7 ms·

Good to see some data on how common/uncommon this may be: it seems that 2% of confirmed patients suffer from some form of "Long Covid", which definitely isn't g

by fab1an 6y ago

Good to see some data on how common/uncommon this may be: it seems that 2% of confirmed patients suffer from some form of "Long Covid", which definitely isn't great news, but certainly better than what some overeager media have irresponsibly reported (the Rome study comes to mind, where hospitalized patients where somehow taken to be representative of the entire pool of infected people). One does wonder about the 'nocebo' factor, too - if you've been told to watch out for lingering symptoms are an infection that certainly affects the way in which you are observing your own body, especially so if you're even minimally hypochondriac. There is an understandable media narrative to portray mostly severe cases (again, understandable from some sort of public health perspective) but that also adds to psychological add-on effects one might face with this disease. I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew, but feel that the OMG-COVID crew hasn't necessarily thought the above aspects through either.

LeoNatan25 6y ago
2% is actually a very large percent, considering how contagious the virus is. Many people like to say that all respiratory illnesses produce similar issues, but no other so widespread virus has such high chronic illness remains.
- agent008t 6y ago
  The symptoms sound similar to the longer-term effects some people experience with mono (Epstein-Barr virus / glandular fever).
  - JimmyAxod 6y ago
    I’ve had both. This (long covid, post virus fatigue, whatever) is a few orders of magnitude worse, at least for me. I had covid middle of March, and am maybe 50% energy most days, and have to do massive breaths every so often. After 7 months of “recovery”?! I don’t know if I’m even getting better... yeah extreme fatigue, brain fog, eating can be exhausting... OTOH, A lot of people came out of it far worse...
    - abathur 6y ago
      Thanks for this comparison. I'm not sure how common symptomatic mono is, but I suspect it (along with some things like maybe pneumonia and bronchitis?) is a good reference point. How was your bout with mono? I recall having tonsils so swollen I was afraid I'd have to go to the hospital for a few days, and then being perpetually exhausted for ~6-8 weeks.
      - JimmyAxod 6y ago
        Yeah for me mono was horrible for a week or so, then exhaustion for 2-3 months but nothing like long covid. Of course it could also be partly the fact I had mono in my early 20s and had covid in early 40s!
    - agent008t 6y ago
      Looking up "mono brain fog", there seem to be a lot of reports of people experiencing neurological symptoms for many months, even years. Symptoms reported are similar - fatigue, brain fog, decreased appetite, some also seem to report anxiety and other similar changes. But it seems to be rare enough that it is hard to establish a causal link / study it properly. I wonder if there could be some common cause? Perhaps also common to CFS?
ourcat 6y ago
I know a couple of people who caught Covid-19 back before the summer, who both described the same symptoms after recovering (and testing negative). This was a while before all this talk of 'Long Covid' came about. Since we're all different, and will all fight viruses in different ways and strengths (depending on health/existing cnditions etc.), there'll be so many variations in how much of a 'toll' fighting it has taken on our bodies (and minds). Since this ia a 'novel' virus, we can only really base any conlusions on the empirical evidence as it comes in.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  The virus shouldn't have been labeled 'novel' in the first place. In a 2020 study by La Jolla Institute for Immunology, they found blood samples pre-2018 that demonstrated a T-Cell immune response to Covid-19. It was found that in SARS-CoV-2 and “common cold” coronavirus fragments that were similar (at least 67% genetic similarity) 57% showed cross-reactivity by memory T cells. If the Covid-19 coronavirus is novel, then we should be designating every new strain of the flu as a novel virus.
  - juliushuijnk 6y ago
    If you have many hours to spare, you can watch George Hotz dive into the details. One of the take-aways is that the Corona virus is a Sars, not a flu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM If your take is that Sars is just another flu, then I guess you just broadened the scope of the flu, and need to be open for the idea that the 'flu' could be more dangerous than you thought.
  - notahacker 6y ago
    Fragments that were 67% similar really doesn't sound very similar when we're talking about DNA, considering us slower evolving mammals share a larger percentage of DNA with our pets, and by your own stat 43% of people's T-cells are not primed to respond at all... We do designate strains of influenza transmitted from animals (and indeed other coronaviruses transmitted from animals) as novel threats.
cheph 6y ago
> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew, but feel that the OMG-COVID crew hasn't necessarily thought the above aspects through either. The incentives are all messed up for the media to provide a balanced information and with the economic devastation coming down the pipes I think both the flu and COVID will look like a walk in the park. https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelihoods-global-estimates-mortality-and-poverty-costs-covid-19 https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelih... > Using those somewhat more generous – but still frugal – thresholds, the number of poverty years in the world (235 million) is 54 times the number of lost years. And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation.
- matwood 6y ago
  > And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation. You say indirectly, I say directly. Even if everything was opened 100% tomorrow, many people are simply not going to go back to what they used to do. The way to avoid economic devastation was/is to deal with covid.
  - djsumdog 6y ago
    Things are pretty much back to normal in parts of Mississippi: https://neckbeard.xyz/notice/9znbtKqgRaGgwdVxgm https://neckbeard.xyz/notice/9znbtKqgRaGgwdVxgm ..and the secondary effects of the economic and psychological devastation are pretty bad. I wrote this back in July: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/ It's been eight months! We cannot keep living like this. We know now the largest deaths came from a failure to protect the elderly and misusing nursing home facilities (Michigan, Kirkland/Seattle, NYC). We need to do more to protect the elderly, but other people need be able to assume their own risks again. Most lockdown restrictions have ended in Ecuador. Florida and Mississippi are opening up. Pennsylvanian had a cord order by Stickman to open up, but it's been stayed pending appeal. Humanity cannot be put into low power mode like a laptop. We are not cogs in a machine that can be stopped and started at will.
gizmo 6y ago
So many people have been infected by covid in the last 9 months that you'd expect a large enough number of infections to coincide with other health problems to make for scary headlines. If somebody has a something as mundane as burnout or depression after catching covid, will people identify it correctly, or will anxiety and relentless doom and gloom news headlines result in a "long covid" self-diagnosis? Do we have any reason to believe long covid is a real thing? Is this not just anecdotes being blown up by the media that is generally useless at science reporting?
- JimmyAxod 6y ago
  I got covid in March, I’ve had “long covid” since, or post virus fatigue... It’s certainly a real thing :) There’s many symptoms, but as most articles state, the main one being extreme fatigue, second one is probably brain fog. Another is breathing issues. When it gets bad for me, I make extreme noises every so often when I sit down, or when I need to take a big breath of air, etc etc Eating can be exhausting - both because you’re spending energy chewing etc, but also you’re not able to breathe as much... I agree with you, that since it coincided with lockdown, people out of jobs, not being active etc, then it could sometimes be misdiagnosed, but it’s very different and pretty easily spotted.
  - oceanplexian 6y ago
    I got the same symptoms of "long covid" and didn't even contract the virus. The lockdowns making it illegal to go to a bar or a sports game, worrying about finances and the economy, the incessant negative politics and media, wearing masks all day, replacing real human contact with computer screens and "Zoom Happy Hours"? All of these have given me the same symptoms: Anxiety. Fatigue. Brain Fog. Breathing issues. It seems like there is another disease going around and no one is talking about it.
    - milesvp 6y ago
      You are right that a lot of the symptoms can be attributed to other health issues around lockdown. I will say though, that I personally experienced a long period of weird fatigue just prior to lockdown. I’d had weird not quite flu symptoms that didn’t quite fit the covid symptom list at the time. But due to timing of dinner with someone who later tested positive for covid, I have reason to think I may have actually had covid. The fatigue was really stange, like pushing my kids on the swing made me pause for strength. And chasing my kids for more than a few steps made me wheeze and gasp for breath. The fatigue lasted at least a month. And was definitely different than the effects of anxiety that happened later. Especially since exercise tends to be invigorating for me in the face of anxiety. This isn’t to say that there aren’t also lockdown related health problems conflating the issue, but I have personal reasons to think long covid is a thing, especially when looking at all the system the virus seems to ravage.
djsumdog 6y ago
> The mean age was 56.5[0] There are potential long term effects from most infections, especially in the elderly. Other infections can cause long term problems, and it's still super early for COVID to talk about long term effects. I remember getting pneumonia in my twenties and it taking 3 months for my lungs to fully recover. We still don't understand exactly what happens with Lymes Disease. Is the immune system left in a state where it's continually fighting/reacting to an infection that's no longer present? The 1976 swine flu vaccine also may have cause neurological issues for up to 4,000 of the millions who received it[1]. Would they have had the same symptoms from an actual infection from the flu? Potentially. It'd difficult to know, but people do have long term issues from other viruses, especially if they're older or have other underlying health conditions. It's not unprecedented. [0]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ (60 Minutes)
