We obviously don't know much about PASC/long COVID, but the initial data is worth paying attention to. This Swedish study says ~10% of healthcare workers who got COVID had lingering symptoms.
Self reported data on things like this is absolutely useless, even though I’ve had lingering taste issues myself. If the media is constantly talking about long COVID it’s no surprise that people will think “gee, I have been kind of tired since I got infected.”
Even my own taste issues might be something else - the only reason I’m confident they’re there is that it’s intermittent and takes me by surprise. I have two friends that think their sense of taste isn’t quite the same as it was and it’s steadily that way, which to me sounds like it could just be all in their heads (or not).
What other measures do you think we have? We have reported symptoms (suffers from what you mention) and physical evidence [1] - what other forms of evidence are even possible?
[1] Imaging data has also physically confirmed lasting damage from COVID which could definitely be affiliated with some of the symptoms we lump under PASC.
I wasn't saying it doesn't exist, I was just saying that "blah blah percentage of people think they have long COVID" is a useless statistic.
In an alternate universe where the media took and ran with the 5G conspiracy theory for over a year, you could survey the population and find the same amount had symptoms from that.
I'm not saying that there will not be people who do not have lingering symptoms. We already know this happens with other viruses.
I'm arguing that most of the science here is bad, and even if these things hold up, the risk of ~10% of the population having anosmia for a few months is not worth the permanent restructuring of our society to fixate on the prevention of a single illness.
Well on the one hand it sounds like what you're saying is that there's a high degree of uncertainty, but on the other we can be certain that there's not a severe long-term problem.
I don't think the fear is about 10% ending up with anosmia. The fear is that the 10% of detectable problems might be indicative of much more severe and/or much more prevalent problems going undetected. You're right that the problem is lack of very good data, but the folks who live and breathe this domain appear to be very concerned by the data we do have.
For what it's worth, I don't think many (any?) people are arguing for a permanent restructuring of our society. They're merely asking that we don't consider death to be the only endpoint that's relevant to the conversation.
If you don’t mind, could you share data on the UK, a place where nearly all adults aged 30+ have received two doses of the vaccine? It simplifies the discussion because there’s no question about self selection bias. If there’s any negative effects, it should surely have manifested in a large subset of this group of tens of millions of people, across ages and ethnicities.
Not just a handful of cases here or there. I’m talking about 0.01% or more of this population suffering some persistent harm. Not something that disappeared after a day or two.
VAERS records around 10k deaths post-vaccination in the US. Around 150 million Americans have been vaccinated. If all those deaths were caused by the vaccine, that would be 0.006% suffering the extremely persistent harm of death. In fact it's not known however whether those deaths following the vaccination were necessarily caused by covid, but unfortunately very little follow up (autopsies) is being conducted, so there's no way to know. Counter-balancing that is the fact that previous research has found "Adverse events from vaccines are common but underreported, with less than one percent reported": https://digital.ahrq.gov/ahrq-funded-projects/electronic-sup...
And thus no substantial change was made today on HN, besides to people who get fatigues seeing 4+ level deep comment debates: only reading a few comments before going back to reading tech articles.
So you bring up the "I have the DATA!" Trump card and then when asked to provide it your response is, "well, no, where is YOUR DATA?"
That long Covid is a pernicious result for many people with debilitating effects is well established in the literature, it's not controversial.
That refusing to get the virus under control will lead to further variants potentially worse than Delta that perhaps the vaccines are less able to guard against. Not some crazy conspiracy!
What this is ultimately about is many of our fellow citizens believe "my choice" and "freedom" means the "freedom" to infect other people with a potentially debilitating virus rather than they be mildly inconvenienced.
