Pretty common, pretty serious.

- One million self-reporting long COVID in the UK, give or take

- 89% of them reporting symptoms at least 12 weeks after infection

- 40% of them reporting symptoms at least one year after infection

- 18.5% reporting that their ability to undertake their day-to-day activities had been "limited a lot"

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

I’ve probably had some long COVID symptoms myself, but self reporting on something like this is next to worthless. You’ve got a mix of the placebo effect with people that had COVID attributing everything negative after to it, all backed with the media constantly reminding them of long COVID.

Even if it is placebo effect - so what? Placebo effect is still real and has real world consequences.

If someone has higher levels of fatigue, or is more susceptible to depression or anxiety after COVID (both symptoms of long COVID) - is it any consolation to them that 'it is all in their head'? It is still an effect that must be considered and that must be studied and treated.

The things that would be studied would be quite different.

Real long COVID - are there still viruses or virus fragments in the body? Is it a minor autoimmune condition? Is it due to damage that the virus did? Is severity of initial disease progression linked to severity of long COVID effects?

Placebo long COVID - To what extent are people susceptible to media influence when it comes to disease effects? Are people in blue states more likely to get it than those in red states? What can be done to assure people that there's nothing wrong with them?

Also, if they acknowledge it might all be in their head then any placebo/nocebo effects might in fact go away.

The problem is that we do not know how long covid works, so both areas of research need to be considered. The discussion around long covid is very similar to the discussion around CFS. Both are somewhat subjective and not easily measurable, unless the form is really severe, yet to the people experiencing them are very real with a clear 'before' and 'after'. The exact mechanism for either of them is unknown. There is some evidence that CFS is caused by a viral infection (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32129496/). There is also some evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy can help with CFS (https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-cfs/t...). So there appears to be both a physical and a psychological side to it, and that is likely to be the case with long covid as well.

Just because something 'might all be in their head', or has a partly psychological cause does not mean that it is easy to treat or can be dismissed, or that it won't happen to you. It just means it needs to be treated with appropriate methods, e.g. therapy.

The bottom line is that long covid most definitely needs to be considered both when setting public policy, and when deciding on the risks everyone personally is willing to take. And we do not yet have enough data on the effects that vaccines have on long covid or on the risks of getting it.

If it's a placebo effect then we should not consider long covid to be an important aspect of the vaccine strategy.

I don't think it's a placebo so much as just typical persistent flu symptoms and people misattributing other problems to their COVID case.

Which is not to regurgitate the meme about covid just being the flu, but if your body is weak and fights off a problematic disease, its not crazy that it takes a long time to heal fully. My original point, poorly worded, was mostly that if you're reducing hospitalizations, you're going to reduce long covid. It's not a mysterious orthogonal effect.

Agreed. I’ve suspected that I’ve had some after effects from COVID including some sleep and lung issues but I couldn’t tell you which is from COVID and which is from gaining weight during lockdowns. Chances are that it’s just that I gained weight and need to get back into shape.

I think "nocebo" is the better term in this case.

Maybe, though I've never understood why there needs to be separate words for positive and negative effects.

UK study with access to NHS patient records: Within 1,199,812 individuals with any acute COVID-19 code, 3327 individuals also had a recorded long COVID code, constituting 0.27% of COVID-19 cases.

Furthermore very few self-reports of long covid symptoms can be paired with a positive covid test.

How do you explain the difference in estimated prevalence of 'long covid'?

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.24.21259277v...