I love Europeans telling us to go to the doctor like it's that easy.

It's not unreasonable. A few folks have developed it after getting vaccinated against COVID. To anyone thinking they might skip on the vaccine for your reason: don't. Health outcomes are still way way better if you get the vaccine.

Definitely possible, but harder/nearly impossible to verify.

Anyways long COVID isn’t one illness, it’s an umbrella term for health problems following a COVID infection. It can mean anything from COVID triggered Autoimmune diabetes to loss of smell after COVID.

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?