Long Covid was initially believed to affect one in every ten people who catch the virus. However, estimates have since come down considerably. In September of this year, the ONS published research indicating that only 2.5% of people still report symptoms after 12 weeks.
As I noted in a write-up for the Daily Sceptic, even this 2.5% figure is probably an overestimate, since it assumes that every participant reported their symptoms accurately. Due to media attention surrounding long Covid, some participants might have been inclined to exaggerate their symptoms – to report things they normally wouldn’t have done.
A new study published in JAMA Internal Medicine suggests that the 2.5% figure is an overestimate. Joane Matta and colleagues analysed data on a sample of about 27,000 French people, who were given serology (i.e., antibody) tests between May and November of 2020.
The same individuals took a questionnaire between December 2020 and January 2021. In that questionnaire, they were asked, “Since March, do you think you have been infected by the coronavirus (whether or not confirmed by a physician or a test)?”
Respondents who answered “Yes” were also asked when they caught the virus. Those who indicated that they caught it after their serology test were excluded from the analysis. Additionally, all respondents were asked to say whether they had experienced each of 18 different symptoms since March of 2020.
The main results are shown in the table below. There are four columns, corresponding to different combinations of belief and serology. The two on the left correspond to a negative test, while the two on the right correspond to a positive test. The belief columns indicate whether respondents believed they had been infected.
There are two main things to notice. First, if we compare the column on the left (for people with a negative test who believed they had not been infected) to the two columns on the right (for people with a positive test), we see that the percentages are about the same. The only exception is anosmia, shown in the final row.
In order to do this, you have to compute a ‘mental weighted average’ of the two columns on the right. For example, 7.3% of people in the first column had joint pain, while the corresponding percentage for the last two columns is 6.5% (the weighted average of 4.2 and 8.2).
These comparisons indicate that respondents who tested positive for Covid antibodies were not, in general, more likely to report symptoms than those who tested negative. (The only symptom they were more likely to report was anosmia.)
The second thing to notice is that, if we compare the two “Belief +” columns to the two “Belief –” columns, we see that the percentages tend to be higher in the former. This indicates that people who believed they had been infected reported were more likely to report symptoms, regardless of whether they actually had been infected.
The researchers estimated multivariate models that controlled for characteristics like age, sex and education, and observed the same pattern of results. Believing that one had had Covid was associated with reporting symptoms, but actually having had Covid was not (with the exception of anosmia).
Matta and colleagues’ findings are consistent with earlier studies based on young people, which found little or no difference in symptoms between those who were seropositive and those who were seronegative. Long Covid, it seems, is mostly psychosomatic.
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Who would have thought eh… told you’re exposed to a life threatening virus, confined to your house, already weak of mind and body – don’t fancy the return to work? Long Covid is the answer. No proof required.
“‘Long Covid was initially believed to affect one in ten people who catch the virus . . .”
How about long Covid was initially believed to be part of the fear porn campaign because they could pin that label on any old real or imagined ailment without having to prove it.
Whenever a studio conversation was flagging the interviewer just had to jump in with
“And of course there is long Covid the effects of which could/might/maybe last a lifetime”
the key word is believed – not proven, hypothesised or examined. It’s a belief.
A short lifetime, if they follow it up with the “poison death shots”
I’d be interested to know if there was a correlation between recipients of paid sick leave and
long covidviral fatigue syndrome.Oh dear. Someone break the news gently to Professor Tim Spector of the Zoe app: He’s convinced he’s tracking thousands of cases of ‘Long Covid’ among the hypochondriac Zoe app users – and regularly uses them to justify calls for more draconian lockdowns and forced injections.
My FiL certainly fits that description. So much as a runny nose and he’s booked his test before even reaching for a tissue.
I have to agree. We’ve become a nation of ‘sick notes’ or malingerers who delight in testing themselves to see if they have a positive reading when a test cannot distinguish real infection from a previous cold. I really cannot see a way out of this mess.
