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Comment by mikewarot | Hacker News Reader

We must eliminate it if we want to preserve our way of life.

Covid has long term effects, not all known at this time. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....

Are you willing to have 5% of the population end up like me... short of breath, and pretty much unable to do more than 1/2 hour of physical labor per day? I can do grocery shopping, and that's it for me.

[Update] I used to be a machinist, on my feet 8-10 hours per day. I feel like I've lost 10-20 years off my life.

If 5% more of the population goes down each time they get it, you're going to run out of people.. just like Texas ran out of natural gas, when it seemed impossible.

Never underestimate exponentials, and long term effects of novel situations.

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Elimination is not feasible, although vaccination can help a lot. There is no real evidence that 5% of the population will become disabled. Some people do get reinfected but those cases typically suffer less severe symptoms.

SARS-CoV-2 is very similar to HCoV-OC43, another endemic betacoronavirus. There is strong circumstantial evidence that OC43 caused the 1889 pandemic which killed around 0.06% of the world population. Now most of us get infected with OC43 as children and build up a level of immunity which protects us later in life, but it can still kill frail and elderly patients.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7252012/

> Elimination is not feasible

According to the ancient legends, our ancestors have eliminated smallpox planet-wide. Too bad their awesome skills are forever lost in history.

Some viruses mutate more quickly/easily than others, and are thus much harder to eliminate than others.

We could now reduce the development cycle to weeks and run a vaccination to less people than a clinical trial. That would be less risky than taking longer and needing to vaccinate 8 billion people with a vaccine.

> Are you willing to have 5% of the population end up like me... short of breath, and pretty much unable to do more than 1/2 hour of physical labor per day? I can do grocery shopping, and that's it for me.

80% of the US population is there already...

more than 40% of US adults are obese and >18% of children. why we don't tackle that with urgency is beyond me, considering it's one of the main preventable health problems we have. and getting worse.

"From 1999–2000 through 2017–2018, the prevalence of obesity increased from 30.5% to 42.4%, and the prevalence of severe obesity increased from 4.7% to 9.2%.

The estimated annual medical cost of obesity in the United States was $147 billion in 2008 US dollars; the medical cost for people who have obesity was $1,429 higher than those of normal weight"

https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

> why we don't tackle that with urgency is beyond me

When you see a person not doing something and are confused, a good first step to understanding the situation is to map out the steps that would be required. Then, go through and start listing the risks and impediments to executing those steps.

It is a lot easier to see a good idea than to implement it -- especially if you're willing to distrustfully ignore difficulties as "excuses".

"Adiposity is the Crucial Enhancer of COVID-19" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7430889/

It has been disappointing to see how our public health officials have taken a defeatist approach by focusing almost entirely on infection control. While minimizing infections is an important aspect of pandemic management, many people are still going to get infected no matter what. So we should also take steps to reduce their risk of a bad outcome, including reducing excess body fat.

Public health officials have tried to get people to lose weight for a while before the pandemic hit, and weren't wildly successful. Considering the difficulties in getting people to go along with very easy interventions, like wearing masks, what makes you expect that public health officials will somehow be more successful at convincing people to lose weight?

We don't have a scientifically proven method to greatly reduce body fat over the long term. (Yes, that includes calorie counting, keto, or whatever other fad diet.) Until we do there isn't much that officials and healthcare providers can to except give out diet and exercise advice that people won't follow.

It has been scientifically proven that consuming fewer calories than you expend over the long term will greatly reduce body fat.

One reason the COVID-19 death rate has been low in Japan despite having a high infection rate and a high proportion of elderly population is that they have very little obesity. I don't support the coercive legal measures they use under the 2008 ”Metabo Law". But strictly from a public health standpoint they have proven effective.

https://www.pri.org/stories/2009-11-10/fat-japan-youre-break...

And if you have a way to get people, on a mass scale, to stick to a reduced calorie diet long-term then you may have a scientifically proven solution. Until you have that you do not have a scientifically proven solution. You have a method of weight loss which only works as long as people stick to it (which scientific studies show they won't).

Fixing it doesn't have urgency to the right people. Kids are too uninformed, adults are too busy and if they're fat, it's easier to cultivate acceptance rather than actually change your lifestyle, corporations profit from consumption so if anything they benefit as obesity and overconsumption is normalized, and people in positions of power and authority have no way to force people to eat healthy.

Health and nutrition are one of the topics where people don't want to hear the truth or know the solution because it's inconvenient and difficult, even though it's straightforward and doable for a lot of people.

There is almost zero institutional legitimacy left because of decades of selling favors, such as blaming fat for the effects of the sugar industry, etc.

Combine this with the replication crisis, and bias towards only funding and publishing novel results... things are worse.

