What is such a small percent and where are you getting your data?

"Long COVID" and medical journals.... Even the highest estimates only have it as a very small percentage of symptomatic patients which is already a subset of the general population.

If you change it instead to be a subset of the working age population, does the percentage look higher?

I've been reading it's 10 to 20% of people who test positive have symptoms at least a month, and as much as 5 to 7% three to six months later. The US workforce is around 160 million people. About 60% of the population is estimated to have had SARS-Cov-2 at least once.

60% of 160 million is 96 million. So 5% of that is 4.6 million people or so with at least a solid portion of a year of symptoms.

There's mounting evidence that some of the damage could take years to recover or even be lifelong.

The current word from the Mayo Clinic is about 20% of folks have what they're calling Post-COVID Syndrome between one month and one year after an infection, with at least one symptom likely from the viral infection. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/i...

If we look at 20% of 60% of the workforce that's around 19 million people symptomatic for over a month after the initial positive test. Twelve percent, almost one in eight people in the workplace.

My understanding from other articles is its currently 1 in every 3 people currently unemployed cite long covid as the primary reason for inability to return to work, though that data may be a few months old now.