I had not seen it, because I don’t read this form these days. I can’t reply in too much detail but here are some points:
I think it’s a decent attempt, but a little biased towards the “statistically clever” estimate. I do agree that many studies are pretty done. However, I’ve seen good ones that include controls, confirm infection via PCR, are large, and have pre pandemic health data. This was in a Dutch presentation of a data set though, and not clearly reported for some reason. (This is the project, but their data is not publicly available: https://www.lifelines.nl/researcher/explore-lifelines/covid-data).
It is really difficult to get a proper control group, because both PCR tests and antibody tests have significant false negative rates.
Furthermore, the Zvi asserts that self reports lead to an overestimate because they are inaccurate. I agree that self reports are inaccurate, but there will definitely be people with long COVID that think it’s something else (e.g. burnout), so this can really go both ways.
In addition, we have biological data with a control group and prepandemic data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5
There were many significant differences in the brain scans of these groups. I can’t do the digging to translate those data into frequency estimates though.
I also think that for outsiders, long COVID symptoms sound vague: fatigue, brain fog, etc. In fact, there’s a lot of clear symptoms, such as orthostatic intolerance, post exertion al symptom exacerbation, heart palpitations, muscle tremors, oxygen saturation drops.
Lastly, I think we should be careful to assess future risk based on past risk: variants change, vaccine protection changes, and as I write above, there’s some initial data suggesting reinfections are worse due to a weakened immune system.
Have you seen this post? What are your thoughts on the risk estimates? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mh3xapTix6fFtd3xM/the-long-long-covid-post
Also see my comment discussing another study estimating severe disability risk differences: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mh3xapTix6fFtd3xM/the-long-long-covid-post?commentId=ejDaeDAhccMoAJT4o
I had not seen it, because I don’t read this form these days. I can’t reply in too much detail but here are some points:
I think it’s a decent attempt, but a little biased towards the “statistically clever” estimate. I do agree that many studies are pretty done. However, I’ve seen good ones that include controls, confirm infection via PCR, are large, and have pre pandemic health data. This was in a Dutch presentation of a data set though, and not clearly reported for some reason. (This is the project, but their data is not publicly available: https://www.lifelines.nl/researcher/explore-lifelines/covid-data).
It is really difficult to get a proper control group, because both PCR tests and antibody tests have significant false negative rates.
Furthermore, the Zvi asserts that self reports lead to an overestimate because they are inaccurate. I agree that self reports are inaccurate, but there will definitely be people with long COVID that think it’s something else (e.g. burnout), so this can really go both ways.
In addition, we have biological data with a control group and prepandemic data: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04569-5 There were many significant differences in the brain scans of these groups. I can’t do the digging to translate those data into frequency estimates though.
I also think that for outsiders, long COVID symptoms sound vague: fatigue, brain fog, etc. In fact, there’s a lot of clear symptoms, such as orthostatic intolerance, post exertion al symptom exacerbation, heart palpitations, muscle tremors, oxygen saturation drops.
Lastly, I think we should be careful to assess future risk based on past risk: variants change, vaccine protection changes, and as I write above, there’s some initial data suggesting reinfections are worse due to a weakened immune system.