A negative Covid-19 test does not mean recovery | Hacker News Reader

A negative Covid-19 test does not mean recovery

nature.com

I am not being glib, I am legitimately curious how many of the post-COVID symptoms could be somewhat psychosomatic.

Imagine getting tested for COVID, you've had it hammered in to your mind that this is a terrible disease that you are lucky to survive. You watched in Italy as the bodies piled up. You saw NYC and refrigerated trucks.

But what you are feeling doesn't align with what you were told. You don't feel _that_ bad. It feels like a bad cold. You are still scared shitless. How does the brain adapt to this? Is it possible that there is an element of guilt (All these people died, but I am OK) or fear (I am still waiting for the other shoe to drop and to end up on a vent). Could the mental stress of this cause fatigue?

I am sincerely asking someone who knows more about this than me to explain the chances that this is a phenomenon that exists and whether it can account for any of the long-hauler symptoms.

Throwaway so that I don't share my medical history publicly.

In the past I had a share of symptoms that were psychosomatic, spent thousands of dollars on diagnostics that - in hindsight, unsurprisingly - came back fine. I lost more than 35 pounds during that period as my results were constantly juggled between gastroenterologists, neurologists, endocrinologists, pulmonologists, cardiologists and laryngologists.

I had most of the symptoms that currently a lot of Covid survivors are describing. Some were disguised as viral infection (I felt like had cold but without the fever, dry coughs, weakness), some as food poisoning. Not even single one of the doctors, who I visited with binder full of medical results, suggested that those might be psychosomatic. I was kept on various different drugs which seemed to help, but only for short amount of time.

It wasn't until my life fell apart (because of the external reasons) and I was put on the antidepressants when I noticed that all of that was psychosomatic - _everything_ went away. The aches, the coughs, the weakness. Now, years later, all of it is behind me and my quality of life improved dramatically. To this day, however, every single time I feel feverish, weak, have problems breathing or I have a random cough attack I wonder is that because something I caught or is it daily stress manifesting that way, and most often then not, the latter is the case.

So I'm very skeptic about some of the long running symptoms, especially since psychical health is still a taboo and I've experience tens of specialists not being able to hit their mark on that.

I appreciate your honesty on this and I am glad to hear you are doing better. The way our medical field is tipped so heavily towards treat symptoms and not causes is surprising to me.

I watched the show "Afflicted" on Netflix, and it made me sad more than anything. (In my opinion) a majority of the afflicted were clearly suffering from psychological problems, but they were kept on very expensive drugs and the doctors were just throwing darts at a wall.

I hope that mental health becomes less taboo, and more research into why mental health is declining is funded.

Stay healthy and glad you are doing well.

Easy to say, hard to back up. There will always be people in genuine need of psychological help, even before infection. It's very unhelpful in cases where cognitive therapy does little to adress physical symptoms.

A good analogy for thinking about psychosomatically-induced symptoms or illness is as the inverse, or the reflection symmetry, of the placebo effect

It's a factor. But it's a factor in a relatively small percentage of cases. It's what you look at when all of the "reasonable" answers come up dry

I tested positive at the end of august, and then negative 2 weeks later. i still get exhausted easy but hope it would not last much longer.

My girlfriend's exhaustion lasted about 3 months. Our loss of smell is persisting and likely permanent as it's been 6 months. Lost about 2/3rd of it.

That sounds really awful. Smell is an important sense and a huge part of taste as well.

Basically if you were a chef you'd have a disability for that job.

I think indeed that this COVID effect is underestimated as the article says. She with the fatigue many people have.

yeah, my smell is also not back. bit i have hope.

Is there any proof/evidence that people who recovered from COVID and tested negative can still spread the virus? The article lacks any references on that.

Any test will have false negatives, and there's indication that the false negative for the COVID RT-PCR test is really quite high. A negative test should not be considered probative.

COVID-19 is not known to persist for a long time, however, and lingering symptoms are not necessarily a sign of lingering infection. Most likely they are a result of damage rather than illness, or perhaps ongoing immune response.

Yes but the FN rate varies strongly with the viral load in the sample. If you are shedding a lot of virus you will almost always test positive. It’s possible for someone to have it in their body and test negative, but if it’s coming up PCR negative it’s very unlikely that you’ll spread it. Of course, this applies on the day of the test. If you just contracted it, you might test negative and then the viral load goes way up and you spread it a couple of days later.

A positive Test does not mean infection

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