Belief in Having Had Covid-19 Linked with Long Covid Symptoms
jamanetwork.com
jamanetwork.com
In the area of "lingering aftereffects", I see a lot of affinities between covid and lyme disease: both usually don't have long aftereffects, both can cause some serious aftereffects that take a long time to go away; both also have a population of people who have real and persistent negative health consequences that were not caused by the initial pathogen but are attributed to that pathogen by the person who has them.
The third group is the most troublesome, because they require both compassionate recognition of their subjective suffering and also a clinical decoupling between that suffering and its ostensible cause, and that's a hard thing to do well.
Really? Or do you mean not every tests positive for seroconversion months after infection. I mean, I suppose there might be some folks that are so severely immunocompromised that they cannot mount an antibody response, but surely the vast majority of infected do mount some antibody response.
In other words, the authors found a population that apparently did clear the infection this quickly, and they didn’t scour a particular large cohort to find these people.
[0] which you shouldn’t.
This wasn't your point but I'm trying to see whether this is accounted for in the study. I don't think it is, unless I missed something.
The study's self-reported long COVID group is people who in the past 4 weeks experienced any symptoms that had been ongoing for 8+ weeks. If these infections were 8+ weeks ago, these people would probably be seronegative anyway. To put it another way, seronegativity now doesn't rule out an infection 2+ months ago, so for some of these people their belief that they had COVID may match reality more than this article implies.
I don't know if there is a way to reliably identify a 2+ month old infection but I think you would need that to be able to say anything definitive about the linkage.
That is a rather astounding conclusion.
I was shocked at the sheer number of people who believed they had COVID between December 2019 and April 2020.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/disaster-motion-flights-corona...
And Google Trends for "fever": https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/02/google-releases-data-set-... , but well, it was winter, a comparison of Winter 2019 and 2020 would've been useful.
Not surprised at all. Drastically alter people’s daily routines, restrict their movement, add stress and uncertainty plus the risk of death and do it for 2 years.
Why would anyone be surprised that psychological manifestations would result independent from actual covid-19 infection?
Psychogenic illness happens all by itself pre-Covid. Seems entirely reasonable it would be much worse during a global health crisis.
My wife and I both got COVID in March 2020–she showed symptoms before I did, but I had it for many weeks and she had it for 2 days.
We both tested for antibodies multiple times since then and she never had them, but I did.
From the research I did back then it seemed like it was likely due to T cell response.
Quick googling just now yielded this, which looks pretty interesting: https://www.t-detect.com/
Or they believe they had COVID because they have symptoms of Long COVID. Hard to say based on the survey's questions because it doesn't seem they asked them why they think they had COVID.
It also makes sense that a number of people who get long Covid would have got CFS/ME eventually anyway either on their own or via another disease stressing them into it. It seems that the likelihood of getting CFS/ME is determined by genetic predisposition with some people unable to get it at all.
Nor do I, it's psychosomatic or depression, I expect those seeking these diagnoses will instead now claim to have "long covid".
I can assure you doctors are no help with CFS/ME or Long COVID and I get no benefit from a diagnosis of either of them. I don’t have a formal diagnosis, there is no point as there is no help, nor would insurance cover treatments.
The only difference is that LongCovid has happened to so many people at the same time that it’s almost impossible to ignore - although many people, institutions, and governments will definitely try to ignore it.
They truly haven't, you need to keep up-to-date on Wessely.
I always found the justification hilarious: "it's obviously a real condition because it responds so favourably to antidepressants and anxiolytics..."
Yes, I wonder why...
>The only difference is that LongCovid has happened to so many people at the same time that it’s almost impossible to ignore
Just another social contagion, and a sexy one people have read about exhaustively for two years.
You’re not the only person who is dismissive. But the evidence that you are wrong is already out there and constantly growing.
For that matter, do we know whether there's something like "long covid" for other coronaviruses or even other flus?
My anecdote is that I've had lingering effects after other flus and I know other people who have as well.
