Long COVID risk: How to maintain an up to date risk assessment so we can go back to normal life?

I have returned to normal life and am essentially ignoring Covid risk going forward.

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what's the alternative? Covid's not going to go anywhere. You can live your life or you can... never live your life and hide in your apartment forever.

This seems to require the premise that ~all of the risk comes from your first covid infection (or perhaps from your first few). If that were true, then most people would indeed have to choose between accepting that risk or living an extremely restricted lifestyle indefinitely. But if it's not true, the huge middle ground between 'precautions necessary to avoid covid forever' and 'precautions necessary to significantly reduce the number of times you get covid' comes into play.

There's also the value of buying time. Our understanding of covid will only grow, and the future could bring any or all of much more effective vaccines, much more effective treatments, and new knowledge that meaningfully changes your personal risk calculation. In the first two cases, avoiding covid for [unpredictable but finite length of time] could have similar value to avoiding covid entirely, even if we never come close to literally eradicating it.

Thanks for chiming in! If I'm interpreting your response correctly, it seems you've stopped closely analyzing evidence on long COVID not because you necessarily think your original analysis is highly likely to be robust against further findings; rather, you think that the cost of avoiding COVID is high enough that even a significantly higher risk of long COVID wouldn't change your behavior.  

This suggests to me that for folks who weigh the cost of avoiding COVID differently, it would be worthwhile continuing to assess the risk of long COVID. (Not saying you should be the one assessing it further, given your relative priorities - just that this is useful information for other interested parties who may be thinking, "well, Zvi doesn't think any of the new stuff refutes his analysis, so must be fine.")

As tslarm's comment suggests, I think there are a bunch of personal options that significantly COVID risk without having to "never live your life and hide in your apartment forever." (For me personally, that looks like avoiding public indoor dining, bars, and large events, and avoiding even smaller indoor events when transmission risk is very high).  That wouldn't be ideal, but if the alternative is, say, a 30% chance of years of fatigue / brain fog, for me it would be very much be a price worth paying. (For the many reasons you articulate, I think the alternative is much less dire -- just illustrating that at a certain risk of debilitating long-term symptoms, the cost-benefit analysis weighs towards avoiding COVID, so "live your life or never live your life and hide in your apartment forever" doesn't seem like the right frame to analyze this from.).There are also a ton of societal investments that could be made to shift that cost-benefit analysis (e.g. broad deployment of better ventilation/filtration, UV light, continuing investment in vaccines, treatments, etc), some of which you cover in your posts.)

Is eating in a restaurant worth 75 minutes of lying in bed with flu wishing I was dead

I am amused to note that some people do think [LW · GW] that going out and drinking to excess with friends is worth 75 minutes of lying in bed with a hangover wishing they were dead.

Thanks! I'm curious what you think of his argument that if debilitating long COVID were common, that would be obvious anecdotally and in aggregate statistics:

Every week someone comes in and says things like 30% chance of brain fog, but think about that for a second. Half the country has had Covid. So this is saying 15% or more of the population is suffering from crippling brain fog? Wouldn't we know? I mean come on.

This feels like a hole in LessWrong in general that would seem to be worth addressing. Maybe a general initiative for synthesis on various topics should be created, not just about COVID?

Thanks for this! 

Question: It seems possible that long COVID prevalence / impact falls short of the level that would qualify a significant proportion of the American workforce for disability, but would still be very concerning for folks with cognitively intensive professions (i.e., the majority of LW readers). How likely do you think this is?

[I removed the other question I'd included here earlier, quoting the insurer Unum from the last article you cited, because I only saw the part where "it has approved “hundreds of thousands” of additional disability claims since the beginning of the pandemic, with an increase from pre-pandemic levels of 35 percent" but missed the part where they said "In general, disability and leave claims connected to covid-19 have been primarily short-term events with the majority of claimants recovering before completing the normal qualification period for long term disability insurance." Incidentally, per https://caveylaw.com/practice-areas/long-term-disability-erisa-lawyer/medical-conditions/ it seems like the threshold for LTD is to be out of work for more than 3-6 months.]

Other comments:

The stats you cited regarding disability claims seem compelling in assessing this question. (I wonder if there are countervailing (non COVID-related) forces that would drive down the aggregate rates of disability claims, but the stats on COVID-related disability specifically would seem to avoid that concern.)

I tend to be wary of arguments which say "the press is just lying" (perhaps because it's really hard for me to assess that, and seems like a convenient way to dismiss evidence that doesn't fit your favored model), but I could believe that the press's assertions are driven by the desire for a dramatic headline, and full of sloppy thinking (and subject to the same sorts of issues that you and Zvi have noted). Regardless, if you have stats on disability claims, and the press does not have better stats, then that seems to settle the issue.