Death is the worst case scenario, but not the only one that we would like avoid. Having months of debilitating symptoms and possibly a lifetime of disability should be taken seriously.
[1] https://deutscher-psychosomatik-kongress.de/wp-content/uploa...
Psychosomatic is what doctors call illnesses when they can't find a physical cause, especially if it "looks like stress".
I don't wish to discount genuine psychosomatic illnesses. However a psychsomatic diagnosis is often found to be wrong in the end, i.e. a physical cause is found after all. This causes no end of trouble for patients, who are effectively told it's all in their heads when it isn't.
I want to add that a direct colleague of mine still hasn't regained his smell which he lost three years ago due to a serious flu.
There is so much we don't know about long covid. Some people seem to think it always happens after virus infections, but only now shows up on our radar due to media attention.
[1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.05.16.21257255v...