Is IFR the proper metric though?
The virus seems to be able to have long lasting effects in otherwise healthy people who survive, albeit I find it hard to find a legitimate study about the prevalence of this rather than popular "news".
The virus seems to be able to have long lasting effects in otherwise healthy people who survive, albeit I find it hard to find a legitimate study about the prevalence of this rather than popular "news".
There isn't a study showing a significantly higher prevalence of adverse long-term effects compared to other respiratory viruses among healthy infectees.
My concern around this is that if long-Covid like symptoms are common with other respiratory illnesses, then how have we been missing them for so long?
Honestly, one thing we might get out of Covid is a better understanding of some chronic illnesses that we currently don't treat well (like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, for instance).
So far, the "long-lasting effects" have mostly been self-reported, based on surveys of people who self-select as "long-haul covid victims". Moreover, when you look at the list of symptoms, they mostly sound like depression and/or lingering cold: headache, fatigue, cough, insomnia, etc.
There have been a handful of studies based on NMR surveys that report cardiac inflammation, but several of these have been debunked completely, and the others are of questionable methodology (i.e. using ML methods to auto-find "abnormalities" in libraries of NMR scans, and reporting everything they found).
It's not to say that there won't be people with long-term symptoms, or even that there won't be people with severe long-term symptoms -- that happens all the time, for viruses we consider innocuous. The question is: at what rate, and how much risk is there relative to all other risks?
Nobody has come close to answering that question, but it seems fairly unlikely to be of high risk, considering that we've now had 34M cases worldwide, and we're not seeing huge numbers of debilitated people overwhelming hospitals.
They don't appear to be that major, but it's concerning that someone young and healthy (mid 30's fit but with a chronic kidney condition for 10 years) has long-term impacts from it.
I think the real concern around long-Covid stuff is that they may be chronic conditions which will present over the next 5-10 years. I agree that they're unlikely to be acute, given that hospitals haven't been overwhelemed.
A family member had the misfortune of getting one twice (at a distance of many, many years), and it took quite a while to recover.
I personally still have a wheeze (slight, but it's there) from a cold I had years ago. If someone asked me to self-report it as part of a "long-haul rhinovirus" study I might, but nobody ever looks for that.
I got a really hard pneumonia few years ago. It took several days in hospital to find an antiobiotic which actually worked, and I was in pretty bad shape in ER when it finally started to work.
It took 10 weeks to recover back to work, and over a year before lungs were back to normal, confirmed by x-ray.
Pneumonia can be deadly, even for healthy young adult.