Scientific reports: Prevalence of long COVID complaints in persons with and without COVID-19, 2023 - Magnusson, Flottorp et al

[Midnattsol]

It sounds as though elderly and other very vulnerable people were shielded early on, so a lot of the people who did get Covid-19 early on would have been young people at low risk of death.

And a lot of the people who both got covid-19 early on and were tested probably were young medical professionals - who would have been naturally at a low risk of death and pulmonary conditions, and probably could get quick access to good care. (That also suggests that there may have been some down-playing of post-infection fatigue rates in those early days, as many of the medical professionals would have known exactly how their colleagues would regard them if they got Long covid.)

This too. In the disability numbers and sick leave, we see nurses and teachers are overrepresented - people who were exposed to covid at higher rates than the rest of us.

Also, I can't recall how it was in Norway, but I think that internationally early on there was some hesitation to label deaths of elderly people with a lot of co-morbidities as being due to Covid-19. Often their death was attributed to some other condition, especially when Covid tests were not yet easily available, as that kept death tallies down.

While there probably was some of this, especially at the start of the pandemic there were few deaths here. We've had 4000+ total deaths from covid, 3000+ were in 2022. While excess mortality started to go up throughout 2021, for most of the period this paper has collected data, there was low death counts across the board.