I think as long as the vaccine is an option for all/most ages then it isn't much of an issue. Although it would be interesting if we allowed kids to get the vaccine at school - possibly without parental permission. (Sort of a tricky area... I think some places provide the HPV vaccine like this since some parents won't let their kids get it.)
Her stories of it radically complicating totally unrelated illnesses and the potential severe long term effects are more than enough reason to take precautions seriously despite what group or demographic you might be in.
This reminds me of a bad take that comes up from time to time around war casualties. Some will see that only a thousand soldiers out of a million died in some conflict and think that it wasn't that dangerous, but for every death in war there can be dozens of people who suffer severe mental and physical harm that negatively affects the rest of their life.
Source?
I would also be interested in seeing comparisons to "long <other infectious diseases>".
A request to support a claim about the "long term" effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago, in a rapidly changing environment, for which it seems pretty improbable for there to have already been robust, repeated, falsifiable studies done, is different.
I would also suggest that if you want "robust, repeated, falsifiable studies" for "effects of a virus/disease discovered less than 2 years ago" you have set your standard implausibly high. That's not how medicine progresses for urgent things, because it's fantastically negligent. Contrast the rapid global Covid response, which saved millions of lives, with the incredible foot-dragging surrounding AIDS in the 80s. If we had waited for perfect knowledge before taking action, hospitals would have been stacking bodies in the streets.
At this stage you get papers saying things like, "A quarter of children experienced persistent symptoms months after hospitalization with acute covid-19 infection, with almost one in ten experiencing multi-system involvement. [...] Our findings highlight the need for replication and further investigation [...]". [1]
[1] https://erj.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/06/10/1399300...
Long COVID isn't well-defined in general; some large subset of it is psychosomatic. The main non-psychosomatic problem seems to be fallout from ARDS (Acute Respitory Distress Syndrome), which is directly related to severe bouts of COVID (and generally younger people have less severe COVID, with or without vaccines).
https://www.statnews.com/2021/03/22/we-need-to-start-thinkin...
Asking a source for an imprecise, sensational-sounding claim doesn't deserve this level of hostility.
We have been made to associate the term "long COVID" with debilitating illness lasting many months, talk of people joining online support groups, etc. I'd like a better breakdown of what is common.
Edit: Downvotes why? It isn't reasonable to want to know how many people are having "any symptom at all past 3 weeks" and how many are suffering from debilitating syndromes?
There are probably more symptoms I’m missing, but that is what I experienced for 9 months
While I have no objection to a vaccine, and I don't question the efficacy of these, the trivial chance of my son's covid19 complications versus forcing him to a doctor's office over his fear of needles, which will cause him a lot of angst, makes me question whether to do it. These decisions aren't always entirely about death percentages.