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Long Covid is overblown and often something else, says Oxford professor
- noduerme 5y agoSome guy says it's overblown and this is ranking on HN? Personally, I know several people who are not normally complainers or full of shit who have had some wild effects for 9-12 months after a bout of covid, including visual disturbances, extreme exhaustion, and loss of focus or mental acuity. I really don't doubt my friends who've suffered this. They're not the kind of folks who think they have made-up diseases or tend to malinger.
- newsclues 5y agoHow can we differentiate COVID and lockdown symptoms?
- noduerme 5y agoif you (God forbid) have covid symptoms, you'll differentiate.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoThat's not a scientific answer. Physical symptoms of stress include: Low energy Headaches Upset stomach, including diarrhea, constipation, and nausea Aches, pains, and tense muscles Chest pain and rapid heartbeat Insomnia Frequent colds and infections Loss of sexual desire and/or ability Nervousness and shaking, ringing in the ear, cold or sweaty hands and feet Dry mouth and difficulty swallowing Clenched jaw and grinding teeth Sounds like all of the physical symptoms of so-called long-COVID. On top of the stress that would undoubtedly afflict a significant fraction of COVID patients, due to the massively inflated fears surrounding COVID, is the effects of physical isolation. One of the requirements for all COVID positive cases is two weeks of total physical isolation. Numerous studies have shown that humans being physically isolated has significant negative health effects. No in person contact. No physical touch. For two weeks. All COVID positive cases, even asymptomatic ones. There are no randomized studies, that control for factors, like the aforementioned psychological distress emanating from fear of COVID, and physical isolation, that suggests COVID causes these long-term symptoms. There are a host of potential confounding factors that could explain these correlations better than damage from the COVID infection. Notice how extreme rigor is demanded for the ivermectin studies but then really just mere correlations is enough to draw scare mongering conclusions about COVID.
- noduerme 5y agoI've had all those symptoms during lockdown and I know I haven't had covid. My friends who have had it describe a much, much worse experience. I suppose stress alone can cause visual hallucinations on the order of the road twisting in front of your car, but I know these people and trust their judgment that they have experienced the after effects of a brain-damaging infection.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoYou cannot rely on anecdotes. I know people who claim that many of their relatives suffered severe adverse effects after taking the vaccine. We do not draw scientific conclusions from anecdotes.
- Pokepokalypse 5y agoyou cannot rely on anecdotes. But: pretty much every single anecdote I've heard (online, or meatspace) tells a very consistent story. Maybe it should be studied. But I guess if some professor at a "prestigious university" says it's all psychosomatic, then I guess not.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoBy all means, study it. But please don't peddle unproven theories as fact, and demand policy that restricts other people's civil and economic liberties, be instituted on the basis of these speculative unproven theories.
- nuerow 5y ago> That's not a scientific answer. Physical symptoms of stress include: I feel you inadvertently tried to misrepresent the symptoms of long Covid. Please check wikipedia's article on long Covid for an objective and we'll sourced reference on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID Among the typical symptoms we have "fatigue, headaches, shortness of breath, anosmia (loss of smell), parosmia (distorted smell), muscle weakness, low fever and cognitive dysfunction". Feeling fatigued alone does not pass off as long Covid, jus like coughing alone does not pass off as Covid. For the sake of having a non-inflammatory discussion, please do your best to substantiate and source these sort of claim so that we avoid spreading disinformation.
- proactivesvcs 5y agoI know someone who, six months later is still struggling to balance, suffering with cognitive problems as well as chronic recall and speech problems. We can differentiate between Long Covid and "lockdown symptoms" because nobody suffers any of these by staying indoors more often than usual and having a reduced social life.
- nuerow 5y ago> Some guy says it's overblown and this is ranking on HN? The guy quoted for said statement is a professor of medicine of a reputable university, so he does have the authority thing sorted out. Also, I feel the quote means something different than the original interpretation. After reading the article, it seems that John Bell simply states that a) long Covid is "more complicated than people assume", and b) it's incidence is lower than initial (and conservative) estimates. The article mentions that "half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it." And that's pretty much it. There is no harm in improving our understanding of the real world effects of a disease.
