symptoms of illness is the illness itself. Ignoring these symptoms of covid or results of the treatment is saying something like "bullets don't kill people, it ruptures blood vessels and you die due to loss of blood"

You misunderstand the ambiguous wording. If you study only includes people with an illness, the illness itself is a confounder.

The point is that if you have a non-ICU covid case, this research is unlikely to apply.

It feels like we didn't read the same article, they break down numbers for people on ventilators but also hospitalized, non-ventilator patients all the way down to those who received no particular care.

The findings were concerning to anyone who had it, they also mention cases where the cognitive deficit was the first reported symptom.

Symptoms from chemo therapy are NOT commonly classified as symptoms of the cancer that it's supposed to treat.

Why do we have to make up extra rules for everything Covid-19 related?

This is a good analogy, but the conclusion I take from it is different from yours. Whether an effect of a disease is a symptom of the treatment or of the disease itself doesn't matter to me. Either way, I'd rather not get the disease if I can help it.

> symptoms of illness is the illness itself

Is it a symptom of the illness or a symptom of the treatment? If you had a better treatment protocol, would it still happen to the same degree?