Research Roundup: Scientists analyze long COVID symptoms, explain thermal noise communication, measure ‘hard’ x-rays

Conventional studies may overestimate the range of long-term COVID symptoms A Stanford-led analysis of 14.4 billion American health insurance claims found that conventional study designs may overestimate how many long-term health problems can be attributed to COVID-19. The study examined two sources of bias in such studies: comparing positive COVID testers with people who were never tested, and grouping negative-testing subjects in hindsight instead of at the time of the test. These biases caused studies to attribute unrelated symptoms to COVID, researchers found, such as a 76% higher risk of future injury from causes including lightning and drowning. By enrolling subjects at their first polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test, then grouping them by positive or negative result, the study found 98% fewer COVID-attributable outcomes from four to 12 months. Myopathy, hair loss, pulmonary embolism and respiratory failure stood as the only effects with substantially elevated risk.

This excerpt comes from the named source. Read the original for the full reporting.