Is “months of debilitating symptoms and possibly a lifetime of disability” common? I mean, if that’s the case then ok, fair point. But without any data to look at nobody can really say.
This recent research was sent to me [1]. It's in German but summarized: n=300, most symptoms are psychosomatic, seem to be more related to general fear or stress.
Some chemical markers of long Covid have been recently identified, which is great news because it offers hope of research towards treatment.
Psychosomatic is what doctors call illnesses when they can't find a physical cause, especially if it "looks like stress".
I don't wish to discount genuine psychosomatic illnesses. However a psychsomatic diagnosis is often found to be wrong in the end, i.e. a physical cause is found after all. This causes no end of trouble for patients, who are effectively told it's all in their heads when it isn't.
Sorry to come back with another link, but this happened to show up in my feed today [1]
Key result: "Seropositive children did NOT report long-COVID more frequently than seronegative children."
I want to add that a direct colleague of mine still hasn't regained his smell which he lost three years ago due to a serious flu.
There is so much we don't know about long covid. Some people seem to think it always happens after virus infections, but only now shows up on our radar due to media attention.
[1] https://deutscher-psychosomatik-kongress.de/wp-content/uploa...