Quote:
it is based on 30 self selected/reported "long haulers". I don't know, and I forget the name of the researcher I was listening to.
But I'm picking on the quoted bit, because that's just the nature of long COVID. It's a collection of symptoms correlated to having had COVID just prior. There is no definitive "test." Yet. So every case is going to be "self-selected."
And it's absolutely in the "dodgy" stage of research, teasing out correlations to try to tease out what's likely to be mixture of "causes" rather than one super-satisfying single mechanism.
I just mentioned the Epstein-Barr research because it seems to make some intuitive sense. It's pretty well established that Epstein-Barr is a weird-ass virus. To use lay terms. But even the researcher looking at it fully admitted there are a few dozen long COVID avenues being researched, and most of them might be going down fruitless paths, including his. That's the nature of science.
And just because Epstein-Barr *can* be linked to lots of things doesn't mean it *isn't* linked to many of those things. Just because you find a correlation doesn't mean there
isn't causation. For example there are recent studies indicating a link between EBV and MS. (
here's one) Of interest to me, because my wife has MS. The methodolgy being used here is a
bit more clever than the logic like, "100% have toes, and 100% of people with long COVID have toes, therefore toes cause long COVID." Which can be gathered by the details of the
Nature article I linked to or even the dodgy one you did.