> They found no relationship between the participants’ belief about whether they’d had COVID-19 and their antibody test results from blood samples collected between May and November 2020. In fact, about half of participants who believed that they’d had COVID-19 tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
If your hypothesis was true, there would need to be some correlation here for there to be a correlation in the second part of the study. You can't blame long covid on more severe infections if they didn't have covid in the first place...
A feature of COVID is that it can be caught by mostly young people who have no idea they had it.
So there's the false belief that you had it but also the false belief that you didn't. You're more likely to have the latter false belief if you had a super mild case.
So the correlation can be affected by people with mild cases not realising they had it and not having long COVID (or milder long COVID).
That they have some kind of long covid type thing that's not caused by covid?
Chronic fatigue syndrome (I don't know whether that's generally accepted as a real disease these days but I know one famous person and one real life acquantance that had it) and similar is often triggered by an infection or virus.
I know another person in real life that was briefly unable to walk after a flu caused his immune system to attack his own nerve endings.
It seems unremarkable to me that people getting post-viral issues in the middle of a pandemic might assume they'd got covid.
It's like calling out car crash victims because "hah! It wasn't a car that hit you, you fraud, it was a pickup truck, look we have video evidence".
Yes? Unless the article is really strangely worded, then the group they looked at was people asked about 20 symptoms similar to long covid. If it was only people who think they have long covid, then it would be kind of weird if a bunch of them claimed they'd never had covid.
If you take a whole bunch of people that you have blood samples for, and ask them if they have a list of symptoms like 'fatigue' then theres no correlation between those symptoms and whether tests show they had covid at that time.
Except for losing the sense of smell, because thats a fairly unique symptom. All the others are things that happen to people for various reasons, some very covid adjacent, like a virus, and some just random like genetics.
This is all true and useful and factual, but people seem to be leaping to the conclusions that 'covid' is fake, 'long covid is fake' when the only real conclusion is:
'If you have a bunch of long covid symptoms right now, then you are more likely to think you had covid last year than actually had covid last year'. Which is a neat result, but not exactly surprising.
But if you're big on the 'plandemic' then this probably feels like supporting evidence for that, when it's clearly not.
When the real takeaway is 'check for other causes in people reporting long covid' which I hope was happening anyway, even for those with a confirmed case of covid.
> They found no relationship between the participants’ belief about whether they’d had COVID-19 and their antibody test results from blood samples collected between May and November 2020. In fact, about half of participants who believed that they’d had COVID-19 tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies.
If your hypothesis was true, there would need to be some correlation here for there to be a correlation in the second part of the study. You can't blame long covid on more severe infections if they didn't have covid in the first place...