Because of the energy drinks. 
It could not have been a more cliche moment. The conversation topic kicked off with the nurse commenting on my bestie’s vape. And how it was so much more dangerous than smoking, with a detailed description of popcorn lung (if you need a reminder) and that people were being put on respirators and still being unable to catch their breath before dying.
She then followed this up with an incredibly passionate, heart wrenching account about the state of things in medicine and how they’re seeing more and more young folks coming in with maladies typically reserved for the elderly… you could have copied and pasted her warning with that of a CC influencer; heart attacks, strokes, etc 19 year olds coming in with things for people in their 50s, yada, yada. All the hits… right up until she concluded on how it’s the fault of energy drinks.
Meanwhile, I’m just sitting there in my n95.
Fast forward later in the night, to the end of this poorly written scene, with the nurse giving me a fistbump and telling me she ‘hopes I feel better’ as we said our goodbyes.
And no, i did not get into it. It was my besties bday and it was not a scenario in which me getting into a debate was going to end well.
So, yeah. I’m just sharing this to remind y’all that there are people are out there in the medical field noticing something is wrong. And that you’re doing the right thing by masking… and/or not drinking energy drinks, I guess. Lol🤷
This is currently the most recent large scale literature research on long covid, that combines the main hypotheses and their empirical evidence: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-025-01300-z
It describes viral persistence as one of several hypotheses, it’s reductive and harmful to say that viral persistence is the main cause for long covid when there is no scientific backing for that claim. There are other factors at play that are not necessarily caused by viral persistence, and viral persistence alone does not cause the symptoms, since viral persistence has also been identified in people who do not have long covid. On top of that, viral persistence is not the same as an acute covid infection. It’s a phenomenon that happens after the acute infection and manifests differently than acute covid. Vaccines can impact the symptoms of acute infection and of post infectious illness differently, and it’s reductive and harmful to group them all together and say that vaccines do not mitigate many of the risks of a covid infection when they do.
For you this might be an argument about ‘semantics’, but for people who suffer from long covid and medical experts who work with people on long covid it defines whether the research is useful or not, and whether there is any progress on treatment.
For decades, ME patients and non grifting scientists have begged for research that does not group all post viral infection or all chronic fatigue patients together because it has been shown again and again that there are different mechanisms at play for these symptoms, which makes any large scale research that does not differentiate between these groups completely useless. Research that groups all forms of long covid together are similarly useless.
Any researchers who claims that they can explain the cause for long covid and back it up with science is lying, because the science says that we don’t know the significance of the different mechanisms at play, and that this significance probably differs greatly because there is more than one distinct illness that falls under the long covid umbrella.
Sorry, comrade, but you’re not convincing me. As far as semantics, I may have worded that poorly and I’ve made a small edit: I’m not saying that all long covid is the result of viral persistence but if someone leaves a faucet running and the flooding it causes leads to collapse of a nearby structure, I’m still going to point at the running faucet. I would even argue that by trying to distance long covid from covid you’re propagating the rhetoric used to sociologically end the pandemic. Social support for those with Long Covid, funding for research, that shit is all undermined by covid denialists. Look at the antimask legislation, look at how they’re getting away with dismantling all future pandemic responses. By trying to separate covid from long covid, it assists that movement, imo. It’s putting up a ‘Pardon our Dust’ barrier around the running faucet while collecting signatures to rebuild the collapsed structure in the same flooding location.
How is viral persistence being a possible cause for some subset of long covid instances relevant for whether systemic change is needed to protect us from viral diseases such as covid? I don’t see how spreading disinformation about long covid being the same as acute covid would lead to systemic change or to people being more careful about spreading viral diseases.
You can also just educate yourself on what post viral disease patients have been advocating for for decades, which includes preventing viral spread always. Because the actual harm that is done to people by prioritising profit over preventing viral spread can only be made visible by working with those patients who are dead while being alive because of their torturous disease. By learning from their advocacy you can actually spread truths instead of disinformation. Because there is no need to twist the truth in order to be alarming, by twisting the truth you’re just distracting from the actual issues and making alarmists who do care about the truth seem less serious.
I’ve corrected what I feel needed correcting and have said what I needed to say. None of which is anything that’s going to satisfy you, I think. So I’m gonna leave it up to these folks and disengage. Hope you have a nice day. Genuinely.
Long Covid is Covid - Winslow Santé Publique
I think per the site rules I’m allowed to reply once more on the content of your comment. Thanks for the source with an explanation of what you meant. I thought you meant to say that long covid is the same as acute covid, but I agree with the source that it does not make sense to put the covid label on the acute version while the post infection version has way more severe consequences. That is a semantics discussion in which I agree with you and the source. I’ve gained some new insights from that text which I’m grateful of.