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jlambvo t1_iqpe7fr wrote

Reply to comment by Parafault in Effect of COVID-19 Vaccines on Reducing the Risk of Long COVID by mightx

I've been curious to find any long Covid studies that focus on measurable, physiological symptoms.

I don't necessarily doubt that it's a real issue, but pretty much all the larger scale studies I've seen on long Covid rely on self-reported symptoms that are fairly vague or general, and don't appear to have high quality (or any) attempt to control for hypervigilance among the convalescent groups.

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throwaway477638 t1_iqpzyee wrote

First, we need to clearly separate long covid from post covid or chronic covid more strictly. In reality, almost nobody is really interested in long covid. If we do so, we see that only 5-10 percent of people are really affected long term.

Second, most of these post covid issues are hard to detect as our medicinal expertise is not advanced enough. There are research groups that try reliable immune marker profiling but this only works for some portion of the post covid group. Other people try specific MRIs or PET scans. In general, if we look long enough, we find damage in any of the post covid patients but that is incredibly costly and not a viable long term strategy. But currently there is no single test (and maybe there never will be) that reliably detects post covid. The issue is that we don’t understand the original damaging process at all and even this process might not be unique. We just see a plethora of different symptoms that we cannot really make sense of.

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