I'm sorry but this kind of calculation is handwavy to the point of absurdity. The author might as well be pulling this number out of a hat.
1. 25% chance for literal anything at all, sure, why not.
2. 66% reduction from vaccination plus booster (but requires booster)
3. 50% reduction from being asymptomatic early on and then this went up later,
combined with asymptomatic cases not being quite totally safe
4. 50% reduction from Omicron only, on precautionary principle
5. 50% reduction for sticking around
6. 0% reduction from the second sticking around reduction because I’m worried about 7. accidentally double-counting somewhere and want to be safe
7. 60% reduction for ‘as bad as all that’ based among other things on my survey
8. 25% reduction for misattribution to give benefit of the doubt
9. 0% impact of good health
That gets us back to a 0.2% chance of Long Covid conditional on first infection, and less than that less for all future ones combined because of immune strengthening.
The entire thing seems handwavey to the point of "don't believe your lying eyes". The author is basically saying we need to ignore people's self-reported incidence of having Long Covid.
This quote in particular seems rather ironic in light of the current labor shortage: "Do we see evidence of the types of sweeping changes we’d expect to see if several percent of people are suddenly unable to work? No, we don’t."
Neither I nor any of the ~20 COVID recoverees I have met and talked with in real life had any long term symptoms. These are all youngish, vaccinated, healthy people. Long COVID seems to primarily exist among a vocal internet minority, as far as I can tell. YMMV.
I've never had COVID, as far as I know, but my health was wrecked after getting sick with influenza. My wife and baby got better. I got better, then got worse, then got better, then worse for longer...
It wasn't as bad as the original infection, but on bad days getting up and walking to the kitchen was a real challenge. I was in fairly good health before this, not obese, walked about a mile each day, and now I couldn't walk around my house.
He's specifying this as his estimate for forward-looking cases of omicron, not saying 0.2% of all Covid infections ever resulted in Long Covid. It's not looking at current results. Nobody is missing from the workforce because of something that will happen in the future.
This post caused me to update my cautious strategy to a somewhat less cautious one. Hoping to invite discussion about aspects Zvi might be missing, though
1. 25% chance for literal anything at all, sure, why not.
2. 66% reduction from vaccination plus booster (but requires booster)
3. 50% reduction from being asymptomatic early on and then this went up later, combined with asymptomatic cases not being quite totally safe
4. 50% reduction from Omicron only, on precautionary principle
5. 50% reduction for sticking around
6. 0% reduction from the second sticking around reduction because I’m worried about 7. accidentally double-counting somewhere and want to be safe
7. 60% reduction for ‘as bad as all that’ based among other things on my survey
8. 25% reduction for misattribution to give benefit of the doubt
9. 0% impact of good health
That gets us back to a 0.2% chance of Long Covid conditional on first infection, and less than that less for all future ones combined because of immune strengthening.