Weird. I'm not convinced just yet, but it's certainly interesting. One thing that occurs to me about the lung damage from the first SARS is whether or not some of the people had damage prior to getting the virus but didn't receive any scans until after they were infected. A friend of mine went through lung cancer treatment recently and he was told that most people by middle-age have a certain amount of scarring in their lungs. Doctors told me the same thing when I did an MRI of my brain and found a couple of spots.
What I gather from your article combined with others I have read is that permanent (or very long-term) organ damage occurs from severe infections, but there are other symptoms that doctors don't quite understand yet that persist for some time. Also, older people (who are statistically more likely to have severe infections) are more likely to be long haulers.
The quote you posted from the article isn't entirely consistent with the rest of the article. It seems like doctors aren't sure what's going on. I'm very curious to look at more solid data when it becomes available. But, you've definitely got me thinking about it. (y)
Here are some quotes from your article that lean more to supporting relatively short-term post virus symptoms and long haulers being elderly and/or severely infected cases:
“Anecdotally, there’s no question that there are a considerable number of individuals who have a postviral syndrome that really, in many respects,
can incapacitate them for weeks and weeks following so-called recovery and clearing of the virus,” Anthony Fauci, MD, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
said in July during a COVID-19 webinar organized by the International AIDS Society."
"In a recent
JAMA research letter, 125 of 143 Italian patients ranging in age from 19 to 84 years still experienced physician-confirmed COVID-19–related symptoms an average of 2 months after their first symptom emerged.
All had been hospitalized, with their stays averaging about 2 weeks"
"As with SARS, many COVID-19 long haulers are health care workers who had massive exposure to the virus early in the pandemic"
"
The older the patients, the more likely they were to say they their pre–COVID-19 health hadn’t come back."