The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk.
Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims.
A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1
The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....
> Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/
I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
Long covid:
> Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment.