He/She was talking about north american health problems. That is the other elephant in the room i was quoting.
Age is something to mark, but it is obviously not as simple as just how old you are. And countries vary in how different age groups live and interact. It would be a mistake not to pay attention to such when tallying stats.
Yeah obesity is definitely a factor
Almost 80 percent worth
For long COVID?
Not for ‘long COVID’ it isn’t, and therein lies a good reason to be suspicious of simplistic tables of figures. You would expect the causes of ‘long COVID’ to correlate somewhat with the factors that cause … well, short COVID. The fact that chronically-ill people are (apparently) no more or less likely than fit, healthy people to be marked down as suffering from long COVID suggests there’s something odd going on. The fact that long COVID correlates with some rather unexpected things (eg., the nature of the person’s employment), likewise.
The main problem here is this: what the hell is “long COVID” anyway? It seems to mean different things to different people. That’s not to say that some people might not be suffering post-viral syndrome, and possibly even a unique form of it post-COVID. But if you can’t define it then you can’t measure it. And since it varies greatly in severity from ‘annoying’ to ‘debilitating’, a one-dimensional table of percentages doesn’t accurately capture the clinical picture.
Yes exactly, we don’t know what it is. It doesn’t correlate with hospitalisations. A lot of people have mild COVID symptoms and still end up with long COVID.We know that it impairs long capacity and brain size.
We also don’t know what bouts of COVID will do cumulatively as people keep getting it.
We aren’t through with this pandemic yet
If we’re not sure what “it” actually is - if the syndrome is not being carefully circumscribed - then we can’t really assert that X number of people (to two decimal places) are getting “it”.
It seems to me that anyone who’s feeling a bit run down is deciding that he or she has long COVID. It also seems to me that simply using the name “long COVID” - before causation is proven - is putting the cart before the horse. There are any number of factors that could be causing people to feel like shit these days, including vaccinations.
It’s certainly the domain of the work shy.
…, as well as not knowing, nearly 2.5 years later, when all this stupid sheet will end.
The not-knowing part can wreak havoc on people’s mental condition, as life plans can be still up in the air (travel, visit relatives. etc.).
Even now, with near-zero deaths from COVID in 2022, it’s like the health bureaucrats want to continue controlling minute movements of people in-coming and domestically.
Long Covid reminds of my time working at a substance abuse rehab. Many of the patients recovering will take month, a year, and sometimes years to be normal. But it’s hard to define what is going on.
Recovery from what we witness is not linear and we are not sure why.
It could just be that the recovery process has its ups and down as well and they over attribute how they feel to long term effects of drugs/alcohol. Many of they have not let themselves feel normal in a long time so any highs and lows are intensified for them.
(Likely a topic to be moved to the Long Covid thread), but…
“And it raises the unsettling prospect of having to broach to patients, without being dismissive, that the symptoms they are experiencing may not be caused by Covid at all.”
Indeed. They can’t even agree what it is. In fact, one study that helped set the agenda for discussing long Covid, published December 2020 by British and American academic researchers and a consortium of patients, lists more than 200 symptoms affecting entire body systems.
The effects of LMV (Long Multiple Vax) are probably also something that should be studied 
There are different types of long COVID because the virus is damaging in different ways to different people and we still don’t know how to classify the damage.
We also don’t know what the effects of cumulative COVID cases are. You could have many mild bouts of COVID but it is still causing irreparable damage.
Again it’s not a cold and we are not close to being finished with it yet. I know that’s not what people want to hear though
"A central feature underlying many psychosomatic-symptom disorders is a fixed belief that one is ill and unlikely to recover. By drawing attention to and legitimizing the ever-present threat of long Covid, medical authorities will lead a large group of impressionable patients to believe that their Covid-19 symptoms have not resolved and that they are helpless victims of an unrelenting sickness.
In the past century, the media has played a critical role in perpetuating psychogenic illnesses—chronic brucellosis in the 1940s, chronic Epstein Barr virus in the 1980s, and today (although scientifically debunked) chronic Lyme disease. It is therefore alarming to witness the recent proliferation of uncritical and sensational media stories about long Covid.
The concept of long Covid has a highly unorthodox origin: online surveys produced by Body Politic, which launched in 2018 and describes itself atop its website’s homepage as “a queer feminist wellness collective merging the personal and the political.” In March 2020, the group’s co-founders created the Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group, and as part of their mission of “cultivating patient led research,” the organization coordinated a series of online surveys on persistent symptoms. Based on the results of these, Body Politic produced the first report on long Covid in May.
But many of the survey respondents who attributed their symptoms to the aftermath of a Covid-19 infection likely never had the virus in the first place. Of those who self-identified as having persistent symptoms attributed to Covid and responded to the first survey, not even a quarter had tested positive for the virus. Nearly half (47.8%) never had testing and 27.5% tested negative for Covid-19. Body Politic publicized the results of a larger, second survey in December 2020. Of the 3,762 respondents, a mere 600, or 15.9%, had tested positive for the virus at any time.
