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Comment by BeatLeJuce | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still appalled that they know it causes blood issues and are not connecting the dots between that and the feet issues.

I feel like you're jumping to conclusions prematurely. If you as health insurance specialist can connect these dots, you can be sure that researchers did, too. However, having a hunch is only the first step of a thorough scientific investigation, and those take time. Until we have collected and analyzed the evidence, this remains speculation, and scientists shouldn't go off spouting half-researched speculations. That leads to only more fake news. If you look through the Lancet or JAMA, you might find first articles on this connection (if there is one). But until there are peer reviewed papers about this, most researchers know that it's better not to speculate when talking to the press.

Source: am researcher

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I feel like you're jumping to conclusions prematurely.

I honestly don't think I am. I am currently a freelance writer by trade. I sometimes write health articles. I'm familiar with protocols for how to carefully qualify things to keep them factual and avoid wild speculation and suggest confidence levels for various tidbits while being informative.

I am not super impressed with the quality of the medical information in the piece.

But given that thanking someone for their remark and saying "Oh, that makes sense to me" is getting me so much flak, it's probably best for me to bow out of this discussion at this point.

Completely fine to bow out, and if you don't reply to this comment I won't infer that it means you agree I'll assume you're still bowing out.

But if you sometimes write health articles, I feel it worth saying: health articles should be written having understood the proven science and convey it to people in an easy to understand way of what is or isn't proven, not by people who assume their connecting the dots is right before the research shows that.

I haven't read any of your articles, for all I know you're a fantastic writer on those subjects. But your HN comments specifically have not been written in the way that health articles should be, which is why people are giving you flak. And on that subject, sorry that you feel attacked here - it certainly wasn't my intention, nor I think the others', we just aren't in agreement.

I get your point, but I think Doreen is actually being reasonable here. Even if you just consider children, the link between covid-19 and Kawasaki Syndrome is well-established (https://www.cdc.gov/kawasaki/about.html).

But, it's not like there hasn't been additional coverage on covid-19 as a circulatory disease rather than a respiratory-first one.

https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2020/07/what-is-known-ab... and https://health.clevelandclinic.org/should-you-be-worried-abo... and https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/autopsies-indicat... for consumer-oriented overviews.

A recent covid-19 study here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32291094/

And this from a post-SARS study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6178621/

There's plenty of primary and secondary research out there. The problem, I think, is that mainstream media headlines have been -- and continue to -- present covid-19 as a respiratory virus.

Perhaps like Doreen, my family have been tracking the circulatory effects more closely than most, given we have a toddler with a heart condition and family with diabetes.

I feel you are missing the point of my comments. I wasn't arguing anything about the disease itself, only about how to approach understanding and talking about it.

Additionally... the article submitted that we're all commenting in response to specifically makes the case that this virus is affecting more than the respiratory system.

I don't disagree with anything in your comment, but I also don't see how any of your comment disagrees with anything I said or with the original article.

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