- Pokepokalypse 5y ago>"half of people suffering from long Covid may not have it." That's a completely baseless statement, and there is some serious fuckery going on here, either with the article, or the supposed expert they're citing.
- noduerme 5y agoOh he's got the "authority thing sorted out" eh? Like every doctor who ever claimed females who were hysterical needed to be vibrated to orgasm to cure their disease...? Or is his authority just on the limited level of chiropractors who spread antivax disinformation on YouTube? Just wondering what level of trust one should place in a man who suddenly catapults into world headlines by claiming millions of people are mistaken on experiencing symptoms of a novel virus.
- nuerow 5y ago> Oh he's got the "authority thing sorted out" eh? Yes, he's no rando posting stuff on his Facebook page, nor is he a rapper or media personality. He's an expert from a reputable university that made solid contributions to the fight against COVID-19 , and he is quoting data from the Office for National Statistics. In the very least we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Even though it's true that appeals to authority don't cut it, that does not mean you are entitled to dismiss any comment you don't like by resorting to personal attacks.
- antiSingularity 5y agoIf we're going to throw anecdotes around, a very close relative of mine has had a severe reaction to the Covid Vaccine (AZ, I believe), and has been off work for 6 months and counting with a variety of health issues.
- noduerme 5y agodid the Russians invade HN when Facebook shut down, or what?
- antiSingularity 5y agoJust goes to show the validity of anecdotes thrown around anonymously online, right?
- noduerme 5y agoNo, you're just throwing around disinformation. Anecdotes aside, I think your cousin made the right decision to get the vaccine. The virus would have likely done the same and worse. Unless they could have avoided it forever, the choices would be the vax or a full assault by a live replicating virus. 700,000 people have died in the US now from it. Better to live.
- antiSingularity 5y agoAnd who gets to define my anecdote as "disinformation"? Surely you can't be saying that any story that runs counter to a particular given narrative must be false? (FWIW, it is completely true). How do you know the disease would be worse? This particular relative is in mental anguish, as the kind of statements that you just made are the only available opinions on whether you should get the vaccine. After 6 months of feeling like death, they are questioning the decision. ps. Are we ever going to re-set the Covid death count at the end of a year? At approx. 300k deaths per year in the US, Covid is the 3rd-biggest killer.
- 5y ago
- celticninja 5y agoI have a relative who is an ICU nurse, he had effects for up to 6 months afterwards. They have always been an active, outdoors type of person, the change was obvious to all around them. Fortunately it has got better, eventually. So yeah these articles, especially from this section of the press, are more likely to be based on political ideology than medical fact. Remember these are the same media organisations that will deny climate change and find scientists who will push that agenda for them. Just because they have a pulpit, it doesn't make them correct.
- disneygibson 5y agoHave you considered that some of these symptoms are consequences of locking down society and preventing real human interaction for 18 months? I haven’t had COVID and I have had more depression and exhaustion in the last year than in my entire life.
- sofixa 5y agoWas there any place on the planet that had 18 months of uninterrupted lockdowns, preventing real human interaction? The pandemic has hit in waves, and lockdowns were usually only applied when needed.
- disneygibson 5y agoI think the uncertainty made it worse. Uncertainty is a common trigger for depression and malaise.
- nsonha 5y agoI think you should have control of hacker news and personally curate articles. Everyone is trying to fool everyone else, high morality people like you are rare.
- sschueller 5y agoI highly doubt long covid is not real. In fact I believe it can be caused by any viral infection and until now has just been blown off as chronic fatigue syndrome. Kind of a catch all for fatigue that can't be explained. A lot of people suffer under it and a big problem is that a lot of people and doctors think it's made up or lazyness. I hope now that there are so many cases we can get a better understanding and actually be able to properly diagnose and treat it.
- antiSingularity 5y agoAs a parent of two small kids, I would struggle to notice if I had "Long Covid". Most of the symptoms sound like my every day experience! ps. In my subjective opinion, Long Covid is completely overblown. I know even fewer people that have suffered from it (0) than people who have had symptomatic Covid (2).
