus, the most has been asked from children and young people, and now is the time when we need to return to normal in society, accepting we balance freedom with risk, and that they will always accompany each other.
The 1% of legit cases are being let down because were being dragged down by the same mass hysteria that linked vaccines and autism.
Chances are this isn't even covid related but an abnormal autoimmune response I'd bet, but given I'm only trained in statistical analysis I could be wrong.
People are always look for something to blame and given the hysteria it's not shocking they are blaming the magical bioweapon that will catch you in your sleep...
It's estimated one in seven kids will suffer long Covid.
The symptoms aren't the symptoms of depression.
Aka : in the immense majority people < 65 are not going to die, and people < 30 barely won't notice anything.
15% of which kids ? the ones that end up in ICU ?
Of all PCR confirmed cases [0]. Disclaimer: preprint.
[0]https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-798316/v1
My opinion is that both should require extreme rigor mind you.
There is no statistically significant evidence for this in large scale analyses.
Also, yes of course covid causes an immune response. It's that response that leads to pneumonic symptoms that in the elderly and at risk prove to be fatal. I fail to see how there is any point to be made over stating you get sick and your body reacts.
My statement is that the immune system isn't perfect and there are long term conditions caused by it misbehaving, and that we need to understand this more.
Low energy
Headaches
Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea
Aches, pains, and tense muscles
Chest pain and rapid heartbeat
Insomnia
Frequent colds and infections
Loss of sexual desire and/or ability
Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet
Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing
Clenched jaw and grinding teeth
Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID.
On top of the stress that would undoubtedly afflict a significant fraction of COVID patients, due to the massively inflated fears surrounding COVID, is the effects of physical isolation.
One of the requirements for all COVID positive cases is two weeks of total physical isolation. Numerous studies have shown that humans being physically isolated has significant negative health effects. No in person contact. No physical touch. For two weeks. All COVID positive cases, even asymptomatic ones.
There are no randomized studies, that control for factors, like the aforementioned psychological distress emanating from fear of COVID, and physical isolation, that suggests COVID causes these long-term symptoms. There are a host of potential confounding factors that could explain these correlations better than damage from the COVID infection.
Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlations is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about COVID.
But: pretty much every single anecdote I've heard (online, or meatspace) tells a very consistent story. Maybe it should be studied. But I guess if some professor at a "prestigious university" says it's all psychosomatic, then I guess not.
I feel you inadvertently tried to misrepresent the symptoms of long Covid.
Please check wikipedia's article on long Covid for an objective and we'll sourced reference on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID
Among the typical symptoms we have "fatigue, headaches, shortness of breath, anosmia (loss of smell), parosmia (distorted smell), muscle weakness, low fever and cognitive dysfunction".
Feeling fatigued alone does not pass off as long Covid, jus like coughing alone does not pass off as Covid.
For the sake of having a non-inflammatory discussion, please do your best to substantiate and source these sort of claim so that we avoid spreading disinformation.
That is not true. Here is a typical study purportedly showing evidence for long COVID:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/28/covid-37-of-pe...
>>One in three people infected with coronavirus will experience at least one symptom of long Covid, a new study suggests.
The most common symptom associated with "long-COVID" is anxiety..
You've said "study" but you're quoting an article from The Guardian.
Also, it seems you even failed to read your source. Your article does not refer to the incidence of long COVID-19. Your source only refers to a statistical study of the prevalence of any of the symptoms that are attributed to long COVID-19, whose goal is clearly to gather data to help understand the problem, or even if one really exists.
Also, I feel you are either misquoting or being disingenuous. The article you quoted quite clearly states that "The most common symptoms were breathing problems, abdominal symptoms, fatigue, pain and anxiety or depression."
So, a charitable interpretation of your misunderstanding of what you've quoted is that you picked up a reference to a study whose purpose is to gather initial observations on the actual incidence of long Covid, looked at the raw data and unwittingly misinterpreted correlations for consequences.
An article which describes the results of a study..
>>Also, I feel you are either misquoting or being disingenuous. The article you quoted quite clearly states that "The most common symptoms were breathing problems, abdominal symptoms, fatigue, pain and anxiety or depression."
I'm referring to the graph in that article, which shows that anxiety/depression is the most commonly cited symptom, at 15% of survey respondents:
https://i.ibb.co/27yyhGG/long-covid-symptoms.png
>>Your article does not refer to the incidence of long COVID-19.
