[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.