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Comment by frockington1 | Hacker News Reader

For a healthy young adult, what are the potential long term side effects of covid? For most healthy young adults it is a mild flu in terms of symptoms. I know there is a minor risk of having a worse case, but the odds of that for young adults with healthy BMIs is low. I'll take the vaccine when it is available but I understand that others are looking at the risk/reward and being distrustful of a vaccine. Particularly when the vaccines have been rushed and have unknown long term effects

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> For a healthy young adult, what are the potential long term side effects of covid?

From an overall risk/reward perspective, I would include the risk of subsequently infecting your parents, grandparents or other vulnerable/high-risk family/friends with severe disease as a 'potential long term side effect' of covid in a young/low-risk individual.

Note though that it isn't clear at this point to what extent the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity.

I know some healthy young people who have a much harder time exercising months after getting the virus, but I concede that those cases are fairly rare—although much more common than any issues from vaccines in trial.

Thinking about it from a societal perspective, I'm willing to take a small risk from getting the vaccine to avoid inadvertently getting and spreading the virus to more vulnerable people like my grandparents.

What is the rational risk/reward that shows the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease?

There's some decent evidence of long-term (permanently?) lowered VO2Max in a large proportion of cases in younger people, along with lower quality evidence of prevalence of scarier post-infective consequences. I don't really want even a minor case of COVID-19.

Yes, the vaccines may be riskier than we're accustomed to. GBS is a 1 per million side effect in most vaccines, with some proportion of these people having permanent side effects. I wouldn't be surprised if we find that these vaccines are more like 1 in 25k. But that's better than the odds even young people face from COVID-19.

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