lucideer 6y ago
The 2% figure is from an app that has been plagued with technical issues[0] since its release. The article also highlights a study[1] finding over 50% suffered fatigue after 10 weeks and 33% were physically unfit to work. From that study: > There was no association between COVID-19 severity (need for inpatient admission, supplemental oxygen or critical care) and fatigue following COVID-19 [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-apps/englands-covid-19-app-does-not-accept-a-third-of-test-results-idUSKBN26H0JI https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai... [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v...
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  This study's sample was pretty strongly non-representative; half the subjects had been hospitalized.
rattray 6y ago
Hmm, that's a bit of a rosy interpretation – the article also says this: > Half of people in a study in Dublin still had fatigue 10 weeks after being infected with coronavirus. A third were physically unable to return to work. > Crucially, doctors found no link between the severity of the infection and fatigue. Study here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v... 128 participants (49.5 ± 15 years; 54% female)
- arcticbull 6y ago
  “fatigue” is one those symptoms that’s heavily affected by placebo/nocebo since it’s predominantly psychological. I’m not saying it can't be caused by a lingering infection or the result of an infection, I’m just saying it’s not like “scarring” or “breathlessness” — it’s hugely subjective. IMO the fact there’s no correlation to disease severity points more towards this being a red herring. [edit] To downvoters, consider that the placebo effect is incredibly strong, much stronger than you give it credit for most likely, and has gotten stronger over time as our faith in medicine has. A 2014 study showed that placebo was 50% as effective as real migraine medication in treating pain after migraines [1]. Similarly for the nocebo effect. A study showed that 20% of people getting placebo drugs in a clinical trial developed side-effects. The nocebo effect may be even stronger than placebo. [2,3]. I'm not minimizing COVID and I'm not saying these people are "making it up." I'm saying, humans aren't computers, and human viruses aren't computer viruses. It's not a case of X happens to you and the result is deterministically Y. There's a lot more to your subjective experience. Generally the more strongly you believe in a potential range of outcomes, the more likely you are to, basically, get them. COVID anxiety is huge, and some of these "long-haulers" symptoms could easily be nocebo. If this long-haul syndrome really is nocebo, it opens up potential avenues for treatment. We need to keep an open mind. [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-th... [2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/The_nocebo_response https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/The_nocebo... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/
  - 6y ago
kalaido 6y ago
I agree. It's like a maginfing glass
oceanplexian 6y ago
> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew One thing I don't get is why saying C19 is "Just another Flu" is somehow taken as downplaying the virus. Seasonal Flu kills as many as 600,000 people annually. Do their lives not matter because they are taken by a regular old virus and not a novel coronavirus? And why doesn't the media report on every strain and mutation of the seasonal flu that could cause "long term effects"?
- nickfromseattle 6y ago
  COVID19 has caused 250,000+ additional deaths in the US on-top of whatever the normal flu kills in an average year. Here is a link for more information on 'excess death': https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
- conception 6y ago
  Because Covid is about a magnitude more deadly. And seems to have more long term effects than the flu typically does. It’s not just another flu. Saying it is is downplaying it.
- funcDropShadow 6y ago
  The seasonal flu is a severe disease. Let's say it kills 600,000 people on average per year. That is not measured like the Covid death are measured in most countries. For the flu they take the excess death to estimate how many people died. But the majority of people are not tested. Whereas we are doing extremely hard counter measures against Covid-19, and we still have more deaths than for the seasonal flu. And the flu and Covid-19 season is just starting in the northern hemisphere. On top of that we have the long Covid phenomenon. But is's incidence is still unclear. But even if it is just 2% of Covid cases, that are ill for month (if not for years), that is really quite significant; even expensive for the economy. So, I don't see Covid-19 as "just like the flu".
- foogazi 6y ago
  We don’t lock down for Seasonal Flu and there is an annual vaccine for it with regular reminders to get your flu shot Covid-19 has been around for less than a year, no vaccine and, with a lockdown and closing our borders, has already killed 3x more than the seasonal flu in the US So it’s not like the flu

