[Question] Long COVID risk: How to maintain an up to date risk assessment so we can go back to normal life?

Despite Zvi’s “Long Long Covid Post” concluding in February that Long COVID risk among healthy, vaccinated individuals is low enough that it’s worth pretty much going back to normal life, I haven’t felt comfortable doing so given the array of claims to the contrary.

Some of them have surfaced on LessWrong itself:

Others I have come across from friends or on Twitter.

My skills at carefully evaluating scientific research are fairly limited, and I’d also like to avoid spending all of my free time doing so, so I’ve been kind of stuck in this limbo for now.

Compounding the challenge of deciding what risks to take is that MicroCOVID doesn’t seem to account for the increasing rate of underreporting or the much higher transmissibility of recent Omicron subvariants, making it really hard to decide what level of risk a given activity will pose. And given the transmissibility of those variants, and society’s apparent decision to just … ignore the risk of Long COVID and go back to normal, trying to avoid getting COVID going forward will be more and more socially costly.

I’m sure I’m not the only one in this situation.

So:

  • Is anyone confident going back to normal life despite claims to the contrary without feeling the need to read and evaluate each new study on Long COVID? Why? What logic /​ heuristics inform that assessment?

    • This seems to be Zvi’s current stance, given he seems to be focused elsewhere with his recent posts, so Zvi, if you’re reading this, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts!

  • Has anyone been tracking claims to the contrary and assessing their validity (e.g. based on the sorts of critiques Zvi covered in his post)?

  • Would anyone be interested in contributing to a systematic effort to do so?

    • Could we start some sort of centralized database of studies on Long COVID (a spreadsheet? a wiki?) and folks grab one or two here and there, evaluate them, and note their assessment /​ rationale?

    • Would folks be interested in contributing to a Kickstarter or something to pay a researcher (e.g. Elizabeth, Zvi, Scott—I don’t know if any of them have bandwidth /​ a price at which they would be interested in doing this currently, but worth asking, or maybe there are other folks with the right skillset/​epistemics) to do this?

  • Any other ideas?