Estimates of the prevalence of long Covid – where symptoms persist for more than four or more than 12 weeks after infection, depending on the exact definition – vary dramatically.
Before getting to the estimates, what kind of symptoms are we talking about? All of the following have been reported: abdominal pain; cough; diarrhoea; fatigue; fever; headache; loss of taste; loss of smell; myalgia; nausea or vomiting; shortness of breath; and sore throat.
The ONS has documented that almost 14% of people who test positive for COVID-19 continue to report at least one symptom 12 weeks later. This estimate is based on data from the Coronavirus Infection Survey (CIS) – a large, random sample of UK residents living in private households. Here’s the ONS’s chart:
The control participants comprise individuals who took part in the CIS but were unlikely to have been infected. Note that only 2% reported at least one symptom on the relevant date. This seems to suggest that fully 12% of people who test positive for COVID-19 go on to experience long Covid (over and above the background rate).
However, while the CIS is a high-quality sample, the 12% figure isn’t necessarily correct. That’s because the symptoms are self-reported, and we don’t have any information on severity.
Due to the amount of media attention long Covid has received, CIS participants who tested positive might have been inclined to exaggerate their symptoms – to report things they normally wouldn’t have done. In other words, some of their symptoms might be more psychosomatic than physical.
By way of comparison, a study published in Nature Medicine in March of this year gave the percentage of people still reporting symptoms after 12 weeks as only 2.3%. This estimate is based on data from the Covid Symptom Study app, which asks participants to input their symptoms at regular intervals.
In a recent unpublished study, researchers analysed data from several longitudinal surveys, and found that the percentage of people still reporting symptoms after 12 weeks ranged from 7.8% to 17%, depending on the mean age of the sample (with older samples yielding higher estimates).
However, the authors of that study also estimated the prevalence of long Covid in the general population. They examined 1.2 million NHS patients’ electronic health records, and found that only 3,327 had been assigned a long Covid code, which amounts to just 0.3%. This suggests, the authors note, that “only a minority of people with long Covid seek care”.
In another recent study, researchers analysed an even larger sample of patients’ health records (comprising 58 million people) and found that only 23,273 – or 0.04% – had received a long Covid code. The outcome in this study was measured between February of 2020 and April of 2021.
In March of 2021, the ONS estimated the prevalence of long COVID as 1.1 million, or 1.7% of the UK population. This is is 41 times higher than 0.04%. According to the authors, the latter may reflect “under-coding, sub-optimal communication of clinical terms, under-diagnosis, a true low prevalence of long Covid diagnosed by clinicians, or a combination of factors”.
Given the possibility that some people’s long Covid symptoms are psychosomatic, the best way to estimate the condition’s prevalence is to ask people about their symptoms without revealing whether they’ve ever been infected. The true prevalence is then equal to the difference in frequency of symptoms between those who have and haven’t had the virus.
As Will Jones noted back in May, an unpublished German study used this method and found “no statistical difference” between those who were seropositive and those who were seronegative. One caveat is that their sample comprised students aged 14–17, so the results may not be generalisable to the adult population.
Interestingly, a new study based on Swiss data has reached a similar result: 4% of those who were seropositive reported symptoms after 12 weeks, compared to 2% of those who were seronegative – a difference of only 2 percentage points. However, the sample comprised students from primary and secondary school, so the same caveat applies as before.
Overall then, estimates for the prevalence of long Covid range from 0.04% to 1.7% of the population. And estimates of the chance of reporting symptoms after 12 weeks range from less than 1% to almost 12%. Given all the available evidence, I would suggest that those toward the low end are more plausible – especially if we’re talking about something of clinical significance.
This post has been updated.
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I’m not at all sure we should be looking for strictly biological explanations especially when the pill has been with us for so long. Were it responsible for these odious phenomena, we should have noticed long before now.
It strikes me, therefore, that the author is trying to smuggle a hard, clerico-conservative line (“Ooh, the wicked pill!”) under cover of due objections to an authentically alarming development. Far wiser to take a right-wing Enlightenment line.
So, why are so many “identifying” as deviant – to use a forceful, old fashioned term?
Can you ask? Are the streets not plastered with the new “rainbow” hammer and sickle? Do people not lose their jobs, their bank accounts, their futures if they question the “rainbow” doctrine in public? Don’t schools routinely ram this sort of crud down pupils’ throats? And are there not serious social disadvantages now imposed on authentic normality?
