Today there are 2 new papers published on the 2-year follow up of over 100,000 people with Covid and millions of uninfected controls. In this edition of Ground Truths, I’ll review the salient findings of the 2 studies, and highlight the uncertainties of our knowledge base for Long Covid, which has already compromised the lives of tens of millions of peo…
Read more
a year ago · Eric Topol
Massive studies. Would require repeated readings to absorb the data. The finding that those who were hospitalised with severe illness had the worst outcomes is actually simple logic, would have been obvious even without this massive data, which no doubt provided much quantification. Many times in the past, I have emphasised that people went into hospitals, many seriously, because of lack of clinically appropriate medications, basically URT medications, in their initial days of viral phase. The medications would have stopped viral load build up in that phase and prevented serious conditions that would have required hospitalisation and eventually long covid incidence. LC has become a burden in the West precisely for this reason, shunning simple, classical early medications. I do not know, if in the large size of this study, one can pick up cohorts who took such treatments, for assessing the outcomes. Second, the results don’t seem to be very different between 2020 and 2021, first and second years. 2021 was the year of vaccination. So the much touted claim that vaccination prevented serious illness gets discounted. Whether officialdom will accept this finding or not remains to be seen. Extending this thinking, vaccination needs to be factored into the data of 2021, to see if it’s effects could be isolated. Even for someone like me with a strong science orientation, this could be a statistical nightmare. A follow up of this kind for 2022 would be even more revealing - repeat vaccinations versus a mild variant, not supposed to cause serious phase, but managed to have an extended tenure in the West.