A Case Against Long Covid (Part 1)

Photo by Edwin Hooper on Unsplash

Here’s a brief summary of why we shouldn’t let fear of Covid-19 control our entire existence, and why so-called long-term effects, the last bastion of fear for this pandemic, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Ground Glass Opacity is fairly common in influenza infection, and so is myocarditis. Ditto for “long covid” symptoms of fatigue and breathlessness and psychological symptoms.

If you’re sick enough to require a hospital, and most early studies were done on hospitalized and elderly patients, it’s not at all uncommon to experience these symptoms of viral infection. They say little or nothing about the many millions who have asymptomatic infections (about 40% of the total) or mild cases (mostly everyone else).

Perhaps 50 million Americans have been infected by now (according to someone who opposes herd immunity). If the author of this article’s numbers were correct then serious complications should be rampant. If it was half as dangerous to let it pass through the younger population as this person implies, Sweden should be overrun with complications, but it isn’t.

What we theorize about viruses causing various types of cancer down the road pales in insignificance compared to what we know about the consequences of prolonged lockdown on cancer screenings and surgical procedures. Operating based on some wild assumptions that it may trigger serious illness later, when all other endemic coronaviruses are colds, is asinine.

Herd immunity is not a far out theory or even a strategy per se, it’s a well known phenomenon which is inevitable. Delaying it is costing lives. The only way to prevent it from happening naturally would perhaps be through very long and harsh lockdown, but even the evidence for that is dubious at best. Until this pandemic it was not recommended under any circumstances. Paradoxically, preventing infections equally across all groups means the virus will circulate longer, making it more likely that an elderly or vulnerable person will happen across it since they cannot be isolated forever.

Shielding the vulnerable could possibly include some stricter measures for them, but what it definitely means is that everyone else goes back to normal, becomes immune or mostly immune, and then they are no longer as much of a danger to the vulnerable. It also means making sure that we still have a society worth saving, and not a population that’s maniacally obsessed with preventing illness to the point of willfully destroying itself.

Later, I will break down individual studies on Long Covid and expose vulnerabilities in study design that are influencing our understanding of the way covid-19 affects young people.