The young live by the approval of their peers and this in turn is shaped by the masters of culture. The masters of today’s culture are a parcel of neo-Bolshevik sh*ts, happy to push confusion and mutilation until the cows come home – presumably as “bulls”. Thus, youngsters squeeze away from the baleful inquisitors’ eyes with pleas of this or that form of impairment or handicap. They are “depressed”, they are “trans”, they are a cat! Anything to find some kind of slap on the back.
Fascinating to note, at this point, that the left in its current “rainbow” guise, has regrouped all sorts of deviancy which it once declared “healthy” alongside diseases, alongside madness itself, which evils it now pronounces good. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” as the witches have it, “Freedom is Slavery” as Orwell updated it.
There lies your explanation – rule by yet another set of gnostic nutters; not the poor old pill.
Do we have a control? We can surely only make sense of this by comparing the rates of LGBTQness across regions. I live in Vietnam and I can state with relief and almost complete confidence that LGBTQ++++ ideology simply doesn’t exist here. I’d expect the rate of homosexuality to be much, much lower amongst millennials and genZs than the very end-days-of-Rome West, even though the amount of chemical pollution is probably just as high.
Indeed – let’s have a correlation with, say, numbers of prescriptions for contraceptives and or other hormones across these several generations, and as you say compare it across cultures.
I don’t know about contraceptive pill use in Vietnam, but I’ll wager it’s pretty high in China given the history of the single-child policy.
Also, feminisation is one thing – gender queer and the like seem uncannily parallel to academic developments since Simone de Beauvoir declared that sex-differences are assigned, not inborn.
I too lived in Vietnam in the 1990s (when I believe homosexuality was illegal there) and while it was quite under the radar, there definitely was a gay scene in Hanoi, at least. But of course, you wrote about LGBT ideology which is quite a different thing! Plenty of countries that I have worked in have a ‘gay’ scene comprised of men who would run a mile if you called them gay – I believe the sexual health people invented the term ‘MSM’ to cover this group.
The article above writes about those who ‘identify’ as LGBT, but I think if they actually ask ‘have you indulged in a same-sex fumble in the past 12 months’ they get a very different (much lower) answer, so that tends to support a social cause.
As to whether chemicals in the water could contribute, I remember when at university studying dog whelks in the Firth of Clyde – we couldn’t find one that wasn’t intersex as a result of Tributyl tin in the water – so it could be an interesting line of enquiry.
I must’ve led a sheltered life as I had to Google why Gen X, Y (millennials) and Z were so called. Turns out some Canadian scribbler called Douglas Coupland wrote a book entitled Generation-X and voila! the term stuck.
As an early ‘Boomer,’ I find the numbers at the top of the article astounding, since not having led an entirely sheltered life, I didn’t happen across my first ‘G’ until the 70s and have yet to knowingly meet ‘B’ or a ‘T.’ I tried convincing myself that I got snubbed on the dance floor at the Mecca in the 60s because many of the lasses I propositioned were of the ‘L’ persuasion. In reality, I’ve met two.
Aware of the British love of a cup of tea, it appears that progressive activists have succeeded in positioned themselves, as elsewhere within the commanding heights of British society, particularly the armed services, at a senior level within the regional water companies.
Elevated levels of bromide within Britain’s water supply have recently been detected.
As many contributors here will know, bromide has long been added to British Army tea with a variety of eccentric effects noticeable particularly amongst junior officers of Regiments such as the Royal Hussars, Lancers, Parachute Regiment and, of course, the Queens Regiment.
Could it, I wonder, be that the senior management of our water companies, under the disguise of tanker loads of sewage discharged into our rivers are also adding massive quantities of bromide?
Isn’t the ‘bromide in tea’ thing a myth?
I remember when ‘conspiracy theorist’ Alex Jones was ‘ fact-checked’ way back in 2010 for talking about this exact same thing….even though I’d heard this even before then…
“Chemicals in the water are turning frogs gay…..One of Jones’ most notorious conspiracy theories ….. In a rant that has since become a meme and a line of t-shirts, Jones said he didn’t like the government “putting chemicals in the water that turn the friggin’ frogs gay.”
Then came the studies…there a numerous ones you can look up, on-line…and all finding the same thing….
