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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID.

A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims.

A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...

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Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences?

Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1

The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.

There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.

CDC reports many kind of long-lasting adverse effects.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/long-term-effects....

That page is useless, it doesn't mention how frequent the effects are.

There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu.

> Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encephalitis_lethargica https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2778472/

Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.”

I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.

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