[brnt]

Part of the challenge is to not mistake as-of-yet unmeasurable or ill-documented conditions for non-existence of the condition. Just because you can readily measure oxygenation levels, and not "Long Covid", does not mean the first is real and the latter is not.

[cton]

This doesn’t help with decision making though. If long covid is worse than going to the ICU then something must’ve been measured or documented that shows this. Otherwise what’s your point?

[brnt]

That's basically the paradox of evidence based medicine, and there's plenty of published criticism on the subject. Naturally, we haven't measured the effect of decades of Long Covid yet. Yet, we can have strong and logical suspicions that the effect is potentially much more severe than a few weeks ICU (although they probably correlate strongly). I am personally in favor of acknowledging the trap of evidence based medicine, and taking 'softer' risks into account, even without evidence. In retrospective, there are plenty of things for which some sounded early alarms, but only when the evidence was in was policy adjusted. I think we can do better.