Less than a fragment of a percent, thus far, most of whom are already on the older side. Admittedly, that's going to total in the thousands by the time this is over.
... yeeeah, no. We
don't have the numbers to say that. Getting them is at least four to ten months out.
Of course, given the next bit...
Yeah... so significant that your own article isn't even willing to say conclusively that it's COVID-related at this point.
... which falls under the category of "evidence that you don't understand how medical science, and particularly epidemiology, works," I suppose I shouldn't exactly be surprised.
Science is, in a very real sense, the systematic acknowledgement of the limitations of our knowledge. Scientists, especially good scientists, and particularly those in wishy-washy, complicated areas like medicine, epidemiology, and
in vivo biology which are prone to things seeped in multifactoral and complex causation, are, by the standards of anyone who's not used to dealing with them, extremely reluctant to say
anything conclusively.
So, yeah, what we're seeing is exactly what we'd expect to see from a post-COVID syndrome. It's also, by
far, the most likely explanation.
I mentioned that it was too early for firm numbers, right? Well, the reasons for that are pretty much the same as why we won't have a vaccine for
at least the latter amount of time despite the fact that we have candidates (the first of which just passed Phase 1 trials with promising results) already. Specifically, you detect things like that via a method called "followup studies..." or, more technically in the case of the aftereffects of the disease,
case-control and
longitudinal cohort studies. Again, without getting into the fiddly technical details, you have to observe people after recovery and follow up on them to see how (and if) they get better.
Thing is, SARS-CoV-2
spilled over back a bit before December -- the first documented case showed his first symptoms on December 1st and was admitted to the hospital on the 16th. The first cases
outside China started in January... and things started to pick up around mid-March.
This means that the
very first known case of SARS-CoV-2 would be about five months past recovery now. The people in the first real "wave" here in America have had less than two months since infection, and about a month and a half since recovery.
Thing is, people's situations in recovery tend to vary dramatically over time. Disregarding the issue the the disease reemerging in a new form (something that there's
notable precedent for), someone who's had their major organs attacked in some way takes time to recover... and so we can't tell if it's going to happen until that time has passed.
For various reasons (again, this involves technical details that I don't have the time or spoons to get into here), the traditional follow-up times are, roughly, three, six, and twelve months, followed by multiples of years. Five-year follow-ups are common.
For reasons of
statistical power and the
sheer number of things we need to look for, getting said numbers will require samples
at least in the thousands.
As such, at least here in the US, that means we'll be looking at the people who started getting infected in March. We should thus expect
early numbers to
maybe start coming out in June, with them firming up somewhat around September or so... while still remaining highly preliminary.
That's also around when we'll be able to get more definitive answers as to whether these syndromes we're seeing are COVID-related. In the meantime, I can simply say that there's substantial precedent for the answer being "yes."
