I now believe we’re hearing “even though the mortality per infection is well under 1% here are the terrible things besides dying that might happen to you” more because maximum scaremongering earns clicks and leads to improved compliance w/ sanitation/isolation measures we want. Personally I think the evidence that this is more or less hard to recover from if it doesn’t kill you than any other viral illness just isn’t there (though there are many identified differences in mechanism). For example, should we expect people with antibodies who never noticed symptoms to be impaired for 6 months? Not noticably.
I now believe we’re hearing “even though the mortality per infection is well under 1% here are the terrible things besides dying that might happen to you” more because maximum scaremongering earns clicks and leads to improved compliance w/ sanitation/isolation measures we want. Personally I think the evidence that this is more or less hard to recover from if it doesn’t kill you than any other viral illness just isn’t there (though there are many identified differences in mechanism). For example, should we expect people with antibodies who never noticed symptoms to be impaired for 6 months? Not noticably.