Post-COVID-19 condition and persisting symptoms in English schoolchildren: repeated surveys to March 2022 2023 Warren-Gash et al

Background
Both post-COVID-19 condition (long COVID) and the presence of persisting symptoms that do not meet formal definitions of post-COVID-19-condition may adversely affect quality of life and function. However, their prevalence among children and young people in England is unclear.

Methods
We used data from repeated surveys in a large cohort of English schoolchildren from the COVID-19 Schools Infection Survey (SIS) for the school year 2021/22 to describe the weighted prevalence of post-COVID-19-condition and compare persisting symptoms between individuals with a positive SARS-CoV-2 test and those with neither a positive test history nor suspected infection.

Results
Among 7797 children from 173 schools, 1.8% of primary school pupils (aged 4 to 11 years), 4.5% of secondary school pupils in years 7–11 (aged 11 to 16 years) and 6.9% of those in years 12–13 (aged 16 to 18 years) met a definition of post-COVID-19 condition in March 2022. Specific persisting symptoms such as anxiety or difficulty concentrating were frequently reported regardless of prior infection status and increased with age: 48.0% of primary school pupils, 52.9% of secondary school pupils in years 7–11 and 79.5% in years 12–13 reporting at least one symptom lasting more than 12 weeks. Persisting loss of smell and taste, cardiovascular and some systemic symptoms were more frequently reported by those with a previous positive test.

Conclusions
We showed that ongoing symptoms were frequently reported by English schoolchildren regardless of SARS-CoV-2 test results and some specific symptoms such as loss of smell and taste were more prevalent in those with a positive test history. Our study emphasises the wide-ranging impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the health and wellbeing of children and young people.

Open access, https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-023-08203-1

 

Authors are all statisticians (ONS) or epidemiologists so I'm not sure there is an obvious pro psych agenda. There are limitations on cohort selection and classification - the cohort results from a monitoring programme set up as an early response to the pandemic essentially as a public health tool (SIS) and the classification is a modification of the WHO Long COVID definition (Long COVID - post-COVID-19 condition - in children) neither of which allow for much granular assessment.

As classification derives from the WHO definition the criticisms made in this paper apply: https://www.s4me.info/threads/jama-...olescents-selvakumar-wyller-et-al-2023.32677/

 

Even though, somehow, evermore money spent on this never actually yields any benefits. It's always "getting worse", in part by conflating unrelated issues and counting them here, but also because the root causes are never addressed, never even looked at, having chosen models so generic they are effectively worse than nothing, fake solutions for made-up problems while the real problems are dismissed as non-existent.

So they will keep throwing money at the problem, and will make it even worse in the process. Which will mean more money needed, more jobs, more careers. Never delivering anything, but by some point it could employ half the human population and there would still be calls to put evermore money at it as things keep getting worse. Even though each additional fund adds less and less value, already far in the negative at this point.

Reminds me of roads and the decades-long trend of widening, widening, always widening roads, putting more lanes. Lanes that always, eventually, choke up at the same places. It never actually improves things, more often than not it makes traffic worse. And this is just as true here. One of the worst things to have happened to our collective mental health turns out to have been spending more money on a product that isn't ready, doesn't even have a viable prototype product yet, based largely on a con, a confidence scam built on failed traditions.