Early on in the AIDS epidemic, what did we know from your 1) 2) 3)? We had no effective treatments. 3) is gone. We didn't know about HIV yet, or the link to

Early on in the AIDS epidemic, what did we know from your 1) 2) 3)? We had no effective treatments. 3) is gone. We didn't know about HIV yet, or the link to AIDS. 2) is gone. AIDS makes you susceptible to a ton of infections that healthy people normally don't get, so the list of possible symptoms was large - and we couldn't disambiguate those symptoms from other conditions - they were those other conditions. Isn't that 1) gone? Thank goodness we kept researching. And concerns about long-term health impact of AIDS were well-founded, weren't they? I also think you're forgetting that we can measure things about populations, and correlate conditions with people who have had a known COVID diagnosis. Then, when symptoms are more common, even years later, in the people who have had COVID, if you want us to say "people who have had a known COVID diagnosis" all of the time, we could... Or maybe it's okay to just say "Long COVID." Clinical practice is not epidemiology is not actuarial science. I think you're (rightly?) disappointed that we don't have the Long COVID Manual for clinical practitioners. But people who study epidemics are for sure seeing a thing, and it's measurable. And it has long-term impacts on human health.