- noduerme 5y agoI know three people who continue to experience it and, again, they are not malingerers. If you've never had a debilitating disease that knocks you off your feet, it might be difficult to comprehend. Imagine having kids AND not being able to walk to the bathroom without losing your breath and getting dizzy.
- antiSingularity 5y agoIt happens, when the kids bring back a particularly nasty disease from nursery. We recently had RSV, and that lasted a month for me.
- noduerme 5y agoSounds like your immune system didn't handle that well, but again, imagine how much worse it would handle covid.
- antiSingularity 5y agoMy immune system would definitely be better if I hadn't been confined to my house for months, and banned from seeing anyone for months after that.
- noduerme 5y agoTrue, and the social isolation has sucked. I've had the shots, and those sucked too. But I'm not concerned this is going to be a new permanent state of affairs. I think it was a one time emergency, and how one carries oneself in a crisis says a lot about a person. If or when it shows itself to be a permanent state of affairs - then the calculus of endless vaccinations and endless quarantine would change things. I have patience and a long term view of this whole situation.
- giu 5y agohttps://archive.vn/N7KjE https://archive.vn/N7KjE
- Aeolun 5y agoIf only half of the people that think they have it (5%) actually have it. Doesn’t that still mean that 2.5% of all COVID cases suffers from persistent issues? That’s still a fairly high incidence rate. At least to the extend that we can’t really ignore it.
- phillc73 5y agoThe article states, "The ONS survey, published last week, found that 5 per cent of people who had tested positive for Covid reported at least one symptom 12 to 16 weeks after their infection." Only 5% of all COVID cases report persistent symptoms. And 3.4% of the general population report the same symptoms. Edit: Comment this is in reply to originally had 50%, now changed to 5%.
- Aeolun 5y agoYeah, apologies. I’m fairly certain I read much higher numbers somewhere else before, but then found this article (through archive.is) had it’s own numbers, so I modified the comment since it frankly works either way. Whether 25 or 2.5%, it’s still millions of people.
- stuaxo 5y ago"only 5%" is one in twenty. Right now the UK is getting something like 30,000 new cases a day. This adds up to a lot, last time I checked the UK was only behind India on total cases. For whatever reason the people running the UKs actions are doing the opposite of protecting people.
- joeberon 5y agoWell, I'm not sure what my sangha member had but she was perfectly healthy, a very active outdoors person, then she got coronavirus, and then was basically bed-ridden for about 10 months. Basically completely weak and chronically fatigued for that period. At least, I am quite sure that her long-term symptoms were due to coronavirus. I'm sure there are many false attributions though, as is bound to happen with such a public disease. For example, I know a lot of people who are convinced they had coronavirus just because they had a cold at this time or that time or whatever.
- JesseMReeves 5y agoWell, chronic fatigue syndrome is out there and has been suspected to be triggered by viral infections for long time. The community actually became quite hopeful when long covid came up that someone would finally listen. Maybe your friend has even found remedies among these long-term sufferers. The people in CFS documentaries look as bedridden as those with long covid to me. So why does long covid get this much attention, while CFS remains obscure?
- soco 5y agoIf it's really the same thing I see only upsides: once long covid gets addressed due to this much attention, CFS will get addressed too. I call it win-win.
- nicoburns 5y ago> So why does long covid get this much attention, while CFS remains obscure? I think it’s probably simply a numbers thing. A lot more people with long focus than other forms of CFS. Hopefully it will get a lot more attention in the present circumstances.
- headmelted 5y agoI’d feel a lot better about this if people stopped making concrete assertions about their hunches however well-informed. For someone in his position to say long covid is overblown and usually something else without any explicit diagnosis for those cases is no more responsible than the “it’s just a flu” brigade have been since this started. Literally everything has become so poisoned by misinformation that we can’t even present real science and reviewed data without feeling the need to represent probabilities as certainties for fear of the conspiracy mob running with it, which it seems like is happening here, and I think is even more dangerous. The rest of us aren’t listening to the whackadoodles on Facebook, but we’re certainly paying attention to credible scientists. I’m sure it’s infuriating for the science community that you have to clear a really high bar of evidence and critical examination of data before making an assertion, whereas Karen or Chad just write whatever stupid and demonstrably impossible nonsense they like on Facebook without a care in the world. The morons don’t have standards. It sucks. But resorting to their tactics, even a little, is a really slippery slope.
