Behold Vinay. My gift to you, from Denmark. Not sure how long this gift link will be available commenting on the study, which itself is linked at the end.
"Study of late complications: More people with late complications have not had corona"
"A study of the members of a Facebook group for people with late complications from corona has reached a surprising result: About a third of the participants in the study did not have antibodies from an infection with corona. So they have not been infected with corona."
In the study, 341 members of the Facebook group "Covid sufferers with late complications" agreed to have a blood test and answer a questionnaire.
Nine out of ten of the participants were women.
"They feel bad, they are sick, they have many different symptoms that they believe are caused by COVID-19," senior author Kasper Iversen, a professor and chief physician at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital, told Politiken.
"Their problems are just not related to a COVID infection. There are other causes of their symptoms than corona.
The study itself:
Self-Reported Long COVID and Its Association with the Presence of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in a Danish Cohort up to 12 Months after Infection
Possible reason for anxiety being lower in the Covid cohort. Those with Covid realized they are not going to die like everyone in the media said they would and now they can relax and live their life. Just a thought.
This is infinitely more useful (and more correct) than an absurd article in Nature Medicine yesterday (Zhang, H., Zang, C., Xu, Z. et al. Data-driven identification of post-acute SARS-CoV-2 infection subphenotypes. Nat Med (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-02116-3) that used generally misguided machine learning to create a narrative that Long Covid was a real disease (analyzing 190 symptoms!) by grouping and regrouping data until something they thought was reportable would come out.
Many of us note the similarity both to CFS (in the appropriate age/sex group) and to the usual post-viral syndromes that people have gotten over ALL of the decades of my practice life.
Most things about COVID are (bad) solutions looking for problems. Says something about those who are desperately focused on finding something when there is no there, there.
I always wondered if the same thing was present for other URIs. I’ve never hear of Long Flu or Long Common Cold. I had COVID a few months ago and I was run down for 2-3 weeks afterward. It was the first time I’d been sick *at all* since Feb 2020. It made sense to me that, despite my two Pfizer shots, my body would take some time to recover fully. That’s totally normal.
I’m thankful for this study but know it won’t matter policy-wise.
I strongly agree with MDA's comment about the lack of validity by studies purportedly demonstrating an enormous percentage of "long Covid" sufferers. These studies - surveys, really - typically ask if someone has one of 200 or 300 symptoms! -covering more or less the entire glossary of symptoms. Even as short as a month post-covid. No wonder some of them conclude that more than half of covid survivors suffer long covid. So does half of those who never had covid. Beyond doubt, these studies are designed to promote the narrative of how awful Covid is supposed to be.
For my part, I've taken care of about 2000 with a history of covid ranging over the entire pandemic period. Out of this denominator, I know of a single high-functioning individual with altered sense of smell about a year post illness. That's it!
This is a basic study repeatedly requested the last two years by those skeptical that Long Covid was 20% like the CDC [1] and journals like American Family Physician [2] regularly quote.
About time this was finally done, and impressed someone with pronouns in bio (likely mandatory at Harvard?) had the temerity to ask the basic question - "if we applied the same diagnostic sweep to non-Covid ILI as we did Covid, how much 'Long _____' would we find?". Basic.
I wonder how many researchers previously tried to conduct a study only to have it file-drawered because it wasn't fashionable to question Long Covid.
Other basic question - if Long Covid was everywhere, shouldn't we be able to select a high profile group of people and find similar rates of incidence that these Cohort Survey studies find? Here is what I came up with:
NBA (n = 450) - 0 players out with Long Covid
NHL (n = 1100) - 1 player, Brandon Sutter, who got Long Covid despite being vaccinated
WNBA (n = 168) - 1 player AD Durr, also got Long Covid despite being vaccinated
NFL (n = 1696) - 0
Congress (n = 535) - 1 person, Senator Tim Kaine, has had Long Covid prior to vaccination
I suspect if I continue down this and check other groups (Cast of Hamilton, NCAA Womens Basketball, cast of Saturday Night Live, etc) I would continue to struggle to find a fraction of the prevalence Twitter Med believes is out there.
Behold Vinay. My gift to you, from Denmark. Not sure how long this gift link will be available commenting on the study, which itself is linked at the end.
