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Long COVID vs Long URI

Additional thoughts
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I posted this the other day, but wanted to share it with you all.

I wanted to stress a few points, just for you all.

  1. ICD10 codes are useless, admin bullshit, and yet one VA group repeatedly conflates these codes with claims that people are experiencing symptoms. That is not appropriate. Here, the authors actually collect patient reported quality of life. What the VA group should be doing.

  2. The results clearly show that Long URI and Long COVID are in the same ballpark. The rates of persistent symptoms and recovery are comparable. I do not agree with others that Covid is better than other URIs. I reject that strong interpretation.

  3. Long COVID was hailed by the media as something catastrophic that could happen to even asymptomatic people. This suggests that symptomatic people do roughly the same as if they had a regular URI. But roughly the same entirely blows up the media narrative.

  4. Of course people who get COVID are different than those who get other URIs, but this is true for all diseases. People who get Syphillus or TB are different than those who don’t. For that reason, I do not conclude that COVID is better than other URI— I am just saying that there is no evidence that COVID appears to be catastrophically worse.

This new paper blows up many myths around long COVID.

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Authors
Vinay Prasad