Something I think deserves more attention is the anecdotes suggesting that people infected early on in the pandemic were much more likely to go on to develop long covid than those infected later in the pandemic. I occasionally see this mentioned in the various covid survivor groups on the internet.
To test, I made a poll in the covidlonghaulers subreddit. 55/137=~40% people stated that they were infected in the first wave of infections (before July 2020), even though a look on archive.org suggests that only about 5%* of the subscribers subscribed before this time.
*The earliest they archived a snapshot was actually in August 2020, at which point there had already been quite a few more infections than there were just before July. Some people may have also unsubscribed so I’m not sure what the actual proportion is. I think 5% is a fair-ish estimate since it would also take some time after you get covid and then long covid for you to start looking online for support communities and run into the subreddit. A brief look through the subscriber count over time does suggest that the subreddit has surges of subscribers after surges of infections, so I do think that the temporal link is at least somewhat reliably there and people join the subreddit at a relatively stationary amount of time after getting long covid (i.e. no large surge in popularity of the subreddit unprompted by lack of actual new long covid cases).
Something I think deserves more attention is the anecdotes suggesting that people infected early on in the pandemic were much more likely to go on to develop long covid than those infected later in the pandemic. I occasionally see this mentioned in the various covid survivor groups on the internet.
To test, I made a poll in the covidlonghaulers subreddit. 55/137=~40% people stated that they were infected in the first wave of infections (before July 2020), even though a look on archive.org suggests that only about 5%* of the subscribers subscribed before this time.
*The earliest they archived a snapshot was actually in August 2020, at which point there had already been quite a few more infections than there were just before July. Some people may have also unsubscribed so I’m not sure what the actual proportion is. I think 5% is a fair-ish estimate since it would also take some time after you get covid and then long covid for you to start looking online for support communities and run into the subreddit. A brief look through the subscriber count over time does suggest that the subreddit has surges of subscribers after surges of infections, so I do think that the temporal link is at least somewhat reliably there and people join the subreddit at a relatively stationary amount of time after getting long covid (i.e. no large surge in popularity of the subreddit unprompted by lack of actual new long covid cases).