social contagion: is "long covid" often just "long parent"?
monkey see, monkey do, monkey pretend to be ill too!
want so see what social contagion looks like?
it looks like this:
you can read the full study HERE.
here’s the real moneyshot:
i’m going to chart some of this to see if i can make the data easier to see because the results are striking.
being PCR negative for having had covid but having parents reporting long covid symptoms makes you 28% likely to report them yourself. this is well above the 23% rate of reporting for people who did have covid but had parents not reporting LC.
quite literally, parents cause more long covid than covid does.
those who had had covid were 18.9% more likely to report long covid than those who never tested positive for covid.
but those whose parents had long covid were 47.3% more likely to report long covid than those who had also tested positive for covid
and among those who had never tested positive for covid, having parents reporting long covid symptoms led to a stunning 64.7% greater chance of reporting them yourself.
this is very much in alignment with french findings that thinking you had covid is more predictive of long covid than actually having had covid.
also note that severity was highly predicted by “parents having long covid.”
those PCR+ with LC parents were 54% more likely to report 4 or more symptoms than PCR+ without LC parents.
this number explodes to 118% among the PCR-.
the signs here are just everywhere, and people are taking advantage of it.
long covid has no known biomarkers and most of its loudest proponents are the anxiety raddled and the “chronic disease” grifters who prey upon them.
(this is a large and truly nasty industry and the rubes can be as dangerous as the carnival barkers)
we’re getting deep into the land of pressure to play make believe here.
“reimagining” indeed…
(and you just KNEW you were going to find “pronouns in bio,” didn’t you?)
this starts to look like we ought to be putting LC predominantly in the DSM-V as opposed to focusing on long term covid sequelae.
to be sure, there probably are some: all respiratory diseases have them. but i have yet to see anything in the actual evidence based covid data (vs self reporting) that makes such long term harms from disease look any worse than flu or moderate pneumonia.
“long covid” is showing a stunning number of the markers of psychosomatic disease, social contagion, and of munchausen by proxy behavior whereby caregivers impose illnesses and maladies upon children to gain attention and approval by caring for them.
oh, and covid has also cured quite a lot of notorious trash-can psychosomatic diagnosis “fibromyalgia,” generating a sharp and instant drop in interest that seems to have durably eliminated about 35% of search traffic. (thanks to gatopal™ stinson for the graphic)
it’s hard to see any other likely postulate here apart from “the same people just changed what they called their long term anxiety and sense of being unwell.”
and the long covid-anxiety linkage is well established.
long covid has simply become the scupper that is collecting the ill at ease, unwell for idiopathic reasons, and the attention seeking. this is mostly a syndrome of social contagion.
were most of these folks not currently suffering from “long covid” they’d just go find some new syndrome with no tests to confirm or exclude and that goes on forever and have a slightly different set of grifters would be preying upon them.
i know folks feel like they have lingering symptoms, and some may well and that would simply make covid just like every other respiratory disease, but there is just no way it has prevalence rates like 25%. such claims appear either imagined or mis-attributed.
the sort of self-reporting studies like the parental prevalence variance studies cited above are notoriously hard to gauge any sort of generalized prevalence numbers from. this is especially so when reporting is of generalized, non specific symptoms like “fatigue” or “brain fog” or any number of other issues.
walk into any school in 2018 and ask about generalized symptoms like this and you’ll get a high hit rate. people always feel some ticks and twinges and also have a tendency to want to “please” the study runners by providing them with the data they think they want. and it’s not like adolescence is not playing merry hell with your body anyhow.
it also says nothing about actual cause and we have not weeded out a number of plausible cross contaminations like masking and vaccine status both of which can cause “long covid” symptoms and that may be driving misattribution and exhibiting complex cross correlations.
overall prevalence is likely massively overstated here and cause idiopathic, so i’m not sure how much we can judge on actual occurrence rates from studies like the one above, but that’s not the really interesting result anyhow.
I'm personally suffering from Long Tyranny still. Just can't seem to shake it.
Sounds like the teens are suffering from rapid onset COVID dysphoria.