I can. Unfortunately it is much worse than what we’ve got at the moment. Not that this should be justification to carry on with the nonsense.
Never did trust Tim.
Employee to employer, “I’m suffering from long Covid so better have a couple of weeks off”.
Employer to Employee “No need for a sick note then and enjoy the sunshine”.
All people should be staying at home and not working because they cannot say if they are ‘asymptomatic’ or not.
Asymptomatic Boris goes to the G7 and COP26 meetings! Asymptomatic potential super-spreader Javid speaks in Parliament without a face mask!
Long Pfizer on the other hand is not just for Christmas.
And a short Pfizer is one that kills early.
Like myalgic encephalomyelitis and most claims of Lyme, it’ll be a “disease” of the public sector and salaried employees.
Nobody responsible for putting their own food on their own table is going to “suffer” from it.
I don’t know what is really going on with Lyme but I do know plenty of hard working people who have had it.
myalgic encephalomyelitis is a real disease identified through imaging of the brain (PET scan)
It actually surprises me that there’s this little evidence for ‘long Covid’. Not because I think it’s a significant problem, but because the bar is set so low that anyone with a lingering cough after a few weeks is counted. When the definition is designed to find high numbers, failure to deliver is almost impressive.
No doubt this will be widely reported by the corporate press. Right?
“long COVID” should really be called “long lockdown”. If you work from home, get everything you need delivered to home, and don’t get much fresh air or exercise, your health and fitness is going to suffer. That’s before we consider the impact on people’s mental health of believing that there is a deadly disease everywhere and having their own government scaring the living daylights out of them.
For 18 months our governments have been telling us to do and not do certain things to “protect our health” but the things they have told us to do and not do have actually made our health collectively worse.
Like forcing gyms to stay closed and keeping kiddies playgrounds landlocked shut for months after allowing Macdonalds and KFC takeaways to reopen last summer.
I agree with @realarthurdent.
But closing gyms didn’t stop anyone from getting exercise.
Yes it did. So did closing swimming pools. Older people who have joint pain don’t walk because, if they are in pain, they have to walk back. At the gym, they can just stop and drive home. For many swimming, which puts no pressure on the joints, is the only exercise they can do.
Many younger people live in cities where walking is neither pleasant nor safe, particularly for women and particularly in winter.
‘Long Covid’ seems to affect younger people rather than older. How many of them live in city flats with no outside space?
The false positive rate and the false negative rate for that test are what? Without that information, all “analysis” of the figures in the four columns is just pissing around.
Further to an earlier comment of yours.
What hope do you hold out for a new left/right anti corruption coalition that might be emerging in Bulgaria?
Long Covid is a load of old bollocks. End of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJqyKEWg6cg
Australian TOTALITARIAN Tourism Commercial – 14 Reasons to Visit!
long covid is bollocks – an invention of people to counteract the ‘its only old people dying’ narrative
News from Germany
The incoming government is “recommending” (that’s the word the Daily Mail use) that unvaccinated people should be
In the state of Saxony, the rule (get this!) is that as soon as more than 1300 hospital beds are filled by “Covid patients” (whatever that means) for three consecutive days, the unvaccinated will be
This, apparently, may be the position by Friday.
The reported rate per population of “deaths with Covid” is about the same in Germany as in Britain; the reported rate of “cases” is slightly higher in Germany, but the test rate is a lot higher. The proportion of tests returning positive results is also a lot higher.
But frankly, much of the stats stuff is poop, a distraction. The point is that the shutters are coming down against the unvaccinated minority in a number of European countries including Austria and Germany. Obviously the ruling scum will declare there’s a “reason” for it, and this “reason” will have numbers in it and be to do with public hygiene.
No doubt Bozo will be eager to punish the non compliant, whatever happens I’m not submitting to these authoritarian monsters.
Correction: the reported rate per population of “deaths with Covid” is about the same in Germany as in Britain; the reported rate of “cases” is slightly higher in Germany – the test rate is a lot lower; the proportion of tests returning positive results is a lot higher.
