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> I don't know anyone, or know anyone who knows anyone who has any serious "long-covid" symptoms.

You are fortunate. I know several who have those symptoms (ranging in age from my own - mid-30's - to my parents' - early 60's), and have had several friends relate their own observations of loved-ones. If Long Covid isn't real, there's an astonishingly-coincidental prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source, which is correlated with those who (from my own observations) took less precautions regarding Covid and/or who caught it more often.

I recognize the irony of responding to your anecdata with my own. No, I don't have any hard data to provide - though given the partisanship observed in the reporting of COVID _itself_, I have somewhat lost faith in the availability of trustworthy data about public health.

> If Long Covid isn't real

I'm not arguing that long covid isn't real (in fact I explicitly state "To be clear, I'm not doubting that long-covid exists"), just that I'm not convinced that we are "we are so, so fucked" (to quote parent).

Your anecdata is appreciated since I share your lost faith in data about public health.

> prevalence of fatigue and impaired cognition from some other source

I personally think anxiety and unspoken stress regarding climate collapse and other forms of society degradation we're experiencing and seeing accelerate are responsible for a good deal of this. Everyone I know certainly seems more tired, more stressed out, and with fuzzier thinking, but I don't think that is a byproduct of long covid. People can't even openly talk about this seriously, even though nearly everyone is clearly feeling it. There are also plenty of people in aggressive denial about this which makes it even harder to discuss.

> I personally think anxiety and unspoken stress regarding climate collapse and other forms of society degradation we're experiencing and seeing accelerate are responsible for a good deal of this.

That's a fair point.

I don't doubt the symptoms, but I think there's always been a percentage of the population that suffers from these types of symptoms. They get rediagnosed as the latest thing every so often, and the latest one is Long COVID. Even if COVID is a trigger (and really any illness could be), there's probably something else underlying all of these.

> A lot of people (not me) did believe there was going to be a return to normal post-covid, and the increasingly obvious impossibility of this is causing people to have tremendous mental health problems

What is not normal in your opinion at this point? Covid still exists as another illness that goes around, but from my point of view everything else has been back to normal for quite a while.

I think the post you responded to is referring to non-covid stuff, like the economy still seems pretty weird, there are teacher and daycare worker shortages, and just service worker shortages in general, and there seems to be other weird stuff coming out of the era like a ton of shoplifting and a seeming pull-back by police forces.

It's unclear (to me) how real or unusual any of these things are, or whether they were caused by the pandemic or were already baked in somehow, but from an intuitive point of view, I do find myself frequently thinking "why isn't stuff working right?" more often than I think I was four years ago.

I don't know enough to comment on long Covid, but I think an element of it is that for a long time we've denied that sometimes illnesses require substantial recovery time.

I remember reading a lot of old stories as a kid where someone would get the flu or a generic fever and take multiple months to recover. Industrial society made that economically infeasible but our biology didn't change.

I don't think it should be surprising to anyone that having a massive population of a virus in your lungs and elsewhere has long term effects.