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Comment by torusenthusiast | Hacker News Reader

This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much. Every allergy attack I've gotten throughout the summer has plunged me into fear I've got it, or every slight cough.

Honestly I was starting to think the dread of the virus was worse than the virus itself, but the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.

Has anyone here had it? Especially as a younger person I read the advice saying things like "the risk is low" but I'm terrified of having to face this.

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I work for a large metro fire department/EMS. We have had lots (<30) of people under 50 get it. Nobody has been hospitalized and most report that it was a sucky flu. We had a retiree who was overweight, with diabetes get it at the ER where he worked as a Paramedic... he had a significantly different experience being placed on a vent and coding several times. He is still kicking however!

Long and short; You can only control what you can control... which is to say not much. Take precaution, but fear is occupying space in your mind rent free. I don't know about you, but I charge for space there.

Well, firemen are tough.

My roommates (likely) had it while I quarantined for a few months in a different location early on in this pandemic.

Their experience was extreme fatigue (totally exhausted going up two flights of stairs), moderate cough, and a very high fever they’re both healthy early-30s.

Everything I have read seems to indicate the severity is heavily tied to your viral load. If you get a lot of the virus your body has to fight harder than a small amount. This is part if the reason masks and avoiding indoor spaces seems to help.

Edit: They both recovered but one roommate says it took about eight weeks to feel “normal” again. No apparent long term damage, but we shall see.

I'm at the tail end of it now. Or at least I hope I am.

It started about three weeks (wait, is it four?) ago with a high fever, migraine, back aches, and fatigue. Then a few days later I started getting a bit of a soar throat, and a few days after that I lost my sense of smell and taste in about a day -- and that's when I knew. A few days later I took a test which four days later came back positive.

My wife and daughter were both sick as well. My wife's symptoms mimicking mine, but offset by two days. My daughter, well... kids are invincible, also being 3 she lacks the vocabulary to communicate much more than this and that hurts. She had a fever and a head ache for a few days.

The fever, migraine and bed rest lasted about a week and a half.

They were both given the all clear last week, while I got put on antibiotics and an inhaler because I was displaying some indications that it was migrating to my lunges. I seem to be in the clear now.

I'm 38 and a C level exec at a startup in a critical phase, and I am afraid to say that I've been defunct since this thing started. The fatigue has been crushing. But it seems to be mental fatigue and not a physical one (well, after the first week at least). I've been doing gardening and started a gazebo construction project while this was going on (being idle makes me go a bit nuts), sweating like a manic under the sub-tropical sun, but I've hit brick walls as soon as I've tried to focus on anything more complex than "man beat tree, tree fall down".

I can't focus on anything complex for more than a little while. Today I stubbornly started debugging an issue, but after my initial findings, and realizing it was a slightly complex problem, I had to hand it over to a coworker as I was completely wrecked after 10 minutes of focusing -- and this was the most work I've done in weeks.

I see some improvement every day, but it is very frustrating not being able to get any real work done. It's scares me that it has had this big effect on me even if I had a comparatively mild case. I can't imagine what other people are going through.

> the more articles like this I see the more I realize it isn't.

There's a selection bias at play here though, a first-hand account of someone who suffered horribly is more "interesting" to the general reader (i.e. more people click, publisher make more money on ads).

Articles like this don’t take into account the bigger perspective. They are all very anecdotal. In the same way, I can tell you that I know many people who got it and experienced none of these very unpleasant symptoms.

>This is utterly terrifying, I barely go out but to know someone following all the precautions could still get it freaks me out so much.

In the end, almost everyone is gonna get it anyway for it to stop spreading, precautions or not. Lockdown/masks/etc are more about flattening the curve (spreading the infections) than about people not getting it ever.

And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.

> And a vaccine could be perpetually "one year in the future" - for many coronaviruses we still don't have one after decades, so all those announcements that we're "18 months from one" are mostly media BS and labs competing for funding.

This is not entirely true. There was no economic incentive for the previous ones but this one is different. We are able to successfully develop vaccines for Coronavirus related diseases in animals. The main problem is upper respiratory tract is a hard area for the immune system to protect.

There’s honestly very little incentive to produce a vaccine for most coronaviruses. The common human ones cause the cold, but there are a bunch of them, and they’re a minority of the viruses that cause the cold. No-one wants a vaccine that reduces their chances of getting the cold by a couple percent, and that’s all a specific vaccine would be for most coronaviruses.

You can't really use the state of vaccines for previous coronaviruses to predict what will happen here. It's such a different situation.

There is an animal coronavirus vaccine that works. Human coronaviruses, until now, either disappeared from the face of the earth (SARS) or are simply not very bad (cold), so there is literally no market for a human coronavirus vaccine, and therefore no reason to make one, until now. It costs at least a billion to make a human coronavirus vaccine, no company can just snap their fingers and spend a billion dollars for no reason. We now have a reason. It is not pollyanna to expect a coronavirus vaccine in the next 6-12 months.

I’d be careful with comparison to other coronaviruses. No one is investing heavily into a vaccine against the common cold. Not many people would get vaccinated - seeing how hard it is to convince people to get a flu shot. There’s much more interest in a COVID-19 vaccine. That doesn’t mean we’ll get one, but drawing the conclusion from “we don’t have one against the common cold, so we won’t get one against COVID-19” is stretching thing.

For you it's a flu. Unless you're really old, or have serious chronic illnesses, you will be fine.

There’s no hard data to support this claim, only anecdotes from the beginning of the first wave.

Here are a couple of links from the CDC. You listen to too much news if you think that young people are at risk. For [0] you should do weekly deaths by age. You'll see that under 25 people are dying at the lowest rate in the past 5 years. For 26-45 you can bet your bottom dollar that the minor bump above is the 40-45 range.

