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Comment by seydor | Hacker News Reader

What's the reasoning behind trying to downplay long covid?

Based on the conclusion I think the author is positioning it was (and still is) overhyped in reporting to be more alarming than it turned out to be, which is a common complaint/issue to take with news reporting.

Yeah, that seems to be what the evidence is pointing to. Certainly for hospitalized patients there can be long-lasting effects, as with any kind of hospitalization, and like all respiratory illnesses it can drag on for months.

There is also the chance that it will develop into a post-viral condition (ME/CFS), which I've experienced myself (long before covid). However in that case the viral infection is really just a trigger, and stresses (whether pre-existing, or from the condition itself) seem to be more important in driving the symptoms.

There’s also no consistent definition so when you’re trying to pump up the numbers a headache is long COVID, but when you want to make it look severe long COVID is debilitating lack of energy, no taste for a year etc. So the image being cast is ‘1 in every 10 infections results in disaster’ which obviously is overblown, a large majority of people have been infected once or multiple times and not 10% of the population is suffering from debilitating long COVID.

It's a self-serving article by the corporate elites to get people comfortable with the idea of returning to the office. Some VP is gonna point to these types of articles and say covid is no longer an issue, back to works guys.

Kinda how like Zuckerberg recently pointed to bogus 'reports' on in-office workers being more productive than remote workers, and then used it as an excuse to RTO. Except it's funnier in that case since Meta is all about the metaverse and being remote, so it's kinda ironic.

I don't think that is ironic. I think it's a pretty damning indictment of how useless Meta really is as a concept and a product.

One could also make the opposite argument, that long covid is just yet another manipulation the antiwork movement is employing to refuse to return to office.

If there is no way to test for it and having it makes one eligible for disability payments, there’s simply a high potential for abuse.

honestly, probably the same reason covid in general has been downplayed: get people working and get people spending

once the vaccines became available to the general public in early 2021, it was game over for any covid mitigations. At that point, it had been about a year since worldwide lockdowns and people were ready to get back to normal.

From then it was a slow trickle of ignoring the problem and getting people to forget covid, in order:

- if you're vaccinated, you can't get or spread covid

- ok if you're vaccinated you can still get covid but it's basically just a cold

- alright, you can still spread covid, but you're vaccinated so not a big deal

- ok looks like there's some new variants of covid, but your vaccine is still basically as effective

- ok look like there's another new variant and it doesn't protect you as much as the original variant, but only unvaccinated people die from covid

- well, looks like the elderly and immunocompromised aren't protected well even with the vaccine, but whatever they can wear masks

- alright, so it looks like repeat infections might cause neurological and cardiac issues, but those people probably weren't healthy.

you get the picture. I'm being hyperbolic here, but this stuff happened over the course of 2-3 years, not overnight. All in favor of trying to keep a status quo that doesn't exist anymore.

Its an obvious lie you can spew when "think about grandma" stops working.

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