AS I have said in these pages before, when they stop talking about covid, we will stop writing about it.
But they don’t stop writing about it as shown this week by a link in Global Health Now (the newsletter of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University) to an article in CIDRAP (the newsletter of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, University of Minnesota).
The article has the extraordinary title: ‘Nearly seven in ten covid survivors tested didn’t know they had a dulled sense of smell’.
The data comes from a study published in JAMA Network with more than 50 authors on behalf of the Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery Consortium. The study included more than 3,500 people who ‘survived’ covid. A total of 66 per cent had not reported hyposmia (a reduced ability to smell) yet it transpired that on testing they did have a reduced ability to smell.
The purported hyposmia was gauged against population norms and the study included a control group of uninfected individuals. The rigour of the study is not in doubt and nor are the findings. Comparing the two groups and calculating the numbers who reported having covid versus those who did not shows that the number needed to harm (NNH) was 15.
In other words, for every 15 people reporting a covid infection one more in that group had hyposmia than if they were in the group that did not report having had covid. It is eminently possible, something the authors admit and which they would have no way of knowing, that many of the people testing for hyposmia in this study already had hyposmia prior to having covid.
The result is statistically significant, but the effect size calculated from the figures in the article shows that this was very small (0.19).
The effect size is a measure of how big the difference really is considering the spread of results in each group. Small effect sizes are rarely considered clinically important. For example, if this were a drug trial, a drug showing an effect size of 0.19 would be very unlikely to be considered clinically useful.
This is all remarkably reminiscent of the days, at the height of the alleged ‘pandemic’, when we were being exhorted to test ourselves repeatedly. Covid was a disease so dramatic and deadly that you needed to test yourself to find out if you had it. The covid testing con (the tests were remarkably poor and prone to generating false positive results) was so expensive that the Government refused to divulge how much it has spent, referring to this as ‘sensitive information’.
However, early in the ‘pandemic’ the New York Times reported that the UK had spent £20million on home tests. Presumably by the time we were relieved of the need for frequent home testing the cost was eclipsed as the UK may have spent up to $410billion (£305billion) on covid measures.
A pattern could be developing whereby the covid con is being perpetuated in unexpected ways. One of these is the continuing fantasy about long covid which consumes a level of funding an order of magnitude larger than that for myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) to which it seems remarkably similar, if not indistinguishable.
Next, on the back of the recent study of hyposmia, which most of the ‘sufferers’ were unaware they had, are we to witness mass testing of covid ‘survivors’ years after their reported infection being hauled in to have their sense of smell tested? If there is money to be made out of this, you can be sure that we will.
