Using a counterfactual of “getting COVID a few years later and you balance out” is certainly tempting, but I don’t think that’s really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.
Using a counterfactual of “getting COVID a few years later and you balance out” is certainly tempting, but I don’t think that’s really how it would go down. Based on how vaccine efficacy wanes, reinfections occur, and new variants are introduced, my guess is that you lose all your immunity and more within 2 years, plus in the next decade we probably will develop increasingly effective drugs against it. Hard to sum everything up but my guess is that getting COVID causes a benefit that is less than half the badness. Probably I should make a best guess here and add it at some point in time but this is the type of factor of <2 that occasionally pop up on either side that I typically ignore.