When I see young healthy people potentially obsessing, turning life into some sort of morbid probability matrix because one particular potential risk (Long Covid) has been made more salient and blameworthy, I sympathize a lot less.
ONS’s latest survey finds 2.8% of the UK population report that they are currently experiencing long COVID symptoms: 67% of that 2.8% report that the symptoms adversely affect their day-to-day activities. Separately, they’ve estimated that 70% of England has had COVID at least once; weighting their estimates for England/Scotland/Wales/NI suggests about 68% of the UK has had it. So conditional on having caught COVID at least once, we have ~3% of the population experiencing symptoms that adversely affect day-to-day activities for at least a month and often much longer. (Table 7 of the associated dataset implies that for each individual symptom, well over half have been experiencing those symptoms for “at least 12 weeks”, which is consistent with Fig 3 in this earlier survey.).
Anyway, if every time or few times that I catch COVID equates to a ~3% chance of long covid that adversely affects my day-to-day activities for a long time, for me that’s high enough that it justifies having categories of things that I do less often than I used to, categories of things that I do while masked, and categories that I do with no precautions. We don’t generally go around criticizing people for “obsessing” when they take other slightly inconvenient actions to mitigate other low-probability risks (wearing seatbelts; having a diet composed of more healthy-but-less-delicious than unhealthy-and-more-delicious foods; cutting down on alcohol; etc.). So this constant criticism of people who are choosing to make changes to reduce their long COVID risk does rub me the wrong way.
ONS’s latest survey finds 2.8% of the UK population report that they are currently experiencing long COVID symptoms: 67% of that 2.8% report that the symptoms adversely affect their day-to-day activities. Separately, they’ve estimated that 70% of England has had COVID at least once; weighting their estimates for England/Scotland/Wales/NI suggests about 68% of the UK has had it. So conditional on having caught COVID at least once, we have ~3% of the population experiencing symptoms that adversely affect day-to-day activities for at least a month and often much longer. (Table 7 of the associated dataset implies that for each individual symptom, well over half have been experiencing those symptoms for “at least 12 weeks”, which is consistent with Fig 3 in this earlier survey.).
Anyway, if every time or few times that I catch COVID equates to a ~3% chance of long covid that adversely affects my day-to-day activities for a long time, for me that’s high enough that it justifies having categories of things that I do less often than I used to, categories of things that I do while masked, and categories that I do with no precautions. We don’t generally go around criticizing people for “obsessing” when they take other slightly inconvenient actions to mitigate other low-probability risks (wearing seatbelts; having a diet composed of more healthy-but-less-delicious than unhealthy-and-more-delicious foods; cutting down on alcohol; etc.). So this constant criticism of people who are choosing to make changes to reduce their long COVID risk does rub me the wrong way.