Why include the reported symptoms of those who never had a confirmed infection? “Due to the severe lack of testing available in many areas and the prevalence of false negatives, we do not believe people’s experiences with COVID-19 symptoms should be discounted because they did not receive a positive test result,” the survey authors wrote in their first report. “We believe future research must consider the experiences of all people with COVID-19 symptoms, regardless of testing status, in order to better understand the virus and underscore the importance of early and widespread testing.”
This didn’t perturb NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins, who has repeatedly supported the Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group’s patient-led research initiatives, promoting the surveys in a series of official blog posts. In the announcement of the NIH’s decision to commit $1.15 billion to long Covid research, Dr. Collins explicitly referred to the Body Politic research surveys.
This subjugation of scientific rigor to preconceived belief reflects a common dynamic encountered in clinical practice. Patients who struggle with chronic and vague symptoms often vehemently reject a physician’s diagnosis that suggests an underlying mental-health issue, in part because of the stigma around mental illness and the false belief that psychologically generated symptoms aren’t “real.”
By relinquishing the need for objective serological confirmation, and by claiming that long Covid can manifest in a mind-boggling 205 different symptoms, the Body Politic Covid-19 Support Group offered its readership exactly this attractive alternative, leading patients away from treatments that could actually ease their symptoms.
The NIH’s decision is a victory for pseudoscience and will do more to harm than help patients."
It’s nice that the WSJ truthfully posted that piece as an “opinion.”
Guy
It’s shame that the origin “studies” on “long Covid” didn’t do the same. Over 84% of the Long Covidians in the second survey had never even tested positive for Covid 
Yeah I think I’ve got long COVID then. I don’t need to catch COVID first, right?
That’s possible. I’m sure the “COVID is going to kill us all!” message hammered into people’s heads has taken a huge mental toll on the vulnerable. If you “test positive” and sincerely believe that you’re going to die, it might well take a long time to recover from that.
My cousin had a near-death brush with cancer, and although the cancer is long gone, he’s a shell of his former self. He’s living half a life, not because he’s ill but because he can’t accept that he’s alive and well.
The central foundation document upon which a large part of this new Long Covid industry is based, surveyed 3,762 respondents from 56 countries.
In turn, these responders self-reported (no positive Covid test result necessary!) that combinedly, they had 205 symptoms in 10 organ systems!
Basically, there was almost no illness, condition or organ that remained uncaused or untouched by Covid, despite over 80% of these respondents not even having conducted a Covid test 
And Covid is apparently so dangerously powerful, that even without someone even being Covid positive, it’s causing all these symptoms? And for something that has been variously estimated having a median IFR noted at 0.24 - 0.27%?
Where’s that doubt meme when you need it?
The authors also acknowledged in that report that these self-reported symptoms were apparently triggered by specific triggers such as "physical or mental activity, stress, menstruation, heat, or alcohol."
So…I’m guessing government-induced so-called pandemic measures were a major contribution to these symptoms as well.
IMO, the foundation upon which the entire LC game is shaky. As noted in the WSJ opinion piece by the psychiatrist, vested interests are pushing this thing, not necessarily coz science!, but for $, and I’m inclined to agree. He believes these poor people are being taken advantage of, basically.
This seems ass-about-face. If someone thinks they’ve identified a unique syndrome - or even two or three distinct syndromes - then they should be able to write down what the symptoms are. Then people can try to figure out what the cause is. Assuming that every bad thing that happens to people is because of The Virus™ is an unwarranted and premature conclusion.
I know a few dozen people who have had COVID, and not one of them experienced anything that could be described as “long COVID”. Clearly, then, this “estimate” is off. Unless perhaps we’re dealing with something that happens only to Americans?
If you don’t need to actually get COVID (the disease, not a positive test for the virus) to end up with long COVID, then clearly the connection between the two things is tenuous at best.
Call me old-fashioned, but IMO if you can’t detect it then perhaps it isn’t there.
I’m finished with it. A lot of people are finished with it. People who are getting research grants for looking into something that may or may not exist are almost certainly not finished with it, and probably won’t be finished with it until their mortgage is paid off.
Look, I’m not suggesting this syndrome - whatever it is - does not exist at all. People on here have posted anecdotes about acquaintances feeling pretty bad for weeks/months after COVID, and I’m not going to suggest they’re lying. But there should be some definition as to what actually constitutes “long COVID”, and it should actually be relatable to the original infection if that name is to stick. And once the thing has been identified and named, we can look into the aetiology. These are two completely different things, and you can’t decide on the cause of something before you know what the thing is that, uh, your cause causes.
I think you meant second mortgage?