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My favorite Long Covid story comes from Denmark:

"A study of the members of a Facebook group for people with late effects from corona has reached a surprising result: Around a third of the participants in the study did not have antibodies from an infection with corona. So they have not been infected with corona.

This is what Politiken writes about the study, which is published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum."

https://jyllands-posten.dk/indland/ECE14608938/studie-af-senfoelger-flere-med-senfoelger-har-ikke-haft-corona/?shareToken=753gikvo1l5jp7m0m4jnkqgf

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I don't deny that some people have had lasting effects after their Covid infection, but it is hard to tease apart what causes some of these symptoms, whether it was from a Covid infection or some other factor.

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It's interesting to me how quickly PH switched, as when my wife was in med school (early 00's) the consensus was still that most of these "phantom pain" syndromes (fibromyalgia, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, etc) were just in people heads.

Notable medical historian Edward Shorter wrote a fascinating (if not by hindsight flawed) book "From Paralysis to Fatigue", chronicling the history of somatic illnesses through the ages and proposed that they reflect the current culture paradigm illnesses. When it was believed you could become paralyzed spontaneously, that was a common "illness". Now (well, in 1992 when he wrote it), Chronic Fatigue is popular, so that is what the people who claimed to be spontaneously paralyzed a century earlier adopt as their "illness".

Obviously, part of his hypothesis turned out to be false - we now know Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is real - but he observation that unexplained illness tends to get re-packaged each generation approximates what we are seeing with Long Covid - ordinary ailments medicine didn't have answers to before 2020 are now given a new cause - Long Covid.

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Also, it is not news that it frequently takes quite a while to fully recover from serious respiratory ailments. I have a Merck Manual from 1997 that says after a bout of flu, "changes in the airways may take 6 to 8 weeks to completely resolve. Weakness and fatigue may persist for several days or occasionally for weeks."

This was without throwing in all the harms lockdowns can do to your psyche and your physical condition.

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That's true. This article was just to clear up some of the confusion about the results of this particular study. I may write another article about Long Covid at some point that covers some of the broader issues.

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