Reply to NIH Long Covid study

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Isn't the takeaway this, which most people here don't seem to be understanding: the physical ailments that would generally be responsible for causing the reported symptoms of "long Covid" are not present in higher rates in the Covid test group than in the control group. Meaning, there is, according to this study, no evidence of Covid causing long-term health problems. There is some evidence that those symptoms may be caused by underlying anxiety. So many posters seem to be interpreting this as "long term Covid exists and we still don't know why."[/quote]

No, that is not the correct interpretation (scientist here).  The correct interpretation is not that there are no health problems.  In fact, there are numerous studies that connect COVID with increased risk for vascular problems, diabetes, even impotence.   That said, long covid is not about increased risk but about symptoms.

The correct interpretation is that “none of the tests performed in this study were significantly different between the two groups.”

There are numerous illnesses we accept as real and that there are no physiological tests for, just reports of symptoms or fuzzy cognitive tests that are impossible to standardize. Examples include schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, and chronic back or knee pain.  We assume many many people are sick with colds even without finding their specific virus or physiological signals.   So the conclusion of this study doesn’t say much.  It definitely does not say long covid is just a bunch of lazy fakers, and it definitely doesn’t say it isn’t, either. Science is slow, and is abused if you jump to conclusions.

[/quote]

Like jumping to the conclusion that covid will cause rampant long term damage to the health of the majority of people who get it? Is that the type of conclusion you’re worried about people jumping to?[/quote]

That would not be a warranted conclusion of this study, but your histrionics are unwarranted.  This is one study.  It was a high quality study.  It ran some good tests.  We can draw the conclusions I stated above from it. We cannot address your agenda particular at this stage.

It takes us hundreds of studies to figure out that smoking is bad for you and hundreds of studies to see that oat bran is not a heart panacea.  We are learning. We will keep learning, if we continue to be methodical, rigorous and open minded.  If you want to be sure of something one way or the other in terms of the far future of this pandemic, sadly science has little to offer you at this stage.  This study did not identify physiological signatures of long covid.  That is all.

There were long term effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic (for example, increased risk of Parkinson’s by sufferers).  There has also a lot of speculation of some sort of post viral syndrome for that pandemic too for which there is reasonably strong circumstantial evidence for this (there is a good discussion of this along with some more speculative ideas in “The Great Influenza,” if you are looking for a popular treatment), but few scientists would say we are able to have conclusive evidence of this being true or not. [/quote]

NP. The PP you initially responded to didn't state that this study definitively concludes that Long Covid has no physiological cause. She said that it shows that [b]at this point, there is no evidence that the symptoms are related to SARS-CoV-2[/b], because there was no difference in their occurrence between the two arms of the study. That is true, and by the way, it is in line with previous controlled studies of Long Covid. Yes, we need more studies, but this wasn't the first one to come to this finding. [/quote]

No actually the original PP claimed that this study said there was “no evidence covid caused long term health problems. “ That is not correct. It compared current physiological test results with current systems.  The study did not look at long term health problems.  Other studies have in fact found correlations between vascular events such as stroke post covid in the short term, but covid hasn’t been around long enough to assess long term health effects (ie the absolute limit of possibility would be two years, realistically less)[/quote]

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