A major source for the previous pessimistic LC estimates, like Scott Alexanders (the UK’s giant ONS survey) published an update of their previous report which looked at a follow-up over a longer time period. Basically they only counted an end to long covid if there were two consecutive reports of no symptoms, and lots of their respondents had only one report of no symptoms before the study ended, not two, so got counted as persistent cases. When they went back and updated their numbers, the overall results were substantially lower. This graphic explains their original mistake:
This is why it’s important not to cut your dataset off early
The new headline result is 7.5% of covid patients had ‘some limitation’ of daily activities after 12 weeks if you ask them if they had long covid. If you go by asking if there were any symptoms from a given list, the rate is lower (like 3%). The full reportis here. What’s notable is that a lot of participants reported LC symptoms with no covid positive test.
They break it down by age and sex in the full report, but you should treat these numbers as numbers for mostly double vaxxed AZ and some mixture of single/double vaxxed Pfizer/moderna for younger groups, since that’s how it worked in the UK.
Specific symptom rates over time (corrected methodology)
Self-reported long covid rates over time (corrected methodology)
Wow, thank you for pointing me at this. That’s… a pretty crazy error. It’s sufficiently bad that I feel like it’s an error that I didn’t catch it, rather than mostly being on them. Damn.
Some good news on Long Covid!
A major source for the previous pessimistic LC estimates, like Scott Alexanders (the UK’s giant ONS survey) published an update of their previous report which looked at a follow-up over a longer time period. Basically they only counted an end to long covid if there were two consecutive reports of no symptoms, and lots of their respondents had only one report of no symptoms before the study ended, not two, so got counted as persistent cases. When they went back and updated their numbers, the overall results were substantially lower. This graphic explains their original mistake:
The new headline result is 7.5% of covid patients had ‘some limitation’ of daily activities after 12 weeks if you ask them if they had long covid. If you go by asking if there were any symptoms from a given list, the rate is lower (like 3%). The full report is here. What’s notable is that a lot of participants reported LC symptoms with no covid positive test.
They break it down by age and sex in the full report, but you should treat these numbers as numbers for mostly double vaxxed AZ and some mixture of single/double vaxxed Pfizer/moderna for younger groups, since that’s how it worked in the UK.
Wow, thank you for pointing me at this. That’s… a pretty crazy error. It’s sufficiently bad that I feel like it’s an error that I didn’t catch it, rather than mostly being on them. Damn.
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