back

by apwheele·3y ago·view on hn ↗
If you want to look to more objective measures, since late 2021 there has been a ICD code assigned to long Covid (so it is diagnosed by a medical professional, not self report).

For example, https://www.dovepress.com/positive-predictive-value-of-the-i..., A Danish cohort of over 20k people that had a positive Covid test, 1.4% have subsequently been diagnosed with long Covid.

Now, you could continue to be really skeptical (are these really Covid related, or would these have happened absent Covid?). To say zero scientific evidence though seems to me to be sticking your head in the sand.

2 comments
I’m sure some post-viral syndrome characteristic of Covid exists, but a diagnostic code does not a diseass make.

A brief look through the history of those ICD and DSM codes emphasize how their are sorts of factors that go into establishing, revising, and retracting codes — political, administrative, clinical, epidemiological, etc etc

In fact, it’s normal for a code to show up as a bucket to help broadly track purported cases well before any etiological basis or scientific consensus is established. The codes are more of an input to science than an output.

Is there zero evidence? No, of course not. However, the amount of evidence is so ridiculously skimpy, even after multiple years of study, that at this point I have no interest in entertaining the idea.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome has a similar link to other viruses and fibromyalgia quite possibly does as well. They haven't really made a whole lot of progress on those for decades despite them each affecting a percent or two of the population..

My interest is less in long covid than in whether the medical community is finally going to get itself together on viral induced damage instead of making up funny names for different combinations of damage.