This from John Lees:

I've just been on the hunt for some scientific confirmation of the existence of "Long Covid". The problem that we have is that in any time period there are people who for various reasons report that they are chronically ill, without any known cause. Oddly, the majority of these people are women. Formerly they would be diagnosed with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or M.E. which are typically just catch-all names given to a range of symptoms, from tiredness, mental fog, chronic aching of muscles and joints etc. mostly associated with aging or poor diet. Sometimes they decide that they have a more specific condition such as Lymes Disease. However, when examined none of these individuals have any clinically determined disease.
My proposition is that in the last year such people have developed a new fixation, with the idea that they have Long Covid.
Looking at the figures from this scientific paper, I notice that of the people who believed that they were suffering from long Covid - near 80% of them were women, AND only 27% of the group had ever been diagnosed with Covid.
I remain unconvinced, I believe that Long Covid is mostly a disease created in the minds of people who are bored, scared and generally feeling unwell most of the time anyway.
Excerpt from: https://www.medrxiv.org/.../2020.12.24.20248802v2.full.pdf

Tim adds:

I believe the term you are searching for is Munchausens. They are people - usually women - who want to be sick for the attention. I suspect a lot of the "long Covid" cases are Munchausen.

Mr. Lees replies:

All this exists in a fuzzy grey area between feeling genuinely sub-par, and being willing to make a fuss about feeling sub-par.
Western societies are full of people who clearly have chronically poor health. Sometimes to a debilitating degree. Whilst not actually having a clearly defined disease with a known treatment.
They probably mostly sincerely believe that they have Long Covid. Desperate people are experts in self-deception.

Tim responds:

Well said John! There are indeed people with chronic disorders and others who like the attention or are just hyper-focuses on themselves (narcissistic) and find every ache or pain and turn it into a crisis in their own minds. People who don't work are often like that; they have nothing to occupy their minds so they hunt for problems. I suspect that is part of the "long Covid" business as well; so many people were left at loose ends from the lockdown and began worrying over every little physical ailment.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:38 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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