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Comment by op00to | Hacker News Reader

Do non-severe cases cause lung damage too? Is the lung damage heal able?

That is the point of my question. There has been no evidence of damage in non severe cases. Indeed, we are having to get complicated testing to find out many people had it at all.

How about this article [1] (translation at reddit [2]) about german divers who had "mild cases" (no hospitalization, recovered at home) and were found to have suffered permanent lung damage, so severe that they can't dive anymore.

[1] https://www.rainews.it/tgr/tagesschau/articoli/2020/04/tag-C...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/g3rv7h/permame...

My ability to navigate Reddit is embarrassing. Never found the comment with the translation. Saw some of the discussion, though.

Sounds like a promising lead to go down. I think my other criticisms are still unaddressed. Scarring damage is tough to place in age. Is plausible that they had some pre existing damage already.

Funny to see the comments talk if walking pneumonia. I had that a decade ago. Was cake compared to whatever hit me early March.

I think the fact that they used to dive but now can't kind of places most of the damage as recent.

My link should be a direct link to the comment. The bottom of the comment is hidden by default, but half of it is visible (and you can unhide the rest using the big blue button). I hate the new reddit design.

I agree it is a strong signal. That said, I suspect there is a lot more to it.

I confess false confidence in CT scans from stories such as back pains paints me a skeptic here. :(

While this is anecdotal, it indicates that people with no symptoms can have lung damage (pneumonia), but not necessarily long-term damage:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/opinion/coronavirus-testi...

Having pneumonia is not having no symptoms. That would be on the low end of severe in the case category. Right?

There have been a number of reports of folks who were diagnosed with otherwise asymptomatic COVID when they had a CT for an unrelated reason that showed their lungs with GGO. And in some cases they have shown no signs of recovery even weeks later.

A link would be awesome. And we would still need to ascertain that they did not have this damage before getting covid. :(. CT scans have a troubled history of seeing damage that preexisted. (See back pains)

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But there is evidence in all of the asymptomatic people getting tested and not having any affects worth making it into a report.

Could they have hidden damage that we can't detect? Plausible. But that is true of many activities. And illnesses.

> Could they have hidden damage that we can't detect? Plausible. But that is true of many activities. And illnesses

The difference is that we know plenty about those illnesses and activities. This is a novel virus and we are just speculating.

We simply don't know the long term effects of this virus, even in recovered cases.

Until we know this virus well enough to make such statements, we should play it safe.

I for one am not willing to risk a lung because you think it's fear mongering

How could we even tell? Biopsy? Lol no thanks.

Presumably you could find some evidence. X-ray? Just listening to lungs?

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