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Comment by orra | Hacker News Reader

> All the "long covid" stuff is essentially fear mongering. There's no science behind it.

That's not true. Studies are showing large fractions, say 10-25% of COVID patients are suffering symptoms after a month.

COVID infections have demonstrably damaged pretty much every organ in the body.

That's very different from the initial assumption, whence all policy, that COVID is like the flu, and passes in two weeks if it doesn't kill you.

> Even after being vaccinated.

However, these vaccines are stupidly effective. Once enough people are vaccinated, COVID will die out in the community, just like measles. You're right that we can't fear COVID forever.

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I believe that the flu causes more long term damage than people give it credit for. For example, here's a paper talking about the flu and heart swelling: [0]

> During the Sheffield, England influenza epi- demic from 1972 to 1973, the cases of 50 consecutive patients who were initially diagnosed as mild cases and were treated on an outpatient basis were followed. Transient electrocardiogram (ECG) changes were seen in 18 patients, and long-lasting changes were seen in 5 patients.

It could be that the flu is worse than covid in this regard, the few studies I looked at were surprising/sobering. They were talking for years about "long-flu" after the 1918 pandemic.

Until we have numbers to back it up I would not make the assumption that covid is any worse or different in this regard. Conventional wisdom is that every virus that attacks the body leaves some people with long term lung, heart, and or brain damage.

[0] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.685...

It's not surprising that when a disease almost kills you, it (or the medical interventions that saved you) might leave your body in bad shape.

But this is being spun to imply that it's a serious threat to people who are otherwise in extremely low risk categories for severe covid. There's no solid evidence for that.

> But this is being spun to imply that it's a serious threat to people who are otherwise in extremely low risk categories for severe covid. There's no solid evidence for that.

It's a numbers game.

When hundreds of millions of people are infected, you're still going to get a lot of hard hit people in 'low risk' categories, aren't you?

Yes, just like a lot of people die in car accidents every year. People have always been willing to take some risk for the sake of freedom and a better life.

The lie here is that it's anything other an extremely minor risk for the large majority of people.

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