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Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Is this any different from any really bad disease that gives you a fever and lowers bloody oxygenation? I know I was completely delirious when I had some damned good leptospirosis. I thought my body parts were having a breakup conversation with me and that they'd each decided to go separate ways after that.

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It may well be. There are reports that the virus causes CNS symptoms. There are also anecdotal reports of demyelination caused by the new coronavirus. If these turn out to be true it would be terrifying, multiple sclerosis-like illness as a possible sequela of covid infection.

The virus is capable of cause strokes, dementia-like symptoms, and inducing encephalitic psychosis. Half of the cases where this was found to have occurred were in people under 60:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...

A bacterial infection that was probably nowhere near as transmissible and treatable with antibiotics? Sounds way different from SARS-CoV-2.

EDIT: gee, sorry if this came off the wrong way but I really was trying to answer the question "is this any different ...?"

Don’t take the downvotes personally. The censors are part of our societal problem.

A group of people telling you that they don’t like what you say isn’t censorship, it’s being in the out-group, and it’s been a thing since animals evolved social behavior

If you want to see real examples of censorship, a forum for liberal tech nerds overlapping with venture capitalists probably ain’t it

I think they are asking if the delirium is any more severe than what you would expect from other diseases that cause fever. They are not saying that SARS-CoV-2 is equally as bad as some other infection.

Nope. But they have to sensationalize it because it's Covid.

(For the record, I had Covid)

It sounds like you no longer have Covid, which is good. I hope you're feeling well.

I worry a little though that comments by people who had coronavirus suffer from survivorship bias - the ones who died rarely log onto HN.

I'm also interested in the stories of people who have had lasting effects from COVID-19. I'm guessing that those stories also suffer from a bit of selection bias.

Talk to chronic Lyme disease victims sometime.

I know two coworkers going on 100+ days since they got it and they still can't taste or smell. One of them has the covid toes/fingers as well. They said that the doctors really don't have any answer for them.

What is covid toes/fingers?

Covid infected can present with Frostbite-like symptoms

Yeah, got it in late February, long since recovered. It was 4 days of feeling very shit and a month of feeling groggy.

Did you have a positive pcr test?

Well with a >99.95% survival rate in the under 50 age group, they are not exactly alone.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Survival shouldn’t be the only objective, there are plenty of lasting impacts that aren’t death experienced by many more people.

When 20m Americans have had it, you’re going to see some weird edge cases.

At such a high and serious rate?

Where do you see that rate in your source? You seem to be off by an order of magnitude.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01738-2

Edit: I misread your qualifier of "under 50 age group". Overall fatality rate seems to be around 0.4% according to the CDC site.

The over fatality rate is actually lower since that listed rate only applies to symptomatic patients. Given their estimate for Asymptomatic 35% you arrive at 0.26%.

I mean Reddit is the opposite though. People all over the place claiming all kinds of health problems. So I’m thinking there are both sides the bias at work.

With a death rate among confirmed cases approaching 10% at its peak, and not enough attention in the USA being paid to safety measures, can you really blame them for sensationalizing it?

It’s a skewed distribution based on age. No age group has a death rate of 10%

He said among ‘confirmed cases’ which was true for a long time as they weren’t testing asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic people.

My statement holds. The average death rate among confirmed cases may be 10%, but no well stratified group actually conforms to that rate.

The death rate is misleading since the worst rate was in places with poor testing near the breakout of the pandemic. Those who do die, die quicker than recoveries take to be confirmed.

The more info we get, the more it looks like the real death rate is 1-2%.

Which is pretty terrifying to me!

CDC says the IFR is .26%.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Nice.

So about 1 person for every 400 infected. It also implies we are about 1/8 of the way from the maximum number of posible fatalities in the US.

Among confirmed cases is a confusing metric since at first only the most severe patients were tested.

For context the IFR is reported by the cdc at .26%

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

Raw number says 0.026. isn't it 2.6% rather than 0.26% ?

Go to table 1 and look at best estimate overall. It’s .004

This is the CFR which is higher. If you consider their projection that 35% of all infected cases remain asymptomatic, the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) drops to just 0.26 %.

If their estimate this week of over 20mm true infections is accurate then the coronavirus has an IFR of 0.6% in the US. Comparatively the 2017-2018 flu season was fairly bad and saw 61k deaths from an estimated 45mm infections[1] for an IFR of about 0.15%. So this is about four times worse than a bad flu season, with significant skew towards far more risk for older people.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html?CDC_AA_refVa...

Interesting point. It makes we wonder if we used years lost (not sure what the correct term is) how it would compare to the flu. Since it scews elderly.

A ton of attention initially was given to safety (I mean large swaths of the country shut down and there’s plenty of business that still hasn’t reopened) however the sensationalist media is obviously sensational and people know it. Now instead of safety people, regular Joes, are thumbing their noses refusing to wear masks and otherwise just doing whatever because it looks like a big sham precisely because of the sensationalism.

It may seem sensational because everything was happening in New York.

Regular Joe's are funny if you tell them they can't wear a mask they would wear one.

The divide feels age related. People are going to die over it.

It seems sensational because the media has purposely done so just like this NYT headline. It’s almost as sensational as saying “people are going to die over it.” Of course they are. They already have.

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