An unprecedented window into how diseases take hold years before symptoms appear

> I wonder if, in parts, the effects of the so called "mild covid" and "long covid" […] are nothing but psychological. There seems to be quite a cloud of uncertainty around the vast array of reported possible symptoms.

Uncertainty does not imply psychological. It’s like saying ”our users report a lot of different bugs that we can’t reproduce, they must be all imagined”, except the body is OOMs more complex than even the most carelessly developed enterprise application. There is uncertainty in every part of medicine, all the time. That’s why it takes time and is difficult (often too difficult) to root cause everything that happens.

If you have a novel pathogen with neurological effects (see olfactory impacts - people literally losing their sense of smell), it would be my first guess of mysterious symptoms rather than.. checks notes the war in Ukraine? Honestly I’m not sure how to connect your first sentence to the next.

Me neither, but there is a theory that Putin grew increasingly disconnected from reality when isolating himself from a potential Covid infection, and that this might have contributed to his decision to go all in.

Should this be the truth, there would be an actual connection between the virus and the war.

Do you think I was talking about the sense of smell?

That's very original but not the kind of thing I proposed.

I am sure there are many ways one could be disconnected from reality.

Doctors have a habit of blowing off unknowns as "it's all in your head" (as if that somehow makes it out of their jurisdiction). There used to be a diagnosis of "female hysteria." After the invention of the MRI doctors were able to see the physical damage caused by the disease and they renamed it multiple sclerosis.

No, but loss of smell is indeed a (very well documented) ”mystery effect” of neurological damage, so it’s not a regular ”flu” by any means. It’s closest relative is SARS1 and that’s also vastly different from flu. There are always psychosomatic or ”mystery” effects even with something clear cut like breaking a bone. Noisy data is the first thing you have to accept dealing with these complex systems. If you see a giant cloud of black smoke, it’s a good idea to assume there’s fire and invalidate it later, should it turn out to be something else.

Absolutely. Academics in particular are hyper averse to saying ”we don’t know yet”. They’d much rather establish an unfalsifiable narrative which can mislead and cause damage for decades, until it can be properly reversed. Archeology is perhaps the best field at turning random early speculations into entrenched dogma. But it happens in all fields.

Ironically.

Do you believe the terms "neurological" and "psychological" are interchangeable?