That's abstractly true, but in this case we also have studies that show long COVID, including one that compared brain scans before and after COVID and could see macro brain damage. The brain is an incredibly delicate organ, it isn't surprising that a severe virus can do damage do it.

The anecdotes still don't add any useful information, because there is no reliability on their representativeness of the overall data, by the very definition of anecdote.

I don't subscribe to this scientism perspective on epistemology when it comes to an individual forming views about the world based on their own experiences. Individual heterogeneity and the level of detail you're able to observe in your own N=1 anecdote can mean that the richness of that dataset is actually superior to an N=1000 dataset in many cases. I am a data scientist and often learn more about a phenomenon by exhaustively digging into a single example than trying to find broad trends in the larger dataset. Basically - avoid methodological purism when it comes to studying phenomena.

The anecodote does not reliably tell you anything about the phenomenon. The experience could be due to an entirely different phenomenon, which you are misattributing to the phenomenon in question. Only the scientific approach can make reliable causative associations.

You have not made some epistemological breakthrough with your anti-scientific take.

While I agree that that particular anecdote tells us nothing -- because it's void of details -- I disagree that anecdotes categorically can't tell us anything. My take isn't anti-scientific, it is against this particular brand of scientism that believes that single examples are useless. Consider that medical scientists often use case studies to better understand phenomena, because this allows for higher resolution investigation of a single example in order to shed light on phenomena, and it addresses edge cases due to individual heterogeneity that cross-sectional data can't address well. In light of this example, I would argue the anecdote vs data is a false dichotomy if you're defining anecdote to mean "example from a single person". If an anecdote is studied properly, as it is in case studies in the medical literature, it is data. It's just a different kind of data and a different mode of scientific study to lower resolution cross-sectional studies (which are also great and necessary, but have different strengths).

>>it is against this particular brand of scientism that believes that single examples are useless

Single examples are useless for discovering generalized properties of reality.

Medical case studies are only useful in conjunction with knowledge about causative associations that were discovered through statistical analyses.

Sure, you are right. I still feel like shit after covid.