My point is that "Long COVID" isn't something new, and therefor is unlikely to effect life expectancy. Viruses are harmful, they cause damage that has long-lasting effects. But COVID isn't more likely to cause those effects than the flu. And we certainly shouldn't be making policy decisions based on those effects.

The new part is the scale at which it’s happening. If we had an addition 100M flu cases, we would expect a decrease in life expectancy.

(Also, this doesn’t address the reality that we don’t know if long Covid is the same as with the flu. I just wanted to point out that even if we accept this premise, we would still se a decrease.)

Everyone has the flu at least once in their life. Any life expectancy drop from Post Viral Syndrome is already priced in.

We don’t know that COVID is any different—in absence of evidence it’s always best to assume the null case.

So you propose we should lockdown every year to prevent the deleterious long term effects of the yearly flu?