by fab1an 6y ago

LeoNatan25 6y ago

2% is actually a very large percent, considering how contagious the virus is. Many people like to say that all respiratory illnesses produce similar issues, but no other so widespread virus has such high chronic illness remains.

agent008t 6y ago
The symptoms sound similar to the longer-term effects some people experience with mono (Epstein-Barr virus / glandular fever).
- JimmyAxod 6y ago
  I’ve had both. This (long covid, post virus fatigue, whatever) is a few orders of magnitude worse, at least for me. I had covid middle of March, and am maybe 50% energy most days, and have to do massive breaths every so often. After 7 months of “recovery”?! I don’t know if I’m even getting better... yeah extreme fatigue, brain fog, eating can be exhausting... OTOH, A lot of people came out of it far worse...
  - abathur 6y ago
    Thanks for this comparison. I'm not sure how common symptomatic mono is, but I suspect it (along with some things like maybe pneumonia and bronchitis?) is a good reference point. How was your bout with mono? I recall having tonsils so swollen I was afraid I'd have to go to the hospital for a few days, and then being perpetually exhausted for ~6-8 weeks.
    - JimmyAxod 6y ago
      Yeah for me mono was horrible for a week or so, then exhaustion for 2-3 months but nothing like long covid. Of course it could also be partly the fact I had mono in my early 20s and had covid in early 40s!
  - agent008t 6y ago
    Looking up "mono brain fog", there seem to be a lot of reports of people experiencing neurological symptoms for many months, even years. Symptoms reported are similar - fatigue, brain fog, decreased appetite, some also seem to report anxiety and other similar changes. But it seems to be rare enough that it is hard to establish a causal link / study it properly. I wonder if there could be some common cause? Perhaps also common to CFS?

ourcat 6y ago

I know a couple of people who caught Covid-19 back before the summer, who both described the same symptoms after recovering (and testing negative). This was a while before all this talk of 'Long Covid' came about. Since we're all different, and will all fight viruses in different ways and strengths (depending on health/existing cnditions etc.), there'll be so many variations in how much of a 'toll' fighting it has taken on our bodies (and minds). Since this ia a 'novel' virus, we can only really base any conlusions on the empirical evidence as it comes in.

oceanplexian 6y ago
The virus shouldn't have been labeled 'novel' in the first place. In a 2020 study by La Jolla Institute for Immunology, they found blood samples pre-2018 that demonstrated a T-Cell immune response to Covid-19. It was found that in SARS-CoV-2 and “common cold” coronavirus fragments that were similar (at least 67% genetic similarity) 57% showed cross-reactivity by memory T cells. If the Covid-19 coronavirus is novel, then we should be designating every new strain of the flu as a novel virus.
- juliushuijnk 6y ago
  If you have many hours to spare, you can watch George Hotz dive into the details. One of the take-aways is that the Corona virus is a Sars, not a flu. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vWaawiUteM If your take is that Sars is just another flu, then I guess you just broadened the scope of the flu, and need to be open for the idea that the 'flu' could be more dangerous than you thought.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Fragments that were 67% similar really doesn't sound very similar when we're talking about DNA, considering us slower evolving mammals share a larger percentage of DNA with our pets, and by your own stat 43% of people's T-cells are not primed to respond at all... We do designate strains of influenza transmitted from animals (and indeed other coronaviruses transmitted from animals) as novel threats.

cheph 6y ago

> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew, but feel that the OMG-COVID crew hasn't necessarily thought the above aspects through either. The incentives are all messed up for the media to provide a balanced information and with the economic devastation coming down the pipes I think both the flu and COVID will look like a walk in the park. https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelihoods-global-estimates-mortality-and-poverty-costs-covid-19 https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/lives-or-livelih... > Using those somewhat more generous – but still frugal – thresholds, the number of poverty years in the world (235 million) is 54 times the number of lost years. And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation.

