I'm not in any way trying to conflate long covid as not existing, but has anyone connected the following: trapped indoors has led to a massive upswing in social media browsing non-stop, which we already knows leads to heavy distraction.
Both are real. I worked in the public sector and only worked from home for a month. My wife works in winemaking and never took any time off work. Both of us due to our jobs were outside all the time. I got covid, and developed systemic inflammation affecting most body functions as well as symptoms consistent with Reversible cerebral vasoconstriction syndrome. The changes to my memory, cognition, mood stability and personality were frightening. While driving home at the onset of symptoms I had a crippling headache, 150+ bpm heart rate, chest pain, and limb numbness. In the 30 minutes between leaving work and arriving home my handwriting completely changed, and my ability compose communication dropped from consulting on peer-reviewed technical papers to junior high at best. There is no doubt in my mind the effects of lockdown were immense and caused widespread intra- and inter-personal issues we haven’t come close to recovering from. But the physiological damage covid possesses the capacity to unleash on those as unfortunate as I was are equally real as well
True, but since everyone in the study -- both those with and without diagnosed COVID-19 infections -- had been subject to this, it shouldn't affect the results. Essentially, they're comparing people who were just trapped indoors vs those who were trapped indoors and also had diagnosed COVID-19 infections (and they also broke the infected group down by severity of infection, what variant was prevalent when they were infected, etc).
The challenge is that many people who have covid are asymptomatic, or have sufficiently mild symptoms that they never take a covid test.
At this point, I'd imagine that lots of people who think they've never had covid, just had mild cases. And it looks like the various long covid / post-viral type of issues can and do occur even in people who had asymptomatic infections.
