I don’t have time to check all of these links to see if this is the one time people didn’t do this, but I’ve been pretty skeptical of the “Everyone is going to get Long COVID” narrative since the arguments for it seem to always make the same two mistakes:
Defining Long COVID inconsistently, including people who cough occasionally as having Long COVID when counting cases, but then focusing on people with severe symptoms when talking about how bad it is
Ignoring reverse causation—getting COVID several times is correlated with bad outcomes, but how much of that is because people who have health problems are more likely to get sick?
Rather than collecting a bunch of different statistics and hoping that naively multiplying them works, I’d be more convinced by a simple graph of people who can’t work due to Long COVID over time that shows a clear upward trend that doesn’t seem to be leveling off (and ideally, comparing that to other sources of disability, and breaking it down by age so we can see if this is “suddenly 20 year-olds are getting freak disabilities” or “80 year olds are getting Long COVID along with all of the other health problems at that age”).
shows a marked decrease in disability levels in 2020, suggesting. There are reasonable explanations for that, but it only makes me more skeptical the methodology is a match for the question you’re trying to answer.
I haven’t done the math, there could still be an uptick in age-adjusted risk of disability. But this graph doesn’t show it.
What we do know is that from 2010 − 2021, the number of disabled people in the US rose by about 11%, while the population rose by about 6%. Then in 2021, the number of disabled people begins to spike, and is now up 13% alone in the last 2.5 years, while the US population is only up about 1% in the same timespan.
That is a huge increase. Something is obviously causing a sharp increase in disabled people. What could that be? Could it be the novel virus that has a proven mechanism to make people disabled that began spreading through the population as restrictions were lifted in 2021?
I don’t have time to check all of these links to see if this is the one time people didn’t do this, but I’ve been pretty skeptical of the “Everyone is going to get Long COVID” narrative since the arguments for it seem to always make the same two mistakes:
Defining Long COVID inconsistently, including people who cough occasionally as having Long COVID when counting cases, but then focusing on people with severe symptoms when talking about how bad it is
Ignoring reverse causation—getting COVID several times is correlated with bad outcomes, but how much of that is because people who have health problems are more likely to get sick?
Rather than collecting a bunch of different statistics and hoping that naively multiplying them works, I’d be more convinced by a simple graph of people who can’t work due to Long COVID over time that shows a clear upward trend that doesn’t seem to be leveling off (and ideally, comparing that to other sources of disability, and breaking it down by age so we can see if this is “suddenly 20 year-olds are getting freak disabilities” or “80 year olds are getting Long COVID along with all of the other health problems at that age”).
You can see that the number of people in the US with a disability (according to the Fed) has surged since COVID. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU00074597
That’s not perfect, but it’s a compelling proxy.
that graph:
uses raw total, not adjusted for population size
is not adjusted for age of population either
doesn’t define disability on that page
shows a marked decrease in disability levels in 2020, suggesting. There are reasonable explanations for that, but it only makes me more skeptical the methodology is a match for the question you’re trying to answer.
I haven’t done the math, there could still be an uptick in age-adjusted risk of disability. But this graph doesn’t show it.
Sure. Here’s the thing: We don’t have that data.
What we do know is that from 2010 − 2021, the number of disabled people in the US rose by about 11%, while the population rose by about 6%. Then in 2021, the number of disabled people begins to spike, and is now up 13% alone in the last 2.5 years, while the US population is only up about 1% in the same timespan.
That is a huge increase. Something is obviously causing a sharp increase in disabled people. What could that be? Could it be the novel virus that has a proven mechanism to make people disabled that began spreading through the population as restrictions were lifted in 2021?