The Lancet just published a study yesterday on natural infection still causing symptoms one year later (“long Covid”) for 49% of unvaccinated people.
I’ll stick to the vaccine.
I’ll stick to the vaccine.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Multiple recent large scale studies have estimated an asymptomatic proportion lower bound of at least ~33% [1], and an upper bound of 65% (and even higher for young adults) [2]. This implies a significant proportion of people infected by SARS-COV-2 will not experience any noticeable symptoms.
Furthermore, there is strong evidence that infections and cases are massively under-reported (by 10x to 100x) [3][4], so it's exceedingly likely that such estimates are underestimates of the true asymptomatic rate.
[1] The Proportion of SARS-CoV-2 Infections That Are Asymptomatic https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/full/10.7326/M20-6976
[2] Estimating the asymptomatic proportion of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the general population: Analysis of nationwide serosurvey data in the Netherlands https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00768-y
[3] Evaluating the massive underreporting and undertesting of COVID-19 cases in multiple global epicenters https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S253104372...
[4] Undiagnosed SARS-CoV-2 seropositivity during the first 6 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/13/601/eabh3826
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
They studied hospitalized patients, who by definition had severe symptoms. We would expect more severe symptoms to take longer to resolve. I don't know the exact numbers in China but in the US 95% of cases were never hospitalized.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/burd...
The study also counted anxiety and depression as "long COVID" symptoms which doesn't make much sense; they haven't proposed a biological mechanism of action for SARS-CoV-2 to directly cause such psychiatric symptoms.
I would still encourage everyone to get vaccinated if they can because the data shows it cuts the risk of death to virtually zero.
I have not read the study you are referring to. Are you sure it is not specifically about hospitalized patients? Even then it sounds extreme.
But you are right that vaccines are clearly better when given a choice.