Unfortunately, while ME/CFS is not considered a terminal illness, people with ME/CFS have a lower life expectancy, perhaps as much as 20 years less

A lot of people with these issues meet the diagnostic criteria for ME/CFS, maybe as many as half:

Or, maybe you already have some lingering issues from your prior COVID infections. Well, now we know that you're at least susceptible to getting them. Based on surveys of patients, it's likely that your symptoms will get worse. Or if you recovered from them, they may come back

Well, we know that the more times you've been infected with the COVID, the more likely you are to have longer term health issues from your infection. So maybe you have been fine so far, but the 10th infection you get 5 years from now will be the one that disables you:

While they may not be hit as severely on average as middle-aged folks, children are also susceptible to the long term health problems from COVID:

And while these symptoms can affect anyone at any age, younger and middle-aged adults actually seem to get hit the hardest:

We do know that somewhere around 25% of people who survive COVID will develop some kind of long-term health issues. These vary in severity from mild fatigue that lasts a few months, to being completely bed-bound and out of work for years or longer:

Underlying all of this is a very simplistic, and very naive view of the data. People are focusing only a single metric: deaths. And to be sure, deaths from COVID are overwhelmingly concentrated among people 65+:

That might sound like a lot, but for comparison, the NIH commits over 5X as much annually to HIV research. I'm not arguing to reduce the HIV research budget, but the percentage of Americans with HIV is well less than 1%. HIV is much better understood - we know how to avoid it and how to treat it

What I find most disturbing about this is that the interest in figuring out the answers to these questions is almost non-existent. Funding for it is a mere pittance. Earlier this year, the NIH committed a mere ~$500M to research it:

What's worse, there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to protect yourself from this besides avoiding infection. Vaccination has only a limited impact, and lifestyle is almost irrelevant: Even 18 year old US marines in peak physical condition developed long lasting health problems at a similar rate

It was once widely believed that children weren't nearly as affected, but recent research has shown that's sadly not the case, with a similar share of kids and teenagers having long lasting health problems from their COVID infections

About 1 in 4 American adults have developed some type of long term health issues from their COVID infections. Data is limited, but it seems reasonable to assume this ratio is similar in other countries.