[bryant]

It's a pretty sad reflection of the times that there's a need to create a throwaway account to talk about long COVID symptoms, but this is a good personal anecdote to draw attention to what's likely happening. In my case, I only caught covid once - somepoint last year just before I would've gotten the updated booster. It took me well over a year to stop having acute pulmonary issues, and my lung performance is down year over year (measured during high intensity training) even though I finally feel no differently at baseline than I did before I caught it.

Most people don't exploit the full capacity of their bodies and so would never notice, which is essentially the point OP is making. This disease very likely ravaged the 20% claimed, but the vast majority may never know because they're just never pushing their bodies hard enough.

[longcovidthrowa]

I mainly created the throwaway because I'm sharing personal medical information and I'd rather not do that with my main account where people know me IRL.

[bryant]

Yeah fair enough. lol

[nradov]

It ought to be possible to test that hypothesis by comparing publicly available race results for the same athletes on the same courses before and after the pandemic relative to the expected age-related performance loss. Anecdotally as an age-group endurance athlete I'm not seeing any big declines in myself and my friends so I'm highly skeptical that 20% were "ravaged". The actual incidence of significant loss of pulmonary function is probably much lower although I have no idea as to the actual number.

If anyone wants to quantify this then Athlinks is a good place to start for race results. Obviously the data is somewhat noisy, like you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.

https://www.athlinks.com/

[Retric]

> you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.

Poor performers and no shows are exactly the population you’re looking for. To be clear the argument isn’t about a 10% decline across the board among people with long COVID as there’s non cardio pulmonary symptoms like brain fog, loss of smell, and difficulty sleeping.

If 80% of the fit population had COVID, 20% of them had long COVID, and half the people with long COVID had a 10% decline in race performance. That’s something like an overall 0.8% drop of performance assuming nobody dropped out or joined, but again you’re loosing people on both sides who were most impacted. Thus I’d be highly skeptical of finding an actual connection here rather than something else that impacts more people.

A more useful approach is to take a cohort of people who raced in 2019 and track what happened to every single one of them specifically.

[omgwtfbyobbq]

You can test it for endurance athletes, but not necessarily for the population at large.

If long COVID disproportionately affects people who are sedentary, then you won't see that in endurance athlete performance.

[jlaternman]

This, and also brain fog – which unless it is truly debilitating is hard to prove, hard to treat, and can feel pointless to talk about after a while. You won't necessarily hear people talk about "having Long Covid" unless their symptoms are easily measurable and debilitating in a key area of their life. 20% sounds viable to me, too.