It’s difficult for me to understand how anyone could see this data- which finds the rate of Long COVID after 3 infections to be a whopping 38%- and not understand why “let it rip” is an unsustainable approach to COVID. But let me spell it out: people are catching COVID frequently, between 1-2 times a year. Each infection carries a high risk of long-term illness, which does not decrease, but compounds with reinfection. Immunity is short-term, and often circumvented by the fast pace of COVID variant evolution. Add these factors together: how do you run a society with a constantly, rapidly increasing subset of the population long-term ill? Frankly, it doesn’t make any sense. It’s not only a moral issue; yes, I believe it’s wrong to forcibly infect everyone with a vascular disease with unknown long-term health effects over and over again. But it’s also just practically unfeasible to operate a functional economy while rapidly disabling the workforce.
How did we get here? When we were first vaccinated, many of us in early 2021, was this the future we were promised? Constant reinfections that will surely disable many of us, but hopefully it won’t be you, so go about your day?