> Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from thane we expected.
No, this is not supported by the evidence. So far, even the worst of the long Covid papers suggests that a minority of people suffer from lingering illness. And most of those papers are bad, defining "long Covid" arbitrarily, and mixing together "cough after three weeks" with far more serious symptoms experienced by a tiny set of people.
When people say "we need more research on long Covid", this is what is meant. We literally have no idea what "it" is, other than an arbitrary container into which people are dumping their worst fears and speculations.
Going from this to "viruses are much worse than we ever knew!" is both wrong (post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people) and overgeneralization.
Let's assume "minority" means 5%. Total "confirmed" cases of Covid are now north of 70 million in the US and at 20 million just before the vaccine.
At 1 million people before the vaccine (5% of 20 million), that would make "Long Covid" one of the most common medical conditions.
That 5% number is probably close for Covid prior to vaccines. Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover. How many people would even have mentioned anosmia after having a cold or flu? That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
Post-vaccine, the "Long Covid" percentage certainly drops by quite a bit.
> post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people
The number of people who got cervical cancer from HPV is small, and yet, before the vaccine, it was one of the more common and fatal of cancers.
"Small fraction" != "unimportant"
In addition, things pile up. Carcinogenesis takes a long time with key mutations as far back as the womb and early childhood. Viruses are part of the landscape that causes those mutations.
You have provided no evidence to counteract my statement so I still stand by it: Viruses period, Covid or not, apparently do a lot more damage and require a lot longer to recover from than we expected.
> At 1 million people before the vaccine (5% of 20 million), that would make "Long Covid" one of the most common medical conditions.
...and yet, we're not seeing these waves and waves of disabled people. This should give you pause, and make you doubt the claims of prevalence, the claims of severity, or both.
By the way: "reported" infections vastly underestimate the true prevalence of disease. Up until the Omicron wave (which has tremendously increased the number) the CDC estimated that almost 150 million US citizens have had it:
Again, this should make you doubt the claims of prevalence. If even 5% of cases have this "long Covid", we're talking about 8 million cases. If claims of 20% prevalence are true, boost that number to 30 million people. The burden on the medical system would be immense; you would not be able to get appointments for even basic care. Chronically disabled people should be swamping medical clinics everywhere.
It's simply obvious nonsense. Only by conflating minor symptoms with pathology do you get to an estimate anywhere near these kinds of numbers.
> Look at the sheer number of people who had anosmia and how long it is taking them to recover.
I'm one of them. Took about a week.
> That sure goes into the "Long Covid" bucket in my book and we're not even discussing the panoply of other damage that Covid does.
We're discussing it right now. What we're not discussing is the evidence for this "panoply of other damage"...because for the vast majority of "long Covid" symptoms, the evidence simply doesn't exist. We leap from self-reports of "symptoms" directly to "panoply of damage", based on little more than speculation and quotes from doctors.
If you bother to read the papers cited within this press release, you'll see they all go on fishing expeditions to find anyone reporting symptoms, then claim that these are caused by Covid. From the headline study [1]:
> Presenting symptoms included palpitations, chronic rhinitis, dysgeusia, chills, insomnia, hyperhidrosis, anxiety, sore throat, and headache among others.
Literally anyone reporting sweating, headache, anxeity or insomnia is counted as "long Covid", if they hadn't reported it before their Covid diagnosis. Completely ridiculous. This is not research.
No, this is not supported by the evidence. So far, even the worst of the long Covid papers suggests that a minority of people suffer from lingering illness. And most of those papers are bad, defining "long Covid" arbitrarily, and mixing together "cough after three weeks" with far more serious symptoms experienced by a tiny set of people.
When people say "we need more research on long Covid", this is what is meant. We literally have no idea what "it" is, other than an arbitrary container into which people are dumping their worst fears and speculations.
Going from this to "viruses are much worse than we ever knew!" is both wrong (post-viral syndrome is a known thing, affecting a small fraction of people) and overgeneralization.