Item — HN Reader

"Researchers analyzed survey data and serology results from 26,823 adults in France. 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."

That is a rather astounding conclusion.

4 comments

I've talked to people who "know" they had covid but never got it confirmed with an official test, they could've easily just had a cold or flu. Likewise, I've talked to people with zero symptoms shocked to learn they had covid. I assume this is what's reflected in this finding.

Last year I joined a support group on Facebook for people who believed they were suffering from long COVID.

I was shocked at the sheer number of people who believed they had COVID between December 2019 and April 2020.

Presumably they're mostly Americans? That's a big range of time, and having Covid in December 2019 is somewhat unlikely but the chances were not zero (Wuhan is a big city with direct flights to international destinations, including New York and San Francisco), if an American told me they got Covid in April 2020, I would believe them, because the government was keeping that number officially zero through bureaucracy ("You didn't travel to China, we won't test you!" and later "Hey, we've found zero Covid cases!"). There were probably also a number of Americans (or Europeans who soon after travelled to the US) who partied in Ischgl, the Austrian ski resort which became a super-spreader site during the months of February and March.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/disaster-motion-flights-corona...

And Google Trends for "fever": https://venturebeat.com/2020/09/02/google-releases-data-set-... , but well, it was winter, a comparison of Winter 2019 and 2020 would've been useful.

some degree of false positives and negatives would be expected, but "no relationship" is still shocking

Not really? Most covid cases are mild, and the symptoms cross over with those caused by a lot of other pathogens. For people who didn't get tested and have mild symptoms, there's no particular reason to assume they had covid, but given the fact that (especially earlier in the pandemic) they are constantly reading about it, people are probably predisposed to assume it's covid.

The mind is a hell of a drug.

Not surprised at all. Drastically alter people’s daily routines, restrict their movement, add stress and uncertainty plus the risk of death and do it for 2 years.

Why would anyone be surprised that psychological manifestations would result independent from actual covid-19 infection?

Psychogenic illness happens all by itself pre-Covid. Seems entirely reasonable it would be much worse during a global health crisis.

IMO you can find similarly strange phenomena without the unusual emotional stress of Covid. This finding is completely in line with my model of how the avg person reasons under normal circumstances. The impulse to check logical blindspots and fallacies simply doesn't exist, so "people are talking about Covid and I had a headache this morning" is all the evidence they need.

It's a predictable consequence of a broader astounding conclusion. Most people have extremely tenuous grasps on reality. Simple logical constructs are beyond them, to the point that they'd scoff at the possibility that they got a cold/allergies during a period when the entire world was talking about Covid.

Couldn't a lot of this be T cell response?

My wife and I both got COVID in March 2020–she showed symptoms before I did, but I had it for many weeks and she had it for 2 days.

We both tested for antibodies multiple times since then and she never had them, but I did.

From the research I did back then it seemed like it was likely due to T cell response.

Quick googling just now yielded this, which looks pretty interesting: https://www.t-detect.com/