I’m sorry, but I have a very hard time believing your 1-15% range for long-term disability. If 15% of the labor force lost (say) half their productivity, we would already be seeing severe economic consequences across the board (all industries, worldwide).
I didn’t follow your calculations, but I do know that some monitoring projects define long covid as “having any symptom on a list (fatigue, more frequent headaches, etc) a few months after infection”. This is the proper definition from a scientific perspective: if we want to understand long covid, we want to capture it at all levels of severity and in many different manifestations. But this obviously produces a huge overestimate in terms of severe cases, as it also captures the upper range of the usual fluctuations of these symptoms.
I’m sorry, but I have a very hard time believing your 1-15% range for long-term disability. If 15% of the labor force lost (say) half their productivity, we would already be seeing severe economic consequences across the board (all industries, worldwide).
I didn’t follow your calculations, but I do know that some monitoring projects define long covid as “having any symptom on a list (fatigue, more frequent headaches, etc) a few months after infection”. This is the proper definition from a scientific perspective: if we want to understand long covid, we want to capture it at all levels of severity and in many different manifestations. But this obviously produces a huge overestimate in terms of severe cases, as it also captures the upper range of the usual fluctuations of these symptoms.
The 15% is an upper estimate of people estimating ‘some loss’ of health, so not everyone would be severely disabled.
Unfortunately, the data isn’t great, and I can’t produce a robust estimate right now
FYI, Alyssa Vance provided additional disability statistics https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4z3FBfmEHmqnz3NEY/long-covid-risk-how-to-maintain-an-up-to-date-risk?commentId=GKmqE9PKXfRSKb5PC which suggest “serious, long-term illness from COVID is pretty unlikely.”
Siebe, I would be interested to hear your take on that, since you seem to have a substantially more pessimistic view of this.