Siderea:The question that everyone wants an answer to, "What are the chances that if I get COVID-19 I will also get Long Covid?" isn't one that has an answer. We are not going to get any sort of useful statistics about the prevalence rates of Long Covid, not for a long, long time, and maybe not ever.
Because two years into this thing, we still don't have a working definition of Long Covid. [...]
Second, I keep running into studies that use proxy concepts like, "any PCR-confirmed COVID-positive patient who was still experiencing any COVID symptoms three months after infection," which bears no resemblance to what anybody means by Long Covid. That definition includes, for instance, people who are basically fine except their sense of smell hasn't returned. Now, that's a pretty serious medical problem, and I don't mean to make light of it, but it's very much not the same as a triathlete who can no longer climb stairs. [...]
I'm horrified and fascinated by what's playing out in medical science around Long Covid because, well, because of a lot of things. For one thing, there's what I already, coming into this, knew about the pretty much complete failure of medicine and medical research to treat previous conditions like fibromyalgia and ME/CFS seriously, and even treat conditions like Lyme disease adequately seriously. I feel like these failures of medicine have been viewed, until the Pandemic, by the larger society as trivial edge cases. But now, now that everyone is aware that there is this hideous possibility that if you get COVID you might never get better, there's this dawning realization that post-viral conditions aren't quite so trivial or rare after all, and medical science's failure to address those conditions means we have much less information than we might like to have about this one -- and also less in the way of conceptual tools.