matwood 6y ago
> And yes, without lockdowns things may be even worse, but the fact remains that the biggest impact on lives from this pandemic will likely not be directly from COVID but indirectly from economic devastation. You say indirectly, I say directly. Even if everything was opened 100% tomorrow, many people are simply not going to go back to what they used to do. The way to avoid economic devastation was/is to deal with covid.
- djsumdog 6y ago
  Things are pretty much back to normal in parts of Mississippi: https://neckbeard.xyz/notice/9znbtKqgRaGgwdVxgm https://neckbeard.xyz/notice/9znbtKqgRaGgwdVxgm ..and the secondary effects of the economic and psychological devastation are pretty bad. I wrote this back in July: https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/ https://battlepenguin.com/politics/secondary-effects/ It's been eight months! We cannot keep living like this. We know now the largest deaths came from a failure to protect the elderly and misusing nursing home facilities (Michigan, Kirkland/Seattle, NYC). We need to do more to protect the elderly, but other people need be able to assume their own risks again. Most lockdown restrictions have ended in Ecuador. Florida and Mississippi are opening up. Pennsylvanian had a cord order by Stickman to open up, but it's been stayed pending appeal. Humanity cannot be put into low power mode like a laptop. We are not cogs in a machine that can be stopped and started at will.

gizmo 6y ago

So many people have been infected by covid in the last 9 months that you'd expect a large enough number of infections to coincide with other health problems to make for scary headlines. If somebody has a something as mundane as burnout or depression after catching covid, will people identify it correctly, or will anxiety and relentless doom and gloom news headlines result in a "long covid" self-diagnosis? Do we have any reason to believe long covid is a real thing? Is this not just anecdotes being blown up by the media that is generally useless at science reporting?

JimmyAxod 6y ago
I got covid in March, I’ve had “long covid” since, or post virus fatigue... It’s certainly a real thing :) There’s many symptoms, but as most articles state, the main one being extreme fatigue, second one is probably brain fog. Another is breathing issues. When it gets bad for me, I make extreme noises every so often when I sit down, or when I need to take a big breath of air, etc etc Eating can be exhausting - both because you’re spending energy chewing etc, but also you’re not able to breathe as much... I agree with you, that since it coincided with lockdown, people out of jobs, not being active etc, then it could sometimes be misdiagnosed, but it’s very different and pretty easily spotted.
- oceanplexian 6y ago
  I got the same symptoms of "long covid" and didn't even contract the virus. The lockdowns making it illegal to go to a bar or a sports game, worrying about finances and the economy, the incessant negative politics and media, wearing masks all day, replacing real human contact with computer screens and "Zoom Happy Hours"? All of these have given me the same symptoms: Anxiety. Fatigue. Brain Fog. Breathing issues. It seems like there is another disease going around and no one is talking about it.
  - milesvp 6y ago
    You are right that a lot of the symptoms can be attributed to other health issues around lockdown. I will say though, that I personally experienced a long period of weird fatigue just prior to lockdown. I’d had weird not quite flu symptoms that didn’t quite fit the covid symptom list at the time. But due to timing of dinner with someone who later tested positive for covid, I have reason to think I may have actually had covid. The fatigue was really stange, like pushing my kids on the swing made me pause for strength. And chasing my kids for more than a few steps made me wheeze and gasp for breath. The fatigue lasted at least a month. And was definitely different than the effects of anxiety that happened later. Especially since exercise tends to be invigorating for me in the face of anxiety. This isn’t to say that there aren’t also lockdown related health problems conflating the issue, but I have personal reasons to think long covid is a thing, especially when looking at all the system the virus seems to ravage.

djsumdog 6y ago

> The mean age was 56.5[0] There are potential long term effects from most infections, especially in the elderly. Other infections can cause long term problems, and it's still super early for COVID to talk about long term effects. I remember getting pneumonia in my twenties and it taking 3 months for my lungs to fully recover. We still don't understand exactly what happens with Lymes Disease. Is the immune system left in a state where it's continually fighting/reacting to an infection that's no longer present? The 1976 swine flu vaccine also may have cause neurological issues for up to 4,000 of the millions who received it[1]. Would they have had the same symptoms from an actual infection from the flu? Potentially. It'd difficult to know, but people do have long term issues from other viruses, especially if they're older or have other underlying health conditions. It's not unprecedented. [0]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768351 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bOHYZhL0WQ (60 Minutes)

lucideer 6y ago

The 2% figure is from an app that has been plagued with technical issues[0] since its release. The article also highlights a study[1] finding over 50% suffered fatigue after 10 weeks and 33% were physically unfit to work. From that study: > There was no association between COVID-19 severity (need for inpatient admission, supplemental oxygen or critical care) and fatigue following COVID-19 [0] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-apps/englands-covid-19-app-does-not-accept-a-third-of-test-results-idUSKBN26H0JI https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britai... [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v...

