Your cohort targets hospitalized patients. It is no surprise to me they have symptoms which continue a year out. If you read my opening I admit that. Also this population is bound to be riddled with other confounders given the population of individuals who were hospitalized looks quite different than those who were symptomatic in the general population.
The 50% rate you talk of for PACS I’ve seen published with a very wide confidence band (10%-60%) with varying symptom definitions. The PACS definition also generally starts at 4 weeks, which again, such a high incidence in that time frame makes sense to me given that the flu and other severe respiratory illnesses similarly linger even out to four months. All of the studies you cite show that PACS is also more coincident with age and preexisting conditions. None specifically discuss symptoms beyond twelve months in patients that were entirely healthy prior to COVID.
That is my population of interest. The rest makes sense. Is it really surprisinf that hospitalized patients have PACS a year out? Not to me. Is it surprising a lot of people still have symptoms out 4-6 weeks? I remember swine flu, so no. But a thirty to fifty year old with no preexisting conditions who now has persistent brain fog a year after? That’s very curious, and yet the research does not come anywhere near addressing that cohort.
It's true that our cohort is all patients that were hospitalized for COVID-19, but notably, our long COVID questionnaire specifically asked which new symptoms they had after COVID-19 that they didn't already have beforehand. That, plus the direct link to acute patterns of gene expression and antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2, makes a strong case for a causal link between acute SARS-CoV-2 infection and long COVID a year later. While we don't look at mild non-hospitalized cases in this study, there's no reason to think a causal link wouldn't exist there as well.
The 50% rate you talk of for PACS I’ve seen published with a very wide confidence band (10%-60%) with varying symptom definitions. The PACS definition also generally starts at 4 weeks, which again, such a high incidence in that time frame makes sense to me given that the flu and other severe respiratory illnesses similarly linger even out to four months. All of the studies you cite show that PACS is also more coincident with age and preexisting conditions. None specifically discuss symptoms beyond twelve months in patients that were entirely healthy prior to COVID.
That is my population of interest. The rest makes sense. Is it really surprisinf that hospitalized patients have PACS a year out? Not to me. Is it surprising a lot of people still have symptoms out 4-6 weeks? I remember swine flu, so no. But a thirty to fifty year old with no preexisting conditions who now has persistent brain fog a year after? That’s very curious, and yet the research does not come anywhere near addressing that cohort.