[kick_in_the_dor]

> we saw that the mitochondria of the muscle, also known as the energy factories of the cell

*Ahem*, powerhouse of the cell

Jokes aside, this is a terrifying stat: "Although the majority of people infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus recover within weeks...around one in eight will get long-COVID. Symptoms in patients with long-COVID...include severe cognitive problems (brain fog), fatigue, exercise intolerance, autonomic dysregulation..."

[blindriver]

There is nothing to be “terrified” about. You are conflating different types of “long covid”.

Some covid infections, just like the cold or the flu, cause symptoms longer than the 5-7 days, maybe for 2-3 weeks. That’s long covid. Also remember that long covid symptoms include symptoms like depression and it ends up not being very rigorously defined.

Then there is the version that creates long term chronic fatigue symptoms. That is a much smaller percentage of the population, more like 1% or less. The chances of getting that are extremely small and there’s nothing to be terrified about. You can also get CFS from the flu, and other benign diseases.

Just from looking at the general population it’s easy to see that 1/8 people are not suffering from long covid. Just like how I know someone who got the vaccine and she ended up being crippled by arthritis from the vaccine, but that is not a common side effect at all otherwise we would have seen that more often in the people around us.

[mort96]

You're right, and I wish we had terms to differentiate them. It's ridiculous that "chronic fatigue and brain fog for the rest of your life" and "flu-like symptoms for 3 weeks and then back to normal" are both discussed under the term "long covid".

[dmux]

We could use C data types as inspiration: long covid, and longlong covid.

[arjvik]

ucovid128_t

[mort96]

volatile long long covid?

[DoughnutHole]

I wouldn’t characterise 1% as an “extremely small chance”, especially considering the prevalence of the disease, especially if it’s possible to develop it on your second or 3rd infection. Would you play Russian roulette with a gun with 100 chambers?

Compared to new-onset arthritis from the vaccine - the biggest lit review I can find found 45 confirmed cases across 31 studies. [1] For comparison there are over 730,000 (self reported, admittedly) cases of long covid lasting more than 104 weeks in the UK alone. [2]

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10055862/

[2]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

[s1artibartfast]

1% can be either small or large in comparison to the background rate of CFS.

[TylerE]

As someone without long COVID (or Covid ever). Your description of long COVID o only a little bit worse than a decent day for me. (Multiple chronic conditions, including multiple respitory). If I had chronic fatigue on top of what I already have, I’d be hardly capable of getting out of bed to go the bathroom. Working would be absolutely out of the question.

[docfort]

I think that for people without enough paid sick leave (maybe especially in the US), being knocked out for 2-3 weeks with a virus that is more infectious than flu is an event causing long term damage to their life. Especially with the repeal of many COVID-safety protocols at companies because of social pressure.

[Thiez]

That is a US problem though, not a COVID problem. Go vote for paid sick leave.

[faitswulff]

> Some covid infections, just like the cold or the flu, cause symptoms longer than the 5-7 days

That's arguably also terrifying if even common viruses are known to cause long term conditions. Also consider the evidence pointing to a link between viral infection and dementia:

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-study-of-500000-medical-recor...

[timr]

When the symptoms are "a lingering cough" (which is what we're talking about most of the time), it's not terrifying. It's just something you ignored before and are not ignoring now.

As OP notes, there are certainly some small fraction people with worse outcomes. But the generic "long covid" term has mixed up all sorts of things -- from hospital syndrome (absolutely real! but very rare!) to symptoms that anyone would completely disregard prior to 2020 as "a head cold" (very common!)

Also, of course, there's a ton of motivated reasoning surrounding this topic where people are in forums and comment threads attributing every symptom under the sun to Covid, and dredging up bad observational studies to support their claims. The link to dementia likely falls in this bucket. It's not coincidental that most of the people to get seriously ill with Covid were/are old, and that most of the people who get dementia are...old.

[faitswulff]

> The link to dementia likely falls in this bucket.

The article I linked to wasn't about covid.

[timr]

The argument wasn't specific to Covid. The people who get "severe viral infections" tend to be people who are old and unhealthy to begin with. When you start with a population of medical records (as this study did) you unavoidably bias your sample toward sicker people.

Observational studies don't/can't perfectly correct for this residual confounding. This exact error has been repeatedly made by "long Covid" research as well (most notably by Ziyad Al-Aly, who has published a half dozen different articles on Long Covid using the same confounded, observational VA medical record dataset, and claimed associations with a huge number of different illnesses. This research is garbage, but it has scared people out of their wits.)

