Your risk of developing long COVID is probably high

I'm sorry, but I have a very hard time believing your 1-15% range for long-term disability. If 15% of the labor force lost (say) half their productivity, we would already be seeing severe economic consequences across the board (all industries, worldwide).

I didn't follow your calculations, but I do know that some monitoring projects define long covid as "having any symptom on a list (fatigue, more frequent headaches, etc) a few months after infection". This is the proper definition from a scientific perspective: if we want to understand long covid, we want to capture it at all levels of severity and in many different manifestations. But this obviously produces a huge overestimate in terms of severe cases, as it also captures the upper range of the usual fluctuations of these symptoms.

First of all, I'm sorry to hear about your disability from long COVID. From my reading on the symptoms, it sounds like a terrible experience, particuarly as for you it has dragged on for so long.

From your "conservative estimate" link, dated March 3, 2022:

Of [1.5 million] people with self-reported long COVID, 344,000 (22%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 less than 12 weeks previously, 1.1 million (71%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least 12 weeks previously, and 685,000 (45%) first had (or suspected they had) COVID-19 at least one year previously.

The percentages total to 138%, which is confusing because the criteria for "date of first (suspected) COVID-19 infection" is defined in such a way as to avoid two answers being true for one person.

These time brackets would be approximately Jan-March, 2022, March-Dec, 2021, and prior to March 2021, respectively. Looking at the cumulative confirmed cases for the UK, these brackets correspond to 7.55 million, 8.76 million, and 4.2 million people. Delta became the dominant strain in the UK in mid-June, 2021, while Omicron became dominant in mid-December, 2021. Because confirmed cases were nearly flat prior to Delta's emergence, these three time phases fairly closely correspond to the periods of dominance of Omicron, Delta, and Alpha strains, respectively. I will therefore refer to them as the "Omicron phase," "Delta phase," and "Alpha phase" going forward.

Of 20.68 million total confirmed UK cases, the Omicron phase is about 37% of cases, Delta is about 42% of cases, and Alpha was about 20% of cases.

Given that the percentages above total to 138%, I'm not sure if the following analysis is valid. But I'll run with it. Based on the given percentages, Omicron is significantly underrepresented in terms of long COVID cases relative to total Omicron cases. Delta and especially Alpha are overrepresented in terms of long COVID. This tracks with the idea that severity of illness, due both to the intrinsic severity of the virus and to vaccine and treatment availability, has been an important driver of long COVID.

This is older than I'd like (July 2021), but it's a place to start. Long covid—mechanisms, risk factors, and management

Risk factors for not returning to “usual health” included age (P=0.01), with the ≥50 years age group having the greatest odds ratio, and number of pre-existing medical conditions (P=0.003), with a greater number of conditions associated with a greater odds ratio of not returning to “usual health.” Of the pre-existing conditions, having hypertension (odds ratio (OR)=1.3, P=0.018), obesity (OR=2.31, P=0.002), a psychiatric condition (OR=2.32, P=0.007), or an immunosuppressive condition (OR=2.33, P=0.047) corresponded with the greatest odds of not returning to “usual health.”18

A cross sectional study identified an association between the severity of acute covid-19 infection and post-recovery manifestations in people who have had covid-19, showing that a more severe acute phase may transform into the development of more severe symptoms of long covid.43 A cohort study, meanwhile, corroborated this finding, with patients with more than five symptoms during the initial covid-19 infection and those that required hospital admission more likely to experience long covid symptoms.34

Based on this, claiming that the reader's individual risk of long COVID corresponds to the population rates seems somewhat misleading, if an understandable place to start thinking about the question. We have data that allows the reader to consider whether or not they are likely to be in a relatively low- or high-risk group for long COVID. Studies exist showing no association between COVID severity and long COVID risk, but I haven't done any kind of a deep dive here and it would be worth looking into more deeply.

If severity of COVID does correspond to prevalence of long COVID, then we can expect continued lower rates of long COVID in the future as treatments improve and become more accessible, particularly if COVID retains its current relatively mild individual severity over the long term. There is no guarantee that it will, but we can continue to monitor for new, more infectious and more severe strains, while resuming normal life in the meantime.

These are only my first thoughts on poking into a couple of your links. I'm particularly interested in updated and better information on:

1. Anys link or evidence against links between COVID severity/strain/treatment and long COVID
2. The distribution of long COVID duration
3. Long COVID severity by symptom (i.e. if sufferers experience fatigue, what is the distribution of fatigue severity?)
4. Evidence of long COVID rates and risks based on clinical diagnosis rather than self-reported data

Thanks for this. Prompted by this and other recent posts, I'm trying to mobilize more of a systematic effort to maintain an updated assessment of Long COVID risk -- if you're interested, please chime in here! https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4z3FBfmEHmqnz3NEY/long-covid-risk-how-to-maintain-an-up-to-date-risk

Have you seen this post? What are your thoughts on the risk estimates? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mh3xapTix6fFtd3xM/the-long-long-covid-post [LW · GW]

Also see my comment discussing another study estimating severe disability risk differences: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mh3xapTix6fFtd3xM/the-long-long-covid-post?commentId=ejDaeDAhccMoAJT4o [LW(p) · GW(p)]

This is really scary stuff. I'm really sorry to hear that your case is severe.

I've heard of plenty of people complaining about "never having been the same" since they took the vaccine. Mostly chronic fatigue complaints, some headaches. Mostly not severe. Just my empirical data, no judgements because I haven't even formed one.

I'd like to recommend you, and everyone else affected by this (or any other chronic illness in fact), to immediately get on a ketogenic diet with intermittent fasting. Over the years I've been getting tons and tons of empirical evidence in Facebook groups, from people who've literally cured themselves of all kinds of chronic illnesses just by doing this. Some also benefit from adding an elimination diet on top of it. Vitamin D3+K2 supplement is also extremely important since I've heard that almost everyone is deficient in D3.

And I really mean this - this can be, in my opinion, even more effective than drugs. It should, in fact, become one of the flags of Effective Altruism.