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124422894
Atrazine is widely used as weedkiller on American farms. And a new study shows this common chemical may have gender-bending effects on frogs. Host Guy Raz talks to biology professor Tyrone Hayes about his work with atrazine and frogs. Hayes found that 9 of every 10 male frogs he exposed to atrazine became chemically castrated. And that other 1 out of every 10? Well, he became a she….In 2002, biologist Dr. Tyrone Hayes conducted a series of experiments that revealed that the most common herbicide, Atrazine, “feminized” male frogs at concentrations below that allowed in drinking water in the United States.1 He hypothesized that Atrazine works as an endocrine-disrupting chemical (EDC), converting testosterone to estrogen in frogs. Hayes’s research ignited an ongoing political controversy over whether Atrazine causes hermaphroditism in amphibians, humans, and other species…
Is there a ‘conspiracy theory’ that isn’t bloody true!!?? LOL!
Master herbalist Stephen Harrad Buhner flagged up this issue at least 25 years ago if not longer, as well as the oestrogenic effects of other chemical like the herbicides. So no, it’s not a new issue or a conspiracy theory and there were academic papers written about it even back then. It’s something I’ve been giving thought to in recent years as much because of the dysphoria thing as the extraordinary increase in man boobs in even relatively healthy chaps, plus the increasing incidence of male breast cancer:
‘…risk factors for male breast cancer include obesity, older age, radiation exposure, a family history of breast cancer, overdeveloped breast tissue (or gynecomastia), exposure to estrogen and heavy alcohol use.’
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/breast-cancer/male-breast-cancer-a-rare-increasing-trend
That is very interesting. Gerald Posner Gerald Posner investigation into the pharmaceutical industry — Gerald Posner 2020 book is a fascinating read and no he does not think the birth control pill was adequately tested before being prescribed to millions of women.
Why do we still use the term “breast cancer” when we can no longer use the term “breast feeding”? Chest cancer surely?
The second that you use a “herbalist” as a source, I’m going to ignore you.
It’s a wonder that giraffes have survived through the ages. They’re all gay, you know. What, you need proof? Well they look it!
LOL! It’s those gay little horns isn’t it??
No, it’s more about the way they run.
And throw. Sure sign of a female.
Any advice on a reliable way to filter drinking water?
Reverse osmosis water filters are allegedly the best, but both Berkefield (UK) and Berkey (US) water filters are supposed to clear at least some.
https://waterfiltergeek.co.uk/best-water-filter-to-remove-hormones-uk/
I’m confused by this bit;
”Medical advice is to stop taking the pill whilst pregnant “as a precaution“.
Isn’t the main reason females take the pill the fact that it acts as a “precaution”? A precaution against falling pregnant? Given that it is a contraceptive and everything…Surely you stop the pill then get pregnant, in that order. I’m not really sure why any sane female would be on the pill whilst pregnant. Perhaps I misunderstood something when I speed-read that…
“I’m not really sure why any sane female would be on the pill whilst pregnant.”
Maybe the medical advice is for females who are not sane, or at least not sane enough to stop taking the pill if they become pregnant.
Though apparently it is possible to get pregnant again while pregnant, it’s known as ‘superfetation’ but it’s extremely rare.
Hi Mogwai,
The link provided in my article helps to explain this, though I agree it is a little confusing. Here is a link to another article providing further information on the subject:
https://www.medicinesinpregnancy.org/Medicine–pregnancy/The-mini-pill/
Thank you!
No doubt the advice is for those who don’t know they’re pregnant. As soon as they don’t find out they should stop taking it.
No need to take the pill when pregnant as the pregnancy acts as a natural contraceptive. Unless anyone can cite evidence of a pregnant woman becoming pregnant again when already pregnant?
I think it’s far more likely that large numbers of men with the kink known as autogynephilia have suddenly been given the green light to indulge their kink and not only that, it’s now protected and recieves billions in grant funding. Not *every* person who believes themselves to have a gender that is not consistent with their biological sex has the autogynephilia kink of course but I would be willing to wager it’s the kink and not actual dysphoria that’s driving the numbers explosion.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22005209/
I’m sure it’s pure coincidence that the rise in people identifying as LGBT coincides with the West becoming more and more dystopian in just about every area.
It is very difficult for a man to examine his testosterone levels throughout his life. The tendency is to attribute things to getting older and the memories of high testosterone youth aren’t always pleasant ones. It makes a huge difference to everything and there are t hings you can do to improve this situation but it is a hard subject to tune into because it seems a bit silly and vain but this isn’t the case because it is the basis of your energy levels and affects everything about your future
I looked up the details of my drinking water by going to the website of Anglian Water, where you can do a postcode search which returns the local water quality and treatment protocols in your area. The water was described as “hard”, which is incidentally how most males in my area would describe themselves. So maybe, yes, there’s something in the water.
