Comment by hatenberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hatenberg | Hacker News Reader

A few ways viruses can cause long term issues:

- You don't get immune due to strains and changes (flu)

- You get it forever latently and it comes back from time to time (HSV)

- malignant tissue abnormalities, Cancer, organ failure over time (some HSV strains, HEP)

- You get immunity but if another strain hits you you bleed from all orifices and may die (dengue)

- It stays with you forever and makes you more vulnerable to tons of other virii (Eppstein-Barr - I know, killer combo, HSV, HEP)

- Chronic fatigue syndrome (Epstein-Barr)

- It depletes your immune system leaving you vulnerable for life (HIV)

- Permanent lung, liver, kidney or heart damage (SARS)

- chronic joint and muscle pain, vision and hearing loss, abdominal pain, bleeding, malaise, and psychological problems (Ebola)

- birth defects, chronic joint pain and inflammation (Zika)

We have NO IDEA right now if this one has such effects or interactions ... it's too early. But we have indication for several side effects from Wuhan that are being studied like permanent lung scarring and T-cell exhaustion.

So this "strategy" (They would all speak German if they used this to save the economy in 1940) is beyond madness.

Please please please do not take this lightly with a I'll get it anyway attitude. More time buys understanding, treatment, lower severity and better survival chances.

(Same reason to be cautious with rushed vaccines (well tested ones are just fine) - especially if they show up unseasonably early for election time. Read up on the Philippines dengue vaccine for the gory details)

This thing appears to work by both reducing lung function (pneumonia) and diminishing oxygen-carrying capacity of blood - a double whammy. If you've got any marginal health issues, this reduces your margin - maybe not to death, but to damage.

Source is this Twitter thread analysing the reports coming out: https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/123897208631765401...

Thread starts at https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/123897208275664896...

This verbal diarrhea helps no one or anything to do with the situation, it's just more main stream media styled hysteria inducting fuckwittery. You are making utterly pointless arbitrary links .. it's embarrassing to see this as the top comment on a HN submission in these times.

Thank you for your well considered input into the conversation.

Well, it helped me a lot. To better ground my concerns about possible health damage this virus can impose after recovery. In fact it matters to me more than the risk of death, after which there would be nobody to care about it anyway. Yet death is the outcome everyone focus on while others are neglected.

Your comment, in turn, just wasted 10 seconds of my time to read it.

Do you really think social distancing will prevent getting to the 60% needed for herd immunity?

I dont think any of our measures are strong enough to actually stop the disease without getting to herd immunity.

Two things.

A) I did not mention social distancing at all. It may be in a pool of measures needed to handle this (see other island nations who have managed that so far) but still not the topic of the comment.

- We don't know yet if there can be hard immunity yet. Probably, maybe likely at least short term, but

B) Herd immunity. It's not a strategy. It's just saying 'let's pray. The costs of just doing that are unknown but have risks based on what we know from many other virii. Risks, not certainties. Regardless

- It won't happen at 60% given the infectiousness of this pathogen. Not even close. We are at much higher vaccination rates (86%) for measles (R0=18) globally.

- It may wane after a few months

Herd immunity right now is a fancy word for The Vast Majority of people will get it.

Not trying to undermine your post here, but can you please at least provide some sources and whether you are an expert in the field?

a short summary is that you have to watch out for the things that don't kill you. i don't know what bojo has in mind.

If herd immunity isn't possible there are too many new variants, then for the same reasons vaccines will also be ineffective. What is the long-term strategy here then?

There are different strategies for vaccines so even if it acted like the flu - there are options, albeit work intensive ones. We do have flu vaccines after all, they are just not guaranteed to work

It is looking good for immunity in monkeys right now, do knock on wood. Failing that...

Get much much better at hygiene and science.

Let's hope it does not come to that but be respectful of the fact that, many times in our history as a species we have been confronted with challenges like this and it did force dramatic changes on the way we live. We are by no means exempt from such dynamics today.

We are still working through HIV and its implication. In the tropics dengue and malaria require constant vigilance and the plague certainly hit the world when their known tools and frameworks failed.

We are a resilient species, if anything we adopt to visible risks quite well once we get out of flight or fight but our lifestyle is not guaranteed and any politicians promising that reality is not real is bad news for our ability to adapt to the threats

Link to the evidence of long term issues please, or is this just scaremongering.

Long term dear, it takes months to years after recovery for 'evidence' (I assume you mean scientific studies) because that's what long term means. The Ebola studies took 2 years to conclusively determine long term effects.

There is several studies in pre-read discussing permanent lung scarring (not exactly surprising from what we know about serious cases spending weeks incubated) and two discussing t-cell exhaustion but they are not peer reviewed yet but you should have no problem locating them.

For SARS we saw significant long term ling damage and, in a statistically significant number of people, terminal, worsening lung scarring over 4 years, so given the strong similarities in the genome of Cov-SARS-2 it's a concern too... we will only know in a few years time.

Humans have the ability to learn from patterns. Many viruses have long term effects, especially if the initial infection was rough - I listed a few examples.

Now we can call this fearmongering and ignore the possibility, but that seems more like a reflexive reaction to dismiss a realistic, potentially dangerous threat than a serious addition to this conversation.

No that is the definition of scaremongering, "the spreading of frightening or ominous reports or rumours".

Isn't that exactly how the west ended up in this clusterfuck. Dismissing what happened in China as scaremongering and failing to prepare for the likelihood of global spread?

Ignoring risks we cannot personally control is a human staple and we found many ways over the years do deal with that, chiefly religion - but it does not remove the risk, it just makes us feel better about it

It's not about the existing evidence it's about the lack thereof, and thus it must be considered as a possibility. To do otherwise is an extremely dangerous assumption. It's valid point and I don't see that as scaremongering.

I'm not an expert but I found this preprint: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...

Other could point to a formal paper, but you can read this in the meanwhile,

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-recovery-damage-...

20-30% drop in lung capacity that "might improve over time" is hardly comparable to HIV or Ebola.

It takes years to recover, IF you recover that lost capacity (that's why it's "might improve").

Also, there's reported cases of people relapsing after being "recovered". Some of them even died, increasing suspicion that this virus might be biphasic:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-reinfection-...

We simply don't know a lot about this virus yet.

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