- s9w 5y agoflagged in 3, 2, 1
- teekert 5y agoI can find a professor that will say: Long Covid is possible responsible for many long lasting, slumbering inflammatory conditions and may potentially be related to effects from Tinnitus to inflammatory fluid build-up anywhere in the body. I think we still need a lot more research. Those ACE receptors express in many tissues.
- pixelbreaker 5y agoMy neighbour thinks she has long covid, but she never had covid.
- gambiting 5y agoNot had covid, but about 2 years ago had a Parvovirus-B19 infection which triggered a reactive arthritis, which means 2 years later I'm still having steroid injections and my joints are more or less in pain. The medical summary is basically "sucks to be you I guess" but it's a semi-common side effect of a virus infection. So yeah, all I want to say is that virus infections are not a joke, even if you got through one "fine" it can absolutely have devastating and life long effects on you.
- shoto_io 5y agoI had a very bad flu in 2017 or so and could not smell nor taste for at least 4 months after I had it.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y agoIf we're sharing anecdotes here, I've been enjoying my chronic tinnitus for close to 20 years. It has developed after a bad flu and then never left. It's not a thing you can get used to, at least I haven't been able to.
- pigeonhole123 5y agoThere is some newish research that suggests that tinnitus can be treated by lowering chronic inflammation. This worked in my personal experience. Going low carb weakened my admittedly moderate tinnitus to below where I rarely notice it anymore. https://www.audiology-worldnews.com/research/3554-is-treatable-neuroinflammation-the-trigger-for-tinnitus https://www.audiology-worldnews.com/research/3554-is-treatab...
- noduerme 5y agoAs a guy who played very loud music for many years, I can relate. Until you said this I was sitting here in silence out in the country listening to frogs and now all I hear is that high whine. I think like a lot of other shit I just learn to tune it out.
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- tdrdt 5y agoI think the title is misleading. The number of long covid cases is overblown. But, and the professor agrees, long covid can be very real. But the name `long covid` is also a little misleading. A lot of virus infections can shake up your body so you will need a long time to recover. A great example is the Epstein Barr virus: very contagious and it can take months or even years to recover from it.
- stuaxo 5y agoThe symptoms of long covid include different symptoms so naming it is valid.
- stuaxo 5y agoThe Times and Telepgraph have been minimising Covid since day one, even providing a platform for groups such as "us for them". Right now there are no mitigations for Covid in UK schools. One of the things safer schools campaigners are pointing out is the risk of long Covid (as well as hospitalisations etc). Example of Covid in one area of the UK https://mobile.twitter.com/DmodosCutter/status/1445303921300410369 https://mobile.twitter.com/DmodosCutter/status/1445303921300...
- danjac 5y agoThe question is why the Times/Telegraph (and their low-IQ equivalents such as the Mail and Express) are so keen to downplay Covid. My hunch is that their owners are losing money on property investments and are desperate to get employees back in the office, who knows.
- doingtheiroming 5y agoIt’s only a conspiracy theory when people I don’t like say it.
- jeofken 5y ago> My hunch is that their owners are losing money on property investments and are desperate to get employees back in the office, who knows. This conspiracy theory based on hunch falls with Occams Razor, as both owners and writers at newspapers likely diversify their investments like any other investor.
- garmaine 5y agoYou must not be familiar with the intricacies of UK property ownership. Most desirable properties in London are owned by a small group of aristocratic people who really do just hold property, and things which give them political influence like newspapers. Corporate ownership of buildings is not as prevalent as, say, in New York (except in the family business sort of way). Part of this is tradition, but also the quirks of UK property law which makes it very hard to trance ownership of property, and so these people who value their privacy prefer property over other more liquid investments they’d have to disclose.