Yes it does. Long-COVID typically refers to any expression of any of the symptoms listed, following a COVID infection.
Presenting your own editorialized conclusions is not the same as providing a primary source.
The proof is that you've tried to pass off a study on the quantification of the real world correlation of symptoms tentatively linked to long covid as, somehow, proof of a causal relationship, even though nothing of the sort was suggested.
You're inadvertently demonstrated the need to check primary sources, and the role that tabloids play in disseminating misinformation
This is a discussion forum. You seem to have an axe to grind with me that's motivated by more than just what I wrote. Are you this non-charitable and critical of those who are sounding the alarm about COVID? This double standard, motivated by political preconceptions, is how dissenting viewpoints are suppressed, and only one viewpoint - that of COVID hysteria - is allowed to express itself.
>>The proof is that you've tried to pass off a study on the quantification of the real world correlation of symptoms tentatively linked to long covid as, somehow, proof of a causal relationship, even though nothing of the sort was suggested.
To clarify, my criticism is of the many who are in fact taking these preliminary results, and drawing the conclusion that long-COVID is afflicting one third of all COVID patients.
I would also add that while I was certainly a bit depressed by the lockdown, I live in the UK where we are no longer locked down and my mental health has improved greatly. But I am still unable to participate in vigorous exercise, and tire much much more easily than my friends. And this is despite going for regular walks during lockdown.
Finally, I would comment that post viral fatigue is a well established phenomenon for other viral diseases including flu. And has also been noted to be particularly bad in other coronaviruses like the original SARS. So it’s hardly a stretch to think that cocos might have similar effects.
One study on pro-athletes found that 0.6% of cases were confirmed, after cardiac MRI, to have inflammatory heart disease post COVID infection:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/few-pro-...
This is only 1/10th as much as the percentage who report chest pain. Some caveats: these are young adults, and athletes, so probably in the lowest risk category. Other demographics could face much higher risks.
So I guess the chest pain could be a real symptom of long-COVID, but I am much more skeptical of the other symptoms (e.g. anxiety, depression, etc).
It's also worth noting that heart inflammation from infections like flu will generally subside over time.
>>One could easily make the case that the drastic rise in violent incidents in public spaces across the world has not been due to the effects of local and sporadic lockdowns on psychological health, but more likely due to the partial frontal lobotomies being performed by the virus.
You don't think it could be a result of massive numbers of careers being destroyed, businesses going bankrupt, and people being physically isolated, as governments restrict people's economic and civil liberties?
And isn't it possible that fearful speculation of the type you're engaging in, is creating political support for the restrictions that are creating all of these adverse social effects?
It's also pretty widely known that virtually all viruses can have a post-viral syndrome so if it would be MORE surprising if there wasn't a long covid.
I've had long covid for the last 10 months, and finally seem to be coming out of it. At its worst, I would get "episodes" where my entire body would start buzzing, so extreme that it felt like I was plugged into an electric socket. I can't convey to you how extreme this was, and if anyone were to suggest that this was caused by pandemic stress, they would be liable to a stressed response from my fist.
You use antibody tests to find undiagnosed prior cases, where the patient was unaware they had it during their infection. Then you can compare those who had COVID, without the associated psychosocial impact and two week isolation, to those who did not, to try to determine what long-term impact COVID has.
Also: what if the stress symptoms they're feeling, are due to the body fighting long-covid?
The guy quoted for said statement is a professor of medicine of a reputable university, so he does have the authority thing sorted out.
Also, I feel the quote means something different than the original interpretation. After reading the article, it seems that John Bell simply states that a) long Covid is "more complicated than people assume", and b) it's incidence is lower than initial (and conservative) estimates.
The article mentions that "half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it."
And that's pretty much it.
There is no harm in improving our understanding of the real world effects of a disease.
Yes, he's no rando posting stuff on his Facebook page, nor is he a rapper or media personality. He's an expert from a reputable university that made solid contributions to the fight against COVID-19 , and he is quoting data from the Office for National Statistics. In the very least we should give him the benefit of the doubt.
Even though it's true that appeals to authority don't cut it, that does not mean you are entitled to dismiss any comment you don't like by resorting to personal attacks.
Either way, spinning the debate to try to focus it on the messenger instead of the message is not a productive or honest way to debate a subject. We should try our best to keep the signal/noise ratio up, specially in topics so prone to disinformation.
