Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Long Covid Is Not Necessarily Your Biggest Problem, published by Elizabeth on the LessWrong. At this point, people I know are not that worried about dying from covid. We’re all vaccinated, we’re mostly young and healthy(ish), and it turns out the odds were always low for us. We’re also not that worried about hospitalization: it’s much more likely than death, but maintaining covid precautions indefinitely is very costly so by and large we’re willing to risk it. The big unknown here has been long covid. Losing a few weeks to being extremely sick might be worth the risk, but a lifetime of fatigue and reduced cognition is a very big deal. With that in mind, I set out to do some math on what risks we were running. Unfortunately baseline covid has barely been around long enough to have data on long covid, most of it is still terrible, and the vaccine and Delta variant have not been widespread long enough to have much data at all. In the end, the conclusion I came to was that for vaccinated people under 40 with <=1 comorbidiy, the cognitive risks of long covid are lost in the noise of other risks they commonly take. Coming to this conclusion involved reading a number of papers, but also a lot of emotional processing around risk and health. I’ve included that processing under a “personal stuff” section, which you can skip if you just want the info but I encourage you to read if you feel yourself starting to yell that I’m not taking small risks of great suffering seriously. I do encourage you to read the caveats section before deciding how much weight to put on my conclusions. Personal Stuff This post took a long time to write, much longer than I wanted, because this is not an abstract topic to me. I have chronic pain from nerve damage in my jaw caused by medical incompetence, and my attempts to seek treatment for this continually run into the brick wall of a medical system that doesn’t consider my pain important (tangent: if you have a pain specialist you trust, anywhere in the US, please e-mail me (elizabeth@acesounderglass.com)). I empathize very much with the long covid sufferers who are being told their suffering doesn’t exist because it’s too hard to measure and we can’t prove what caused it. Additionally, I’m still suffering from side effects from my covid vaccine in April. It’s very minor, chest congestion that doesn’t seem to affect my lung capacity (but I don’t have a clear before picture, so hard to say for sure). But it’s getting worse and while my medical practitioners are taking it seriously, this + the experience with dental pain make me very sensitive to the possibility they might stop if it becomes too much work for them. As I type this, I am taking a supplement stack from a high end internet crackpot because first line treatment failed and there aren’t a lot of other options. And that’s just from the vaccine; I imagine if I actually had covid I would not be one of the people who shakes it off the way I describe later in this post. All this is to say that when I describe the long term cognitive impact of covid as being too small to measure with our current tools against our current noise levels, that is very much not the same as saying it’s zero. It’s much worse than that. What I’m saying is that you are taking risks of similar levels of suffering and impairment constantly, which our health system is very bad at measuring, and against that background long covid does not make much of a difference for people within certain age and health parameters. A common complaint when people say “X isn’t dangerous to the young and healthy” is that it implies the death and suffering of those who aren’t young and healthy don’t matter. I’m not saying that. It matters a lot, and it’s impossible for me to forget that because I’m very unlikely to be one of the people who gets to...