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These "pulling together data from medical records to try to characterize Long Covid" studies don't seem to be capturing Long Covid in any kind of useful way. This one concludes that exactly zero of nearly half a million people infected with Covid had "post exertional fatigue" and less than 0.5%...

Yes, it was very clear that N95s were more protective than surgical masks (for which we had plenty of mechanistic evidence). It seems rather unethical to undertake a 6-month trial to see if more nurses in the surgical masks arm — who were caring for Covid patients — caught Covid when we had very...

David Fisman, one of the authors, recently pointed out that the Canadian government gave a $600,000 grant earlier in the pandemic for a 6-month RCT of surgical masks versus N95s for nurses treating Covid patients (they never reported any results). That seems to me like a pretty good example of...

Their basic point — that we should not discount mechanistic evidence — seems pretty sound to me. I think this is something we've fallen down on many times with Covid (oh, we don't have an RCT that proves masks work and so on). Mechanistic evidence works in pretty much hard science field...

They include a copy of the whole survey in the supplemental materials (all studies should do this!) and I think it's fairly clear what they're asking.

Key Points Question What proportion of children infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were tested in emergency departments (EDs) reported post–COVID-19 conditions (PCCs) 90 days after their ED visits? Findings In this cohort study of 1884 SARS-CoV-2–positive children with 90-day follow-up, 5.8% of...

It's a bit confusing how they present it, but they asked about physical exhaustion, difficulties concentrating, etc. at any point between the test date and the survey date, so presumably most of those are people who felt physically exhausted while acutely ill or perhaps in the weeks immediately...

1.5% of the negative group reported a CFS diagnosis in 9 months — that's 2% annually. Interesting to see such a high number relative to a lot of other estimates. I would not have thought Denmark was a country in which it was easy to get a diagnosis. Could be a few with asymptomatic infections...

Oliver expanded on his tweet here. There's only one paragraph about his own health: "After two years of dodging the bullet I then caught covid myself in March, and, while not sick enough to be admitted, I haven’t been right since. Some of my symptoms have doubtless been covid related, but...

This jumped out at me as well. Perhaps these results suggest EBV re-activation is common in the early months or years of Long Covid and ME, but not later. It would be interesting to know how long the patients had been sick for, especially the ME patients. This would suggest that maybe EBV...

The one Putrino didn't get from NIH was on microclots, so I think entirely different (apparently, they didn't provide any reviewer comments, so no info on why it didn't get funded).

"Targeted metabolic profiling indicated low amino acid and triglyceride levels and deregulated acylcarnithines, characteristic for CFS and indicating mitochondrial stress in LCS patients." Oddly, these are only low in the LC group relative to the Covid recovered group, not low relative to the...

The authors note in the discussion: "As seen in Table 1, relatively high levels of positive results were found in the control group, as follows: coxsackievirus A7 IgG in 88%, coxsackievirus B1 IgG in 100%, coxsackievirus A7 IgA in 58%, coxsackievirus B1 IgA in 88%, echovirus IgG in 100%, and...

I think to explain PEM and lowered capacity in a PEM state, maybe it makes more sense to imagine cells that are flipped from the normal TCA cycle state to the itaconate shunt state by some aspect of exertion and then take a few days to flip back. There may be a baseline percentage of cells that...

The things dialysis removes are many orders of magnitude smaller than red blood cells, so simple filtration wouldn't work at all. Also, they give heparin to prevent clotting in the dialysis machine, which wouldn't be necessary if it removed clots.

Isn't dialysis passing blood over a membrane and pulling things out by osmosis? Is there any filtration involved?

This is exactly what I'm thinking. The evidence for decreased use of glucose and increased use of glutamate is pretty weak: Armstrong found less serum glucose in one study and slightly more in the other, altogether a tiny difference relative to what you'd see in normal variability over time in...

They report a risk ratio of 0.32 (.25–.42) for new diagnosis of malignant neoplasm (cancer) for vaccinated versus unvaccinated people within 28 days of a Covid test and 0.23 (.17–.32) within 90 days. This seems pretty damning because cancer doesn't just show up in 28 or 90 days (most cancers...

I suppose with a typical western diet having much more protein than we strictly need, it's unlikely that a lack of amino acids would be an issue unless a person had a lot of cells in this state. Non-alcoholic fatty liver is so common and presumably under-diagnosed, so unlikely to show up in...

I wonder what the theorized impaired use of glucose and fat at the mitochondrial level, compensated for by increased use of amino acids, would imply on the macro level. What would we expect to see for the effect of diet on patients? What would happen to the excess glucose and lipids? What about...