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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

> the long-term/permanent damage being caused (lung damage, senses, brain damage)

Do you have any actual evidence for this? I keep hearing people bringing up 'permanent damage' but it's impossible to say something in 'permanent' when this has been around less than 6 months. Lung damage from pneumonia takes 3~4 months to heal (I had pneumonia in University, as well as one of my good friends. It took me out for over a month and he had to drop out for the semester. My lungs did not fully recover for 3 months, but they've been fine in the 20 years since).

Every article I've seen is either vary vague, or it's talking about elderly people in care homes with other existing conditions. The permanent damage narrative feels like straight up fear-mongering.

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You're of course right that it's hard to know (but not impossible to know) the permanent effects of a novel virus (because the damage could be like other diseases/conditions we've seen).

Brain damage is just as concerning to me as lung damage. The lung damage at least seems to be more likely to be long-term rather than permanent (brain damage seems less clear). I've seen some articles also taking about kidney and heart damage.

Some articles discussing research/studies (which you may have already seen): https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-brains... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/health/coronavirus-recove... https://scroll.in/article/965138/covid-19-patients-may-suffe... https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-som...

Your attitude (and people with similar) are the problem. If we isolated for four weeks, wore masks, and focused on contact tracing early on, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. But suddenly, we have a whole crop of arm chair doctors and statisticians who disregard basic instructions by medical experts and attempt to minimize (or dismiss outright) the threat of this disease.

Worse yet, we now have a sizable portion of our population that honestly believes that the economic damage is worse than losing 1% (or more) of our population. Given the unpredictability of how people cope with this virus, you are telling me I should risk my family because we are too stupid and/or lazy to do basic things like wear masks and observe a quarantine?

Obviously hard to say anything long-term about a novel virus, but studies have been made of its cousins.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7228737/

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