That first one is interesting. Though, as with all of the studies I’ve seen on long COVID, nearly all the symptoms are self-reported (I realize there probably isn’t a good alternative at this point) and likely hard to disentangle from non-COVID causes. The Lancet study reports
At 6 months after acute infection, COVID-19 survivors were mainly troubled with fatigue or muscle weakness, sleep difficulties, and anxiety or depression. Patients who were more severely ill during their hospital stay had more severe impaired pulmonary diffusion capacities and abnormal chest imaging manifestations, and are the main target population for intervention of long-term recovery.
Pretty much the entire world is suffering from increased anxiety, depression, and fatigue - with or without a COVID diagnosis. How does the studied population compare to a control group? Lumping the serious, abnormal chest imaging patients in with people experiencing some degree of mental distress seems pretty low-information to me.
The second study:
The CDC report is based on telephone surveys of 274 COVID-19 patients.
Ehhhh… this is on the quality level of self-reported Facebook groups for me. The headline “One-third of COVID-19 patients who aren’t hospitalized have long-term illness” is absurdly misleading.
Found the cite I was looking for: LINK
We analysed data from 4182 incident cases of COVID-19 who logged their symptoms prospectively in the COVID Symptom Study app.
558 (13.3%) had symptoms lasting >=28 days,
189 (4.5%) for >=8 weeks and
95 (2.3%) for >=12 weeksLong-COVID was characterised by symptoms of fatigue, headache, dyspnoea and anosmia and was more likely with increasing age, BMI and female sex.
There’s obviously a ton a research still to be done, but for me, based on my understanding of the stats at this moment in time, serious, long-term symptoms shouldn’t be terribly large concern for the majority (again closer to 100% than 50%) of the population. As more and better data comes out I will adjust my opinion.