The hard-core hillbillies around here would balk at the suggestion they’re being feminized by the water!
Ther water is just one thing amongst many. Why doesn’t anyone notice the dramatic decline in insect populations over the last few years. You aren’t going to be able to escape the toxins they are too potent and there are too many of them. So there is acceptance that we are likely in a sub-optimal state which seems to be degrading at a rapid rate. Awareness doesn’t come to the masses in waves of information but it comes through accumulation of experience and then suddenly there is a thwack like a Zen master hitting you with his stick because you were drifting off. Look at how much cash has been withdrawn from banks in the UK over the last four weeks.
As Alex Jones puts it so succinctly: ‘They’re turning frogs gay!’
I wonder how much cancer and other damage is caused by this and whether domestic water filters in jugs clean any of this out… (water jugs, that is, not jugs growing on men!!)
This book explains it well. What we are seeing now is nothing new and took place in ancient civilisations.
This book explains it well, checkout the reviews…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Return-of-the-Gods/dp/B0BBN53PWX/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=144239813427&hvadid=621632421555&hvdev=m&hvlocphy=9045852&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=9328553555025074605&hvtargid=kwd-1674935301041&hydadcr=13663_2323583&keywords=return+of+the+gods+jonathan+cahn&qid=1690054546&sr=8-1
If you think about it, if they can disrupt your physiological functioning then all political discussions become redundant because the realm of civil discourse presupposes a world without chemical weapons. It is predicated on the idea of rational decisions and these toxins rob us of far more than that. If we can say to each other that we recognise the poisoning and we might feel it ourselves then there is the start of a movement which is going to happen anyway. If you’re canny then you can see where this is going and you will align yourself accordingly.
Can’t anyone spot the attention-seeking here. In my day, it was about getting on with a career and our lives. Suffice to say you’ll find a woodlice under a rock if you look under enough of them. Tut, tut Daily Sceptic.
I one found a wood louse in some hotel muesli, does that count?
It seems logical to me that taking a regular medication which is hormone-based and intended to prevent pregnancy, will have wider consequences if that medication gets into the rest of the population. Which it undoubtedly does through treated tap water.
I suspect it is a contributory factor, along with changes in the law relating to homosexuality and more recently transgenderism, plus several decades of social conditioning.
I applied the precautionary principle to the original “pill” decades ago and never took it. Although I did take the mini-pill for a couple of years in my early 40s. I sailed through the menopause with absolutely none of the usual symptoms ….. and I do wonder whether not taking “the pill” for several decades previously impacted that as well.
Perhaps this contributes. I know of a number of young people who in job applications etc classify themselves as Gay, Bi etc when they are not, they do this because they see it as a way to gain an edge in the job, promotion etc opportunity, as more companies now adopt D.I.E and are judged by the number of LBT whatever, race, etc it is in the companies and the employees interest to classify themselves as one of the special groups, hence the growth of those identifying as “special”. Frankly competence doesn’t matter any more, but who you have sex with is the way to get to the top.
Give people targets and guess what they will play the sytem to achieve.
“Cultural Narratives”. Or the Lemming effect. ————Once one lemming leaps over the cliff, they all start doing it. A good example of this copy cat stuff is the use of the word “Perfect” in today’s world. ——-It used to mean something that was flawless eg a perfect circle. But today it is used by those easily led to copy everyone else. —-You will hear shop assistants ask if you want a receipt and when you say “yes”, they reply “perfect”. It is the same with a waitress asking if your ready to order and in almost every interaction the reply is —“perfect”. —–This has only happened in say the last 10 years and it is a great example of how people can shift to behaviours based entirely on the cultural that surrounds them, and not wanting to be left out they adopt the new fashion. I suggest that a lot of what happens these days with gender is exactly that —-fashion.
Thank you for this elaborate rendering of Something is happening and we don’t understand it! I suggest another grouping that’s certain to reveal something the authors of this study absolutely didn’t think about, namely, by religion. The outcome will doubtlessly be that – despite drinking the same water – the percentage of people self-identifying as somehow also gay is drastically lower among muslims.
WATER will never take my manhood away. I’m determined of it! Whatever you do to me, Anglian Water, I will not submit to your dastardly aims.
Care in the Community has a lot to answer for.