Prevalence of long COVID complaints in persons with and without COVID-19, Magnusson, Flottorp et al, 2023

ABSTRACT

We studied the prevalence and patterns of typical long COVID complaints in ~ 2.3 million individuals aged 18–70 years with and without confirmed COVID-19 in a Nation-wide population-based prospective cohort study in Norway.

Our main outcome measures were the period prevalence of single-occurring or different combinations of complaints based on medical records: (1) Pulmonary (dyspnea and/or cough), (2) Neurological (concentration problems, memory loss), and/or (3) General complaints (fatigue).

In persons testing positive (n = 75 979), 64 (95% confidence interval: 54 to 73) and 122 (111 to 113) more persons per 10 000 persons had pulmonary complaints 5–6 months after the test compared to 10 000 persons testing negative (n = 1 167 582) or untested (n = 1 084 578), respectively.

The corresponding difference in prevalence of general complaints (fatigue) was 181 (168 to 195) and 224 (211 to 238) per 10 000, and of neurological complaints 5 (2 to 8) and 9 (6–13) per 10 000. Overlap between complaints was rare.

Long COVID complaints were only slightly more prevalent in persons with than without confirmed COVID-19.

Still, long COVID may pose a substantial burden to healthcare systems in the future given the lasting high incidence of symptomatic COVID-19 in both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32636-y

 

This is a paper from the Norwegian Institute for Public Health who has downplayed Long Covid since day one and also argued for a "let it rip" approach to the pandemic.

 

Good data, methods seem acceptable, stats appear OK; data is only to 2021 which is a limitation but not fatal. This is another study showing that Long Covid is an unhelpful descriptor which at a population level is difficult to discern from background ill health. Undoubtedly the authors have an agenda, but here the data is supporting them. Would have been good to see cohorts separated into age groups given that other studies show strong correlation between older age and higher/longer PASC burden.

 

Completely useless research, then. It evaluates what physicians record, not what's happening. Actually it's probably more about what they're instructed to do. And we know for a fact that they almost record nothing of the issues with LC, clearly by instruction, as for example doctors don't "like" to hand out ME diagnoses. We basically cannot trust any of their data, because we know they deliberately distort it.

As expected from Flottorp. This is not research, this is as much propaganda as the fraudulent research the tobacco industry funded. Parts of medicine are basically becoming a criminal enterprise, lying about reality, recording it wrong on purpose.

And somehow where they end up is always the same: it's all about the hospitals and how expensive it gets to the system. The patients can walk out in the ocean for all they care. This is a completely inhumane system that places no value on individual lives.

 

Health record research has always been of low quality due to incompleteness and errors in medical records.