Long-Haulers Are Redefining Covid-19

>She says that experts and officials should stop referring to all nonhospitalized cases as “mild.” They should agree on a definition of recovery that goes beyond being discharged from the hospital or testing negative for the virus, and accounts for a patient’s quality of life. “We cannot fight what we do not measure,” Alwan says. “Death is not the only thing that counts. We must also count lives changed.”

I've definitely wished for months now that major media at least would work to include both not just a "mortality rate" figure in general reporting but side-by-side a "morbidity rate" figure as well. It's not as if this is some unheard of thing, the entire actuarial industry does detail morbidity rate calculations because it's critical to calculating proper premium costs. Death is certainly not the only thing that counts even from a pure cost perspective, ongoing complications and disability is a huge deal. Military planners have long considered it as well, again for heavily practical reasons beyond common humanity: just because soldiers have "survived" doesn't mean their fighting power is undiminished, or even exists at all any longer. There is a reason for the old saying that an enemy left disabled might be more militarily valuable then a dead one, since they may tie up multiple other enemy forces.

So it's really kind of odd, but for whatever reason "morbidity rate" doesn't seem to have entered the common discourse this pandemic. There's a lot of "1% mortality rate" (or whatever figure) tossed around without further stratification, naturally implying that the other 99% aren't a concern. But morbidity may well exceed mortality by quite a multiplier, and it's looked for months like there's enough evidence that at least it'd be worth funding some more rigorous and organized data collection including followup weeks/months later. It's unfortunate the general collection, graphs, maps and so on seem to pretty universally remain split between "infected" and "dead".