I quickly skimmed the El-Aly et al paper. It does look much better than some of the other studies. One concern is the demographics of the patients. Only 25% of people with Covid are younger than 48. Only 12% are female. I’d guess the veterans under 35 are significantly less affluent than LW readers. (Would more affluent veterans use private health care?). At a glance, I can’t see results of any regressions on age but it might be worth contacting the authors about this.
How to adjust for this? One thing is just look at hospitalization risk (see AdamGleave’s adjustment point (1)). However, it seems plausible that younger and healthier people would also recover better from less acute cases (and be less likely to have lingering symptoms). OTOH, there’s anecdata and data (of less high quality IMO) suggesting that Long Covid doesn’t fit the general patter of exponential increases in badness of Covid (and other similar diseases) with age. Overall, I’d still be inclined to make an adjustment of risk down if you are under 35 and healthy.
This is a good point, the demographics here are very skewed. I’m not too worried about it overstating risk, simply because the risk ended up looking not that high (at least after adjusting for hospitalization). I think at this point most of us have incurred more than 5 days of costs from COVID restrictions, so if that was really all the cost from COVID, I’d be pretty relaxed.
I quickly skimmed the El-Aly et al paper. It does look much better than some of the other studies. One concern is the demographics of the patients. Only 25% of people with Covid are younger than 48. Only 12% are female. I’d guess the veterans under 35 are significantly less affluent than LW readers. (Would more affluent veterans use private health care?). At a glance, I can’t see results of any regressions on age but it might be worth contacting the authors about this.
How to adjust for this? One thing is just look at hospitalization risk (see AdamGleave’s adjustment point (1)). However, it seems plausible that younger and healthier people would also recover better from less acute cases (and be less likely to have lingering symptoms). OTOH, there’s anecdata and data (of less high quality IMO) suggesting that Long Covid doesn’t fit the general patter of exponential increases in badness of Covid (and other similar diseases) with age. Overall, I’d still be inclined to make an adjustment of risk down if you are under 35 and healthy.
This is a good point, the demographics here are very skewed. I’m not too worried about it overstating risk, simply because the risk ended up looking not that high (at least after adjusting for hospitalization). I think at this point most of us have incurred more than 5 days of costs from COVID restrictions, so if that was really all the cost from COVID, I’d be pretty relaxed.
The gender skew could be an issue, e.g. chronic fatigue syndrome seems to occur at twice the rate in women than men.