- Kaibeezy 5y agoTimes headline is overblown and often something less dramatic once you dig into it, realizes reasonably aware skeptical reader.
- lukastr0 5y agoI found this summary of Long Covid research quite intriguing and nuanced: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-than-you-wanted https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t...
- rob_c 5y agoNothing new here. 90%+ of people don't understand that either they're suffering depression from isolating from other humans, or in cases of healthcare, symptoms don't suddenly appear months after a disease or vaccine for hundreds of people like some episode of House. The 1% of legit cases are being let down because were being dragged down by the same mass hysteria that linked vaccines and autism. Chances are this isn't even covid related but an abnormal autoimmune response I'd bet, but given I'm only trained in statistical analysis I could be wrong. People are always look for something to blame and given the hysteria it's not shocking they are blaming the magical bioweapon that will catch you in your sleep...
- stuaxo 5y agoCovid itself creates an auto immune response. It's estimated one in seven kids will suffer long Covid. The symptoms aren't the symptoms of depression.
- charbonneau 5y agoNot peer-reviewed. Only 13.5% of the children completed the 3-month online questionnaire. After 3 months, 30.3% of test-positives and 16.2% of test-negatives had 3+ symptoms. Possible response & recall bias. No control group for other respiratory infections. Did not assess whether symptoms were continuous for the entire 3 months.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoUnfortunately, the media has scared the shit out of people, and they are so convinced that COVID is an extreme threat to every one, that the evidence that confirms their biases requires zero rigor, while the evidence that contradicts the consensus narrative, like ivermectin being an effective prophylaxis, requires extreme rigor. My opinion is that both should require extreme rigor mind you.
- charbonneau 5y agoI downvoted your comment because you obviously don't know what you're talking about. Only rigorologists can advise whether extreme rigor should be required or not.
- mnw21cam 5y agoThis is going to be one of those cases where the professor makes a well-nuanced detailed well-researched sympathetic statement, the press turns it into a headline that makes him sound like an insensitive clod, and everyone just reacts to the headline instead of the full statement, isn't it?
- Kliment 5y agoThis is something that's hard to talk about because it's both painful for patients to hear, and legitimately controversial due to shortage of data. There doesn't seem to be a syndrome here. There's a handful of different symptoms, and they mostly don't occur together. There's certainly long-term symptoms, and mostly correlated with disease severity. You have long-term effects of hypoxia, and long term effects of lung damage, which you see in a significant number of patients who had severe disease. The hypoxia from untreated covid infection causes all sorts of multiple organ damage. This is entirely uncontroversial and well-understood. In addition, there is some kind of likely autoimmune response, which is sometimes triggered by covid, sometimes goes away after vaccination, and has very variable severity and duration. This is really poorly understood, and seems to be similar to CFS. It is more frequent in more severe cases, but not exclusive to them (just rare for low-severity cases). On top of that, there's an increased level of anxiety and depression in patients, but there's not enough data here to exclude a population effect. Anxiety and depression has jumped on a population level in covid-affected regions regardless of infection status. Now, while having any long-term effect is common, having any particular long-term effect is rare, and multiple effects coinciding is both rare and strongly correlated with disease severity. My opinion is that treating these three categories of long-term effects as a syndrome is wrong, and trying to treat them as if they're the same thing is going to lead to worse patient outcomes. There's a huge problem with this however - "long covid" is a patient-preferred term for a reason - it gets taken seriously. Those that have done the research on CFS know that patients with CFS get ignored and shrugged at for decades, and know if they lose the "long covid" wave of interest in the biomed/research/practitioner community they're screwed for the foreseeable future. Which is why patients insist on long-term post-covid effects being seen as a syndrome, and attack anyone who questions this (I have personally been attacked verbally about expressing this opinion). And I get it. CFS patients have been left alone in the dark for far too long, just like several other poorly understood diseases that systematically get ignored, mis-treated, or patients accused of making it up (see also: fibromyalgia, depression, a number of cognitive disorders in history). "long covid" is getting a fresh look at by the medical community, and this is a source of hope that it's mean to destroy. But reality doesn't care about whether it's mean, and I believe in reality we're dealing with a number of entirely separate syndromes that need to be treated very differently from each other, and bunching them together is distorting both the conversation and the treatments.