[radicalbyte]

You literally have that same symptom with the flu.. or a cold.

ME / CFS is a horrible disease. My younger brother was out with it for a year but I know several women for whom it has effectively been a life changing condition.

[remarkEon]

What is the fitness level of people suffering from the more extreme cases of "long covid"? As in, are they overweight and unhealthy in other ways? Because if that is the case the issue isn't the virus, it's the general health of that population in the first place. That's my gripe about this discussion, because I can never tell, since all I get is anecdotes, if this is a result that's agnostic to body type/fitness. Does any research control for this?

[francisofascii]

Just anecdotal, but there are many fit, marathon runners that have suffered from this, myself included. I had LC for five agonizing months. I think it was because I tried running through some of the mild symptoms that caused me to get this. I don't think I lost my overall fitness, but rather my muscles/cells, etc. lost its ability process oxygen properly. Once I got "better", my ability to run fast returned quickly, like within one or two months.

[remarkEon]

Again, anecdotal, but your story checks out in that fit people who have described LC symptoms are almost always distance runners or very overweight. I'm really curious if there's something there and if the correlation to body-type exists at the tails for some reason.

[whatamidoingyo]

I had chiseled abs. Trained Jiu-Jitsu 2 times per day 5 days per week as well as lifted weights, etc. My diet consisted heavily of fruits, veggies and lean meats. Nothing artificial. Only water, coffee, and an occasional pre-workout.

I lost my sense of smell and taste for ~6 months. Was in bed for 1 week, sleeping like 18 hours per day. Some foods still don't taste the same (mostly eggs and chicken).

This was about 2 days after I got the second dose of Moderna's vaccine.

[thenerdhead]

https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s128...

[Glench]

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-44432-3

[remarkEon]

Thanks, but this doesn't really address my question. It looks like they took 25 people, and measured some variables before and after exercise post recovery (why such a small sample size? looks like a really easy test to run). I'm not really talking about how covid affects ones ability to exercise. I'm talking about the likelihood of "long covid" appearing in people who are fit and healthy vs not.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

> I know someone who got the vaccine and she ended up being crippled by arthritis from the vaccine

wat.

[TylerE]

Maybe the needle hit/pinched a nerve? That's the only scenario that seems even vaguely possible.

[Krssst]

> That is a much smaller percentage of the population, more like 1% or less.

(French) https://www.sante.fr/covid-long-2-millions-de-personnes-pres...

1.2% of the French population has long COVID with large/very large impact on daily activities. 4% has long COVID more generally. So I expect more than 1% of chances of getting debilitating symptoms. Though it could be that people with "light" long COVID recover while people with debilitating long COVID don't and make for an unexpectedly high share of the population as they accumulate. (not saying I think that this is the case, just saying this is a possible alternative explanation to "chances of debilitating long COVID are chances of long COVID / 4")

[thenerdhead]

Under some developing models by long covid researchers, they believe that with enough of a "viral load" of persistence in your body(or different areas of your body), it can be the difference of being asymptomatic and symptomatic.

Might be worth looking at https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/72/wr/mm7232a3.htm which is more aligned to what this study researched.

[zanfr]

hmm friends of mine who got infected in early 2020 are still feeling quite unwell also recent studies have shown the body never totally clears the virus.

[jddj]

Did your friend find any relief?

[dekhn]

how do you know the arthritis came from the vaccine?

Base rates and coincidences explain many things better than "vaccine caused my <blah>"

[xerox13ster]

Even more terrifying considering we can be reinfected multiple times so we might be rolling those odds every time.

E: changed "we are" to "we might be"

[fsiefken]

Yes, but isn't it more like if there is perhaps a factor X you don't belong to the 1/8 risk group that the chances that with subsequent infections you get long covid-19 is smaller (or near zero)? It's likely that this factor exists as lots of people got infected multiple times and not everybody has long covid-19. Is it a matter of rolling those odds every time for everyone or is that only for 1 in 8 people or would they get long covid-19 100% after each infection. Would mRNA vaccines adequately protect this group from long COVID-19?

[spion]

AFAIK, gene links have only been found for persistent cough and shortness of breath, but not other long covid symptoms.

Protection from vaccines has ranged (IIRC) from none to about 50% reduction in probability

[Log_out_]

Could it be a side effect of some treatment, similar to contagan? You take something to reduce side-effects, covi let's it into cells where it poisons the mitochondria?

