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See this Quillette article on how the symptoms of "long Covid" are so variegated that people who claim(ed) to have been suffering from it may have simply been using a topical buzzword to describe the ordinary ennui, malaise, tedium and frustration attendant to modern life. It has not escaped my notice that the demographics most likely to claim to suffer from long Covid are the same demographics most likely to
I'm being a bit cheeky here, because on both occasions I had Covid, I uncontroversially had long Covid symptoms: in the first instance a persistent sore throat, in the second instance an extremely phlegmy cough, both of which persisted for months after the acute symptoms went away. But the key differences are a) my initial dose of Covid (and I think also my second) was confirmed via antigen test; b) the symptoms I was reporting were extremely specific (as opposed to impossibly vague constructions like "fatigue") and c) the second instance of long Covid went away after a GP prescribed me an inhaler and a course of antibiotics.
I had a persistent (dry) cough for half a year after a non-COVID respiratory illness, and such a thing was never too uncommon among people I knew as they grew older. If after COVID this counts as "long COVID", then long COVID is not as unique or novel a threat as it is made out to be.
I don't think there's anything remotely unique, novel or threatening about long Covid. Sequelae for the flu were known to be a thing for decades before Covid. It's just a rhetorical tool pro-lockdowners only invoke while moving the goalposts when the more relevant metrics aren't producing the desired results.
It's one thing that really annoyed me when arguing with people who were in favour of prolonging lockdowns indefinitely. When Covid death rates started to decline, pro-lockdowners would inevitably resort to "but what about muh long Covid???"
Having gone through it twice now, my response to that is "yeah, it's a bit annoying. Is preventing it worth shutting down the entire country and throwing thousands of people out of work indefinitely? No, obviously not."
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My perception was that people thought that the fairly severe post viral disorders that we already know can occur after infections might have had a higher incidence rate for Covid, especially pre-omicron, but the definition got so ridiculously widened so that it included pretty much every person with any kind of lingering effect, if thats a cough, lessened smell or being so debilitated that they can't stand up.
This lead to sinulatanous claims of long covid occuring after something like 5-40% of COVID infections and that it's extremely severe, when in reality it's only that severe in some fraction of a percent of cases and likely isn't meaningfully more common than for other viral infections or the flu.
So did COVID cause a higher rate of post viral disorders or not? Was there anything novel about those disorders? Did some variants cause more severe issues than others? We have fucking idea because all the stats are so thoroughly contaminated that you can't discern anything at all with them being close to 100% noise.
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