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Arguments for the existence of "long covid" are the same ones used by vaccine deniers 10 years ago. "I got vaccinated" ... "later something happened" . Just rep

Arguments for the existence of "long covid" are the same ones used by vaccine deniers 10 years ago. "I got vaccinated" ... "later something happened" . Just replace vaccinated with covid. This anti scientific bull needs to stop. People get sick from various diseases, and people get covid some time in their life. Everything bad following it does NOT imply it was due to covid. 90 % have had it or something. Some are bound to have a bad time later on no matter what.

mjhay 4y ago
Long covid is real enough to take seriously (in the literature and self-reporting even in this thread). Similar long-term symptoms can be caused by other viral diseases as well. Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of developing long covid, so how is its existence an anti-vaxx argument?
vkou 4y ago
You have your negatives confused. When someone catches COVID, loses their sense of smell, or ability to think without brain fog, and it doesn't come back within a year, that's not 'later something happened'. Yours is the unscientific position. We don't need to be able to explain a phenomena to observe it happening in a novel, unprecedented way to millions of people, that just happens to be correlated with them catching a novel, serious disease.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  Sometimes there are complications after being vaccinated too. That does not mean that all adverse effects you experience at any point later in life is the cause of it. Long term debilitating diseases happen to people very single day, and since there is quite a high percent chance of a person catching corona in that day as well, you end up with thousands of "unexplained long covid" which are, in reality, just two bads of different coins
  - vkou 4y ago
    > That does not mean that all adverse effects you experience at any point later in life is the cause of it Correct. But that's not the situation that people have with long COVID. The situation that they do have is that they test positive for COVID, they get regular COVID symptoms (loss of smell, brain fog, fatigue), that then don't go away after three weeks. > Long term debilitating diseases happen to people very single day, and since there is quite a high percent chance of a person catching corona in that day as well Except that it's not a high chance that on any particular day/week/month you're going to catch COVID, and an even lower chance that you're going to catch a completely unrelated, rare, hitherto unknown disease that has all the same symptoms, but is not COVID. The intersection of these odds is even lower. The rate at which people have long COVID symptoms has dramatically gone up since the start of the pandemic. You have an incredibly high hill that you have to climb to convince us that no, those symptoms are actually caused by some unkown unrelated mysterious thing that just happened to have affected all these people in the same week/month that they caught COVID. If we release a bunch of tigers into the woods, and people going into the woods start mysteriously dissapearing, with the occasional discovery of a mutilated body covered in tiger shit, Occam's razor leads me to believe that the tigers probably have something to do with it. It's possible that there's another explanation, but you're going to have to do a lot of work to convince us of it. 'It could have been something else' doesn't meet that bar.
slg 4y ago
This article specifically links long Covid symptoms with heightened antibody and cytokine levels measured in the patients. It isn't just people self reporting being tired or whatever you are implying.
nicoburns 4y ago
Well except that there's strong evidence that covid directly attacks parts of the body like the respiratory and cardiovascular systems that people develop (in some cases long term) problems with. The fatigue stuff is a bit fuzzier as nobody really knows the underlying cause of that, but it's known to be triggered by other viruses, so it's entirely plausible (and likely given the sheer number of reports) that it's triggered by this one.
dangoor 4y ago
These are not the same at all. Actual studies on vaccines have showed that people didn't have the various conditions (eg autism) above the baseline level. On the other hand, studies of covid that include control groups have shown that some proportion of people have longer-lasting symptoms that do not appear in the control group. It's also my understanding that other viruses have been known to cause longer-lived effects as well, so this is not limited to SARS-CoV-2. It's totally true that you can't just go by an individual person's account of what happened to them, but I think the evidence for the existence of long COVID goes beyond that.
stcroixx 4y ago
Agree. Every few months I check back in to see if anything at all has been proven and still nada. It certainly doesn't help that completely subjective things like sense of smell and how tired you are are key components.
- vkou 4y ago
  If smell is completely subjective, so is eyesight and hearing.

mjhay 4y ago

Long covid is real enough to take seriously (in the literature and self-reporting even in this thread). Similar long-term symptoms can be caused by other viral diseases as well. Vaccination greatly reduces the risk of developing long covid, so how is its existence an anti-vaxx argument?

vkou 4y ago

You have your negatives confused. When someone catches COVID, loses their sense of smell, or ability to think without brain fog, and it doesn't come back within a year, that's not 'later something happened'. Yours is the unscientific position. We don't need to be able to explain a phenomena to observe it happening in a novel, unprecedented way to millions of people, that just happens to be correlated with them catching a novel, serious disease.

heywhatupboys 4y ago
Sometimes there are complications after being vaccinated too. That does not mean that all adverse effects you experience at any point later in life is the cause of it. Long term debilitating diseases happen to people very single day, and since there is quite a high percent chance of a person catching corona in that day as well, you end up with thousands of "unexplained long covid" which are, in reality, just two bads of different coins
- vkou 4y ago
  > That does not mean that all adverse effects you experience at any point later in life is the cause of it Correct. But that's not the situation that people have with long COVID. The situation that they do have is that they test positive for COVID, they get regular COVID symptoms (loss of smell, brain fog, fatigue), that then don't go away after three weeks. > Long term debilitating diseases happen to people very single day, and since there is quite a high percent chance of a person catching corona in that day as well Except that it's not a high chance that on any particular day/week/month you're going to catch COVID, and an even lower chance that you're going to catch a completely unrelated, rare, hitherto unknown disease that has all the same symptoms, but is not COVID. The intersection of these odds is even lower. The rate at which people have long COVID symptoms has dramatically gone up since the start of the pandemic. You have an incredibly high hill that you have to climb to convince us that no, those symptoms are actually caused by some unkown unrelated mysterious thing that just happened to have affected all these people in the same week/month that they caught COVID. If we release a bunch of tigers into the woods, and people going into the woods start mysteriously dissapearing, with the occasional discovery of a mutilated body covered in tiger shit, Occam's razor leads me to believe that the tigers probably have something to do with it. It's possible that there's another explanation, but you're going to have to do a lot of work to convince us of it. 'It could have been something else' doesn't meet that bar.

slg 4y ago

This article specifically links long Covid symptoms with heightened antibody and cytokine levels measured in the patients. It isn't just people self reporting being tired or whatever you are implying.

nicoburns 4y ago

Well except that there's strong evidence that covid directly attacks parts of the body like the respiratory and cardiovascular systems that people develop (in some cases long term) problems with. The fatigue stuff is a bit fuzzier as nobody really knows the underlying cause of that, but it's known to be triggered by other viruses, so it's entirely plausible (and likely given the sheer number of reports) that it's triggered by this one.

dangoor 4y ago

These are not the same at all. Actual studies on vaccines have showed that people didn't have the various conditions (eg autism) above the baseline level. On the other hand, studies of covid that include control groups have shown that some proportion of people have longer-lasting symptoms that do not appear in the control group. It's also my understanding that other viruses have been known to cause longer-lived effects as well, so this is not limited to SARS-CoV-2. It's totally true that you can't just go by an individual person's account of what happened to them, but I think the evidence for the existence of long COVID goes beyond that.

stcroixx 4y ago

Agree. Every few months I check back in to see if anything at all has been proven and still nada. It certainly doesn't help that completely subjective things like sense of smell and how tired you are are key components.

vkou 4y ago
If smell is completely subjective, so is eyesight and hearing.