Yes, I have returned to normal life and am essentially ignoring Covid risk going forward.
I stand by my analysis in the Long Long Covid Post, but even if you disagree with that on the merits—and sure, I can see various reasons people might disagree somewhat—what’s the alternative? Covid’s not going to go anywhere. You can live your life or you can… never live your life and hide in your apartment forever. Your call, really. If you applied that level of caution generally it’s not compatible with life, and at a minimum it was certainly never compatible with living in a city, among the disease and the air pollution.
I have returned to normal life and am essentially ignoring Covid risk going forward.
[...]
what’s the alternative? Covid’s not going to go anywhere. You can live your life or you can… never live your life and hide in your apartment forever.
This seems to require the premise that ~all of the risk comes from your first covid infection (or perhaps from your first few). If that were true, then most people would indeed have to choose between accepting that risk or living an extremely restricted lifestyle indefinitely. But if it’s not true, the huge middle ground between ‘precautions necessary to avoid covid forever’ and ‘precautions necessary to significantly reduce the number of times you get covid’ comes into play.
There’s also the value of buying time. Our understanding of covid will only grow, and the future could bring any or all of much more effective vaccines, much more effective treatments, and new knowledge that meaningfully changes your personal risk calculation. In the first two cases, avoiding covid for [unpredictable but finite length of time] could have similar value to avoiding covid entirely, even if we never come close to literally eradicating it.
Even if the alternative is minimal exposure but regular vaccination? I would have expected that to give most of the immunity boost at significantly lower risk.
One thing I’m not clear on is the effect of exposure that doesn’t lead to a detectable infection. (I mean a situation where a person has definitely breathed in or otherwise ingested some virus particles, but they don’t last long enough or multiply sufficiently to cause symptoms or register on a test.) My current impression is that it probably tends not to make any significant difference to the body’s ability to deal with subsequent exposures, but I haven’t seen strong evidence either way. (It seems like observational studies would struggle to distinguish between those casual contacts who breathed in some virus and those who didn’t; and for household contacts who ~certainly must have got some virus in them, but didn’t get infected, it would be hard to tease out the protective effect of this exposure from the selection effect.)
How much more mitigation do you think you’re going to buy by stalling for time? We already have vaccines and Paxlovid, each of which reduces the likelihood of severe COVID effects by at least 90%, and that’s coming down from a baseline of less than 1% for people who are young and healthy.
The poster’s concern is with long COVID, which can certainly have effects that a lot of people would consider severe. The “severe” COVID that has a baseline of less than 1% for the young and healthy refers to COVID that requires hospitalization. Long Covid rates are higher.
Also, some LWers are neither young nor healthy, and/or have family responsibilities that would become problematic or impossible at some levels of lasting lung or organ damage, whether you call it “long covid” or not. So I’m definitely waiting for more understanding of long-term effects before I change my risk profile.
Thanks for chiming in! If I’m interpreting your response correctly, it seems you’ve stopped closely analyzing evidence on long COVID not because you necessarily think your original analysis is highly likely to be robust against further findings; rather, you think that the cost of avoiding COVID is high enough that even a significantly higher risk of long COVID wouldn’t change your behavior.
This suggests to me that for folks who weigh the cost of avoiding COVID differently, it would be worthwhile continuing to assess the risk of long COVID. (Not saying you should be the one assessing it further, given your relative priorities—just that this is useful information for other interested parties who may be thinking, “well, Zvi doesn’t think any of the new stuff refutes his analysis, so must be fine.”)
As tslarm’s comment suggests, I think there are a bunch of personal options that significantly COVID risk without having to “never live your life and hide in your apartment forever.” (For me personally, that looks like avoiding public indoor dining, bars, and large events, and avoiding even smaller indoor events when transmission risk is very high). That wouldn’t be ideal, but if the alternative is, say, a 30% chance of years of fatigue / brain fog, for me it would be very much be a price worth paying. (For the many reasons you articulate, I think the alternative is much less dire—just illustrating that at a certain risk of debilitating long-term symptoms, the cost-benefit analysis weighs towards avoiding COVID, so “live your life or never live your life and hide in your apartment forever” doesn’t seem like the right frame to analyze this from.).There are also a ton of societal investments that could be made to shift that cost-benefit analysis (e.g. broad deployment of better ventilation/filtration, UV light, continuing investment in vaccines, treatments, etc), some of which you cover in your posts.)
Look. This is dumb. Every week someone comes in and says things like 30% chance of brain fog, but think about that for a second. Half the country has had Covid. So this is saying 15% or more of the population is suffering from crippling brain fog? Wouldn’t we know? I mean come on.
Every time there is a new factoid or study the same impossible claims get made and I have to go through the same statistical fallacies and correlations and impossibility arguments again and again, life beckons.
If you want to go installing UV lights, I mean, sure, go nuts. But I wouldn’t try to convince the Feds to do anything, it won’t work.
Thanks—I find that (“Half the country has had Covid. So this is saying 15% or more of the population is suffering from crippling brain fog? Wouldn’t we know?”) compelling, and it usefully cuts through the new claims / studies that continue to pop up without needing to examine every one.
My personal logic here I think is the same as Zvi’s: I know at least ten or fifteen people fairly well who have had Covid, I think in at least one case twice, and only one of them seems to have had significant long term fatigue (and that was from a bad untested case in April 2020, and he is highly sensitive to health concerns—that is to say, I think he is a hypochondriac, but he probably doesn’t think he is one—and whose fatigue mostly went away after more than a year).
If there was a really high chance of healthy pepole having bad fatigue/ brain fog from each mild case of Covid, everyone’s anecdata would look different.
