'Long Covid' - I've done a few searches on this and the earliest reference I can find is 14 Jul 2020.
As there are no studies, adopting a precautionary principle is fine, but that principle needs to be defined and set out what's involved.
I don't recall what (if any) precautionary principle was applied with any other virus outbreak with unknown consequences.
HIV, for example, caused quite a scare in the 1980's. Initial fears were it could be spread through saliva (kissing) and handshaking, and that large groups of the population could already be affected.
There was no lockdown, because there was no conclusive or significant studies that supported these views.
Without scientific studies , 'Long Covid' belongs in the scare-mongering category.
Investigation of transmission is quicker than investigation of these deeper issues.
These studies take time, and understandably initial focus has been on how does this transmit, how can we treat it in hospital, vaccine studies.
We're less than a year into this.
It is reasonable to expect that there will be long term complications affecting a certain % from this virus e.g. based on those seriously impacted by flu. And this is a more severe disease than flu - it has killed more people in 8 months than flu has done in the past 5 seasons in the US.
I don't remember any discussions about lockdown for AIDS full stop do you? Was hospital capacity under threat from it?
AIDS itself is a long term disease. And the scale of this outbreak dwarfs that of AIDS in the 1980s. It is an entirely different order of threat.
We only went into lockdown for covid when its potential to infect large sections of society became clear.
To suggest it is scare mongering - NADA. No basis for that whatsoever.
It is something that needs to be considered in the balance if someone is advocating herd immunity versus lockdown\restrictions along with - number of deaths and hospitalisations for both cohorts, how do we tell who the cohorts are, how will hospitals cope with influx of seriously sick, and the longer term complications resulting from said infections.
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