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It seems like common sense that the more prevalent/disabling a condition is, the more attention it would get. (And also that social/cultural biases would skew the actual results wildly) But I haven’t actually seen a chart before that quantifies whether that’s really the case. Fascinating!

The first figure in the post above isn't in the paper - quickly made it based on the their data provided in the supplementary material.

2) The authors used Long COVID prevalence from Census Bureau surveys (9/2022-8/2023) and disability weights from the Global Burden of Disease Study. The NIH matched its funding to these categories using the Research, Condition, and Disease Categorization (RCDC).

3) For Long Covid, the disability weight was 0.21 (0 equals full health, 1 equals death). It's equivalent to that of traumatic brain injury (0.21) and complete hearing loss (0.22), but less than moderate rheumatoid arthritis (0.34), migraine (0.44), and ME/CFS (0.46)

4) If we multiply by the prevalence, we get the 'years lived with disability (YLDs)' per 100,000 U.S. adults. For Long Covid, this figure was 319, similar to asthma. For ME/CFS, it was 598.