“they’re saying only 1% of people die of covid so why are you worried?” ok then. not looking at any sources, let’s go off that statistic for this post. note: we’ve lost over a million people and counting in the united states alone.

i’ve seen some estimates saying 10%-30% of people end up with continuing symptoms (fatigue, brain fog, etc) after the end of infection, which could mean tens of millions of people. however, if even only 2% had persisting symptoms and we go by that 1% death statistic, that could be 2 million people living with some form of long covid impacting their daily life.

don’t wanna listen about covid? ok, let’s compare it to another disease known for its lasting symptoms and its “long” form: polio.

polio could be asymptomatic, but symptoms presented as flu-like if there were any. all things considered, paralysis was rare in comparison to infection numbers. i’ve seen a lot of polio statistics, and some say only 1 in 1,000 (0.1%) polio cases resulted in paralysis, though this seems like a rough average between the three variants. still, there were tens of thousands of cases of poliomyelitis paralysis. 1952 alone had over 20,000 paralysis cases reported, and that’s one year of many polio outbreaks (the most well known u.s. outbreak was 1948/49-1952).

just because a percentage seems low does not mean the damage is minuscule. be knowledgeable about how information is being presented to you and what the actual impacts are. small numbers do not equal little harm.