How does the risk of long COVID differ from the myriad...¶

"How does the risk of long COVID differ from the myriad other risks humans tacitly accept?" I think this is a very important question, so here's my attempt to explain the scale of risk:

The main differences are the transmissibility, novelty, magnitude, and commonality of risk. Transmissibility:

Pretty self-explanatory. You can't transmit Lyme disease or a horse riding injury to someone else, and you certainly can't accidentally do so simply by breathing on them. You might be willing to accept the health risks of smoking, but even though secondhand smoke can harm other people, you can't really transmit a smoking addiction to someone that way -- and still society has decided it's not ok to smoke indoors in public places, where others are exposed to a risk you took on for yourself. Novelty and magnitude:

These are related, and deal with the specific nature of the condition itself: the potential bad outcome at the other end of the risk. We don't yet know everything about long COVID, but what we do know is terrifying. It can affect pretty much every organ system, lasts for at least as long as we've been tracking it, and has a wide range of symptoms with varying degrees of impact from "a mild, but persistent cough" to "cannot move or get out of bed, even to eat or drink." We don't know what risk factors are involved, we don't know the disease progression, we don't know the extent of the damage done with each subsequent infection, etc. ... The clues we have from clinical, cellular, and biochemical studies point to it being a very serious, chronic condition in a significant number of cases, with an accumulating risk of disease severity with each infection. Is it progressive? Recurrent? Static? Any of the above? Do people recover on their own eventually? How common is that? Is there potential for treatment or cure that is so effective it can completely mitigate the public health impact? These are questions we simply do not know, because the disease had existed for less than 4 years. Commonality:The risk of achieving the undesired outcome of a given risk calculation is cumulative with every time you roll the dice. Right now, COVID is running rampant, with no real surveillance: people barely even consider the possibility that they might have COVID. Many aren't testing at all, or they just take a single, unreliable antigen test and think a negative result absolves them. Governments and PH agencies are increasingly not requiring hospitals to test or report COVID numbers, and have shuttered other surveillance programs So we are dealing with a fog of war scenario, where the risk is completely unpredictable. But before that fog of war descended, COVID had already swept across the world in multiple overlapping waves, each able to burst through the supposed "wall of immunity." It has integrated itself firmly in the global population, and has unchecked growth and unlimited evolutionary space to evade immunity indefinitely. COVID is everywhere. Almost a billion confirmed cases so far, with an unknowable number more that have gone undetected. The chance of never getting infected with COVID if you take no precautions is practically 0. The chance of getting high-impact long COVID once you get infected is another unknown, but even with estimates of 10%, we're talking potentially hundreds of millions of cases already. People are developing long COVID at a much faster rate than they are seeing any recovery. The global disease burden is accelerating rapidly, and could come to quickly eclipse even heart disease -- although part of the disease manifestation includes cardiovascular effects. In summary, the risk of long COVID is massive. The sheer scale of impact, the ease of invisibly transferring that risk to others, and the massive prevalence of the disease all make it undoubtedly the MOST impactful risk on a social level. There are plenty of things you personally could do that are more risky on the individual level, like wrestling bears or getting blackout drunk every night. But the highest risk things people do, they rarely choose to do. On the scale of society, these are blips compared to the risk presented by just going through "normal life" during the omnipresent spread of a debilitating virus. The scale of danger to society presented by COVID remains high, and every new study confirms that.