Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpiguy | Hacker News Reader

Vast majority of people recover just fine and what ever neurological structural changes are caused by the virus appear to have very little affect.

The article claims that both non-severe and severe patients get the same damage, meaning that globally we have at minimum 10 million people with this damage, probably many time more since most cases aren't tested.

But the article does very little to study if these changes actually effect people and for how long.

Evidence, as well as basic observation points to people recovering very well from the disease (we have over 4 million cases in the US but the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal, otherwise we'd be able to observe a massive group of impaired individuals).

The article does very little to illustrate that impact on people.

For example, people who lose their sense of smell, which is listed as symptom in this Chinese study get it back and they get it back faster than when they lose the sense of smell with other viruses:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/thousands...

>> But the article does very little to study if these changes actually effect people and for how long.

The higher bilateral gray matter volumes (GMV) in olfactory cortices, hippocampi, insulas, left Rolandic operculum would have long-term consequences which are indeed what it means: "long-term" i.e. too short to see physical manifestations of the impact in this study. But these changes in the brain are in itself horrifying given that the symptoms only manifest as respiratory and so on.

> the number of people with crippling long-term effects is minimal

The thousands of of reported "long haulers" is troubling. While not crippling, feeling tired and feverish every day for months does not sound pleasant. It also raises awareness that viruses in general (not just Covid) could potentially help explain long term lingering health issues.

I'm a long hauler. Caught COVID in March. Still suffering. 28 years old. AMA.

Which symptoms are still going?

How bad was your acute phase? Was it like a bad common cold or did you require hospitalization? Also, what symptoms do persist and how bad would you say they are? In what ways is your quality of life affected?

CFS has long been suspected to be caused by an immune deficiency, causing hard to detect chronic EBV/strep/... infections that result in the manyfold problems affected people have.

> Evidence, as well as basic observation points to people recovering very well from the disease

For now. We have no idea what kind of long term damage this is going to cause yet.

>For now. We have no idea what kind of long term damage this is going to cause yet.

Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population? Given how the immune system works it doesn't make sense that someone's body is good enough at fighting the virus that it only displays mild cold-like symptoms yet weak enough that it somehow lets the virus cause serious long-term damage.

I have a cyst on my spine. It doesn't keep me from walking.

But, many days, it keeps me awake and makes it very difficult for me to do physical tasks that I was once able to accomplish with ease.

I used to be able to squat 545lbs. I can hardly lift 100 lbs without assistance. If I do a moderate day of yard work, I am unable to take a shower upright.

All because of a pea-sized cyst.

Just because something isn't fatal, or debilitating to the point of it putting you in a wheel chair, doesn't mean it can't have a massive impact on not only your quality of life and your relationships, it can keep you from being able to adequately care for yourself or be a productive member of society.

> Has there ever been an influenza/coronavirus-like infection with less than 0.1% fatality rate in working-age people (https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/singapore/) that caused lasting disability in a significant proportion of the population?

I've read that the low fatality rate of Singapore is due to mostly foreign, younger, healthy workers being the "cases" who were infected. Assuming that, the statistics of Singapore is not in any way inconsistent with what is observed in other locations. We already know that the older people have an order of magnitude higher probabilities to die while infected, or even two orders of magnitude when old enough.

Note that the "fatality rate" in this context then says absolutely nothing about the permanent damages of the people's organs. The fatality rate is just "who promptly died after being detected positive." We don't know how many of Singapore cases remained with worse health after being infected, or even if some died or will die later, after being declared virus-free, and it's not probable that we'll know, them being the foreign workers.

Therefore, it seems that citing Singapore in this way is irrelevant while talking about the known and reported cases of people with damaged health in, for example, the U.S.

We need other statistics.

Depends on what you consider significant. Even influenza itself is traumatic enough that the risk of long-term effects is part of public health planning; flu vaccines aren't considered so critical because of the "lie in bed eating chicken soup all week" cases. (Although I don't fully endorse everything upthread, and I'd agree there's not much risk of hidden damage where patients we think are recovered will actually end up being disabled.)

The first study I could find from a quick search: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17497-6

Weak symptoms from COVID-19 are likely due to the ~ 30% match with the Mumps vaccine. People who've had their MMR shots do better, on average against SARS-COV-2 than those (like older people) who haven't had it.

When I was fifteen, I had mononucleosis. For about three months, I spent large portions of my time in bed. I didn't go outside, except to go to the doctor for checkups, and to the library on the way back from the doctor's office.

The next five years were awful. I still had bouts of extreme fatigue, muscle soreness, joint pain, inability to concentrate... This lasted for 5 years. (I graduated a semester late from high school. The kids used to joke about my absences that I was working on my time machine and hadn't quite perfected it yet.) At the time, the name "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" was new coinage. There are other names for it now.

Every so often, I'll get an enlarged spleen, fevers (100+ degrees in the evenings), pain, fatigue. It usually happens when I've been under significant stress (new child, moving, new job, the pandemic). Blood work shows very little, and the symptoms go away after a few weeks.

There's so much we still don't know about how viruses affect us as individuals over the long term. Let alone how we as a species adapt to them. Take Multiple Sclerosis, for example. It turns out that we carry MS in our genes, likely as a adaptation to a virus we once had trouble with. Every so often, something happens to some of us, and the adopted sequence of what was likely an external virus gets activated. That is, MS is an endogenous retrovirus.

Over the longer term, what will SARS-COV-2 do to us? It's really hard to say. I'm going to do my best to avoid it. I have enough trouble dealing with whatever it is I already have.

For those people blathering about "rights", those freedoms you enjoy require corresponding measures of personal responsibility. You have a right not to where a mask, but you have the corresponding responsibility to not be so selfish in enclosed public spaces. If I ask you to wear a mask, I'm not trying to be your nanny attempting to force you into doing what's good for you. It isn't for your protection, it's for mine.

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