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.

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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]

This is all reasonable, but the problem is that this reasonable approach is not reflected in the way long Covid is covered in the media, nor in the way many individuals draw conclusions about what we as a society should be doing regarding Covid mitigation. If everyone talked about long Covid like this, I don't think you'd get a lot of pushback. Unfortunately, most people who are discussing long Covid these days talk about it as though it is killing as many or more people than Covid itself. They cherry pick anecdotes of people who are suffering with genuinely debilitating issues (often omitting important aspects of pthat person's medical history) in order to argue in favor of whatever Covid policy they want that day. It's disingenuous and genuinely damaging.[/quote]

I’m sure there are examples of extremes being portrayed as more common than they are really in the media.  (This is very common; plane crashes scaring people more than they should is a classic example.). That said, is the correct response to this sensationalism to overhype studies to the contrary, perpetuating the same cycle.

Studying the phenomenon of long covid and trying to identify what we can is really important.  It is also completely good to state that this study did not identify clear physiological signatures.  It is a good study and decreases the evidence that there is an obvious physical signature available to us that we have missed.  But again, this study can’t shed light on whether the symptoms are real or not. There were more symptoms in the covid group than in the control group.  It is possible these some of these are psychosomatic, but one simply cannot draw that conclusion from a lack of measurable physiological stat.  If that logic followed, as I said, above, we’d dismiss and stop studying Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia too.  I hope you don’t have those opinions.

I think it would be great for a good study to try to elucidate more broadly the spectrum of symptoms and try to identify the severity of truly severe symptoms, and then perhaps try to specifically first address people with those concerns over the much broader population of people who report milder symptoms.  One might also try to measure the frequency of “Severe” symptoms in the population to help us as a society understand this.  But that will take time and be hard work.  And this point is just my personal and relatively uninformed opinion on what study sounds worthy to conduct, it doesn’t tell you anything about what one would find (or not) in such a study.[/quote]

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