[thu2111]

There was also evidence COVID was a terribly deadly disease that would kill at minimum 500,000 healthy people (in the UK), thus requiring urgent and massive shutdowns. Turned out to all be completely false.

So my point stands. If you're going to make simple pro-mask arguments, be prepared for equally simple counterarguments. Excess death data says 2020 is for most countries an unremarkable basically normal year. Even in the few where it's not, it's still comparable to prior years when nobody noticed anything at the time, so hardly abnormal.

"Long COVID" may be the usual problem of slow recovery from viral infection that occasionally happens, or it may hardly be real given the broad array of vague symptoms that are now allowed to characterise the disease. Everything from a runny nose to a headache to full blown pneumonia is classifiable as COVID these days. That means many people with other issues will end up with spurious correlations of the form, "I had COVID symptoms and now I am fatigued" when the cause may not be "COVID". The apparent lack of consistency in these reports, the wildly varying time between infection and onset, etc, all suggests there's a lot of noise in these reports. Definitely not a part of any simple argument for mask wearing.