I would be surprised if the worst cases, where people can’t really work and it lasts about half a year or longer, were mostly psychosomatic, or at least mostly psychosomatic in a way that’s easily avoidable by just having different beliefs about long COVID. Can you really believe yourself into debilitating chronic fatigue and brain fog for half a year?
(EDITED: “a year → “half a year”, since I don’t recall long COVID studies going much longer than half a year, when I looked into them, which was probably 3-6 months ago.)
I broadly agree but don’t think that proves covid was the culprit. Vague shitty symptoms doctors refuse to grapple with were a problem long before covid, and if people with these symptoms can get better care by calling it long covid than leaving it open or blaming something else, they’d be stupid not to.
That’s a good point. I think the comparison of severe symptoms between COVID-positive COVID-negative matched controls would be good evidence about the risk. I don’t recall if any comparison studies tracked severity between positive and matched negative groups, though, rather than mostly just presence of symptoms, and I do recall studies without comparisons tracking severity, which people could use to report non-COVID-related severe symptoms, as you suggest.
When I looked into this there was a paper that compared psych sequelae from covid to influenza and flu-like illnesses and found “covid to be modestly worse except for myoneural junction and other muscular diseases, where covid 5xed the risk (although it’s still quite low in absolute terms). Dementia risk is also doubled, presumably mostly among the elderly.” This was not controlling for age or acute severity, and data was gathered pre-vaccine.
(note: I did this research months ago and haven’t done any follow-up, so trust what I wrote then over what I remember now)
I would be surprised if the worst cases, where people can’t really work and it lasts about half a year or longer, were mostly psychosomatic, or at least mostly psychosomatic in a way that’s easily avoidable by just having different beliefs about long COVID. Can you really believe yourself into debilitating chronic fatigue and brain fog for half a year?
(EDITED: “a year → “half a year”, since I don’t recall long COVID studies going much longer than half a year, when I looked into them, which was probably 3-6 months ago.)
I broadly agree but don’t think that proves covid was the culprit. Vague shitty symptoms doctors refuse to grapple with were a problem long before covid, and if people with these symptoms can get better care by calling it long covid than leaving it open or blaming something else, they’d be stupid not to.
That’s a good point. I think the comparison of severe symptoms between COVID-positive COVID-negative matched controls would be good evidence about the risk. I don’t recall if any comparison studies tracked severity between positive and matched negative groups, though, rather than mostly just presence of symptoms, and I do recall studies without comparisons tracking severity, which people could use to report non-COVID-related severe symptoms, as you suggest.
When I looked into this there was a paper that compared psych sequelae from covid to influenza and flu-like illnesses and found “covid to be modestly worse except for myoneural junction and other muscular diseases, where covid 5xed the risk (although it’s still quite low in absolute terms). Dementia risk is also doubled, presumably mostly among the elderly.” This was not controlling for age or acute severity, and data was gathered pre-vaccine.
(note: I did this research months ago and haven’t done any follow-up, so trust what I wrote then over what I remember now)