Long Covid is overblown and often something else, says Oxford professor

The real problem isn't that one guy has an opinion.

The real problem is that there's an article about it, and this article is somehow getting massive promotion and engagement as if it's real valid science.

This is probably the #1 reason why I was so careful about avoiding the virus back when there was a lot of voices yelling "just catch the virus, you won't die". I knew the people who didn't die but just got lingering afflictions would be treated like gulf war syndrome vets.

There is some weak evidence of a higher rate of anxiety among people who've had COVID, including [0] as well as another nonzero but statistically insignificant difference from Amin-Chowdhury et al. But the difference in anxiety prevalence would only be a few percentage points (point estimates of 4.3% and 4.2% respectively), nowhere enough for that to be an underlying causal explanation for long-term symptoms that occur >20% of the time.

In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population. I think you'd really have to jump through hoops to argue that (1) some symptoms caused directly by COVID persist for a long time, (2) other symptoms caused directly by COVID reliably go away after a few weeks, but (3) people who have had COVID re-develop those same symptoms at a higher rate than the general population, months later, for reasons not caused directly by COVID.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8282115/

Any one who was diagnosed with having had COVID was prescribed to two weeks of total physical isolation, which is pretty unusual experience amongst people who did receive a COVID diagnosis. But yes it's possible that this did not have a significant impact. We wouldn't know without controlling for it.

>>In any case, unless you're claiming that social isolation causes a loss of taste and smell that persists for 8+ months, it's pretty clear that some symptoms of COVID persist for a long time in a significant minority of the population.

The two week physical isolation is one of many psychosocial differences between the two groups, and could affect one of many of the reported symptoms of long-COVID, some of which are much more likely to have a psychosomatic origin than loss of smell/taste, like the most commonly reported "long-COVID" symptom: anxiety.

Like any infection, long-term effects in some cases are very likely. The question is how many effects, and how common they are. Without much more rigorous studies, or some of cross-comparative analysis showing that COVID infections result in a markedly more severe clinical presentation than other infections, I think it's irresponsible to start sounding the alarm about some impending public health crisis from long-COVID. The very hysteria this could rouse could result in far more harm to public health, through more physical/social isolation and greater economic decline, both of which have a documented negative impact on health.

And the harm that a climate of fear can cause is already evident, from the massive increase in childhood overweightedness/obesity during the COVID era:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037a3.htm?s_cid=mm...

"Among a cohort of 432,302 persons aged 2–19, rate of body mass index increase approximately doubled during pandemic compared to prepandemic period. Persons w/ prepandemic overweight or obesity & younger school-aged children experienced largest increases."