> Among participants who tested positive for COVID-19, 68.7% experienced at least one symptom after 30 days, marking the distinction for long COVID. This prevalence increased to 77% after 60 days of follow-up. Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID.
In this study N = 303, and ~67% of these participants had at least one pre-existing chronic condition. Furthermore the symptoms were self-reported through an online survey.
Pointing out these facts because the results are far from conclusive, and thus may not be representative of the population at large.
How can the prevalence increase between 30 and 60 days? Shouldn't this be x days of continuously experiencing the symptoms? Otherwise why do they assume the symptom is from the same continued illness?
Because their immune systems are weak due to unhealthy food and life habits that poor, uneducated people usually have.
We don't need vaccines, we need to start taking care of our bodies. If you look at countries where the majority of people are educated and in good shape like Sweden, covid deaths are near 0 now because natural immunity has taken care of it.
It's hard to take this study seriously when there were no proper controls and many of the symptoms are non specific. They reported anxiety as one of the most common "long COVID" symptoms, but according to the NIMH something like a fifth of US adults have anxiety in any given year.
FWIW the researchers acknowledged this in the cited paper:
> because stress/anxiety is a symptom that many persons may be experiencing due to the pandemic, and not due to COVID-19 per se, we quantified the number of individuals who experienced stress/anxiety as their only symptom
> We found that only 6 participants reported stress/anxiety as their sole symptom, demonstrating that our PASC prevalence is not driven by this non-specific symptom.
That said, completely agree that the study is fairly low quality and has many confounding factors, see my other responses here for further commentary.
> Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID.
How do we know any of these symptoms were caused by COVID?
EDIT: why the downvotes, this is a genuine question.
Your point is fair in the sense that the research cited in OP establishes a correlation between these symptoms and SARS-CoV-2 infection. The cited research does not claim causation. Indeed there are many confounding factors such as pre-existing chronic conditions that were not controlled for in the study.
That said, you're probably getting some down votes because it's well established in the scientific literature that COVID-19 encompasses all of these symptoms.
How do we know? That's literally what research is for. Researchers compare symptoms of people who do vs people who don't have covid. Math tells us if the results are statistically significant. Biology helps explain the mechanisms causing it.
I'm sorry but the symptoms reported "fatigue, shortness of breath, brain fog, stress or anxiety, altered taste or smell, body aches and muscle pain, insomnia, headaches, joint pain, and congestion" could all (except for altered taste/smell perhaps) be linked to a million other causes.
What makes you so confident that these are due to COVID?
As far as I know, it's not like we've discovered an exact biological mechanism we can point to and say "that's what causes long COVID".
Yes, they could be linked to other causes. In fact, those things ARE linked to other causes. But it seems like they are ALSO related to long covid. That's what the research is trying to prove or disprove.
It does this by looking at data from people who do have covid vs people who don't. And the research find that people who have covid, are more likely to have these symptoms. And they had more of these symptoms vs non-covid people 30 to 250 days later.
As with all research, this is just one study of 300 patients. So no one should be "confident" based on just this study. That's why other researchers will try to do similar studies.
That's also why studies explain a lot about who they studied. For example, in this study 70% of people who had covid were women. Could these symptoms be caused by their gender? Probably more likely the covid, but maybe that's something to consider for studies in case it shows up again in the future.
Downvoted both because of your tone and because other mechanisms (like people who’ve had Covid becoming more prone to reporting symptoms caused by other sources) could explain these results.
But that paper makes no such claim. They didn't check symptoms for the same subjects both before and after infection, so we can't be confident of causality.
I had covid 8 months ago and have definitely experienced long term changes in taste and smell. Have a hard time experiencing sweetness. I don't enjoy apples or bananas anymore, they taste bitter, or like chemicals. I can't taste the richness of chocolate. Luckily savory has come back and I enjoy that relatively more now.
I don't know for certain if I had long covid but I experienced weird symptoms in my body beginning in January when there where >30,000 new cases per day in my country.
I was fatigued, had unexplainable chest pains some of the time, had problems concentrating, headaches, always a runny nose. I never did a antibody test because I self-isolated for most of the time and never met people without a mask, so I initially thought I was just developing an allergy. Multiple doctors tried to find out what was wrong but all tests where pointing to me being very healthy.
Then I got my second mRNA shot in July and all those symptoms went away, like magic. Very weird for me and maybe I had long covid and what you described happened.
While You’re the only one able to judge your personal experience and I can only go by what you have written, I have close Friends and relatives who had similar experiences. Runny nose in particular was not seen as a Covid Symptom in adults by health authorities at the time. Chest Pain is a common symptom of anxiety. All my Friends who had similar symptoms and got antibody tests prior to vaccination had no Covid antibodies. Let me suggest an alternative explanation that might or might not also apply in your case. Constant stress and anxiety about catching a horrific disease or loosing family members lowered the immune response as it is a well known effect of stress. Being fully vaccinated not only lifted that anxiety but also gave the immune system a boost. Thus no more infections with beta-coronaviruses and other viruses that caused the runny nose.
Immunity acquired through vaccination or natural infection helps prevent severe illness, which is likely to reduce the risk of damage to areas of the brain responsible for smell and taste [1][2].
AFAIK, there is currently no scientific evidence supporting the idea that mRNA vaccines uniquely "treat or cure long COVID" through other mechanisms.
