The fear of COVID-19 still shouldn’t rule your life.

Since the initial omicron wave receded and inflation replaced COVID-19 in the headlines, the debate over reopening has largely been settled in favor of the reopeners. But the debate over the wisdom of reopening and unmasking hasn’t gone away. As cases rise again, there is still a vocal constituency that thinks too much normalcy is a public health mistake.

Of late, this constituency has shifted its focus somewhat, from the dangers of death to the peril of long COVID-19, the potentially debilitating chronic form of the disease. In a recent Washington Post essay, health-policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel wrote that “a 1-in33 chance” of long COVID19 symptoms (assuming that for the vaccinated, which he is, about 3% of COVID-19 infections turn chronic) is still enough to keep him in an N95 mask, out of restaurants and off trains and planes as much as possible.

As Emanuel concedes, there is a lot of uncertainty around long COVID-19. As with many issues, there’s also a noticeable intellectual clustering effect: People who still favor pandemic restrictions are more likely to emphasize its dangers, while mask-and-mandate skeptics seem more likely to suspect that it’s a kind of blue-state hypochondria.

I am, since vaccines became available, a pandemic dove who happily tore off my mask once planes no longer required it, which should make me primed for skepticism about long COVID-19. But at the same time, I also have extensive knowledge about chronic illness and its controversies, based on extensive personal experience, which made me a long COVID-19 believer from the start: Its scope is uncertain, but it’s clearly real and often terrible.

From Emanuel’s perspective, I shouldn’t hold both of these positions. I’ve experienced in my own flesh just how bad a chronic infection can become:

What am I doing eating out, flying planes barefaced, writing this column unmasked in a coffee shop?

It’s an interesting question, and it inspired me to do some math about a different kind of risk — the risk my family takes by still living in Connecticut, a hotbed of Lyme disease, my own unwelcome chronic visitor.

The estimates for how often Lyme disease turns chronic range from 5% to 20% of cases. Call it 12% and you get a risk four times as high as Emanuel’s 3% estimate for COVID19.

But thankfully Lyme disease isn’t airborne, so your risk of being infected in the first place is much lower. If endemic COVID19 ends up resembling the flu, your chances of getting it in a given year might be between 1 in 5 and 1 in 20, whereas your chances of getting Lyme are more like 1 in 700.

However! Here in Connecticut the incidence is at least three times the U.S. average, and then there are six people in my household for me to worry about. So the odds of any one of us getting infected annually might be close to 1 in 40. Combine that family figure with the somewhat higher odds of Lyme disease becoming chronic, and our risks are in the same general ballpark as the long COVID-19 risks that Emanuel considers unacceptably high. With that said, we do take precautions.

The lesson I’ve taken from my Lyme-earned knowledge is that infection-mediated chronic illness may be so commonplace that to lead any kind of normal life is to expose yourself to risk.

Chronic illness is a great scourge, which long COVID19 has helped bring into the light, and it cries out for better diagnosis and better treatment. But doing the math and knowing the danger won’t keep me from showing my face on planes and in restaurants or my kids from walking — carefully, I hope — in Connecticut’s state parks.