[0] - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm [1] - https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

If you get it, regardless of your age, there's a relatively high probability that you will directly and indirectly infect enough people to kill at least one person. I don't want that responsibility on my conscience.

Also, while the data on this for for COVID-19 is obviously limited at this point, the long-term impacts of SARS and MERS on cardiovascular health [0] are concerning. I wouldn't be surprised if getting it knocks a couple years off of life expectancy for a 25 year old.

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000629522...

"As shown, deaths in young people (from babies to college students) are almost non-existent. The first age group to provide a substantial contribution to the death toll is 45-54 years, who contribute nearly 5% of all coronavirus deaths. More than 80% of deaths occur in people aged 65 and over. That increases to over 92% if the 55-64 age group is included."

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-death...

"The estimated IFR is close to zero for younger adults but rises exponentially with age, reaching about 0.3% for ages 50-59, 1.3% for ages 60-69, 4% for ages 70-79, 10% for ages 80-89."

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.07.23.20160895v...

"Our estimated overall infection fatality ratio for China was 0·66% (0·39–1·33), with an increasing profile with age."

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...

"Among the 0-4 year, 5-17 year, 18-49 year, 50-64 year, and ≥ 65 year age groups, the highest rate of hospitalization was among adults aged ≥ 65 years, followed by adults aged 50-64 years and adults aged 18-49 years."

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidvi...

CDC infographic showing clearly that hospitalization and death are both strongly associated with age:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/investi...

"The paper found that the fatality rate gradually increases with age. For example, there were no deaths among children aged nine or younger while it stood at 0.2 percent for people aged between 10 and 39. It increased to 3.6 percent in the 60-69 age bracket before rising to 8 percent among those aged 70 to 79 and 14.8 percent among people in their 80s or older."

https://www.statista.com/chart/20860/coronavirus-fatality-ra...

...and on, and on and on. There is so much data supporting the OP's statement that you have to be trying to ignore it.

I see it differently. Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death. To say, "you young person, you'll be fine". Is inaccurate. To say, you will most likely be fine. Yeah, sure that's accurate, but some of those people will actually die. Let's not candy coat that. Death is permanent and awful.

There are still young people that die from driving a car, or getting pneumonia. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here

If you just sit out a year and be more careful, you just might not die from something we all are aware of?

Also isn't also the problem, that people who have light symptoms and are very active are super spreaders?

Could you rephrase?

"Yes, young people are much less likely to have a serious illness from COVID. But, there are still young people who will die from COVID (the death rate is not zero for 0-18yrs old even without preexisting conditions). For those young people, it is death."

You may believe this to be true, but your sense of risk is ridiculously out of proportion to the actual risk involved. In the US, fewer than 300 people under the age of 25 have died from Covid:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm

During the same period that those 300 kids died of covid, literally thousands died of all other causes.

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-death...

For those young people, of course, death is also death. More young people have died this year from accidents than have died from Covid.

It seems like the much more likely and scary scenario for young people (myself included) is long term health problems that are difficult or impossible to treat and basically destroy your quality of life.

I was curious if you have done any research on that? I keep hoping to find something to put my mind at ease.

Agreed, theres way too much focus on death rate for under 40.

When in history have we ever seen a disease where doctors, the public, or the media said "living in fear for your life is a good idea if you contract this disease?"

If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine? And yet all of society has turned this idea on its head when it comes to coronavirus. One report after another about how horrific it is. Constant anxiety and fear that takes a real toll on people.

Yes it's worse than the flu, if we take the stats in Los Angeles for example about 2.5% of confirmed cases have died. (Based on this it's a fair guess that less than 1% of all cases, including the unreported ones, have died.) Many people like the author have severe symptoms and then recover.

I have to wonder if this aberrant response to coronavirus says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself. A 24/7 stream of corona terror is being pushed into our eyeballs. How does that help anyone, especially the people who get sick? Does panic, fear, and a response straight from our lizard brains help us end the pandemic? Who decided that mass terror was the best way to beat it? I didn't sign up for this strategy and I bet you didn't either.

It's a bit misleading to say this "says more about our times and the media we're subjected to than the virus itself", although it is no Ebola for sure. To me, it seems to be somewhere (disturbingly) in the middle -- a low apparent CFR and yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time. Perhaps it's too early to tell and we should be cautious and reserve our judgment?

Nevermind "should" -- we should definitely be cautious, observe and reserve our judgment. It's good to be skeptical. But, draw a line at careless speculation.

"yet it still seems to cause permanent lung damage a disturbing amount of the time."

Fact check: there is no evidence of this. Even otherwise reputable sources are trading in anecdotes, and relying heavily on "may" and "could" to spread fear:

https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...

"While most people recover from pneumonia without any lasting lung damage, the pneumonia associated with COVID-19 MAY be severe."

Lots of illnesses can cause lung damage. The essential question is: at what rate?

Mass terror didn’t kill 200000 people.

Also, if it bleeds, it leads. There’s no grand strategy here in the US, just media doing what they always do and government not making grand strategy.

> If someone contracts a dangerous disease aren't we supposed to reassure them that things will be OK? Isn't that part of good medicine?

No. That used to be quite common, but it’s unethical to lie to patients these days.

1% of 300 million is 3 million, I think that’s the fear on a large scale. So dissemination of information is important, but the 24/7 news cycle not so much. It started its current cadence well before the pandemic, somewhere around mid-2015. I think it’s here to stay. Here at least we have an excuse of keeping people informed for their physical health, even though the amount of new knowledge about the virus itself is vanishingly small.

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