Whataboutism like "has anyone studied Long Cold" really does no one any favors.
Which, you know, we've probably messed up by not studying post-viral syndromes more as we're accumulating more and more evidence that they're important to long-term health outcomes.
It just took COVID to fully convince us of this importance, because it does it so visibly at such a higher rate.
I believe half to 3/4 of "long covid" is anxiety and hypochondria. But that still leaves a pretty substantial "real" burden.
8500 recorded cases may not sound like much (for one possible diagnostic code of a few choices), but that's 0.1% of the population, and about half the number of people who died in Sweden. That's a pretty substantial amount of increased disability, especially if the risk of long COVID on each infection is close to independent (e.g. we keep accumulating people with long term effects at this kind of rate).
I have a family member affected; went from highly active to completely intolerant of exercise in her early 20's. Walking half a mile wipes her out for a few days.
Five of my teammates had it. One of them got long Covid.
> From the start of the pandemic Covid has been reported as much more dangerous in the US than in many other countries.
The US is a leader in the developed world when it comes to the venn diagram of co-morbidities, obesity, and poor access to healthcare for the people most afflicted by it.
It also has a generous helping of anti-collective-action public attitudes, horrible sick time policy, and a large fragment of the population that's been primed to believe all sorts of unscientific nonsense, due to a few decades of cynical and self-serving political messaging.
All of these factors are present in other countries, but to a lesser extent.
Furthermore, I can assure you that Covid has been reported as just as dangerous outside the US as within. Indeed, it was within the US that it became most strongly politicised, spawning such dangerous nonsense as it is 'just the flu'.