I always catch flak for saying it, but we need to be honest about the fact that long COVID is largely a psychogenic illness. It can be a real thing, in the way that any infection can leave a sort of malaise that persists for years or even decades for the unlucky, but such reactions are incredibly rare. Yet based off the self-reported surveys, you'd think the rate of long COVID was like 10% among progressive twitter users in their early 20's...
I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...
Most ‘long’ Covid cases aren’t that long. It’s entirely common for people to still feel symptoms 8-12 weeks after a respiratory infection; by most studies that’s ‘long’ Covid.
What gets reported however are the extreme outliers, people who are reporting Chronic Fatigue-type symptoms 6+ months later. Some of these people genuinely have a delayed immune response, while others were probably psychosomatic cases (turns out having to live with the fear of a deadly virus does a number on people’s mental state if they actually do get sick). But either way, these cases are likely a minority of what’s included in the ‘long Covid’ umbrella.
It’s irresponsible reporting, and I’m not sure if it happens through ignorance (scary news is fun to talk about) or an ulterior motive (if we can convince our readers that they’ll likely to have long-term effects from getting Covid maybe they’ll mask up and vaccinate). Either way, it’s proof that even ‘mainstream’ media often can’t be trusted to report the facts.
I don't have the link to it but I saw a hilarious pre-print on "long COVID" the other day that was comparing the incidence of long COVID amongst people that had vs never had COVID. In many groups the people with COVID had more long COVID (but not enough to reach significance), but in the age range of like 12-15 years old there were literally more kids who never had COVID who reported long COVID than those who had COVID. It's as if people forgot that fatigue and malaise and chronic inflammation are all things that happened before COVID and will continue to happen long after...