New research confirms a large body of previous research: Long COVID does not exist

To be specific, there is nothing different about post-COVID-19 syndrome and other post-viral syndromes. In other words, while some people do experience a post-COVID syndrome, it is not any more common or severe than any other post-viral syndrome.

Before discussing the new research that again shows this, let’s place this new research in context.

Firstly, it has long been known that Long COVID has a strong psychosomatic component. This probably accounts for a significant part of the hysteria around COVID: it is in part a social contagion.

A paper from the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry in 2022 showed a strong association between depression, anxiety, worry, perceived stress, and loneliness and the development of long COVID [1].

Furthermore, a paper from the Journal of the American Medical Association Internal Medicine showed in 2021 showed in a study of 30,000 adults with Long Covid, symptoms of Long Covid were associated with self-reported Covid infection but NOT laboratory-confirmed Covid infection [2].

This suggests, again, either a psychological origin to Long Covid, or a non-Covid origin. We can put these two hypotheses together: both psychological factors and non-Covid factors, such as other viral illnesses, can contribute to Long Covid.

Here’s another interesting finding: transgender people have the highest rates of Long Covid, while men have the lowest rates. Furthermore, transgender people have severe Covid at 5X the rate of men and 4X the rate of women [3]. Why should this all be?

Again, this suggests a psychological origin of Long Covid, at least in some or many cases. It may also suggest a greater vulnerability of transgender people to Covid, a plausible but less likely possibility.

Now, neuropsychiatric symptoms of Long Covid, such as fatigue, mood and anxiety symptoms, sleep disruption, and brain fog, are possibly the most prominent Long Covid symptoms. And another 2022 paper shows that the neuropsychiatric symptoms of Long Covid occur at the same rate as neuropsychiatric symptoms of people hospitalized for other illnesses [4].

Again, this rules out Long Covid as some kind of unique illness. Rather, it suggests that Long Covid is a non-specific post-illness disorder—or a psychiatric disorder.

Another 2023 paper out of Norway comes to the same conclusion: Long Covid (using the WHO definition) was present in 49% of those who reported mild infections that tested positive for COVID, while the same symptoms were present in 47% of those reporting mild infections who tested negative for Covid [5].

Again, provided these findings, we must came to the same conclusions that we came to earlier.

Enter the newest study [6].

A cohort of 5112 Australian individuals with respiratory infection symptoms were tested for COVID-19 in May through June of 2022. Some tested positive for COVID-19. Some positive for influenza. And some positive for nothing. Then they were followed up one year later, in 2023, and asked what their symptoms were.

If they tested positive for COVID-19 (n=2399), they actually had a slightly lower chance of having moderate-to-severe functional impairment versus having tested positive for influenza (n=995) or having tested positive for nothing (n=2713). In other words, they had a LOWER chance of having a post-viral syndrome if the illness was COVID-19 compared to influenza or no positive test. This difference however was not statistically significant.

Other symptoms predicted the development of moderate-to-severe functional impairment: age of 50 years or older, dizziness, muscle pain, difficulty breathing, post-exertional malaise, and fatigue.

But not having had COVID-19.

Authors speculate: "In health systems, long COVID may have appeared as a distinct and severe illness because of high volumes of COVID-19 cases."

In other words, a lot of people got COVID at once, meaning that there was a lot more post-viral syndrome than normal. But there wasn't anymore long COVID than there would have been long influenza, if all those cases had been influenza!

Long COVID was a moral panic, a panic of pathological compassion. We were told it was some horrible, unprecedented illness, but it wasn’t. It is an illness, to the degree it is one, that the human race has known for hundreds of thousands of years. It is time to slay this mind virus once and for all

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[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2796097
[2] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2785832/
[3] https://usafacts.org/articles/who-has-long-covid-heres-the-data-by-gender/
[4] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01646-z
[5] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2802893?s=03
[6] https://drive.google.com/file/d/12sjDXLBvy49FQOipn6W0y-WwLiGaRta_/view