Thanks for sharing this! I'd be interested to see the qualitative data sorted by whether the person was vaxed at the time.
Not quite sure what you mean, but all data is linked at the end of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3Rtvo6qhFde6TnDng/positly-covid-survey-2-controlled-productivity-data
Here are some more careful results from a survey I ran the other day on Positly, to test whether it’s trivial to find people who have had their lives seriously impacted by long covid, and to get a better sense of the distribution of what people mean by things like ‘brain fog’, in bigger, vaguer, research efforts.
Respondents are from the US, aged 20-40, and decided to take the survey—entitled ‘Lifestyle 2022’ with a longer description mentioning the pandemic—when offered good compensation for doing so, a couple of days ago.
Most basic results
This was the basic long covid question:
In retrospect, it seems misinterpretable, but looking at other responses (see very bottom for all questions, or section ‘How bad are these long covid cases’ for more details on most of them), I don’t think they misinterpreted it much.
Long covid from cases over two months ago, by vaccination status
The most basic results are not so telling, because maybe all of those people with ongoing problems are among the masses recovering in recent weeks, and will recover from everything before long. So here we’ll just look at people who were infected more than two months ago.
Also, let’s divide up rates by vaccination status at the time of infection.
Minor details:
These results are about cases rather than people, i.e. people with two cases are registered twice below (I asked about the date, vaccination status and health consequences for each, so e.g. one person says they got long covid from the second case, so the first is counted under ‘no LC’).
‘Vaccinated’ = at least a full one or two shot course for two weeks
Results:
In sum, in this (small) group:
Or to put it visually:
How bad are these long covid cases?
A thing I wanted to know was how bad these ongoing symptoms are for people. So I asked some more quantitative questions, as well as for open-ended descriptions.
There are only nine cases of long covid from more than two months ago, and I asked people a few different things about them, so it seems easier to tell you their answers than to try to summarize, especially because I think it’s helpful to see all of a person’s answers together:
(8th column heading ends: “…you were on average in 2019”; for the second column, other options that nobody in this group agreed to were ‘I am unable to walk up stairs without resting afterward’, and ‘A doctor has diagnosed me with having specific organ damage’.)
Taking answers at face value, about eight of these sound pretty bad to me, just on column Q grounds. However it seems likely that some amount of miscommunication is going on, so I trust more impressions coming from several questions. On that basis, maybe half sound like very likely a big deal to me, holistically (and most of the others plausibly so).
To be maybe continued later…
(Maybe coming up later: What’s going on with all these people who don’t want to be vaccinated? Are people still taking many precautions? Which ones? What fraction of people’s covid-infected acquaintances seem to be severely ongoingly unwell from it? —I had a lot of prepaid survey-taking minutes from people who didn’t have covid with which to satisfy some of my pandemic curiosities.)
Full guidedtrack.com code for this survey
Bla