Thursday, September 02, 2021

Day 580: Long, Long, Long COVID

The rationalists are out in force on the controversial topic of Long COVID. Scott Alexander summarized the definitional chaos overnight, and Zvi summarized the meta impact on the COVIDosphere (as it were) today.

While Zvi continues to disbelieve in long COVID as anything more than just another long flu, and notes that a society-wide epidemic of depression and other mental illness is hiding (in plain sight) in the long COVID control group data. Scott, on the other hand, gives it too much credit by calling it a long Spanish Flu, though he agrees there's probably little to no long COVID in children. He also mentions that, otrangely, vaccination does not reduce the rate of long COVID in the infected.

PlagueBlog sides with Zvi; the only thing we need to fear is the fear of long COVID itself:
I agree with Scott’s view here that our worries about Long Covid strongly imply the need for more worry about Long Disease in general, and also Long Everything. The previous Aceso Under Glass post emphasized this point, that there’s lots of such risks in the background all the time, and this isn’t an especially big one.

More to the point, Long Covid Prevention has clearly reached crisis levels and really is a big deal, and seems more severe than Long Covid, and a huge percent of the population has this problem, so we need to do what it takes to stop this deadly syndrome in its tracks.
Massachusetts cases were up about a quarter of a percentage point again today.

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