Article Summary
Two fascinating studies on Long Covid show how strong the mental state has on the experience of the symptoms of Long Covid. By not recognizing that, the problem of Long Covid is overestimated and even fueled.
Read full article: The question marks about Long Covid
Reading time: 6 minutes
An American author, going by the pseudonym “El Gato Malo”, has written an interesting article about two fascinating studies on Long Covid. Partly because the US CDC published that 1 in 5 Americans developed health problems after they had Covid. This is his full article. Below is a translation of much of that article.
It’s about a recent study conducted at a hospital in Bethesda, near Washington DC, that sheds more light on the alleged symptomatic and clinical manifestations of what people are calling “Long Covid.” They call it PASC (post-acute sequelae of Covid) and that is why that term is also used in the article.
Introduction
First, some insider information to keep in mind: there is such a thing as “long everything”. Virtually any illness and clinical condition, from the flu to the common cold to pneumonia, fractures, or severe traumatic stress, can have lasting effects. Some quite serious. The flu can and will cause permanent neurological damage in some people, and so on. This is simply a mark of sickness, injury and health. Conceptually there is nothing unusual or new about it. It is only the relentless bringing to the fore of this concept in Covid that is new, along with the claims that it is extremely common/severe.
But is that so?
A challenge in assessing “Long Covid” is that psychosomatic illnesses are a real and common problem, as is ill health in general. Many feel ill and have general or non-specific symptoms of “brain fog” or “unwellness” or “low energy”.
This is a longstanding feature of the public and such sufferers tend to attribute their perceived illness to what is currently popular, from chronic fatigue to fibromyalgia (pain in muscles and connective tissue), etc. So it should by no means be unexpected are that such people claim “Long Covid” as it is the non-specific disease that is constantly in the press at the moment and for which there is no clinical test to prove or rule it out.
The question becomes: how can we separate these two competing (and not mutually exclusive) hypotheses?
The new study
This study has approached that in an interesting and good-looking way.
The study was of reasonable size, 189 people with lab-confirmed Covid-19 of which 12% were hospitalized. Combined with a control group of 120 participants, who were determined by antibody testing that they had not had Covid, seems to be a large enough study size.
“Symptoms consistent with Lung Covid” were reported in 55% of the Covid-19 cohort and 13% of the control group.
What makes this study interesting is that they not only established the symptomatic issues and complete medical history, but also a physical exam and a series of blood tests along with neurocognitive assessment.
It looks quite robust.
It led to some very interesting initial data on the characteristics of the three separate groups. In particular, that mental health problems and especially anxiety disorders were common in this group and were strongly reflected in Long Covid. In the graph you see the control group in the first column. In the third column the Covid-19 patients who do not report lung Covid symptoms and in the last column those who did.
Pink color indicates the percentage in each group with mental health problems. In yellow the percentages of those with anxiety disorders:
48% of the PASC/Long Covid group (last column) had diagnosed mental health problems, 37% had an anxiety disorder. This is the kind of attunement seen in high psychosomatic or attributive disorders.
PASC/Long Covid was also expressed at a ratio of approximately 2:1 in females (36% of PASC/Long Covid were male).
This is also consistent with data from other psychosomatic or attributive disorders. Fibromyalgia (a “garbage can” exclusion diagnosis that has no clinical basis, no known cause/organic source of disease, or any validating test) is very similar. It is about 8:1 female (when tested based on tender point analysis and not just very general questions) and has a significant overlap with depression.
So right away we see some of the warning signs of likely mental health involvement in the perception of the syndrome. This is very consistent with other studies in this area.
A great French study
This French study of more than 27,000 people from 7 months ago also shows this. Before receiving the results of the antibody test, they were asked whether they thought they had had Covid. And then they were presented with a large list of possible long-term complaints that they had. The results are spectacular.
If someone had not had Covid, but thought they had it, significantly more complaints were reported than people who had had Covid (as the antibody test showed), but did not think they had it.
Two examples of the results. It concerns fatigue and breathing problems, which people had experienced for a long time.
- Of those who had not had Covid and did not think they had it, 2.5% reported long-term fatigue. But of those who had not had Covid, but believed they had had Covid, 12.5% reported prolonged fatigue from Covid. Among those who did have Covid, that distribution was pretty much the same!
- Of those who had not had Covid and did not think they had it, 0.8% reported breathing problems. But those who had not had Covid, but thought they had had Covid, 6.5% reported having long-term respiratory problems from Covid. Among those who really had Covid, that distribution was also almost the same!
Having Covid was a virtually useless predictor of “lung covid” symptoms. But “the belief that you had covid” was a strong predictor of Long Covid, even in the control group (who had no antibodies). Those who had never had Covid, but thought they had, claimed to have Lung Covid more often than people who had actually had Covid and this was true for every symptom except loss of smell/taste.
Reported complaints
The new US study became even more interesting when it came to looking at the actual markers of impairment or immune activation/response/pathology.
The Covid group claimed to have many more symptoms (which is not surprising given that more than half of them were selected for having those Lung Covid symptoms).
In terms of actual physical abnormalities, there was little variation other than possibly musculoskeletal, which does not seem unexpected given the 38% obesity rate (versus 26% control) in that group.
They reported lower overall health in questionnaires. So this group seems to be feeling less well.
What is striking is the almost total absence of any variation in the hard indicators of disease between the groups.
The immune parameters also showed no variation between those who had Covid and reported Long Covid and those who did not (although both differed from the control group).
There is really an impressive lack of hard clinical evidence that PASC/Long Covid is a permanent immune problem!
The only real risk factors that showed a strong association with PASC/lung covid were gender, diabetes (a disease that has many systemic adverse effects and was seriously out of control in 2020-2 due to weight gain, drinking, lack of exercise and poor diet). and anxiety disorder.
Nothing else was very predictive except possibly race and I suspect there are cross-links with diabetes etc making it difficult to read the signal.
Conclusions
Taken as a whole, this strongly argues that “Long Covid” is mostly a non-syndrome, but rather some sort of collective term for general malaise and ill health.
This is not to say that no one has lasting consequences from Covid. Some certainly do, because this applies to all diseases. But it means that the prevalence doesn’t seem high or different from other ailments like flu or pneumonia in any way in data I’ve seen and all the key factors and predictors seem to point to a mental rather than a physical cause.
And this matters because the health authorities make senseless and baseless claims about it and create needless fear. They probably create the syndrome by lighting a lamp outside in the dark, as it were, drawing the frightened and weak like insects to torment themselves!
This deliberately harms public health, such as with this recent report from the American CDC, which is based on this report that came out on Tuesday.
Worse still, it amplifies and amplifies the signal from the charlatans, who always turn up to validate and “treat” these chronic “disorders”.
People like the self-proclaimed “warrior princess” Diana, who founded the “Covid Survivor Corps”, prey on those who have been sucked into this vortex and do their best to trap others.
She proudly posts one test after another, looking for positives/to make sure the other negatives are really negative. Because covid is everywhere!
This kind of ill-calibrated and sensationalized scaremongering has no place in public health. It does real damage and leads to useless responses, attribution and risk assessment. It also prevents the identification of real diseases and possible vaccine damage. A cynical person might wonder if this is why the CDC is so interested in promoting this feeble story.
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