tl;dr: 20 million people have or had long covid in the US. 2 million in Canada. Reinfections increase risk of long covid.
I'm guessing there is a huge amount of survivorship bias going on in the world today.
Millions in Canada and US have long COVID
Al-Aly knows this aftermath well because he and his team at Washington University in St. Louis documented the first characteristics of long COVID and did the most widely cited research on the condition. The Tyee has highlighted his important work repeatedly.
Al-Aly testified that the condition of long COVID now afflicts at least 20 million Americans. Their disability represents an economic toll of $3.7 trillion in terms of lost productivity and lost lives. That’s a loss equal to the 2008 recession.
Canada shares this great burden. According to a recent Statistics Canada survey, **more than two million Canadians reported suffering from the symptoms of long COVID as of June. **That’s seven per cent of the adult population. More than half report no improvement in their condition over time. More than one in five Canadians battling long COVID on average took 24 days off from work or school.
Al-Aly also highlighted one of the key findings of that little-cited Canadian survey and even shared a graph from the study showing that reinfections heighten the risk of long COVID.
“Even if people managed to emerge unscathed after the first infection, they may get long COVID after reinfection,” warned Al-Aly.
There is a myth that frogs will stay in a pot of water until it boils and they die. This is untrue. They will only do that if you keep giving them treats.
They're quiet about it because it's a failure that affects the NON-POOR
Capitalism works because it only targets the POOR. The lowest jobs get automated, the poorest people become unemployed, and either kill themselves, get prisoned, or killed by cops. Meantime everyone one rung up the economic ladder gets to convince themselves that their jobs will remain important forever, until the next rung up gets automated, put in prison, and then the third rung from the bottom gets to delude themselves that they'll still survive. They won't, and only about 6% of the population will actually get to escape capitalism alive--this experiment was run 10,000 years ago and that's what the gene contraction came out to be (at least on males).
long-COVID is a problem because it attacks non-poor people. Instead of attacking the ladder sequentially, it attacks all rungs all at once. Rates might be higher in poor, but they are still almost as high in "middle class" and even upper middle class people.
Having ~10%+ of your middle class realize that the government doesn't care about their slow death is not a good thing. They weren't supposed to start rotting like this, only poor people were. Thus, the wealthy long-COVID individual is transformed into a potential revolutionary.
It's especially worse for the government because there is no cure for long-COVID other than avoiding COVID, which means setting up isolated communes with a high potential for separatism. Imagine if the 10% of the population with long-COVID properly understood this and withdrew from society altogether and started growing potatoes on some rural plots of land. These people could still conceivably be able to pay taxes to the US government, depending on how much wealth they have, but the government still wouldn't like this independence.
This is the logical conclusion of a long-COVID patient. They have nothing to lose because COVID is slowly killing them anyway--there IS NO ALTERNATIVE FUTURE. The media is quiet about it because they don't want LCers to realize the full big-picture extent of their problems, and they don't want us organized and doing something about our future, because it creates a potential threat to their power
They especially don't want us realizing that they made the bioweapon in the first place!