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The Long Long Covid Post

24 points| nooumenon | 4 years ago |thezvi.wordpress.com

9 comments

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nodamage|4 years ago

I'm sorry but this kind of calculation is handwavy to the point of absurdity. The author might as well be pulling this number out of a hat.

1. 25% chance for literal anything at all, sure, why not.

2. 66% reduction from vaccination plus booster (but requires booster)

3. 50% reduction from being asymptomatic early on and then this went up later, combined with asymptomatic cases not being quite totally safe

4. 50% reduction from Omicron only, on precautionary principle

5. 50% reduction for sticking around

6. 0% reduction from the second sticking around reduction because I’m worried about 7. accidentally double-counting somewhere and want to be safe

7. 60% reduction for ‘as bad as all that’ based among other things on my survey

8. 25% reduction for misattribution to give benefit of the doubt

9. 0% impact of good health

That gets us back to a 0.2% chance of Long Covid conditional on first infection, and less than that less for all future ones combined because of immune strengthening.

Jeema101|4 years ago

The entire thing seems handwavey to the point of "don't believe your lying eyes". The author is basically saying we need to ignore people's self-reported incidence of having Long Covid.

This quote in particular seems rather ironic in light of the current labor shortage: "Do we see evidence of the types of sweeping changes we’d expect to see if several percent of people are suddenly unable to work? No, we don’t."

nooumenon|4 years ago

This post caused me to update my cautious strategy to a somewhat less cautious one. Hoping to invite discussion about aspects Zvi might be missing, though

kwertyoowiyop|4 years ago

He’s probably mostly correct, but remember he doesn’t have any actual medical qualifications.