How is everyone so sure 12 month+ symptoms are due to COVID-19? Yes, I accept 3-4 month coughs and brain fog can be attributed (many papers on this, it is also well documented with the flu). Yes, I accept chronic issues evolving from pre-existing conditions and severe illness. However, we had 100M people in the US alone be infected with a virus in a two year span. Many people develop chronic fatigue, mental illness, and hosts of othe syndromes in normal times often without clear cause. These symptoms are at times written off as "made up" as well.<p>It's extremely human to attribute the origin of inexplicable disease to a foreign agent like COVID just as much as people often search for the origins of their suffering in food, relationships, and other facets of life, but these are often not causal.<p>To complicate matters further, COVID presented tremendous stressors beyond the illness itself: fear of COVID, lockdowns, social isolation, disruption in work/schooling, social pressures around reopening and beliefs, inflation. People died. Routines were disrupted. Lives were upended. The environment these past two years were a breeding ground for affective disorders.<p>I only bring this up because a decade ago my mother began to suffer from fatigue and aches that to this day are a complete mystery. She was diagnosed with fibromyalgia which affects 2-4% of the population. Had this happened during COVID, she would have sworn on her life her symptoms were due to COVID. Even I would have agreed.<p>Again, the scale and immediacy of COVID is wild. The <i>entire world</i> got sick <i>at the same time.</i> That's <i>at least</i> 600M people globally, 100M of those in the US. This means 1 in 100K and 1 in 1M events <i>will</i> happen. Now blend that with the natural incidence of every neurological and mental disorder... yikes.