Covid19 produces somewhat less commonly lingering symptoms compared to Sars and less severely but no where near as much as we might like (more like 5% long term).
> "Long COVID Symptoms Linked With Belief in Having Had COVID-19"
vs
> "Belief in Having Had COVID-19 Linked With Long COVID Symptoms"
Guess which is more consistent with the article.
Guess which is more soundbytey/controversial.
Guess which was chosen.
smh
But even putting causality aside, it also implies something about the direction of the 'join', to use a database term; one is like a left join, the other is like a right join (well, a left join with the order of joined tables reversed).
'Belief of past Covid linked with long covid symptoms' implies that belief of past covid may also be linked to other things, but one of those is long covid symptoms. The visual created is that the belief of past covid may be linked to all sorts of things, one of which is exhibiting long covid symptoms. Those wacky 'past covid believers' are at it again!
'Long covid symptoms linked with belief of covid' implies that long covid symptoms may also be linked to other things, but one of those is belief of past covid. The visual created is that having long covid symptoms may be linked to all sorts of things, one of which is believing you must have had covid in the past causing them. Quite a reasonable assumption.
Therefore the order not only matters in a perceived 'implies causal direction' sense, but also in which direction you place the one-to-many emphasis on.
I suppose it's possible that I have a blind spot here due to basic statistical literacy, which definitely isn't true of the general audience for these articles. (Note that I'm not implying this is true of you; your complaint about how the general public interprets the article is independent of your own interpretation of it).
----
Tangentially, if we take for granted your claim that the article implies that the belief caused the reporting of long covid symptoms: why do you think the article is more consistent with the other direction of causality? Symptoms like cognitive problems, soreness, and fatigue can be devilishly hard to pin down as pathological, which is why CFS has been so tricky a field for so long.
I speak from experience: I've recently started working with an immunologist/CFS specialist after decades of these symptoms, and I'm constantly double-checking my reporting of symptoms against plausible alternative explanations, including psychosomatic and non-pathological causes.
Ah, the authors actually make their intended direction clear towards the end of the abstract:
> The results “suggest that physical symptoms persisting 10 to 12 months after the COVID-19 pandemic first wave may be associated more with the belief in having experienced COVID-19 infection than with actually being infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” the authors wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine.
> They found no relationship between the participants’ belief about whether they’d had COVID-19 and their antibody test results from blood samples collected between May and November 2020. In fact, about half of participants who believed that they’d had COVID-19 tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
If your hypothesis was true, there would need to be some correlation here for there to be a correlation in the second part of the study. You can't blame long covid on more severe infections if they didn't have covid in the first place...
A feature of COVID is that it can be caught by mostly young people who have no idea they had it.
So there's the false belief that you had it but also the false belief that you didn't. You're more likely to have the latter false belief if you had a super mild case.
So the correlation can be affected by people with mild cases not realising they had it and not having long COVID (or milder long COVID).
Chronic fatigue syndrome (I don't know whether that's generally accepted as a real disease these days but I know one famous person and one real life acquantance that had it) and similar is often triggered by an infection or virus.
I know another person in real life that was briefly unable to walk after a flu caused his immune system to attack his own nerve endings.
It seems unremarkable to me that people getting post-viral issues in the middle of a pandemic might assume they'd got covid.
It's like calling out car crash victims because "hah! It wasn't a car that hit you, you fraud, it was a pickup truck, look we have video evidence".
Except for losing the sense of smell, because thats a fairly unique symptom. All the others are things that happen to people for various reasons, some very covid adjacent, like a virus, and some just random like genetics.
This is all true and useful and factual, but people seem to be leaping to the conclusions that 'covid' is fake, 'long covid is fake' when the only real conclusion is:
'If you have a bunch of long covid symptoms right now, then you are more likely to think you had covid last year than actually had covid last year'. Which is a neat result, but not exactly surprising.
But if you're big on the 'plandemic' then this probably feels like supporting evidence for that, when it's clearly not.
When the real takeaway is 'check for other causes in people reporting long covid' which I hope was happening anyway, even for those with a confirmed case of covid.