The first. Before COVID infection I was a healthy young person doing 30 hours of sports a week, since getting COVID I’ve been unable to leave my bed suffering from dozens of symptoms vomiting every day getting loads of infections because apparently my immune system called quits.

And just to be clear. While I initially faced disbelief from loads of doctors. I eventually found one specialised in long COVID who confirmed this and then I was confirmed when I had to go through the 1000 loops of hell to get disability income. So I’m not pulling this out of my arse.

(And frankly the “Actually it’s probably just stress” is the sort of minimising and harmful prejudicial attitude that’s hurting advocacy efforts and making it hard for long COVID to be taken seriously by the general public.)

Nah those are legit different things.

The sympathetic/parasympathetic disregulation probably responsible for some MECFS cases is a different mechanism from the immune system disregulation probably responsible for others. Though, it is unlikely that just general stress would get you MECFS, you're probably burnt out, which is also a real thing but different.

Key question: do you have an effort limit, and will surpassing that effort limit cause your body to revolt (sometime within the next ~24 hours) as well as lower your effort limit for future episodes?