That’s fallacious. There are loads of professors spewing bullshit, including about their field, including at Oxford. It says nothing about the validity of the point they are making. Particularly after the point has been filtered through journalists with a questionable understanding of science.
No, not really. The fallacious bit is blindly and outright dismissing any statement, along with attacking and accusing anything a researcher says as being "spewing bullshit", just because you didn't liked hearing it.
Eve though I agree that appeals to authority are no way to get close to the truth, what we are seeing here is pure denialism and a primal anti-intellectual attitude directed towards a researcher from a reputable university just because he dared point out that initial conservative estimates might have been conservative.
To be quite clear, John Bell does not dictate the truth just because he is a professor of medicine at Oxford. But that is not the problem. The problem is actually trying to attack him just because he had the audacity to quote statistics on the real-world incidence of long Covid and state that initial estimates were off.
Sounds like the BMJ dont trust this chap and are questioning his financial interests. Therefore I would question his motives with regard to this article, he isnt very forthcoming which is usually indicative of having something to hide.
The article you mentioned only refers to stock portfolio and potential conflicts of interest regarding policy decisions on performing antibody tests.
The statement that was quoted in this discussion is about an entirely unrelated subject: the prevalence of long Covid. The initial claim is that the statement is supported by data from the Office for National Statistics.
If you want to question John Bell's claim regarding the prevalence of long Covid, just check if his statement is corroborated by the data. Either it's supported or not.
There is a very good way to verify the claims: check the data.
Dragging in questions regarding antibody test policies, stock portfolios, and potential conflicts of interest just sound like cheap character assassination attempts that have absolutely no relation with the prevalence of long Covid.
Don't accept things blindly because you agree with them (or the converse), "be a good judge of who is a good judge".
If that's what you're going with then you only need to verify the data to either refute or verify his claim.
Everything else is just noise at this point.
You didn't even bothered to look, did you?
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
That is not nearly good enough.
This is HN. We should be posting peer-reviewed research results, not just-any-professor-in-the-field's-feelings.
That's a completely baseless statement, and there is some serious fuckery going on here, either with the article, or the supposed expert they're citing.
How do you know the disease would be worse? This particular relative is in mental anguish, as the kind of statements that you just made are the only available opinions on whether you should get the vaccine. After 6 months of feeling like death, they are questioning the decision.
ps. Are we ever going to re-set the Covid death count at the end of a year? At approx. 300k deaths per year in the US, Covid is the 3rd-biggest killer.
If you bring out the usual line that "being vaccinated stops you having such bad symptoms and thus passing it on to others", then surely that means I would have a higher chance of being asymptomatic if I do still catch Covid, and thus not knowing if I am putting others at risk? I suppose you might tell me that's why I need to also regularly test, but then why get vaccinated?
>I'm sorry for them - and I hope they recover - but they should be considered a hero.
I think they would find your gung-ho attitude deeply upsetting, especially when they are of an age where the personal protection offered by the vaccine is significantly more relevant than any supposed benefit to others.
Remember these are the same media organisations that will deny climate change and find scientists who will push that agenda for them. Just because they have a pulpit, it doesn't make them correct.
There doesn't seem to be a syndrome here. There's a handful of different symptoms, and they mostly don't occur together. There's certainly long-term symptoms, and mostly correlated with disease severity. You have long-term effects of hypoxia, and long term effects of lung damage, which you see in a significant number of patients who had severe disease. The hypoxia from untreated covid infection causes all sorts of multiple organ damage. This is entirely uncontroversial and well-understood.
In addition, there is some kind of likely autoimmune response, which is sometimes triggered by covid, sometimes goes away after vaccination, and has very variable severity and duration. This is really poorly understood, and seems to be similar to CFS. It is more frequent in more severe cases, but not exclusive to them (just rare for low-severity cases).
On top of that, there's an increased level of anxiety and depression in patients, but there's not enough data here to exclude a population effect. Anxiety and depression has jumped on a population level in covid-affected regions regardless of infection status.
Now, while having any long-term effect is common, having any particular long-term effect is rare, and multiple effects coinciding is both rare and strongly correlated with disease severity. My opinion is that treating these three categories of long-term effects as a syndrome is wrong, and trying to treat them as if they're the same thing is going to lead to worse patient outcomes.
There's a huge problem with this however - "long covid" is a patient-preferred term for a reason - it gets taken seriously. Those that have done the research on CFS know that patients with CFS get ignored and shrugged at for decades, and know if they lose the "long covid" wave of interest in the biomed/research/practitioner community they're screwed for the foreseeable future. Which is why patients insist on long-term post-covid effects being seen as a syndrome, and attack anyone who questions this (I have personally been attacked verbally about expressing this opinion). And I get it. CFS patients have been left alone in the dark for far too long, just like several other poorly understood diseases that systematically get ignored, mis-treated, or patients accused of making it up (see also: fibromyalgia, depression, a number of cognitive disorders in history). "long covid" is getting a fresh look at by the medical community, and this is a source of hope that it's mean to destroy. But reality doesn't care about whether it's mean, and I believe in reality we're dealing with a number of entirely separate syndromes that need to be treated very differently from each other, and bunching them together is distorting both the conversation and the treatments.
The medical community seems to take the problem(s) seriously, but has very little idea how to treat it. Hopefully the high profile of the problem will lead to increased research in this area over the next few years.
A lot of people suffer under it and a big problem is that a lot of people and doctors think it's made up or lazyness.
I hope now that there are so many cases we can get a better understanding and actually be able to properly diagnose and treat it.
I’ll have to look at the survey in more detail but incidence rates would have to be really inconsistent with that study (i.e. probably an order of magnitude lower) to indicate that long COVID is anything other than a massive and serious problem.
Almost every symptom listed could be a result of anxiety, which in turn can be a result of the extreme fear that is now surrounding COVID.
There is some weak evidence of a higher rate of anxiety among people who've had COVID, including [0] as well as another nonzero but statistically insignificant difference from Amin-Chowdhury et al. But the difference in anxiety prevalence would only be a few percentage points (point estimates of 4.3% and 4.2% respectively), nowhere enough for that to be an underlying causal explanation for long-term symptoms that occur >20% of the time.
In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population. I think you'd really have to jump through hoops to argue that (1) some symptoms caused directly by COVID persist for a long time, (2) other symptoms caused directly by COVID reliably go away after a few weeks, but (3) people who have had COVID re-develop those same symptoms at a higher rate than the general population, months later, for reasons not caused directly by COVID.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282115/
Any one who was diagnosed with having had COVID was prescribed to two weeks of total physical isolation, which is pretty unusual experience amongst people who did receive a COVID diagnosis. But yes it's possible that this did not have a significant impact. We wouldn't know without controlling for it.
>>In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population.
The two week physical isolation is one of many psychosocial differences between the two groups, and could affect one of many of the reported symptoms of long-COVID, some of which are much more likely to have a psychosomatic origin than loss of smell/taste, like the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptom: anxiety.
Like any infection, long-term effects in some cases are very likely. The question is how many effects, and how common they are. Without much more rigorous studies, or some of cross-comparative analysis showing that COVID infections result in a markedly more severe clinical presentation than other infections, I think it's irresponsible to start sounding the alarm about some impending public health crisis from long-COVID. The very hysteria this could rouse could result in far more harm to public health, through more physical/social isolation and greater economic decline, both of which have a documented negative impact on health.
And the harm that a climate of fear can cause is already evident, from the massive increase in childhood overweightedness/obesity during the COVID era:
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...
"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."
ps. In my subjective opinion, Long Covid is completely overblown. I know even fewer people that have suffered from it (0) than people who have had symptomatic Covid (2).
I myself have a relatively mild case so I can still mostly do my everyday activities, but what has gone is my ability to push myself past my comfort limits. Stay up late onto get something done? Go for a 15 minute run? Previously I’d have felt a bit tired and shit the next day. Now it might leave me ill and in bed with heart pain for 3-5 days.
US Right-wingers since 2020.
Meanwhile: 700K Covid deaths in the USA.
So as a "gotcha" political point against all these "sky is falling" liberals, it's not actually very useful. What it sounds like is right-wing contrarians looking for any authoritative figure to bolster their claims that all the sick people and dead people didn't really die or get sick and stay sick, or if they did they were already sick, so they can simply return the economy - which is the only thing they give a shit about - to making them money.
It's not actually very convincing or compelling if you're not, y'know, a free market loony or a sociopath.
The real problem isn't that one guy has an opinion.
The real problem is that there's an article about it, and this article is somehow getting massive promotion and engagement as if it's real valid science.
This is probably the #1 reason why I was so careful about avoiding the virus back when there was a lot of voices yelling "just catch the virus, you won't die". I knew the people who didn't die but just got lingering afflictions would be treated like gulf war syndrome vets.