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Comment by peterwoerner | Hacker News Reader

I thought most of the treatments were meant to help you recover faster, limit severity and feel better while you had the disease. I must be missing something.

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> The results, which are yet to be peer-reviewed, suggest that none of these treatments has a substantial effect on mortality or on the length of time spent in hospital, the WHO said on Thursday.

(Emphasis mine)

Thanks

All those things are correlated with death. So that it does not reduce mortality, is a strong indicator that it won’t help with severity either.

Thanks!

Why would anyone spend time developing a treatment for temporarily feeling bad when dying is what people are afraid of?

If I was one of those 90% that survive, I'd rather recover completely than be left without smell, sight, hearing or other problems.

How likely is that? There's a curious lack of non-anecdotal evidence.

And I forgot: You wouldn't be one of the 90% but of the 99.5%.

To focus on another point the person you're replying to thought was the focus, limiting length of stay in the hospital would be valuable, even if it didn't affect mortality. Especially when one of the potential problems with COVID is running out of beds.

I'd count that as preventing deaths since that's the point of being treated in a hospital.

Isn't that what much of the health care system is? Maybe I am overly cynical, but it seems we can't/don't fix underlying issues as much as treat symptoms. I really only have a third grade understanding of this stuff (we can fix bacterial infections but not viral ones) which is why I asked the original question.

In general yes. But we've been neglecting everyone's quality of life for the past months, making an exception here makes no sense.

Well...yes...all those things plus hopefully preventing you from dying. Not sure where your confusion is.

Unless those treatments also ensure you can't spread the disease while recovering that actually sounds like an absolutely terrible idea to me.

While that's true, we don't want people out and about while virulent, reducing severity and recovering faster doesn't sound like a terrible idea to me at all.

My point is: what does "recovery" mean in this context? Feeling great but still being virulent during the same period?

To give an analogy, I can take painkillers to suppress pain but my body is still as sick as before - it "only" affects my perception. Now, I'm not against easing symptoms in itself but given how many people I know who go to work while coughing I don't know how to feel about medication that only helps with perceived discomfort.

(then again, I'm in Sweden where barely anyone seems to take covid seriously, sadly)

Neglecting mental health and education to protect people against Covid infections at all costs is disturbingly common. But neglecting people actually suffering from Covid, that's an original absurdity.

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