Any disease that can cause blood clotting will also impact the brain, as well as other tissues.

This study focused on the brain, but it's well known that the same sort of damage occurs in other parts of the body.

We are under restrictions from fear of short covid killing, not long covid killing.

The infection fatality risk of short-COVID for the 18-49 demographic is 0.05%. For under 18 years it's 0.003%. And this is for unvaccinated people. For the vaccinated it's at least one order of magnitude lower.

Under no sensible cost-benefit analysis, would you restrict the entire population with risk profiles like this.

0.05% is huge. That's one death per 2000 infected. If you extrapolate that out to the world population, it's one-third of a holocaust. To me that handily justifies restricting the entire population.

Then again, lots of things kill more people and don't mobilize nearly this level of response. Which I guess has to do with them only killing people in third world countries, cough malaria...

0.05% is tiny. If you extrapolate any top 10 causes of disease death to the world population, it's holocaust-scale.

It doesn't mean we impose severe restrictions, that significantly reduce quality of life, on the other 99.95%.

> 0.05% is tiny. If you extrapolate any top 10 causes of disease death to the world population, it's holocaust-scale.

Yes it is.

If we could fix any of those with severe but temporary restrictions, I'd be all for it.

None of these problems, including COVID, could be permanently fixed with the COVID restrictions. COVID is endemic.

The reduction in quality of life for the 99.95% as a result of the restrictions is far too high a price to pay even if it saved the entire 0.05% of this demographic who die from COVID.

The costs to mental health, economic well-being, education, as a result of the restrictions, are also staggering.

Any rational person would trade a 0.05% increase in chance of premature death, which is only 1/2,000, to live without the COVID-motivated restrictions for the remainder of their 80 year lifespan. Basic math tells you that. 0.05% of an 80 year lifespan is only 14 days. Would you endure all the COVID-related restrictions, for your entire life, just to add 14 days to your life?

And this thought experiment is under the absolute best case scenario for the restrictions which is that they completely eliminate the risk of dying from covid which they do not in reality.

I would bet for most people, the COVID restrictions reduce quality of life by at least 5%. Meaning people would be willing to shorten their lifespan by 5% in order to not live with them. A 0.05% risk of death doesn't even come close to justifying the restrictions.

The simplistic narrative that supports these restrictions is simply wrong. It's unscientific and irrational and only supported due to the inertia of public opinion.

> 0.05% is huge.

Big or small, it's the same as the yearly flu; it definitely does not justify the response.

Isn't the problem that trying to save someone dying from the flu requires less human resources than trying to save someone dying from Covid-19 ? And that Covid infects more people than the flu, making more people sick than the flu so Covid reduces our economic capacity more than the flu would ?

COVID hospitalization rates are 1-5% and much lower still for lower-risk demographics like those under 49. And hospitalization generally lasts a couple weeks, not more.

Moreover, COVID burns itself out as the population lacking immunity dwindles with the pandemic's advance. It's a transient phenomenon. The economic damage it causes would seem to pale in compairson to the damage done by severe restrictions imposed for months/over-a-year on the entire population, including the majority who are healthy and relatively unsusceptible to it.

Flu hospitalization rate is a bit over 1%, and average a week stay. COVID19 is worse, but not by nearly as much as people seem to think.

Or people getting killed in traffic accidents. Yet we accept it as normal.

My bad, I should have written something like `We are under restrictions from fear of short covid consequences, not long covid killing.`

What I observe often happening in the public debate is that the unknowns related to long-COVID are the backup argument that the case for restrictions falls back on when the risks of short-COVID are presented and seen to be insufficient to justify such a severe government response.

I think I agree. Strangely I don't see it hammered a lot, at least in Europe. It's usually more about lessening pressure on healthcare.

Well, on a personal level it is long Covid I fear the most (or even long term consequences of a mild covid) and yet I am uneasy about the argument that restrictions are put in place only to soften the impact of the pandemic on hospitals. It means that maybe if hospitals weren't full then our leaders wouldn't care about people getting covid ?