>They found that even mild COVID damaged otherwise healthy people's hearts so badly that their risk for heart problems are now comparable to those of obese people.
False.
The study did NOT look for heart damage in the study population as a proximal cause for other cardiac events, it simply looked at incidence of cardiac events. Your interpretation is one possible explanation as to why this might be, but the study neither supports nor disproves this explanation.
Increased incidence is evidence as is the known link between viral infections and heart problems.
Suppose your car doesn’t start. That supports the possibility of a dead battery, it also supports broken wire or anything else that’s a possible cause. What it doesn’t support is your car being in proper working order.
If your car doesn’t start and you haven’t used it in 2 months, well it could be something else but …
>Suppose your car doesn’t start. That supports the possibility of a dead battery, it also supports broken wire or anything else that’s a possible cause. What it doesn’t support is your car being in proper working order.
Yes, these are hypotheses. But they are not meaningful in a scientific sense until you design a study and set about to try to disprove them. OP's claim was in relation to precisely what a scientific paper did or did not prove. Therefore, the appropriate level of rigour we need to apply here is a scientific one.
It is the study’s author referring to damage, he wasn’t willing to say what kind.
“even in people who were previously healthy and had no risk factors or problems with the heart—COVID-19 affected them in such a way that manifested the higher risk of heart problems than people who did not get COVID-19.
It was really eye-opening that the risk was also evident in people who did not have severe COVID-19 that necessitated hospitalization or ICU care. People who got COVID-19 and were asymptomatic
…
Why would SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID 19, which we all thought about as a respiratory virus, attack the heart up to a year down the road?”
I am sure the author would love to preform a more detailed study, but calling his conclusions unscientific seems to be overreaching.
I'm not calling the author's conclusions unscientific. At. All. He does not refer to damage, he does not draw conclusions about the mechanism which leads the cohort to have a higher risk of heart problems, and he certainly doesn't draw conclusions about individuals within the cohort, only the cohort as a whole.
Other people reading into the study things that aren't there is what I am calling out.
He's asking the same question I'm asking: "Why"? The scientist who conducted the study is saying his findings raises more questions, as any good study is likely to do. - I'm not sure why so many people want to read between the lines versus picking up the line of inquiry and doing further studies. There are any number of reasons why we could see heart issues from covid. Simply saying 'well, it must be direct damage to the heart, case closed' is completely reductive.
I agree he doesn’t know what specific method of action(s) or type of damage(s) is involved.
I suspect multiple different things result from getting COVID that directly or indirectly cause harm. The study only looks at the effects without digging into the proximate causes.
He did say: What we found is that even in people who did not have any heart problems start with, … —COVID-19 affected them in such a way that manifested the higher risk of heart problems than people who did not get COVID-19.
That doesn’t imply that COVID caused damage directly, it could have done something else and that something else caused damage. But that still means COVID started a chain of events resulting in heart damage.
Why would SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID 19, which we all thought about as a respiratory virus, attack the heart up to a year down the road?
False.
The study did NOT look for heart damage in the study population as a proximal cause for other cardiac events, it simply looked at incidence of cardiac events. Your interpretation is one possible explanation as to why this might be, but the study neither supports nor disproves this explanation.