Something I've been wondering about: has anybody tried to separate out the effects of the pandemic itself from the symptoms of long covid? So many of the symptoms of long covid are incredibly nonspecific. I believe there was a study on long covid patients that found that the only long covid symptom that had a significant correlation with actually having tested positive for covid was loss of smell and taste. There is a lot of evidence that social isolation and sedentary lifestyles are detrimental to our health and we now live in a world where loads of people barely left the house or spoke to anyone other than their immediate family members for the better part of two years. We're seeing widespread effects throughout society in everything from education to crime to the amount of violent incidents on airplanes. It's likely that millions of people who do not have long covid are currently in some form of mental health crisis related to the pandemic. Overdose deaths and suicides are up. I wonder how many people started the pandemic with no major covid risk factor and now have a risk factor such as obesity or diabetes that can be directly linked to the psychosocial effects of the pandemic.

I'm not suggesting that long covid doesn't exist, but I wonder how much of that long tail of effects can actually be causally linked to covid infection (obviously not talking about things like lung damage, though I do wonder if stress and isolation could have affected previously healthy people's immune systems). My personal experience with mental health issues suggests that they can have severe and wide-ranging physical effects that are as bad as any disease.