I know somebody who's had this. Despite never being hospitalized, after getting sick they had to take a long medical leave from work in hopes of getting their strength back. That's worlds away from "sick for a few days".
Then, if one starts digging into more serious discussion – even your link above – one finds that "long term" in medical parlance may mean a series of months but not necessarily years, and similar months-long impacts are known from diseases that we have generally tolerated among society. It also isn’t clear that these lingering symptoms affect enough people to impact the economy if measures are lifted once hospitalizations fall.
Do you have a citation for this claim?
I was obviously not referring to actual scientific studies of long-term COVID effects, but as I said, those studies don’t say quite what the more sensationalistic mass-media coverage is saying.
Your insistence on denying distinctions like this makes you look like a person arguing a case, not somebody trying to jointly get at the truth. Which from my perspective, makes you much worse at arguing your case.
Hundreds of thousands of people. Average age mid 40s and sliced by hospitalized or not. Controlled against people who had the flu during lockdown.
Double digit percentages have issues 6 months on. Unsurprisingly not very different from SARS 1 and those people are still sick since 2003.
This issue seems to be important to you personally and to others whose concerns may or may not be reasonable, but I don’t believe it will be important to most of society as vaccinations roll out and the Northern Hemisphere spring and summer are upon us.
This is the claim I'm disputing. I don't see evidence that this is so rare. In fact everything I can find suggests otherwise.
To be clear, I hate this.
Your thymus is very likely to be useless after 40 due to something called thymus involution.
Intracranial haemorrhage is 3-4x more likely in hospitalized patients; ~5x higher in those with encephalopathy. For stroke, 2-3x for both. For first mood disorder, 1.5x/2x more likely.
They don't break down the cross-tabs by age (as they should), but given the patterns here, I would expect to see a strong correlation.
The sicker you are, the sicker you are.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
Figure 3 has risk ratios sliced by age+sex
There's far too much to get into in a single comment, but the TL;DR is that they bury a lot of important information in the supplemental materials [1] that make a strong argument that what they're observing are spurious correlations with a third factor. At the very least, this kind of statistical fishing expedition has a high risk of bias, because the researchers know the outcomes ahead of time.
Consider supplementary tables 10 & 11: these show that a large number of the "psychiatric sequelae" are correlated with the control conditions, and the effect of Covid is not significantly different (even where they are, the authors have clearly gone on a fishing expedition, which should make you skeptical).
Figures 16-21 show that the risk of a patient developing Covid is 1.5x greater if they've had a recent psychological illness. This is on par with the risk ratios discussed in the text of the paper, and indicates that the association is not necessarily causative (i.e. it's not clear if Covid causes psychiatric problems or vice-versa).
Figure 22 shows a particularly interesting series of plots, where the diagnosis rates of the control illnesses (broken bones, etc.) are plotted over time. Without exception, everything drops but Covid. It is almost inevitable that if you look at this dataset, you will find an increase in diagnosis of X after Covid...because Covid patients are being seen at much higher rates!
Overall, my interpretation of the supplementary figures is that there was an intense focus on "Covid patients" in 2020, and all other groups stayed out of the doctor's office. Covid patients were showing up in the clinic, so covid patients were the ones being diagnosed with other illnesses.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/cms/10.1016/S2215-0366(20)30462-4/...
Worth keeping in mind it was impossible to get a COVID test for a large fraction of the first wave.
It isn't like that with disease.
The worse I've had is the complete inability to stand long enough to make a simple dinner, for example, and this was after napping and sitting most of the day. I'm lucky: Mine passed. Some people live with this day after day after day, and this is more similar to what folks with disease-related fatigue.