- tfehring 5y agoI think this study, also out of the UK, is the standard reference on long COVID symptoms. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v2.full.pdf https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.18.21253633v... I’ll have to look at the survey in more detail but incidence rates would have to be really inconsistent with that study (i.e. probably an order of magnitude lower) to indicate that long COVID is anything other than a massive and serious problem.
- CryptoPunk 5y agoYou'd have to control for potential confounding factors, like the psychosocial effect of COVID, and the two weeks of total physical isolation every COVID-positve case is subjected to, to even begin to start drawing the conclusion that COVID infections are causing a significant fraction of these self-reported symptoms. Almost every symptom listed could be a result of anxiety, which in turn can be a result of the extreme fear that is now surrounding COVID.
- tfehring 5y agoAre people who had COVID actually more likely to have had significant periods of physical isolation in 2020 than people who didn't have COVID? I'd expect the opposite, if anything. Amin-Chowdhury et al asked about "loneliness" and found a slightly lower rate in people who had had COVID than in the control group, though the difference wasn't statistically significant. There is some weak evidence of a higher rate of anxiety among people who've had COVID, including [0] as well as another nonzero but statistically insignificant difference from Amin-Chowdhury et al. But the difference in anxiety prevalence would only be a few percentage points (point estimates of 4.3% and 4.2% respectively), nowhere enough for that to be an underlying causal explanation for long-term symptoms that occur >20% of the time. In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population. I think you'd really have to jump through hoops to argue that (1) some symptoms caused directly by COVID persist for a long time, (2) other symptoms caused directly by COVID reliably go away after a few weeks, but (3) people who have had COVID re-develop those same symptoms at a higher rate than the general population, months later, for reasons not caused directly by COVID. [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282115/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282115/
- sAbakumoff 5y ago"Covid is overblown and isn't much different than flu" US Right-wingers since 2020. Meanwhile: 700K Covid deaths in the USA.
- jzellis 5y agoSo one professor of medicine at Oxford says that long Covid is idiopathic. As Bell is an academic professor and not a clinician in the field handling patients, or a virologist tasked with studying this particular situation, his opinions are educated but not necessarily informed enough to be authoritative. And, of course, no amount of theorizing negates the fact that a great number of people with Covid seem to be suffering from prolonged and in many cases debilitating symptoms from, well, something that didn't cause them before these people had Covid. And a great many other doctors very clearly don't share his opinion, including actual practicing doctors in hospitals and surgeries and virologists. So as a "gotcha" political point against all these "sky is falling" liberals, it's not actually very useful. What it sounds like is right-wing contrarians looking for any authoritative figure to bolster their claims that all the sick people and dead people didn't really die or get sick and stay sick, or if they did they were already sick, so they can simply return the economy - which is the only thing they give a shit about - to making them money. It's not actually very convincing or compelling if you're not, y'know, a free market loony or a sociopath.
- q1w2 5y agoIt shouldn't be on the HN front page at all. He's literally presenting zero evidence. This is just some professor's personal opinion.
- Pokepokalypse 5y agoI agree. The real problem isn't that one guy has an opinion. The real problem is that there's an article about it, and this article is somehow getting massive promotion and engagement as if it's real valid science.
- equalsione 5y agoI've known a few of people over the years with some form of hard-to-diagnose autoimmune illness (ME/CF/...) and the hardest part seems to be getting a medical professional to take them seriously.
- lamontcg 5y agoHere comes the gaslighting. This is probably the #1 reason why I was so careful about avoiding the virus back when there was a lot of voices yelling "just catch the virus, you won't die". I knew the people who didn't die but just got lingering afflictions would be treated like gulf war syndrome vets.
- 100kristine 5y agoAnecdotally have friends who have very obvious chronic health issues after catching COVID. Trouble breathing, migraines. They're young and healthy too, mid twenties to early thirties. Might be same catalyst triggering different chronic issues but it's horribly irresponsible to say this is something "overblown."