Re:What causes Long Covid? Here are the three leading theories
by mike_hearn on Friday June 17, 2022 @07:08AM
(#31776509)
That analogy doesn't seem to hold. People understood that cholera was a real disease. They weren't sure how it was spreading. With long COVID it's the reverse: people are pretty certain about how it spreads, but not to what extent it's a real disease.
The challenges for isolating what long COVID really is are very real. You have problems like a significant number of sufferers not having had any positive tests or antibody results. You have the incoherent list of symptoms that captures all possible illness. You have incidence of long COVID going from 25% at two months after infection to 50% after 4 months in meta-studies [1] and various other things that strongly imply that whatever long COVID is, the data set must be seriously distorted by other things. Of those things, hypochondria is a very plausible explanation.
The challenges for isolating what long COVID really is are very real. You have problems like a significant number of sufferers not having had any positive tests or antibody results. You have the incoherent list of symptoms that captures all possible illness. You have incidence of long COVID going from 25% at two months after infection to 50% after 4 months in meta-studies [1] and various other things that strongly imply that whatever long COVID is, the data set must be seriously distorted by other things. Of those things, hypochondria is a very plausible explanation.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/jid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/inf...