Given that by now pretty much everyone has had COVID, it would have been possible to design a study that ran long enough to capture a very large swath of the po

Given that by now pretty much everyone has had COVID, it would have been possible to design a study that ran long enough to capture a very large swath of the population. That would eliminate some of these confounders, but would be further complicated by the fact that different variants may have different effects. But I agree with your sentiment. The first study doesn't follow people at all, and the second study has a 13-question test. IMO this is very overblown — these studies do not give cause for alarm that would justify shutting down the world again.