Where is your evidence that there is actually an injury crisis outside the norms as one club having more than usual to a statistically significant level? United have quite a few and City have hardly any? Djokovic is making things up as he goes along (as usual) as injuries aren't higher and mainly aren't muscle related (which is where you would expect a spike if your COVID claim were correct). None of the NFL players mentioned have injures that could be related e.g. concussions, broken fingers etc from a quick scan of the article.I was awaiting the inevitable response claiming it’s all one big coincidence. Rather than claiming the science is “sloppy as hell”, would you care to explain why it is so?
Lockdowns to blame 3.5 years ago is it then? Football continued as usual, as you well know. As did most other sports. Just behind closed doors. And there’s far more studies than the two I linked, but I’m not sure spamming studies is beneficial. You’ll just come back and say “no it can’t be covid, it’s just a cold”. As you’ve done multiple times in the past when this subject has popped up.
In fact, it only takes a quick search for the word “Covid” under your username, and you’ve got quite the posting history on the subject. Borderline obsessive, considering this is a football forum. Always the same “influenza is more dangerous, vaccines for kids are evil etc, why bother testing anymore, live your life”.
I’m more than happy for you to challenge the science/claims around Covid and present you with data/evidence to prove it either right or wrong. Something which is severely lacking in your entire positing history on covid, is evidence. It’s never provided, shockingly.
You also know full well professional athletes do not test for covid anymore. It is not a requirement, and is in fact discouraged. Plenty of players have missed games recently citing “illness”, they just never specify what it is. Some may be covid, it may not be. But they certainly aren’t avoiding infection since they’re mixing as usual, just as we all are. Or are you going to claim covid isn’t infecting anyone anymore? It is literally impossible to avoid Covid now unless you isolate yourself away completely from human life/mask etc. Footballers certainly aren’t doing that.
But seeing as I actually bothered to link some scientific research which did highlight a heightened risk of injury after infection, would you care to provide some evidence/science to the contrary? More than happy to see those and discuss. I’m also happy to link even more studies showing the musculoskeletal impacts of covid.
And you cite the World Cup. The women’s game didn’t have the winter World Cup yet their injuries are as bad. Nor did the NFL, MLB, or tennis. But you conveniently skipped past those injury crises. You also cited a congested fixture schedule, but tennis certainly hasn’t had one. Nor has the NFL.
Do you not play football yourself? I do, and injuries even amongst the amateur leagues are aplenty. What’s your specific reason for injury crises in the lower leagues? Middlesbrough are having a terrible time with injuries at the moment.
So just to clarify, you genuinely believe it’s just one big massive coincidence? I’m saying it could potentially be coincidental, albeit unlikely, but I don’t think you or I could say beyond reasonable doubt. So I find it bizarre that you completely dismiss the notion.
What will the excuse be when the situation is even worse next season? And is for the other sports too? And then even worse the season after that? Or will it all just resolve itself and cease to be a problem?
Probably best to not even discuss this topic, and just let’s wait and see what happens. Hopefully it’s got absolutely nothing to do with the ongoing pandemic and injuries won’t continue to worsen, and people won’t keep getting sick multiple times per year. Let’s reassess Christmas 2024.
I'm also not sure you have read or comprehended the papers that you linked to.
The first one is not primary literature but a web resource/journal for Geriatric Health articles, almost exclusively age related practical articles for geriatric health professionals (not research/investigations). And in the introduction this article says that it is just a "narrative review ... to describe the potential long-term effects of COVID-19 on muscle health in adults". Importantly it is only a review of people who suffer long COVID and even more importantly there is no investigation as to causation. That people who have long COVID suffer muscle loss (health) issues is zero surprise to anyone and has nothing to do with injuries to footballers who don't have long COVID. Combined with the fact that the only place they could get published was secondary online literature, not even in the field they are publishing about (they slipped in a line saying old people had worse muscle outcomes when they had long COVID to get published), and that nothing like this has been published in the 2.5 years since suggests it was just another speculative medical thought bubble that were so common during the pandemic.
The second article looks like a much better study albeit with a small sample size - 84 included participants, 22 were infected with SARS-CoV-2 and 14 players developed a muscle strain during the follow-up period - although if the reported results with HR 5.1; 95% CI 1.1 to 23.1; p=0.037 which seem good - I'd be interested to know what tests they applied though. But lets assume they results are correct and it still doesn't say anything about causation and they themselves say that it may well be short-term detraining effects due to quarantine and/or pathologically effects of COVID infection.
This data is also 3 years old, followed straight on from the pandemic lock downs and involved a very different version of COVID, with very different severity of symptoms. So as Pogue said, the evidence isn't convincing (to be generous). That doesn't meant that muscles aren't affected by COVID any more or less than they can be by many vital infections, just that the evidence that COVID has resulted in an muscular injury spike, that probably doesn't exist, just isn't there.
Even if there was you are almost certainly describing a correlation and not causation. Fat people drink more diet drinks but diet drinks don't case them to be fat.
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
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