[wpietri]

I take it you haven't been following what's going on with "Long Covid". But even among people who aren't hospitalized, there's lasting harm: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91270

I know somebody who's had this. Despite never being hospitalized, after getting sick they had to take a long medical leave from work in hopes of getting their strength back. That's worlds away from "sick for a few days".

[Mediterraneo10]

I have been following "long COVID" reports. Firstly, much of the mass media coverage is misleading, often intentionally so in pursuit of clicks and advertising revenue. A lot of the people claiming to have debilitating "long COVID" were never actually tested positive for COVID in the first place. They are the broadly the same demographic that, before COVID, were claiming to have "chronic Lyme" or whatever. Certainly mainly of them do have symptoms and distress, but it is questionable what relationship they have to COVID.

Then, if one starts digging into more serious discussion – even your link above – one finds that "long term" in medical parlance may mean a series of months but not necessarily years, and similar months-long impacts are known from diseases that we have generally tolerated among society. It also isn’t clear that these lingering symptoms affect enough people to impact the economy if measures are lifted once hospitalizations fall.

[rcpt]

Here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.16.21249950v...

Hundreds of thousands of people. Average age mid 40s and sliced by hospitalized or not. Controlled against people who had the flu during lockdown.

Double digit percentages have issues 6 months on. Unsurprisingly not very different from SARS 1 and those people are still sick since 2003.

[Mediterraneo10]

Yes, indeed, the various studies (and yours is a typical example) show mainly an older demographic reporting symptoms stretching into months, and include the observation that it was mainly (even if not exclusively) a severe course of the disease that preceded lingering symptoms. But a lot of the attitudes that restrictions must be kept in place to prevent "long COVID" are held by younger people who are very afraid of coming down with the phenomenon, yet they are not significantly at risk of it according to these studies.

[rcpt]

I struggle to see how you reached that interpretation of the paper.

[timr]

Table 3 and Figure 2 make it clear that the hazard ratios for patients with hospitalization and/or encephalopathy are multiples higher for those without hospitalization and/or encephalopathy.

Intracranial haemorrhage is 3-4x more likely in hospitalized patients; ~5x higher in those with encephalopathy. For stroke, 2-3x for both. For first mood disorder, 1.5x/2x more likely.

They don't break down the cross-tabs by age (as they should), but given the patterns here, I would expect to see a strong correlation.

The sicker you are, the sicker you are.

[rcpt]

Yes you are right. I looked into the authors research and found a more recent paper that breaks it down by age

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

Figure 3 has risk ratios sliced by age+sex

[Mediterraneo10]

Average age 40, as you said yourself. And then as the authors of this paper find, "Risks were greatest in, but not limited to, those who had severe COVID-19."

[chc]

Framing an "average age of 40" as "an older demographic" seems a bit misleading, as the average age of human beings in America is 38. We're not talking a few sickly senior citizens here (which, even if we were, I wouldn't feel justified in writing off, but it's not).

[rcpt]

the "but not limited to" is the important part

[orra]

> A lot of the people claiming to have debilitating "long COVID" were never actually tested positive for COVID in the first place.

Worth keeping in mind it was impossible to get a COVID test for a large fraction of the first wave.

[NortySpock]

> A lot of the people claiming to have debilitating "long COVID" were never actually tested positive for COVID in the first place.

Do you have a citation for this claim?

[Mediterraneo10]

I was talking about the innumerable "long COVID" media coverage where some ordinary person is invited to tell the whole story of how they got ill, felt terrible, and still feel terrible, but nowhere did they actually go to the doctor and get a formal positive COVID test. They are just guessing that they had this disease that was going around. And now dedicated Facebook groups etc. are popping up whose membership has complaints and claims that are extremely similar to the "chronic Lyme" groups that flourished just before COVID.

I was obviously not referring to actual scientific studies of long-term COVID effects, but as I said, those studies don’t say quite what the more sensationalistic mass-media coverage is saying.

[wpietri]

There is a big difference between "formal positive COVID test" and "just guessing". For the case I mentioned above, tests were effectively unavailable at time of illness. But later on, multiple doctors said that from the symptoms and the follow-on illness, it was probably COVID.

Your insistence on denying distinctions like this makes you look like a person arguing a case, not somebody trying to jointly get at the truth. Which from my perspective, makes you much worse at arguing your case.

[metalliqaz]

I have been "fatigued" for 3+ years due to having children. Life goes on.

[Broken_Hippo]

"fatigued" from not getting enough sleep or being physically active is not the same thing as folks get from diseases. When you are fatigued from children, you can sleep and take care of it. It is solvable.

It isn't like that with disease.

The worse I've had is the complete inability to stand long enough to make a simple dinner, for example, and this was after napping and sitting most of the day. I'm lucky: Mine passed. Some people live with this day after day after day, and this is more similar to what folks with disease-related fatigue.

[ben_]

Don't be so crass, people are suffering because of this that didn't chose to

[colecut]

That is a not insignificant percentage of parents

[psnatch]

Amusing - me too. Obviously you raise the false equivalency, though.