This study appears to suggest that MS is essentially "long Epstein-Barr." Terrifying if the same pattern holds for covid, given the number of people who have some sequelae (the most conservative estimates are 2-5% for "serious" post-viral symptoms, which would be hundreds of millions of people worldwide). There will be an extraordinary amount of suffering, not to mention radical shifts in economic and public policy.
There's another paper from June of last year[0] that proposed a long COVID explanation: Epstein-Barr reactivation. I haven't seen any follow-up work yet, but if both that and this paper have any predictive power to them[1] we might start seeing a cohort of "long long COVID[2]": people who got COVID, didn't recover, and then progressed to MS.
That sounds unlikely. Epstein-Barr is a herpesvirus, and it's persistent - once you catch it, it stays latent in your body and you'll shed it through your saliva periodically for life.
As far as I can find, coronaviruses have no way to pull that trick. Once your immune system gets rid of it, it's gone and not coming back unless you're infected again by a sufficiently unrecognizable relative.
Coronaviruses do a weird thing where their viral RNA persists in cells long after the initial infection. [1] No one knows if this has a bearing on long COVID or not.
I would be hesitant to generalize from existing coronaviruses to SARS-2. As the sibling comment points out, SARS-2 has been shown to persist in every organ of the body well after initial infection.
We don't really know. A recent manuscript submitted to Nature shows minute persistence in various tissues as long as 230 days or more post-infection. [1] RNA is fragile, if the infection is completely cleared or not integrated into the genome in some way we would not expect it to persist.
The study really doesn't suggest that. All it suggests is that EBV seropositive people are much more likely to develop MS than the seronegative minor population.
As for long COVID, the data quality is very variable. I'd like to see a controlled study that compares recovery from COVID vs. other respiratory viruses.
It's pretty clear that the causal explanation is the only reasonable one here. (Besides, at least for covid, not everyone who contracts the virus develops antibodies for it: https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/Spectrum.00904-21 )
There's a reason I quoted conservative estimates of long covid. The 2% is from this ONS study: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan.... The high end of estimates is 10-30%, which would mean the end of our current era of civilization.
There are lots of viruses that persist forever. You can get chickenpox as a kid then die of shingles as a retiree. Measles might give you only mild symptoms then 6-15 years after reactivate and cause Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE), a fatal brain inflammation with all the interesting symptoms that implies (starting out with mood swings progressing into dementia, muscle spasms and blindness).
Think of this the next time some brain dead person starts talking about the "unknown long term effects of the vaccine" - we know what has long term effects, and it's freaking live viruses!
