The headline is a bit misleading, as the 1 million figure refers to children who had ever had Long Covid, and 293,000 were experiencing it at the time of the survey. That doesn't mean it isn't a serious issue, but I believe accuracy is important here.
These headlines are accurate to the study and their noted limitations, not necessarily the actual prevalence which is already known to be much higher than this.
Unfortunately, I can't access the full text of the study directly, but I would argue it would be more accurate to say it impacted (past tense) 1 million children, assuming this paragraph from the news story is correct:
> Results of the analysis, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, showed approximately 1.01 million children, or 1.4%, are believed to have ever experienced long COVID as of 2023 and about 293,000, or 0.4%, were experiencing the condition when the survey was being conducted.
There are certainly reasons to think it might be under-reported, so perhaps that should go in the headline (or subheadline) as well. But I don't think the headline should suggest this particular study estimated 1 million children were experiencing it at the time.
That’s a fair point. Science reporting often skips the discussion section, which adds important context. A strong report would compare this with other studies to show the bigger picture, especially given concerns about undercounting.
This report has led to a lot of minimization and misinterpretation especially from certain bad faith actors. Some claim the number is “stable” year over year, suggesting long COVID isn’t a big deal, overlooking that this study uses a completely new sample each year, not the same children.
Long COVID in kids is real and widespread. It’s not "rare". Far more than 200k are affected. This latest survey aligns with previous data, but it’s likely an undercount(noted by the authors as a limitation) due to reliance on parental reporting. Kids often struggle to articulate symptoms. Pediatric Long COVID has been ignored despite millions suffering debilitating effects.
Note: I work on NIH efforts to cure Long COVID called RECOVER, RECOVER-TLC, and help non-profits dedicated towards viral persistence/immune dysfunction hypotheses.
given lack of success with ME/CFS, do you think we'll fare any better this time?
post-viral syndromes have been with us for a long time.
outside of very clear sequelae like definitive texbook case of autoimmune disease or something obvious like that - we don't really know how to treat them?
absolutely, in fact many of the top ME/CFS researchers have converged their research and are teaming up with the Long COVID researchers to tackle this once and for all.
we now have novel technology being used like PET scanning, T cell biosensors, and single molecule ultrasensitive assays.
Antigen/superantigen persistence is shared and may be treated with extended courses of antivirals, monoclonal antibodies, immune modulators, and even trying checkpoint inhibitors to reverse T cell exhaustion.
the textbook is being rewritten and a key publication on how to treat at least Long COVID based on what I mentioned above will come out next week. NIH will launch their trials very soon likely announcing in March.
If these symptoms were not attributable to covid, we would expect that the symptoms would be present at the same rate in patients who have never had covid, no?
I'm also not sure what the explanation would be for why the symptoms improve over time, if those were the causes.
I didnt do anything during lockdown, that is, I carried on mostly as normal. I co-founded a community that was about socialisation for kids and being outdoors. None of us have long covid. None of us had anything worse than a flu.
I also have friends that I didn't see closer than 10 metres during lockdown, they stayed indoors and watched Netflix, ordered food online, and behave themselves. 8 of them have "long covid". I understand anecdote isn't evidence, but when this whole thing became political I decided I can only make decisions based on experience and not what my better insist upon me.
There was a bulk re-dating of all federal government websites to game Google and make it seem like the new administration is doing more than it actually is:
Likely many mainstream news sources are using LLMs to summarize existing data sources and not actually reading them with a human, so ABC's crawlers pick up the new federal data, it's been re-datestamped to make it seem like it's dated Jan 24 2025, the AI naively reports it as being published last Monday, and then readers assume it's new reporting. Win-win for everyone involved, and completely useless as news.
