I mean if you're basically paralyzed, how does that not count as being disabled? What do you think muscle weakness and fatigue actually means in this context?
> Muscle weakness and fatigue is in no way shape or form like paralysis.
Having muscle weakness in your arms mean that you can't do things like raising your hands to chest level and squeezing someone's hand. In practice it means you can't do everyday things like opening doors, or else can only do them with great difficulty.
Having muscle weakness in the legs means that if you're lying on your back, you don't have the ability to raise your legs off the ground. In practice, it means that you can't do everyday things like walking, or else can only do them with great difficulty and probably some form of assistance.
It's obviously not exactly the same as being paralyzed, but it's not that far off either. On the spectrum from "I'm not setting new deadlift PRs lately" to "I'm likely going to hospice soon", it's a lot closer to the latter than the former. There's a good chance that it means using a wheelchair, possibly indefinitely. I think you're doing people an extreme disservice by underplaying how serious this is.
With paralysis, the cause is usually traumatic spinal cord injury. Whereas with muscle weakness, the cause is usually something more like an autoimmune disease attacking the tissue around your spinal cord. But in both cases the end result is nerve signals not getting properly transmitted, and the impact on everyday life is pretty similar.
COVID doesn't cause what you just described as "muscle weakness" in anywhere near 20% of people. The thing it causes that other people describe as "muscle weakness" is much closer to "I'm not setting new deadlift PRs lately".
Muscle weakness is a standardized medical diagnosis. When you see the term being used in a medical paper, it always means the same thing. C.f.: https://www.aafp.org/afp/2005/0401/p1327.html
This is basically the same argument that gets trotted out whenever someone points out Telsa's deceptive advertising wrt "autopilot".
"Real pilots know that autopilot means you still have to pay attention - nevermind that 99.9% of society thinks that idiom means they can sleep behind the wheel while it's turned on"
This is worse than that. With that, the argument sticks with that one definition throughout. Here, one meaning of "muscle weakness" is being used to make it sound scary, and another meaning is used to say COVID causes it. It's the equivocation fallacy.
So you're arguing that the New England Journal of Medicine article is using the word "weakness" in a colloquial sense, rather than in the medical sense, in the same sentence that the words "dyspnea" and "myalgia" appear?:
