Regarding the comments earlier in this thread suggesting that long Covid is largely misattributed depression, the symptom profile doesn't seem to bear this out. "At five weeks post-infection among Coronavirus Infection Survey respondents testing positive for COVID-19", quite a few are still experiencing symptoms that don't sound much like depression: 11% of individuals are still experiencing cough, 8% loss of taste, 8% loss of smell, 8% muscle pain. It also seems fairly clear from Figure 1a of the first(?) ZOE App long Covid study that a substantially higher proportion of those testing positive, vs. symptom-matched negative controls, have long symptom timecourses. You might take some comfort from the fact that the same figure shows that the proportion still experiencing symptoms continues to drop off markedly as additional time passes, though admittedly part of this might be down to some people eventually tiring of logging symptoms into the app.
That said: Speaking for myself, as someone who has been very cautious throughout the pandemic, after my second vaccination I suspect I will mostly go "back to normal", with some exceptions like continued mask-wearing in certain indoor public spaces subject to case rates. If Covid is going to be endemic at this point, as appears likely, the fact that I am as young as I will ever be, and will be recently fully vaccinated, gives me the best protection I will ever have. So after full vaccination, I suspect that when my immune system eventually gets to practice on "the real thing" - while there would be a small risk of a breakthrough infection (and a small risk of long COVID if one occurs), it seems there might be an equivalently small chance that the experience would increase my adaptive immunity such that I am in a better position if I catch a variant when I am older.
In areas with a lot of vaccine penetration, case counts mostly are just going to be very low anyway; combined with the vaccine effectiveness against infection (~80-90% for mRNA vaccines) the probability of being infected will be negligible. For example, in my local area and given my demographics, my current best estimate is that I incur around 10 microcovids if I spend an hour indoors breathing right on another random person. (And I am using conservative numbers.) If that's not true in your area, it may well be true in a month or two.
The only way this is going to change is if a new variant comes around and mucks everything up (in which case the current studies won't be very informative.)
So for myself, I don't really care very much about answering this question right now.
30% lower than without vaccination – according to this study.
The King’s College London/ZOE app collaboration is the largest longitudinal study of Covid symptoms in the world. Through our work, we have also examined the impact of vaccines on existing Covid-19 symptoms and the chance of developing Long Covid. While it is now widely known that double vaccination reduces the chance of getting infected by around 85 per cent, our work indicates that on top of this, vaccines also decrease the likelihood, if someone does get infected, of developing Long Covid by up to 30 per cent.
The risk of death from covid after vaccination is near zero and this seems to be the case despite the variants. The vaccines all seem to be holding up well against the variants so your friends info is anecdote not data. If you’re still worried, keep wearing a mask, taking vitamin d and avoid large gatherings with people of unknown vaccination status. Apart from that, assuming you are living in an area with high vaccinations rates, just get on with your life. I would suggest that the risk to your mental health from continued isolation is higher than the risk of long covid.
I received my 2nd shot of the Pfizer vaccine in the middle of April, but I still have some anxieties about some higher risk activities like indoor dining. Mostly, I'm worried about the possibility of long Covid.
This article, although it presents only one anecdote, does show that long Covid is at least possible after being fully vaccinated. As immunity evasive variants grow as a share of new infections, we might even expect this kind of occurrence to become more common as time goes on. A redditor claims that four vaccinated people he knows still ended up symptomatic. He could be lying, but maybe these variants are getting good at their job.
I wish I could present better sources for my concerns but I'm afraid scrappy anecdotes and self reported data is really all we have to work with on this front right now. Or so I thought, until I ran into this preprint from the folks from JoinZOE and the Covid Symptom Study app. If you take a look at tables 8 and 9, you can see that the authors found no evidence for reduced incidence of symptoms lasting >28 days after vaccination in the younger age group (given that infection did occur, of course). The effect was significant in the older age group. I should add that this was self reported data and not a trial.
What are we to make of this? Do vaccines not protect us against long Covid in the way that we hoped they might? Of course, if we don't get infected, this isn't an issue. But if we are infected, then are we really at equal risk of developing long Covid as someone who was infected without vaccination? What other sources out there discuss this?