[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>"