First modification:
A new study published in the scientific journal ‘BMJ’ concludes that estimates of persistent Covid patients are inflated due to poorly designed methodologies and lack of consensus around the definition of the disease. Almost four years after the virus arrived in our lives, there are many gaps in the research of this disease.
For some, persistent Covid is when a patient lasts two months with symptoms of the disease until three months after being infected. For others, it is when a person still shows symptoms of Covid-19 four weeks after being infected. Additionally, symptoms can range from losing your sense of smell to maintaining breathing problems or developing chronic fatigue.
All this confusion makes it difficult to have a consensus on what persistent Covid, or long Covid, is, and of course to measure how many people suffer from it. General estimates usually range between 10% of people who have harbored the virus and 20%, although some studies estimate that half of those infected with SARS-CoV-2 have had persistent Covid at some point.
However, A new study published in the scientific journal ‘BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine‘has a different vision. According to the authors of the research, the articles published so far are “distorted” by the lack of consensus around the definition of long Covid and by methodological errors in the design of the studies, such as not having good control groups, that is That is, from people who have not been infected with Covid-19 to evaluate the long-term consequences.
“The unintended consequences of this may include increased social anxiety and public health spending, the failure to diagnose other treatable conditions misidentified as long Covid, and the diversion of funds and care from those truly suffering from secondary chronic conditions from the Covid-19,” they point out.
Although the call to agree on a definition of the disease and to make better study designs that allow us to truly understand how long Covid behaves is shared by a large part of the scientific community, some voices have come forward to criticize this study. their postulates.
“I agree with the first message of this article, which is that we need well-designed studies to provide a valid measure of the long-term effects of acute Covid-19 infection (…) The second message of this article seems be that there is a negligible risk of persistent Covid, based on the selection of the documents they have cited. That message is worrying and does not agree with conventional scientific evidence or the experience of the large population of people living with persistent Covid and the doctors who take care of them,” says Michael Baker, professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago (New Zealand).
Your analysis, collected in ‘Science Media Center Spain‘, continues: “There is now overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2 carries a significant risk of long-term effects. This evidence comes not only from epidemiological studies, but also from studies examining the serious and long-lasting pathological changes that occur after SARS-CoV-2 infection.
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