[frakt0x90]

It would be interesting to know if the odds decrease with reinfection. Are there any studies on that?

[lamontcg]

There are studies that are supposedly showing that people with multiple reinfections suffer more long covid:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...

But that study itself notes:

> People that had their first infection early in the pandemic, though, were also more likely to report multiple COVID-19 infections. For example, in this study the average date of first infection for those with three or more infections was May 2021, compared to September 2021 for those with two infections, and May 2022 for those with one infection. Those infected earlier in the pandemic, before vaccination and the emergence of the Omicron variant were more likely to develop long-term symptoms, but also had more time since their first infection to become infected with COVID-19 again.

This is also all self-reported surveys. That means that they're selecting for people who will self-report questionnaires, which is incredibly highly biased.

Immunologically it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and there's no theoretical foundations for how this could be happening. If its linked to people with susceptible genetics/biology (something like MHC subtype) then long COVID should stabilize affecting only that population. If it is due to autoimmunity then people who have formed healthy immune responses to COVID shouldn't increasingly be susceptible after the initial immune response is formed. Give it a few more years, and I strongly suspect that better studies come out finding that long COVID risks decrease over time (although they probably never go to zero, but it starts to look more like flu/cold risk of ME/CFS and that antibodies to vaccination/prior infection are actually protective, like one would logically expect).

[dekhn]

I think we need more, better, and longer-term studies before we can adequately conclude that reinfections lead to more long covid. And I think the answer to that question, if it comes with enough accuracy, could influence long-term decisions about how we respond to COVID.

Already the progressive subset of my social media is mostly working on the assumption we are seeing a "rapidly rising, ever-worsening reinfections leading to continuously increasing amount of long covid", but that's not what I'm hearing from the medical subset (in person, off the record, not on social media, because they're tired of the whole social media garbage cycle).

[lamontcg]

I mean from the start of the pandemic most virologists were leaning towards COVID becoming another seasonal human coronavirus. Fauci initially was prepping us for the vaccines only being 50% effective against infection (which is probably around about where they actually wound up).

There's this Mandela effect in left-leaning circles which thinks that the messaging started with the early 3-month >90% efficacy-against-infection results from Dec 2020, and they're getting fairly hysterical that we abandoned zero covid, when that actually was never the policy. We just collectively all leaped to that hope with the first round of vaccine results because we wanted the pandemic to just have a simple off switch.

And now that's been twisted up into weird us-vs-them political pathologies where the nominally right-wing antivaxxers are shouting about how the vaccines don't work because they weren't what was "promised" while the left-wing is getting hysterical about giving up on covid eradication.

Most virologists/immunologists/microbiologists are happy that we have vaccines that are 95% efficacious against severe disease/death and that the pandemic is either over or winding down (based on entirely debatable definitions), but this pisses off both different political tribes in different ways.

[subtra3t]

Also if there's a study on how the symptoms change with reinfection that'd be great too.

EDIT: I just realised that some people may interpet the comment as saying that long-covid's symptoms are a great thing or something along those lines. I just meant that it would be nice to find such a study. Sorry.

[johnchristopher]

https://www.sciencealert.com/every-covid-infection-increases... (just saw this one today, links to studies in the article)

[olivermuty]

A news thing I read today said the trend was opposite. Norwegian article and no reference to whatever publication they based that claim on, but serious newspaper at least.

So take the claim with a grain of salt.

[dns_snek]

Are you sure about that? Couldn't it be a case predisposition, meaning you roll those odds exactly once?

[vikingerik]

It's less terrifying when you make the proper comparison. What proportion of people would self-report brain fog, fatigue, etc, on any given day with nothing to do with Covid? Probably close to one in eight.

[nullserver]

Got exposed to a lot of chemical gas in a home that had a gas leak. Developed all the above symptoms and more.

Later diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder. Sjogrens. Best I can figure, I had Sjogrens before, but it was so mild. I didn’t really notice or care. After the exposure, all the symptoms were amped up 50 fold. Also had Factor V Leiden. Which went from not an issue to multiple clots every single week.

After about four years, the symptoms dad calmed down to certain degree. Getting Covid was a full relapse for about six months.

Of course my wife got the vaccine and her arm swelled up and years later still hasn’t gone back down.

[m3kw9]

What about a spectrum of long Covid? Maybe you can be fine but you are actually 80%, not enough to notice but enough to affect your full potential?