Pfizer Covid vaccine approved for use next week in UK

"Second, covid is not some magical entity, it’s a coronavirus, and it behaves like other coronaviruses, and other respiratory viruses more generally. It would be strange for covid to cause symptoms that other respiratory viruses don’t. And since I’ve never heard of “long rhinovirus” or “long influenza”, I’m inherently doubtful of claims that there’s such a thing as “long covid”."

This is just getting caught up in silly semantics, people are experiencing longer term health effects, they are calling it "long covid" for lack of a better name not because it is an affirmative diagnosis.

"On MedRxiv, there is a pre-print awaiting peer review of a prospective cohort study that followed 4,182 people with positive PCR tests... if we assume that this study was reasonably accurate, then one in 50 people who get covid still have symptoms at the twelve week point..."

This is supposed to be an argument that inclines me to think that whatever "Long Covid" is I am not supposed to be worried about it? If 1 in 50 people that get a positive test are still feeling after effects of having what the author believes "behaves just like other coronaviruses" then I think we should be very concerned! Even if truly long term effects only develop in 1 in 500 COVID-19 cases.. that's a lot of people who are going to be sick for a really long time! It would be 400 Americans a day right now. Yikes! That's bad!

I'll take my chances with a vaccine!

(And I know the standard response to this is.. "well, those people are mostly old or sick with something else so you can't really count it that way" but a certain, maybe large, proportion of those people would probably never get a serious respiratory virus in the near or medium term in the absence of COVID-19. It is a really large number of extra sick people, and all at once.)

Also the 4 other coronaviruses circulating thing is silly, obviously the long term effects of the common cold viruses are not going to be comparable if the short term effects are clearly not comparable, it is reductionism of the worst kind.

> Also the 4 other coronaviruses circulating thing is silly, obviously the long term effects of the common cold viruses are not going to be comparable if the short term effects are clearly not comparable, it is reductionism of the worst kind.

What you are saying is "obvious" is not at all obvious, and is not the assessment of the experts who have looked at the data and weighed in.

In terms of obviousness: why do you think that the long term effects are unlikely to be comparable (if not strikingly similar), since the long term (adverse) effects of each of these four (and also several of the influenza A) viruses seem to be clinically identical, despite each having distinguishable acute characteristics?

> This is just getting caught up in silly semantics, people are experiencing longer term health effects, they are calling it "long covid" for lack of a better name not because it is an affirmative diagnosis.

I agree that the terminology becomes tricky. But I think the question is better stated as: is "long COVID19" any different from other "long covid" (ie, the rare but well known post-viral syndrome that is observed with all coronaviruses).

> Even if truly long term effects only develop in 1 in 500 COVID-19 cases.. that's a lot of people who are going to be sick for a really long time! It would be 400 Americans a day right now.

...but a relatively small cohort in the bigger picture of post-viral syndrome, if indeed it occurs with approximately equal frequency with the other coronaviruses (and some influenza A viruses).

I think we need to be careful about measuring potential adverse outcomes against one another, and try our best to use numbers that reflect the likely lived experience of people (to wit, nearly everyone contracts the "garden variety" coronaviruses a few times in their life).

If the current slate of vaccines don't prevent this effect, then I'm having trouble putting any math together that suggests that it will generally reduce population-level instances of "long covid" (again, defined broadly as long effects from any covid, not just COVID19).

How is this a credible person to listen to? It boggles the mind, she is an epidemiologist! After making a professional error on that scale I would crawl in a hole and not come out for a year!

You're just goalpost moving here, the argument in the article you are citing clearly says the viruses are similar and presumes that their effects are similar on that basis. If YOU don't accept that then you don't accept your own cited authority, you're wasting your own time here on that basis.