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Comment by bicijay | Hacker News Reader

Anecdote, had covid in the end of 2020, still dont feel 100%, maybe i just grew old while sick and thats just life, but i feel like shit comparable to what i felt before it.

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Work on lung exercises for fatigue.

I have had health complications that caused the same problem as long covid seemingly causes; tiny tiny clots wreaking havoc on capillaries. I think it depends on where the viral load landed and grew, but if it was in your lungs, you would maybe need to treat it as if you have chronic bronchitis.

If it was in your sinuses and mouth, messing up your senses, then I'm sorry, idk what to do. ...maybe a similar approach with anti-inflammatories, hopefully something for your nerves too.

Hope you're good atm

Yeah, had literally 100s of lab tests, all came back ok. Exercise intolerance for at least an year. But im slowly getting back on form, gym doesnt kill me anymore. Still have some random digestion issues, slightly elevated HR and just generally feeling worse than before. But ill look into lung exercises, thank you for the tip

Did you tests include inflammation markers such as sedimentation test D-dimer, CRP, or Ferritin?

CRP and ferritin, not the other two i think

How much did you self isolate? I’ve noticed that the elderly who self isolated while having it or being around partners who had it have gone through a marketed mental decline. I think physical declines are probably there as well especially as we all age it is difficult to turn back the clock in physical fitness, past 35 more so.

This is me also. I was also isolated seeing only one other human for the entirety of COVID (including now, but I'm gonna move soon so I can at least go into a physical office). I feel like my brain still works at lots of stuff, once it gets going, but I forget what I'm doing randomly and I think I used to be not _THIS_ bad at interacting with other humans :/

Isolation is associated with much higher risk of serious health conditions:

https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-older...

Humans are social animals. COVID response policy to encourage more physical isolation could have deadly implications.

All this was completely obvious to anybody paying even a little bit of attention. Sadly their voices got shut out of the conversation; their proponents yelled at, called horrible names, etc.

What society did over the last two and a half years is shameful. Society encouraged and cheered on what is basically mental illness.

It's not just you. I know a physically fit personal trainer that has had long COVID for over 8 months now.

It's not just you. I know someone who had Long COVID for 1 month. I also know someone who works with someone who was running marathons every weekend and now they can't walk stairs because of knee pain, all because of COVID. I know someone else who had COVID and then was not doing any sport or social interaction for almost two years, barely left the house and who feels much more tired and depressed now, because of COVID. I know a child, who had COVID, then didn't have proper education for nearly two years and now is really underdeveloped, because of COVID of course.

Yeah, I'm definitely not where I was before. Dunno if it's the effects of covid, but social isolation and lack of physical exercise certainly hasn't done my overall well-being any favors either.

I'd argue that it feels precisely like that - that you became old in last months.

this is exactly me also

I've heard numerous stories like yours, except about getting the COVID vaccine.

Anecdotes are really not useful for teasing out general effects.

That's abstractly true, but in this case we also have studies that show long COVID, including one that compared brain scans before and after COVID and could see macro brain damage. The brain is an incredibly delicate organ, it isn't surprising that a severe virus can do damage do it.

The anecdotes still don't add any useful information, because there is no reliability on their representativeness of the overall data, by the very definition of anecdote.

I don't subscribe to this scientism perspective on epistemology when it comes to an individual forming views about the world based on their own experiences. Individual heterogeneity and the level of detail you're able to observe in your own N=1 anecdote can mean that the richness of that dataset is actually superior to an N=1000 dataset in many cases. I am a data scientist and often learn more about a phenomenon by exhaustively digging into a single example than trying to find broad trends in the larger dataset. Basically - avoid methodological purism when it comes to studying phenomena.

The anecodote does not reliably tell you anything about the phenomenon. The experience could be due to an entirely different phenomenon, which you are misattributing to the phenomenon in question. Only the scientific approach can make reliable causative associations.

You have not made some epistemological breakthrough with your anti-scientific take.

While I agree that that particular anecdote tells us nothing -- because it's void of details -- I disagree that anecdotes categorically can't tell us anything. My take isn't anti-scientific, it is against this particular brand of scientism that believes that single examples are useless. Consider that medical scientists often use case studies to better understand phenomena, because this allows for higher resolution investigation of a single example in order to shed light on phenomena, and it addresses edge cases due to individual heterogeneity that cross-sectional data can't address well. In light of this example, I would argue the anecdote vs data is a false dichotomy if you're defining anecdote to mean "example from a single person". If an anecdote is studied properly, as it is in case studies in the medical literature, it is data. It's just a different kind of data and a different mode of scientific study to lower resolution cross-sectional studies (which are also great and necessary, but have different strengths).

>>it is against this particular brand of scientism that believes that single examples are useless

Single examples are useless for discovering generalized properties of reality.

Medical case studies are only useful in conjunction with knowledge about causative associations that were discovered through statistical analyses.

Sure, you are right. I still feel like shit after covid.

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