> That being said, do you think that people lied about being in hospital/on ventilator. That seems unlikely to me, and the cognitive outcomes seem to respond in

> That being said, do you think that people lied about being in hospital/on ventilator. That seems unlikely to me, and the cognitive outcomes seem to respond in a dose-dependent fashion to each step of Covid infection, which is not something that I would have expected to see if there were response biases going on. I said in my original comment that we need to be more careful about separating the degrees of severity of illness from reports of "long covid". Post-hospitalization syndrome is a thing -- people who were on ventilators have lingering after effects. It isn't "long covid", and confusing that with reports of "I had asymptomatic illness and now I am tired" is just bad science. Unfortunately, most of these "long covid" studies do exactly that. They take all levels of severity, mix them together, correlate with self-reports of symptoms, and don't anchor anything to objectively observable criteria (like test results). Most of this stuff wouldn't pass muster at an 8th grade science fair. > Looking at the methods, the Covid stuff comes after the cognitive test, so could not have impacted the cognitive test results. You have no evidence that they had covid at the time of the cognitive test (or before). It's self-reported. Even if it's true that the two questions were strictly separated in time, and it wasn't possible to take the cognitive test later, after the covid questions were added (this is not clear from the methods, btw), the results are hopelessly confounded. > Again, I think the biggest bias in this sample is likely to be their TV-watching status. They recruited across the web as well. It's right there in the methods.