Yes, I have returned to normal life and am essentially ignoring Covid risk going forward.
I stand by my analysis in the Long Long Covid Post, but even if you disagree with that on the merits—and sure, I can see various reasons people might disagree somewhat—what’s the alternative? Covid’s not going to go anywhere. You can live your life or you can… never live your life and hide in your apartment forever. Your call, really. If you applied that level of caution generally it’s not compatible with life, and at a minimum it was certainly never compatible with living in a city, among the disease and the air pollution.
This seems to require the premise that ~all of the risk comes from your first covid infection (or perhaps from your first few). If that were true, then most people would indeed have to choose between accepting that risk or living an extremely restricted lifestyle indefinitely. But if it’s not true, the huge middle ground between ‘precautions necessary to avoid covid forever’ and ‘precautions necessary to significantly reduce the number of times you get covid’ comes into play.
There’s also the value of buying time. Our understanding of covid will only grow, and the future could bring any or all of much more effective vaccines, much more effective treatments, and new knowledge that meaningfully changes your personal risk calculation. In the first two cases, avoiding covid for [unpredictable but finite length of time] could have similar value to avoiding covid entirely, even if we never come close to literally eradicating it.
I find it plausible it’s better to be exposed to covid early and often, so your immunity never wains.
Even if the alternative is minimal exposure but regular vaccination? I would have expected that to give most of the immunity boost at significantly lower risk.
One thing I’m not clear on is the effect of exposure that doesn’t lead to a detectable infection. (I mean a situation where a person has definitely breathed in or otherwise ingested some virus particles, but they don’t last long enough or multiply sufficiently to cause symptoms or register on a test.) My current impression is that it probably tends not to make any significant difference to the body’s ability to deal with subsequent exposures, but I haven’t seen strong evidence either way. (It seems like observational studies would struggle to distinguish between those casual contacts who breathed in some virus and those who didn’t; and for household contacts who ~certainly must have got some virus in them, but didn’t get infected, it would be hard to tease out the protective effect of this exposure from the selection effect.)
How much more mitigation do you think you’re going to buy by stalling for time? We already have vaccines and Paxlovid, each of which reduces the likelihood of severe COVID effects by at least 90%, and that’s coming down from a baseline of less than 1% for people who are young and healthy.
The poster’s concern is with long COVID, which can certainly have effects that a lot of people would consider severe. The “severe” COVID that has a baseline of less than 1% for the young and healthy refers to COVID that requires hospitalization. Long Covid rates are higher.
Also, some LWers are neither young nor healthy, and/or have family responsibilities that would become problematic or impossible at some levels of lasting lung or organ damage, whether you call it “long covid” or not. So I’m definitely waiting for more understanding of long-term effects before I change my risk profile.
Thanks for chiming in! If I’m interpreting your response correctly, it seems you’ve stopped closely analyzing evidence on long COVID not because you necessarily think your original analysis is highly likely to be robust against further findings; rather, you think that the cost of avoiding COVID is high enough that even a significantly higher risk of long COVID wouldn’t change your behavior.
This suggests to me that for folks who weigh the cost of avoiding COVID differently, it would be worthwhile continuing to assess the risk of long COVID. (Not saying you should be the one assessing it further, given your relative priorities—just that this is useful information for other interested parties who may be thinking, “well, Zvi doesn’t think any of the new stuff refutes his analysis, so must be fine.”)
As tslarm’s comment suggests, I think there are a bunch of personal options that significantly COVID risk without having to “never live your life and hide in your apartment forever.” (For me personally, that looks like avoiding public indoor dining, bars, and large events, and avoiding even smaller indoor events when transmission risk is very high). That wouldn’t be ideal, but if the alternative is, say, a 30% chance of years of fatigue / brain fog, for me it would be very much be a price worth paying. (For the many reasons you articulate, I think the alternative is much less dire—just illustrating that at a certain risk of debilitating long-term symptoms, the cost-benefit analysis weighs towards avoiding COVID, so “live your life or never live your life and hide in your apartment forever” doesn’t seem like the right frame to analyze this from.).There are also a ton of societal investments that could be made to shift that cost-benefit analysis (e.g. broad deployment of better ventilation/filtration, UV light, continuing investment in vaccines, treatments, etc), some of which you cover in your posts.)
Look. This is dumb. Every week someone comes in and says things like 30% chance of brain fog, but think about that for a second. Half the country has had Covid. So this is saying 15% or more of the population is suffering from crippling brain fog? Wouldn’t we know? I mean come on.
Every time there is a new factoid or study the same impossible claims get made and I have to go through the same statistical fallacies and correlations and impossibility arguments again and again, life beckons.
If you want to go installing UV lights, I mean, sure, go nuts. But I wouldn’t try to convince the Feds to do anything, it won’t work.
Thanks—I find that (“Half the country has had Covid. So this is saying 15% or more of the population is suffering from crippling brain fog? Wouldn’t we know?”) compelling, and it usefully cuts through the new claims / studies that continue to pop up without needing to examine every one.
My personal logic here I think is the same as Zvi’s: I know at least ten or fifteen people fairly well who have had Covid, I think in at least one case twice, and only one of them seems to have had significant long term fatigue (and that was from a bad untested case in April 2020, and he is highly sensitive to health concerns—that is to say, I think he is a hypochondriac, but he probably doesn’t think he is one—and whose fatigue mostly went away after more than a year).
If there was a really high chance of healthy pepole having bad fatigue/ brain fog from each mild case of Covid, everyone’s anecdata would look different.
Thanks! I find that compelling.