We're at 30 million confirmed cases in the US! Over 115M worldwide! If "only" 2% of them develop something like long Covid, that's 600,000 Americans and over 2.3M people with long-term illness from this -- and those are only the confirmed cases which probably understate the prevalence by 2x-3x. How are people still so blasé about this pandemic?
How concerned were you about malaria, prior to this year? If the answer was "I didn't particularly think about it", then you have the answer for how people can be blasé about diseases that have a very high cost in human lives and suffering.
We're talking about different kinds of blasé though. Many people - me included - don't think a lot about malaria because they don't live in a malarial area and have the health and healthcare access to probably recover when travelling into them ). In fact, I gave so little thought to malaria even whilst in malarial areas that I didn't devote time to arguing malaria's long term effects were relatively rare and might be psychosomatic so not really worth the Gates Foundation bothering with, which is the specific kind of dismissive attitude towards the disease being called out here.
And by "case" you mean detected matter with PCR cycle counts undocumented at aggregate levels. But don't let science get in the way of emotional appeals.
Bizarre PCR truther claims aside, assign an IFR to the disease and work backwards from the 500k deaths we have.. then multiply that by 2% to understand how many people will have "Long Covid" and why it's crazy to play it down as overblown.
So if we do that, we get that about 4x as many people have "Long Covid" as die... I personally think dying would be rather more than 4x worse than getting "Long Covid", so if the 2% number is actually accurate that implies that the people who have been focusing on mortality as the main concern with this virus are largely right to do so.
That said, I have some doubts about the 2% number. Estimates vary widely from about 2% as the lowest plausible number I've seen to about 10% at the highest plausible number. If it's really 10% of infected people reporting long-term symptoms, that changes things a bit. Also note that pretty much all of the sources are preprints or otherwise not peer reviewed articles -- an actual rigorous investigation is very welcome here, and hopefully that is what the $1B from NIH will buy.
Uh, what? The WHO updated their guidelines a month and a half ago because PCR tests were being misused: Too many cycles and not taking symptoms into account was resulting in too many false positives.
You're literally repeating a discredited right wing conspiracy theory - WHO adjusts their guidance constantly and according to the WHO and virologists everywhere, these changes didn't meaningfully impact the number of positives since almost all positive results happen at far lower cycle counts.
The part that primarily caught my eye, which isn't what Reuters is attempting to debunk:
> Where test results do not correspond with the clinical presentation, a new specimen should be taken and retested using the same or different NAT technology.
"clinical presentation" - in other words, the symptoms. This advice runs contrary to the entire past year, where a single positive test in an asymptomatic person has counted as a case. This alone is enough to inflate the numbers, without even taking PCR cycles into account.
And Reuters ends up just barely short of confirming the part about PCR cycles anyway:
> ”The WHO are saying that if the manufacturer has defined a value but you could if you chose to adjust that setting, please don’t - stick to what the manufacturer has stated because they have done the earlier work to determine the best value for that threshold,” Mackay said.
Labs using too high a threshold has been a concern for about half a year: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/29/health/coronavirus-testin... (And note the numbers in this article, almost all in the range of 33-40 cycles - I recall on rare occasion seeing higher reported elsewhere, around 45 and 50 cycles)
