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0 pointslamontcg2y ago0 comments

There are studies that are supposedly showing that people with multiple reinfections suffer more long covid:

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2023001/article...

But that study itself notes:

> People that had their first infection early in the pandemic, though, were also more likely to report multiple COVID-19 infections. For example, in this study the average date of first infection for those with three or more infections was May 2021, compared to September 2021 for those with two infections, and May 2022 for those with one infection. Those infected earlier in the pandemic, before vaccination and the emergence of the Omicron variant were more likely to develop long-term symptoms, but also had more time since their first infection to become infected with COVID-19 again.

This is also all self-reported surveys. That means that they're selecting for people who will self-report questionnaires, which is incredibly highly biased.

Immunologically it doesn't make a lot of sense to me and there's no theoretical foundations for how this could be happening. If its linked to people with susceptible genetics/biology (something like MHC subtype) then long COVID should stabilize affecting only that population. If it is due to autoimmunity then people who have formed healthy immune responses to COVID shouldn't increasingly be susceptible after the initial immune response is formed. Give it a few more years, and I strongly suspect that better studies come out finding that long COVID risks decrease over time (although they probably never go to zero, but it starts to look more like flu/cold risk of ME/CFS and that antibodies to vaccination/prior infection are actually protective, like one would logically expect).

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dekhn2y ago

I think we need more, better, and longer-term studies before we can adequately conclude that reinfections lead to more long covid. And I think the answer to that question, if it comes with enough accuracy, could influence long-term decisions about how we respond to COVID.

Already the progressive subset of my social media is mostly working on the assumption we are seeing a "rapidly rising, ever-worsening reinfections leading to continuously increasing amount of long covid", but that's not what I'm hearing from the medical subset (in person, off the record, not on social media, because they're tired of the whole social media garbage cycle).

lamontcgOP2y ago

I mean from the start of the pandemic most virologists were leaning towards COVID becoming another seasonal human coronavirus. Fauci initially was prepping us for the vaccines only being 50% effective against infection (which is probably around about where they actually wound up).

There's this Mandela effect in left-leaning circles which thinks that the messaging started with the early 3-month >90% efficacy-against-infection results from Dec 2020, and they're getting fairly hysterical that we abandoned zero covid, when that actually was never the policy. We just collectively all leaped to that hope with the first round of vaccine results because we wanted the pandemic to just have a simple off switch.

And now that's been twisted up into weird us-vs-them political pathologies where the nominally right-wing antivaxxers are shouting about how the vaccines don't work because they weren't what was "promised" while the left-wing is getting hysterical about giving up on covid eradication.

Most virologists/immunologists/microbiologists are happy that we have vaccines that are 95% efficacious against severe disease/death and that the pandemic is either over or winding down (based on entirely debatable definitions), but this pisses off both different political tribes in different ways.

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dekhn2y ago

lamontcgOP2y ago

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