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Comment by Miner49er | Hacker News Reader

> Third, we did not have a baseline (pre-COVID-19) assessment of participants’ physical and mental health. Thus, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of COVID-19 from pre-existing conditions. The interpretation of our findings regarding depression and anxiety is further limited by the psychological burden that the pandemic may impose in general [48, 49]. While we tried to compare our results with estimates from the general population, applicable comparison data was not available. Other studies investigating longer-term sequelae after SARS-CoV-2 infection found a relevant excess risk for longer-term symptoms among infected individuals compared to SARS-CoV-2-negative control groups [9, 50].

Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline, IMO.

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> Kind of hard to tell what this result means without a control or baseline

Yes. As pointed out in

Causation or confounding: why controls are critical for characterizing long COVID

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01402-w

"To address some of these biases, we and others used established longitudinal cohorts recruited at the start of the pandemic for regular testing for antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and thus provided objective confirmation of infection. We asked our healthcare-worker participants about 72 symptoms reported to be associated with long COVID, at a median of 7.5 months after the development of COVID-19, and found that mental-health, gastrointestinal and dermatological symptoms were as common among 140 patients with mild-to-moderate symptomatic seropositive COVID-19 (‘cases’) as in 1,160 control participants who remained asymptomatic and seronegative throughout the surveillance period. Of concern, 40–60% of both cases and control participants reported mental-health symptoms, which highlights the toll of pandemic on the healthcare workforce. We also identified three clusters that included 12 symptoms—affecting the sensory, neurological and cardiorespiratory systems—that were reported by 67% of cases but also 44% of control participants, which emphasizes the ongoing difficulties in characterizing long COVID."

I hope we don't go down the path of dismissing post-COVID symptoms as mental illness.

Yes, some patients with post-COVID symptoms could simply be presenting with mental illness. However, we can't simply dismiss the patients with measurable symptoms like cardiac irregularities, exercise intolerance, orthostatic intolerance, and other physical issues that only occurred after the COVID infection.

Modern medicine (in any country) is not well equipped to handle complex disorders that don't yet have specific medical tests. It's common for doctors to reach for mental illness as an explanation, to the detriment of patients. Let's not repeat that for post-COVID.

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