"Study of late complications: More people with late complications have not had corona"
https://jyllands-posten.dk/article14608938.ece?shareToken=753gikvo1l5jp7m0m4jnkqgf
Excerpts, translated with MS Edge:
"A study of the members of a Facebook group for people with late complications from corona has reached a surprising result: About a third of the participants in the study did not have antibodies from an infection with corona. So they have not been infected with corona."
In the study, 341 members of the Facebook group "Covid sufferers with late complications" agreed to have a blood test and answer a questionnaire.
Nine out of ten of the participants were women.
"They feel bad, they are sick, they have many different symptoms that they believe are caused by COVID-19," senior author Kasper Iversen, a professor and chief physician at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital, told Politiken.
"Their problems are just not related to a COVID infection. There are other causes of their symptoms than corona.
The study itself:
Self-Reported Long COVID and Its Association with the Presence of SARS-CoV-2 Antibodies in a Danish Cohort up to 12 Months after Infection
https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/spectrum.02537-22
Possible reason for anxiety being lower in the Covid cohort. Those with Covid realized they are not going to die like everyone in the media said they would and now they can relax and live their life. Just a thought.
This is infinitely more useful (and more correct) than an absurd article in Nature Medicine yesterday (Zhang, H., Zang, C., Xu, Z. et al. Data-driven identification of post-acute SARS-CoV-2 infection subphenotypes. Nat Med (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-02116-3) that used generally misguided machine learning to create a narrative that Long Covid was a real disease (analyzing 190 symptoms!) by grouping and regrouping data until something they thought was reportable would come out.
Many of us note the similarity both to CFS (in the appropriate age/sex group) and to the usual post-viral syndromes that people have gotten over ALL of the decades of my practice life.
Most things about COVID are (bad) solutions looking for problems. Says something about those who are desperately focused on finding something when there is no there, there.
I always wondered if the same thing was present for other URIs. I’ve never hear of Long Flu or Long Common Cold. I had COVID a few months ago and I was run down for 2-3 weeks afterward. It was the first time I’d been sick *at all* since Feb 2020. It made sense to me that, despite my two Pfizer shots, my body would take some time to recover fully. That’s totally normal.
I’m thankful for this study but know it won’t matter policy-wise.
I strongly agree with MDA's comment about the lack of validity by studies purportedly demonstrating an enormous percentage of "long Covid" sufferers. These studies - surveys, really - typically ask if someone has one of 200 or 300 symptoms! -covering more or less the entire glossary of symptoms. Even as short as a month post-covid. No wonder some of them conclude that more than half of covid survivors suffer long covid. So does half of those who never had covid. Beyond doubt, these studies are designed to promote the narrative of how awful Covid is supposed to be.
For my part, I've taken care of about 2000 with a history of covid ranging over the entire pandemic period. Out of this denominator, I know of a single high-functioning individual with altered sense of smell about a year post illness. That's it!
This is a basic study repeatedly requested the last two years by those skeptical that Long Covid was 20% like the CDC [1] and journals like American Family Physician [2] regularly quote.
About time this was finally done, and impressed someone with pronouns in bio (likely mandatory at Harvard?) had the temerity to ask the basic question - "if we applied the same diagnostic sweep to non-Covid ILI as we did Covid, how much 'Long _____' would we find?". Basic.
I wonder how many researchers previously tried to conduct a study only to have it file-drawered because it wasn't fashionable to question Long Covid.
Other basic question - if Long Covid was everywhere, shouldn't we be able to select a high profile group of people and find similar rates of incidence that these Cohort Survey studies find? Here is what I came up with:
NBA (n = 450) - 0 players out with Long Covid
NHL (n = 1100) - 1 player, Brandon Sutter, who got Long Covid despite being vaccinated
WNBA (n = 168) - 1 player AD Durr, also got Long Covid despite being vaccinated
NFL (n = 1696) - 0
Congress (n = 535) - 1 person, Senator Tim Kaine, has had Long Covid prior to vaccination
I suspect if I continue down this and check other groups (Cast of Hamilton, NCAA Womens Basketball, cast of Saturday Night Live, etc) I would continue to struggle to find a fraction of the prevalence Twitter Med believes is out there.
____________________
[1] Nearly One in Five American Adults Who Have Had COVID-19 Still Have “Long COVID” https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/20220622.htm
[2] This most recent issue even they continue to cite Greenhalgh et al August 2020 survey study and pass these rates on uncritically!
https://www.aafp.org/pubs/afp/issues/2022/1100/long-covid.html#afp20221100p523-sort3A