> [everyone] understands that this only affects a small percentage of those who contract it
This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.
I remember that thread, and that claim is disingenuous. From the actual study:
>The incidence of any psychiatric diagnosis in the 14 to 90 days after COVID-19 diagnosis was 18·1% (95% CI 17·6–18·6), including 5·8% (5·2–6·4) that were a first diagnosis.
So only 5.8% of people got a first diagnosis, and the remainder of the 18% were people who had been previously diagnosed with one of these conditions.
Further, if you looked at the normal flu the same way, you'd see a 13% incidence rate.. and that's without the impact of lockdowns or media hype.
> Comments like this are gonna quickly turn this place into just another /r/science, where people of no particular qualification chime in and try to make themselves feel smart by contradicting a peer reviewed study without taking the actual effort needed to properly question a peer reviewed study, especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet.
Thank you. Nobody’s interested in your level of incredulity, however you italicize it.
>especially one in as prestigious a journal as the Lancet
While I agree in principle, the Lancet aren't immune to crummy papers (indeed, no-one is). Even just this year, they published that super-dodgy Surgisphere paper that turned out to be completely irreproducible (to put it kindly).
Scientific papers are written by people, and the peers of people who (for example) don't really understand statistics are likely to also not understand statistics, so while peer review is definitely helpful, one should always read scientific papers sceptically.
That being said, low-effort dismissals based on anecdotes are much, much worse than the average scientific paper.
It is a garbage number- 18.1% took a diagnostic test that showed they had any mental illness- with no accounting for whether they had one before. For 5.8%, they hadn't received a diagnosis before, but it was not shown whether they were undiagnosed or developed the condition as a response to the pandemic itself, rather than the infection.
Sure, nobobody is saying that anxiety disorders aren't a mental illness. But it's also likely the reason why the rate of mental illness was found to be 1 in 5. From your own link, 1 in 5 adults already have anxiety:
>Over 40 million adults in the U.S. (19.1%) have an anxiety disorder.
So it follows that undiagnosed anxiety disorder would be found in abundance in people recently diagnosed with covid.
It looks like they accounted for that or at least did as much as they could to account for that.
>In patients with no previous psychiatric history, a diagnosis of COVID-19 was associated with increased incidence of a first psychiatric diagnosis in the following 14 to 90 days compared with six other health events.
So it looks like they compared it to six other health events and it (anxiety, insomnia, dementia) was still higher with COVID, but they add "we cannot exclude possible residual confounding by socioeconomic factors."
This is highly questionable. There are many articles (whether factual or not) suggesting widespread lasting effects, e.g. just last week on HN one suggested 1 in 5 patients develop mental illness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25046157. With all these articles floating around, I just wouldn't agree that there's some sort of consensus that 99%+ of people won't have issues.