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
This study's sample was pretty strongly non-representative; half the subjects had been hospitalized.

rattray 6y ago

Hmm, that's a bit of a rosy interpretation – the article also says this: > Half of people in a study in Dublin still had fatigue 10 weeks after being infected with coronavirus. A third were physically unable to return to work. > Crucially, doctors found no link between the severity of the infection and fatigue. Study here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.29.20164293v... 128 participants (49.5 ± 15 years; 54% female)

arcticbull 6y ago
“fatigue” is one those symptoms that’s heavily affected by placebo/nocebo since it’s predominantly psychological. I’m not saying it can't be caused by a lingering infection or the result of an infection, I’m just saying it’s not like “scarring” or “breathlessness” — it’s hugely subjective. IMO the fact there’s no correlation to disease severity points more towards this being a red herring. [edit] To downvoters, consider that the placebo effect is incredibly strong, much stronger than you give it credit for most likely, and has gotten stronger over time as our faith in medicine has. A 2014 study showed that placebo was 50% as effective as real migraine medication in treating pain after migraines [1]. Similarly for the nocebo effect. A study showed that 20% of people getting placebo drugs in a clinical trial developed side-effects. The nocebo effect may be even stronger than placebo. [2,3]. I'm not minimizing COVID and I'm not saying these people are "making it up." I'm saying, humans aren't computers, and human viruses aren't computer viruses. It's not a case of X happens to you and the result is deterministically Y. There's a lot more to your subjective experience. Generally the more strongly you believe in a potential range of outcomes, the more likely you are to, basically, get them. COVID anxiety is huge, and some of these "long-haulers" symptoms could easily be nocebo. If this long-haul syndrome really is nocebo, it opens up potential avenues for treatment. We need to keep an open mind. [1] https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-th... [2] https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/The_nocebo_response https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/The_nocebo... [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4804316/
- 6y ago

kalaido 6y ago

I agree. It's like a maginfing glass

oceanplexian 6y ago

> I'm in no way part of the just-the-flu crew One thing I don't get is why saying C19 is "Just another Flu" is somehow taken as downplaying the virus. Seasonal Flu kills as many as 600,000 people annually. Do their lives not matter because they are taken by a regular old virus and not a novel coronavirus? And why doesn't the media report on every strain and mutation of the seasonal flu that could cause "long term effects"?

nickfromseattle 6y ago
COVID19 has caused 250,000+ additional deaths in the US on-top of whatever the normal flu kills in an average year. Here is a link for more information on 'excess death': https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid https://ourworldindata.org/excess-mortality-covid
conception 6y ago
Because Covid is about a magnitude more deadly. And seems to have more long term effects than the flu typically does. It’s not just another flu. Saying it is is downplaying it.
funcDropShadow 6y ago
The seasonal flu is a severe disease. Let's say it kills 600,000 people on average per year. That is not measured like the Covid death are measured in most countries. For the flu they take the excess death to estimate how many people died. But the majority of people are not tested. Whereas we are doing extremely hard counter measures against Covid-19, and we still have more deaths than for the seasonal flu. And the flu and Covid-19 season is just starting in the northern hemisphere. On top of that we have the long Covid phenomenon. But is's incidence is still unclear. But even if it is just 2% of Covid cases, that are ill for month (if not for years), that is really quite significant; even expensive for the economy. So, I don't see Covid-19 as "just like the flu".
foogazi 6y ago
We don’t lock down for Seasonal Flu and there is an annual vaccine for it with regular reminders to get your flu shot Covid-19 has been around for less than a year, no vaccine and, with a lockdown and closing our borders, has already killed 3x more than the seasonal flu in the US So it’s not like the flu