Long COVID – major findings, mechanisms, and recommendations

Excellent long COVID research summary published today, accessible to the motivated layperson:

Long COVID: major findings, mechanisms and recommendations | Nature Reviews Microbiology (Jan 13, 2023)
—Hannah E. Davis, Lisa McCorkell, Julia Moore Vogel, Eric J. Topol

After reading: In the face of these findings, the three reasons I can think of that people are gathering indoors anyway with no masks or other mitigations are

• unawareness of the long-term risk to themselves and others (everybody at every age is at risk)
• they're being compelled to by their situation (e.g., employer, school)
• it's their trauma response

Ignorance may be bliss, but in this case, I think ignorance of what we're learning about long COVID and its disabling consequences is dangerous.

TL;DR:

"Long COVID is a multisystemic illness encompassing ME/CFS [chronic fatigue], dysautonomia, impacts on multiple organ systems, and vascular and clotting abnormalities. ...

"At least 65 million individuals around the world have long COVID, based on a conservative estimated incidence of 10% of infected people and more than 651 million documented COVID-19 cases worldwide ... The [long COVID] incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases and 10–12% of vaccinated cases. [where case = COVID infection of any severity] ...

"On the basis of more than 2 years of research on long COVID and decades of research on conditions such as ME/CFS, a significant proportion of individuals with long COVID may have lifelong disabilities if no action is taken."