I see. The reason I asked is (and I'm not a doctor, obviously) you might've ended up avoiding the very cure you were looking for. Some people have had their long COVID symptoms heal (including smell) after a second dose. You can Google around (e.g. see [1]), it's still not Scientifically Proven™, but it seems to have helped some people. You might want to ask your doctor if the fever is a genuine, serious risk, and whether you should try to get a couple doses if not.
> She almost didn't get her second dose. But she did — and a few days later, she noticed her energy was back, breathing was easier and soon even her problems with smell were resolving.
> About 40% of the 577 long COVID patients contacted by the group Survivor Corps say they felt better after getting vaccinated.
Thanks, this is a much better article with no paywall - this link should be used.
Here's the cited paper [1]. The sample size is small with significant bias in the demographics and plenty of confounding factors that were not controlled. The results should be taken with a large grain of salt. IMO the title of OP should read: "Long-haul symptoms may affect majority of Covid-19 patients, UA study finds".
Highlights:
> 303 people who had a positive PCR or antigen test and were not hospitalized for their illness were surveyed.
> Participants had a mean age of 44 years (range 12-82 years), were mostly female (70%), non-Hispanic white (68%), with college or greater education (38%), and with at least one pre-existing chronic condition (67%). The most commonly reported pre-existing conditions were seasonal allergies (42%), asthma (16%) and hypertension (15%).
> At ≥ 30 days follow-up, 208 of 303 (68.7%) participants reported experiencing persistent symptoms.
> The 10 most commonly reported symptoms among individuals with PASC at >30 days post-positive test fatigue (37.5%); shortness of breath (37.5%); brain fog (30.8%); stress (30.8%); altered smell or taste (26.4%); body aches or muscle pains (26.0%); insomnia (22.1%); headaches (20.7%); joint pain (20.2%); and congestion or runny nose (19.2%)
My wife coughed for almost a year. A YEAR. Awful coughing that hurt my ears when I was nearby. Never anything coming up. Just coughing and coughing and coughing. One day it finally stopped.
I had a chest x-ray last year because my chest hurt. Nothing showed up. It kept hurting. For a year every day when I’d wake up my right chest hurt. It hurt a little bit to breathe for almost a year. Eventually I realized if I sort of flexed in a weird way tensing up the muscles I could breathe without it hurting. So I started doing that, and one day that pain stopped.
I don’t know if these were symptoms of long haul Covid but they were certainly bizarre things to have happen, and it seemed like a major coincidence for it to happen during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I had similar symptoms. Scary persistent cough for something like six months. Finally got chest xrays. Doctor called and left a message - "we found something on your xrays, give us a call". That was on a Friday, and the office wasn't open till Monday. I spent the weekend mentally preparing my will.
When I finally talked to the guy: "General lung irritation, possibly due to postnasal drip, take a sample of this anti-allergy nasal spray". I think I used it once or twice, but mainly it just cleared up all on its own.
This was a dozen years ago, long before covid.
I guess what I'm saying is: There were a million problems your body could have before covid, most of them not life threatening, and those issues are still around even with this scary disease running rampant.
Post viral illness damage has been known for a long time, for example post polio. I feel like there's probably been a host of other viral illness that could also be responsible for long Covid like symptoms but it's only with Covid that we are seeing it being in the public consciousness.
That's completely inaccurate. PCR tests were specific for only Covid. They were extremely good at covid identification. A recent "recall" of PCR testing protocol was to introduce a new test that could perform identification of both Covid and/or flu.
You are blaming the experts in epidemiology for not being able to overcome political agendas, cable news propaganda, ignorant people, and a lack of trust in “the establishment” (which includes the FDA and CDC) caused by all of the above. The PR article was for medical professionals.
Americans on social media have become far too gullible. They can’t be bothered to fact check and they sure aren’t going to the source material. This is not a problem the CDC’s comma team could have prevented.
Know your audience, there is little point in speaking Russian to Hindu native speakers.
There is also little to be gained in only communicating in overly complicated language to your average Citizen. The CDC could, quite easily and simply communicate really very important announcements in a way that your average "man on the street" could read, consume and truly understand with very little effort or time.
The audience is different. They have tuned themselves to short videos, short blurts of text and meme images. I agree this is not good, but they need to communicate in the same language or risk this sort of misinformation spreading.
I had an argument on another site with someone making a similar claim about why I think the flu results started turning up mostly negative and why flu death attributions are basically non-existent this year, but I think it just muddies the point. The COVID PCR tests that have been used over the past 12+ months are accurate and do not conflate COVID with Influenza.
This article only make statements without references, which is troublesome. I agree with the recommendation to be careful of what you share, but just because it’s an article written by a medical doctor/institution, it doesn’t give it a free pass. I can show you articles of many other doctors and institutions contradicting many of these statements related to PCR.
Also interesting to note:
“ Every PCR test must be validated, meaning checked for its sensitivity and specificity.”
> Further: PCR tests are non-specific even when you keep the cycle count down - they show positive for BOTH Covid and Flu which is why flu "disappeared" in 2020: PCR tests were positive flu and was judged as Covid.
> Among participants who tested positive for COVID-19, 68.7% experienced at least one symptom after 30 days, marking the distinction for long COVID. This prevalence increased to 77% after 60 days of follow-up. Researchers also found that individuals who experienced long COVID were more likely to be less educated, have seasonal allergies and pre-existing health conditions, and self-report greater symptom severity than people without long COVID.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...