Plus people only talk about acute problems, while a great deal of viruses leave chronic problems visible sometimes even 30 years later (polio causing paralysis, mononucleosis virus causing multiple sclerosis, HIV causing AIDS...).
Medium term, we know that SARS2 can lead to long COVID in roughly 20% of adults and roughly 7% of children.
Those are huge numbers if you let the virus spread unmitigated.
We know that loss of smell and taste is on neurologycal level, and that SARS2 attacks the brain. Similar loss of smell is an early symptom of Parkinson:
Loss of Smell
There are early signs of Alzheimer signiture in attacked brains:
SARS-CoV-2 invades cognitive centers of the brain and induces Alzheimer’s-like neuropathology
Alzheimer's-like signaling in brains of COVID-19 patients:
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My greatest fear:
SARS2 just spreads as a respiratory virus, but in the body it is a vascular virus attacking every organ with veins (i.e. literally every organ), therefore taking a much greater toll on immune system than more localized diseases.
T Cells: Warriors of SARS-CoV-2 Infection - PubMed
Immunological dysfunction persists for 8 months following initial mild-to-moderate SARS-CoV-2 infection | Nature Immunology
SARS2 is differentiating our naive T cells to fight the virus at a great rate.
This is good for the next infection, but if we get infected every few months with no mitigation because it's "mild", in 10 years we might end up with an old immune system, incapable of fighting new diseases (in this way SARS2 has some similarities with HIV, although it is not directly killing T cells like HIV).
Similarities with HIV:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.10.475725v1
Children are ok now, but in case of unmitigated continuous spread of variants they might end up with naive T cells depleted in their 20s.
loss of smell is also a early sign of dementia.
apparently covid can also increase the risk of diabetes in kids too.
Study finds COVID-19 may increase risk of diabetes in kids: 3 things for parents to know
Covid may raise the risk of diabetes in children, C.D.C. researchers reported.
saw this comment on reddit too
Coronavirus may dice heart muscle fibers into tiny snippets, remove cells' DNA
