[walnutclosefarm]

> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked.

SARS-CoV-2 is certainly with us to stay, so in that sense it's not over. But beyond that, I don't see how "we are so, so fucked" as you say. Covid is no doubt taking a small nibble out of life expectency, and yes there is some long Covid still taking its own nibble out of productivity and life satisfaction ... but it's not that big a part of the big picture. Covid is killing less than half as many people in the US at this point as lung cancer, and those deaths are overwhelmingly amongst the elderly. I don't want to be overtly callous, but knocking a few years of life off people well into retirement is hardly going to bring the country to its knees. There are essentially no Covid deaths among people under age 18, and among the working age population, cases requiring hospitalization or leading to long term debilitization are rare.

Those who suffer, of course, suffer. We shouldn't be unsupportive of them in their trials. But Covid as a public health crisis is largely over.

[blueskies89]

This isn't how the math works.

The reason why life expectancy is going down is because middle age people are dying. People dying in their 80s has almost no impact on life expectancy calculations

[sixstringtheory]

Isn’t life expectancy an average? If so, then reducing any input values (people dying earlier than they otherwise would) would reduce the average. Doesn’t matter in which n-tile the reductions occur.

[pohuing]

Wouldn't a person dying 40 years early have a tenfold impact on the average compared to someone dying 4 years early. Early being compared to the expectancy calculated without them.

[Aeolun]

Numbers/source please. 1 middle age or young person dying drops the life expectancy but is obviously just a drop in a bucket.

[MisterBastahrd]

Each time you catch COVID, you risk the chance of getting long COVID.

You pretend that it's not a big deal, but those numbers are going to pile up into a giant ball of health issues for a lot of people as the years progress. And for many of them, those issues are happening far outside "old age." Go get something that fucks you up for life in your 30s and then get back to us about how it's no big deal.

THAT's the point.