https://xcancel.com/michael_hoerger/status/1993183181932310977
Wastewater-derived estimates suggest that 74 million people in the U.S. got infected during the summer wave.
That's 21.6% of the population, about 1 in 5 people. These infections are anticipated to translate into 3.7-14.7 million long-term conditions. #LongCOVID
Text description of post image
Graph titled "SARS-CoV-2 New Daily Infections, Wastewater-Derived Estimates (U.S.)" which has days on the X-axis (with ticks for the first of each month for July through November 2025) and infections on the Y-axis. The graph highlights a peak of 1.4 million infections/day in early September. Additionally, it shows that 60 million infections occurred in the two-month span from early August to early October, and 75 million infections occurred in the three-month span from mid-July to mid-October. The graph is attributed to Mike Hoerger, PhD, MSCR, MBA (@michael_hoerger
) and links to pmc19.com/data
The lowest estimate I've seen of your chance of getting long covid every infection is 3.4%. And reinfection raises that risk. I've not seen any new estimates other that studies confirming long covid risk is real and increases with every infection.
So with 74 million infections, that would be about 2.5 million people with new onset long covid symptoms. What are the consequences of giving 2.5 million people brain damage? How many people could you essentially give a concussion to before you'd notice an impact on society?
Kids were probably hit harder than most due to school and parents being told it's not harmful to kids and being spooked by anti-vax sentiment. How many kids could you give concussions to before school performance starts being effected?
We lost about 2 million people to covid in the first couple years, and couldn't forget about it fast enough, so I guess I'm not surprised our society can just overlook this shit or refuses to come to grips with the impact it's having on us still. "Large number bad and scary so it can't be true."
Phone bad, "lockdowns", poor weight/diet/exercise, anything but the C word.
And as conservative as those numbers are, let's not forget that people are still seeing cognitive slowing without clocking any of the symptoms that indicate Long Covid.
And this was years ago. The average person is like 5 infections deep at this point, minimum.