Leopards don’t change their spots
I wouldn’t be surprised if more than one virus and perhaps one or more species of bacteria too have been put into circulation, and then we have the exposure to microwaves from phones and the phone network (not just 5G), and lockdowns, and the indefinite delay of needed hospital operations…and whaddayaknow, there is a widespread feeling of chronic fatigue.
Of the 18 symptoms listed on the study, I experienced at least 10 of them before anyone had ever heard of Covid 19, and I continue to experience them today! Nothing to do with the virus- even though I believe I had it in Feb’ 2020. Nah, I’ve never been convinced that long Covid is anything more than feeling below par for a while in the same way that it can take weeks to return to firing on all four cylinders after a bout of flu.
You must have had Short Covid.
I could have told them that
In my case I get most of the symptoms – I put it down to Long Life (75yo).
It may be anecdotal, but I can relate to these findings. Ever since this thing started in early 2020 I have discovered, to my frustration, that I am a bit of a hypochondriac. I cannot even tell you how many times I’ve felt feverish only to read 36.4 on my thermometer. At least I go about it in a rational way, trying to determine if what I’m feeling is real or I’m imagining things (again). But I bet that there are quite a lot of people out there that assume the worse and go with it, which causes them to get tested, which then triggers a false positive, and there you go, one more non-case. And I am even sure there are people out there who secretly hope they have it, like some sort of access to a victim’s club.
Well, well, well – imagine my shock.
A friend who is 83 went into hospital with a serious illness early in the Covid panic. He was put on a ventilator for several days as a consequence of that. Whilst in hospital he contracted Covid (and so did his 84yo wife) and suffered as a result.
He still feels bad after more than a year, and is convinced that it is long Covid, despite his other infection which was life threatening.
Usually when the media is trying to scaremonger about long covid, they will trot out somebody who has trouble walking and breathing normally. Near the end of the segment, they will mention that the person was on mechanical ventilation for about a month.
Long covid …
Why am I not surprised.
Long Covid is a psychosomatic illness, as is ME; as was Neurasthenia in Victorian times: psychosomatic conditions adjuvated by the social and cultural contexts in which they manifested, and progressively-defined and redeined to conform with those contexts. How depressed and poorly somebody’s Aunt Julia has been feeling for the past twelve years is not relevant.
I never thought I’d find myself recommending Susan Sontag as a source of wisdom; but people really should read “AIDS and its Metaphors” as a masterly deconstruction of the politicisation of pathology.
MSM is trying to make fun of people wanting to protect themselves with cheap and proven drugs. Ivermectin has been FDA approved for human use since 1996. It also beats Pfizer’s new wonder drug hands down, and costs next to nothing. Ivermectin doesn’t make tons of money. So they know the Covid shot is on its final gasp, so they take it add something different to it, rebrand under another name and charge 20 times what they would for ivermectin. I cannot wrap my head around this nonsense. When I explain this to my relatives they label me as crazy and ask me if I know better than science. I don’t make up these information out of my ass. All this information is true and proven. For some people it is near impossible for them to wake up. They are comfortable in their clown world life. If you want to get Ivermectin you can visit https://ivmpharmacy.com
Gas lighting those unfortunate enough to suffer post viral syndrome is beyond septic its ghoulish and cruel. Still, at least any pretence at .scepticism has been dropped. What a den of sad mean delusion this is.
well – fuck off out of it then.
Of course it is. Along with ‘ME’, ‘fibromyalgia’ and all the other imaginary illnesses whose ‘symptoms’ are actually a result of depression, obesity and lack of physical activity. ‘Long Covid’ is caused by lockdowns and masks.
Funny how they acknowledge this could be true but covid itself couldn’t possibly be psychosomatic. Maybe it is just a poisoned system (mentally and physically) struggling to cope.
What do they say about the Pope and Catholicism?
Isn’t it strange that long covid is unheard of in the self employed.
Everyone I know with “long covid” has had two shots of the Astra juice.