Any hypothesized cases of long covid subtle enough to be undiagnosed?

[syfry]

TL;DR Summary

People get covid without symptoms. And people get long covid. So are any researchers voicing the possibility for long covid with subtle symptoms that potentially get overlooked?

Wondering what discussions on that possibility (of a so far undetected long covid) anyone might've seen.

 

[OmCheeto]

TL;DR Summary: People get covid without symptoms. And people get long covid. So are any researchers voicing the possibility for long covid with subtle symptoms that potentially get overlooked?

Wondering what discussions on that possibility (of a so far undetected long covid) anyone might've seen.

Considering the fact that symptoms run from 'none' to 'death', I'm guessing that the list of symptoms already runs the gamut, so I'm confused as to what you are asking.

Your topic title hints at the situation like the 'Ohio Covid Pooper'.
Now THAT would be a thread I would love to watch.

 

[phinds]

So are any researchers voicing the possibility for long covid with subtle symptoms that potentially get overlooked?

As I understand it, "long covid" is, BY DEFINTION, the long term retention of negative symptoms that manifest themselves. If you are showing no symptoms, you don't HAVE long covid.

The condition you describe does not seem to me to be impossible, but it is NOT what is described by the phrase "long covid".

 

[jim mcnamara]

FWIW:
Long COVID is one of the dumbed down names for 'post Covid sequelae' - so you can see why they renamed it to something non-medical people can deal with.

Long COVID is symptoms -often unlike what the patient experienced earlier -- and disease processes that appear well after first symptoms are gone. Some few symptoms may persist from the start to well after the initial infection. Example: anosmia is total loss of sense of smell and very obvious when it persists.. So like most pathologies it presents with varying symptoms among patients from the start through Long COVID.

Long COVID does not appear in every patient. Some long COVID patients were aysmptomatic with positive PCR tests, then some weeks later they developed a whole new group of problems.

See: https://byjus.com/biology/difference-between-exons-and-introns/
For a more detailed explanation.

 

[syfry]

Thanks for the replies. My question is about magnitude of symptoms. It's true that long covid is named for obvious symptoms, and a definition doesn't always cover the entire range of possibilities.

As an example, before 2014 we might've defined the flu (influenza) by including the symptoms we'd expect people to feel.

But by then a study of over 5,000 people had discovered that a lot of flu cases went unnoticed because of either zero or mild symptoms:

Fever, muscle aches, nausea — these are what we usually associate with having the flu.

But just because you don't exhibit these symptoms, it doesn't mean you don't have the flu, researchers say. And you could be just as contagious. In fact, their study found that roughly three-quarters of people with seasonal or pandemic flu show either no symptoms or mild ones that aren't usually linked to flu.

People often mistake the flu for the common cold, Hayward tells Shots. "A lot of the time you may just have a runny nose, a bit of a cough, perhaps a sore throat," he says. But the classic flu symptoms of a sudden fever and muscle aches — "the study shows that that very often doesn't happen. And it's often a much more mild illness."

Roughly 1 in 5 unvaccinated people was infected with the flu virus each winter, the study found, but only a quarter of those people showed any symptoms of the infection. And only 17 percent of those infected were sick enough to see a doctor.

Yet the only medical dictionary that I could find online is still defining the flu by expected symptoms, without mention that most people who have the flu might have zero symptoms. (similarly with its defining of the more official influenza wording)

So for a hypothetical example to what my question is about, if anosmia were to include a milder 20% loss of smell, or a low enough loss that most people wouldn't notice, then that aspect might go undiagnosed, but also maybe some researchers have already voiced the possibility.

jim mcnamara pointed out long covid could start without symptoms and then develop a whole new set of issues. Now what I'm wondering is, has anyone heard about any researchers hypothesizing a long covid with mild enough symptoms that might get mistaken either for the normal aches and pains of aging, or as being seemingly unrelated.