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Comment by dasudasu | Hacker News Reader

True, but that's not as if death was the only bad outcome. Not that we can even pretend to know the long-term effects yet, but anecdotally it seems that some people are already experiencing them, which include lung scarring and neurological symptoms.

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yep. many people have been sick since March, but saving lives is the priority, so we know almost nothing about "long-haulers." plus the hospitalization rate is a lot higher than the death rate, and hospitalization often means ICU for a month plus.

a realistic calculation of risk should be looking at your risk of dying, your risk of serious illness, your risk of permanent illness and/or long-term effects, _and_ your risk of medical bankruptcy. one dude got a bill for a million dollars when he finally was able to leave the ICU.

For example, in a recent study, 78% percent of recovered people had heart changes visible on a CMRI weeks after recovery.

COVID-19 is going to have a long tail...

[1] Outcomes of Cardiovascular Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Patients Recently Recovered From Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), Puntmann et al, JAMA Cardiology, 2020

This isn’t really substantially different than regular influenza. Indeed a very high proportion of flu patients show the exact same CMRI heart changes.[1]

Yet we know that while heart attack risk is elevated for a few weeks after a bout of flu, it reverts to baseline for virtually all otherwise healthy patients.

The myth of long-term COVID heart damage is, as of the evidence yet, media scaremongering. We have no reason to believe that COVID behaves any different than any other common respiratory infection in this regard.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/cardiovascres/advance-article/doi/1...

Mostly Ages 50+

As somebody young and fit, I am not really scared of dying if I catch covid, but losing my taste or getting my lungs scarred (especially since my respiratory system is not that great to begin with) is definitely preoccupying.

Heart scarring too

https://www.smh.com.au/national/seizures-and-battered-heart-...

Just like the flu. Here is a nice paper that goes through all the cardiac, neurological, renal and other organ complications of influenza.[1]

[1]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irv.12470

Just like the flu... which we vaccinate for and doesn’t sweep through the population.

So... not like the flu in scale or scope.

The vaccine is true, but not "doesn't sweep through the population". The CDC estimates 35M Americans got the flu last year.[1]

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

The top level comment is likely to also be wrong with regard to complication incidence of "healthy" people and "teachers and parents" vs average population. Granted, nobody really knows, and it's all anecdotal.

It's interesting that people are only applying this level of precaution to covid when (if they were consistent) they would probably apply it all the time to every novel viral strain. If the far-off chance of covid causing some crazy complications down the line is enough to warrant partially shutting down civilization, then we should probably all just live in hermetically sealed bubbles on account of the possibility of the hundreds of more obscure but (cumulatively) more dangerous viruses out there.

When 10% of the country has gotten this, you will see some weird edge cases. Day 1, tested positive with covid. Day 2, started having seizures.

Where is proof of causality between coronavirus and these afflictions?

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