Authors’ response: Thank you for pointing this out.
The authors wrote later in the conclusion section “[…] but a non-significant trend was found for the association between female gender and long COVID.” (page 11, line 389). This is a “no-go” in scientific research, the interpretation of “trends” resulted from non-significant results is strongly misleading. Honestly, there is no empirical evidence that there is an association between female gender and long COVID, there was no significant difference observed between men and women (p=0.05). That is the true story. Hence, I urge the authors not to mislead readers and to re-write these sections.