> I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the leve

> I'm really only wondering about whether or not other infectious diseases cause also cause long term issues but it just hasn't been detected before at the level of Covid. To put it more simply I'm wondering if every time we get sick, it decreases our overall vitality just a little bit. Maybe even catching the common cold is chopping a month or two off our lifespan and we never noticed before. They do, just look at the prognosis section of influenza on Wikipedia [0] (I know, Wikipedia isn't the best source). I had a colleague that had a bad flu one year and then never properly recovered. The doctors say he now has "chronic fatigue syndrome". This was before COVID was a thing. I'm not claiming that flu is as bad as covid, just that this stuff does happen without covid to unlucky people. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis