I agree the number of soccer players reported to be out of play due to Long Covid is low enough so we can be confident that Long Covid risk for healthy young demographics is <<2%. I’m not sure it’s low enough to be confident it’s <0.5%.* I think “0.5% Long Covid risk for young people; higher for older people” would just about make it into the lower end of Siebe’s 70% confidence interval of people who are suffering from Long Covid. (To get to the higher end of the confidence interval, we’d have to assume that the vast majority of people who get Long Covid are from older demographics and presumably had severe disease – and maybe vaccinations have brought these risks down a bunch, so I’m skeptical about the higher parts of the range in the confidence interval.)
*Professional athletes are probably trying to avoid getting Covid. After 5 minutes of googling, I could find a bunch of accounts of soccer players with Long Covid. Arguably, there are fewer than 200 “world-famous soccer players” currently active, so not seeing a case in the news of a famous player who was forced to retire isn’t strong evidence against a Long Covid incidence of 0.5%.
I don’t think pro athletes are any less likely to get covid than other people. The English football leagues continued throughout the early peaks of covid and (anecdotally) vaccine scepticism rates among footballers seem to be surprisingly high.
If any English footballer retired due to long covid, it would be national news. The premier league is by far the most popular sports league in the world and if any player retired due to long covid it would be huge news. The second tier of English football has the third highest attendances of any league in Europe; numerous clubs gets tens of thousands of fans at each game. The only case of news reporting on a footballer retiring with long covid was a BBC report report on one non-famous squad player for AFC Wimbledon (a fourth tier club with few fans) who retired because of long covid. But he had been released from his pro contract before getting covid and so wasn’t actually a pro footballer. There are about 5,000 pro footballers in England and there are no other news stories about players retiring with long covid after 1.5 years of covid. This suggests that the risk to healthy young people is low.
There are reports in the news of players suffering with long covid, where this is struggling with recovery a couple of months after getting covid, but all of those people have subsequently started playing again.
don’t really get why this has been downvoted so much. The BBC reported on a non-famous non-pro footballer player who claimed to retire due to long covid, which is evidence that the media would report on one of the 5,000 other pro footballers if they were to retire due to long covid
I agree the number of soccer players reported to be out of play due to Long Covid is low enough so we can be confident that Long Covid risk for healthy young demographics is <<2%. I’m not sure it’s low enough to be confident it’s <0.5%.* I think “0.5% Long Covid risk for young people; higher for older people” would just about make it into the lower end of Siebe’s 70% confidence interval of people who are suffering from Long Covid. (To get to the higher end of the confidence interval, we’d have to assume that the vast majority of people who get Long Covid are from older demographics and presumably had severe disease – and maybe vaccinations have brought these risks down a bunch, so I’m skeptical about the higher parts of the range in the confidence interval.)
*Professional athletes are probably trying to avoid getting Covid. After 5 minutes of googling, I could find a bunch of accounts of soccer players with Long Covid. Arguably, there are fewer than 200 “world-famous soccer players” currently active, so not seeing a case in the news of a famous player who was forced to retire isn’t strong evidence against a Long Covid incidence of 0.5%.
Here’s the long Covid prevalence per age group per the ONS UK data, per May 1st 2022
2 to 11 0.45%
12 to 16 1.44%
17 to 24 1.50%
25 to 34 2.14%
35 to 49 3.23%
50 to 69 3.10%
70+ 1.53%
Average 2.21%
I don’t think pro athletes are any less likely to get covid than other people. The English football leagues continued throughout the early peaks of covid and (anecdotally) vaccine scepticism rates among footballers seem to be surprisingly high.
If any English footballer retired due to long covid, it would be national news. The premier league is by far the most popular sports league in the world and if any player retired due to long covid it would be huge news. The second tier of English football has the third highest attendances of any league in Europe; numerous clubs gets tens of thousands of fans at each game. The only case of news reporting on a footballer retiring with long covid was a BBC report report on one non-famous squad player for AFC Wimbledon (a fourth tier club with few fans) who retired because of long covid. But he had been released from his pro contract before getting covid and so wasn’t actually a pro footballer. There are about 5,000 pro footballers in England and there are no other news stories about players retiring with long covid after 1.5 years of covid. This suggests that the risk to healthy young people is low.
There are reports in the news of players suffering with long covid, where this is struggling with recovery a couple of months after getting covid, but all of those people have subsequently started playing again.
don’t really get why this has been downvoted so much. The BBC reported on a non-famous non-pro footballer player who claimed to retire due to long covid, which is evidence that the media would report on one of the 5,000 other pro footballers if they were to retire due to long covid
(wasn’t me!)