Combine that with the telomere issues from having lab mice optimized for lowest cost... and the subsequent need to re-test everything... and there isn't much hope left.

It doesn’t help that nutrition “science” is a cesspool of correlations. The average Joe has no idea who to believe when it comes to diet recommendations.

If you already follow a diet, especially for the first time, you will likely see result whether this diet is keto, paleo, mediteranean or anything really. i think the positive effect i got when i did keto a few years back were in hindsight 90% taking care of myself, paying attention to what goes in my stomach and some contextual effects (placebo), despite what i said at the time. The allergies reduction might've been keto though.

> If 5% more of the population goes down each time they get it

Is there any reason to believe the 95% who didn't "go down" after the first time have the same 5% risk if they get it again?

Not saying you are wrong or that the article is right. It's just something important to consider. It's also important to remember that even if the 95% face zero risk after they get it once, 5% of the global population is still a lot of people.

I really don't want people to end up like me... but at the same time I don't want people to discount this possible outcome when doing the math... it's an exponential term lurking in the shadows.

I am now some 7 weeks after a fairly mild case of Covid.

I got heart arrhythmia as a bonus, but lowish dose of Concor, a beta-blocker, took care of that. Fortunately, nothing serious on the heart itself.

I also suffer from some muscle twitching, especially at rest. It is getting better, but very slowly. Accidentally, the cardiologist who got me into a heart clinic for my arrhythmia (a friend) suffers from the same twitching problem after his bout of Covid, but in his case, it is a bigger problem, because he actually performs heart surgeries. I was happy to tell him that a certain over-the-counter medication reduced my twiching problem. It helped him as well.

Perhaps there is something that can help you with your shortness of breath. Do not give up the search for possible solutions.

I had some sort of viral infection must be almost three years ago now that gave me an arrhythmia. It comes and goes in severity but I’ve been on beta blockers for a couple of years now and that does seem to keep in in check.

I’ve never been able to get my fitness levels back up to where I was before though, maybe 50%. I’m also still way more tired than I ever was before. It sucks to never really have fully recovered. I feel bad for the long COVID sufferers who sound like they’re in for something similar.

I think long covid is temporary for most people. I had it for 4 months last year and have recovered. Got to stay positive through out it, have faith it’ll get better, and do everything you can to stay healthy

We likely won't eliminate it because eliminating a virus has happened only twice in human history (smallpox and the non-human disease rinderpest) and it's considered more difficult for diseases that can transmit to/from other species.

But living with this coronavirus certainly does not mean that 5% of the population will have long term negative health effects, especially in light of a dozen effective vaccines (and more in the pipeline). We should also consider what we mean when we say "long term" for a disease that has barely been around for a single year.

> especially in light of a dozen effective vaccines (and more in the pipeline)

The US doesn't even have modern healthcare. There's no point of developing new vaccines if we're using the market—you know for sure it's going to go to fewer people than it should. For-profit medical research is fundamentally a death cult.

I’d be curious to learn how many who are suffering from shortness of breath post-Covid may be experiencing costochondritis (among other conditions). This condition was found to be responsible for 30% of chest-pain emergency room visits [MedScape] and is known to be caused by viral infection [WebMD]. While it is often seen in primary care, it is apparently rarely referred to physical therapy though stretching has been shown to help provide relief [1]. One physical therapist developed a simple device to facilitate stretches called the BackPod (I have no affiliation with this/him) which won a Red Dot Award in 2013 [2] and I know some have turned to for relief.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5455195/ [2] https://www.red-dot.org/project/backpod-6994

You may have just changed my life! thank you so much!

I'll keep digging, but it looks like some simple exercised might help get me out of this hell. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5455195/

Happy to! hope you find this helps!

How, though?

There are substantial animal reservoirs, vaccinating the entire planet won't do it, like it did for smallpox.

hi. i am verry sorry to.hear aboht your condition. it shouldnt have happened. mind if I ask how your health was before.covid?

Long covid is really rough from what I have heard. That being said if enough of the population is vaccinated you won't be seeing severe covid symptoms anymore with vaccinated people and booster shots in the future. So the virus is circulating but its affect on the population is dramatically different than 2020/mid-2021. Well that is the plan anyways.

The bearish hypothesis is vaccines could not be effective against newer variants and the carnage continues, could all airplane travel be banned in this scenario? Could Lockdowns continue in perpetuity? Maybe? I really doubt this scenario as history has never seen a scenario like this, looking at previous epidemics, like the swine flu of 1918 the virus ran its course in a year and half due to immunity after infection. Given we have vaccines being deployed now this should stop the virus in its tracks after more people are being immunized.

>Are you willing to have 5% of the population end up like me... short of breath, and pretty much unable to do more than 1/2 hour of physical labor per day? I can do grocery shopping, and that's it for me.

Honestly, yes.

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