@augieray

I think one thing that's so important to make clear here is that it doesn't mean 9%(on the low end) of *people*. When NBC published the recent article talking about an estimated 5-10% rate of long COVID, nearly every non-scientist I know interpreted that as "5-10% of the population is at risk." They, therefore, all said "Hey, I've had COVID already, don't have long COVID(although some of them clearly do and won't admit or deal with it....different story), so I wasn't in that 5-10%. I'm at no risk anymore!" Which is wildly wrong, but there's no convincing many people otherwise. Sadly, I think that article did a lot more damage than good.

This appears to be an actual great paper on my first read, though. Defines what they're calling long COVID right off the bat, in a time when many articles never even do so, and also points out that there's likely many causes, so there's no one size fits all treatments coming. They hit on so many important factors that are often ignored and appear to have done a really well balanced job of putting a lot of data out there from a lot of sources.

There's tons of great quotable material here, so I'm not going to pick a bunch out, but I'll be saving this one for future reference. From the conclusion for anyone who still thinks there's nothing to worry about:

"Notably, the intersection of these figures with the WHO official statistics (650 million diagnoses of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection up to the end of 2022) would enable us to hypothesize that up to 400 million people worldwide (underestimated) may be already seeking care for long‐COVID in the near future, thus putting under unprecedented pressure the already exhausted and drained health care system."

This is a must read for people who still care. Apparently it's been out for a little while and I hadn't seen it, so thank you very much for sharing it!