worldoptimization
ok dumb question what is the best current research on long-term effects of COVID?
I haven’t really been following COVID discourse much for several months but like … we have enough data by now to know like what percentage of people by age group, etc are experiencing various symptoms six months later, right?
googling has so far failed to turn up anything concrete
worldoptimization
ok, reading through this article:
- a study of people who were hospitalized in Italy showed that 87% had at least one symptom 2 months later. this is just people who were hospitalized though, which accounts for 15% of diagnosed cases, and a lot lower in younger people
- another study in Ireland found half of people having fatigue 10 weeks after being infected, but I think this has similar selection effects (it looks like participants were recruited from people who were attending a post-COVID follow-up appointment?)
- the COVID Symptom Tracker app in the UK found that 2% of people were still experiencing any symptoms after 90 days. that seems pretty different from the above two numbers! I’m not sure how representative of a sample their userbase is, but they do have 4m users which is a lot. I can imagine it being biased toward young people, but at least that tells us that the rate of long COVID is pretty low in young people.
looking back at a spreadsheet I made back in March, my guess was that DALY costs from long-term effects of COVID would be 2x DALY costs from deaths. if the 2% number is real, then I feel like 2x is a reasonable upper bound, and probably significantly too high; either way, seems like much lower than would justify the costs of lockdown.