Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bserge | Hacker News Reader

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I'll just add my own experience. I had almost no symptoms, no cough, no taste loss, not even sniffles. Likely infection date 15th of February. PCR test on the 24th of February.

No symptoms at that point. 2 days later, I started feeling more tired than usual. The next day I had a mild fever and was sweating more than usual when exercising. This lasted 3 days, after which I only felt the fatigue for another 5 days.

No lasting effects that I can name.

I'm 31, male.

I had a cold around 5th-10th of February. I take levothyroxine every day, multivitamin everyday, Gabapentin every day, Vitamin C 500mg twice a week. Light exercise everyday, a more thorough workout twice a week. I drink alcohol and smoke tobacco regularly, and everyday between 24th of February - 15th of March.

I mention all that because some research said the cold and CV viruses are competitive, plus having the immune system "battle ready" after a simple cold could've helped. Levothyroxine increases metabolism, vitamins and exercise probably help. Smoking has been linked to lesser symptoms, too. I wonder what the effects would've been without all that.

Anxiety over Covid (I scared myself reading reports on Reddit) and losing my job (unrelated, but bad timing) was by far a bigger problem than the virus itself.

I now personally know over a dozen people (ranging from mid-20s up through upper 40s) who have had Covid-19. All had minor illness and are now fine.

Which is not to say that others do not have lingering symptoms -- but if we're going to emphasize scary anecdotes, it seems like we should spend proportional time reporting the vastly larger number of anecdotes that are not scary, as well?

It would be great to have such a database of reports from anyone with a confirmed Covid infection. Like Erowid for Covid.

Most people (I read it's around 86%) having such mild symptoms that they don't even realize it's Covid must've contributed a lot to its rapid spread.

The more vulnerable people get the same virus and suffer much more. Perhaps vulnerable people should've been subjected to stricter lockdown measures, not sure what else could help reduce the deaths.

You could start by datamining /r/covid19positive timelines. There should be over 100 personal experiences there, with symptoms per date

> but we're going to emphasize scary anecdotes, it seems like we should spend proportional time reporting the vastly larger number of anecdotes that are not scary, as well?

I haven't backed up my personal data in years and nothing nasty has happened, despite all those catastrophic data-loss stories you read online. I'm all for proportional reporting time, but strangely, no one reports on stories like mine - it's mostly in the vein of "Company shutters after accidental db deletion". I wonder why.

Similarly, I've been wearing my seatbelt my whole life and have never gotten into an accident while driving. My kid was placed on his back in the crib without any pillows or blankets, even though he hated it, but never once stopped breathing. I have health insurance but ... shit, there was that one time in high school where a kidney infection put me in the hospital and would've killed me had I not gone, was billed at a hundred grand or so, but insurance covered the whole thing.

There's a reason we pay attention to tail risks, where the low-probability negative consequences are far worse than the high-probability costs of averting them. The vast majority of people are not going to die in car crashes, or of SIDS, or of COVID, or from untreated kidney infections. They are lucky. But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.

Quite. Anecdata does have its place but only for the sample population (1).

I still hear people worrying about safety despite the fact that half the UK, a large part of the US and countless others have been jabbed. That's after the original trials. I can understand some people's reluctance wrt vaccination. Many countries have had examples of problematic vacc campaigns. In the UK the MMR jab had a major set back due to Andrew Wakefield's false article in the Lancet [1].

From what I gather the thrombosis risk from the Oxford/Astrazeneca jab is somewhat swamped by error bars and open to interpretation. However the risk from the pandemic is very real and demonstrably so. I had my jab last Tues and it was O/AZ but I wont ask anyone to extrapolate much from that!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMR_vaccine_and_autism

> There's a reason we pay attention to tail risks, where the low-probability negative consequences are far worse than the high-probability costs of averting them. The vast majority of people are not going to die in car crashes, or of SIDS, or of COVID, or from untreated kidney infections. They are lucky.

No, by definition, they're the norm. They're not lucky, they're just normal. The expected outcome. The people who encounter the tail risks are unlucky.

Not too long ago, a part of a jet fell off over suburban Denver. I would be dismayed if someone -- engineers and investigators -- didn't obsess over this event. But if my brother wants to know if it's safe to get on an airplane, or live in suburban Denver, then my answer is not going to change.

I would also discourage anyone else from reading HN posts with obscure technical documents from Boeing and the FAA, and speculating about what it means for aviation in general. Or reading other peoples' posts on these topics, and sharing anecdotes about how "someone they knew" died in some ghastly aviation accident. And so on.

It is in our nature to exaggerate the importance of rare events. They are still rare.

> But the consequences of death are so much worse than the costs of wearing a mask, or not seeing your friends in person, or dealing with anxiety, that it's worth taking some precautions even if the chance that you'll die from COVID is low.

How did masks get swirled up into this? I swear...people will find any way to turn these things into a political debate. Can we agree that by this point, the debate about masks is fully baked, and no amount of discussion of Covid outcomes is going to change someone's mind?

You can find anecdotes on the internet to support literally any fear that you care to indulge. The point is, most of the time, these fears are not worth indulging, and what you read on the internet exaggerates the actual threat.

I'm certainly not going to live through my life worrying about everything that could happen or go wrong. I've driven without a seatbelt a lot in my life (I once drove into a ditch at maybe 40-50 km/h without one, not even a scratch - lucky!).

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're saying I quite disagree with you that death is so much worse than anything else. Why is death so bad? It's the only certainty you actually have in life. There's an average age of death but you're quite unlikely to die at that specific one. It's gonna come either expectedly (like a cancer diagnosis giving you X months to live) or unexpectedly (an accident). Just accept it and stop trying to fight it by trying to minimize the risk since it'll happen anyways. Instead think about whether there are things you want to prepare for those left behind when you do go. And then stop worrying and enjoy the ride while it lasts. It's just a dice roll anyways, try to have fun! Don't hold back. Challenge yourself, face your fears, jump into the unknown. Don't try to follow the recipe for a perfect harm-free life to the book. That sounds like an insanely boring life to me but I suppose YMMV.

Ok, but the UK has a large, integrated, health care system, with an office of national statistics that is following the disease and published this data.

It also talks about how poorer people, and those from non-white backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have worse outcomes.

Just because you don't see it happening in your circles, doesn't mean it's not happening in other ones.

The authors write in the BMJ: “The increase in risk was not confined to the elderly and was not uniform across ethnicities."

> Ok, but the UK has a large, integrated, health care system, with an office of national statistics that is following the disease and published this data.

Having an office of national statistics does not mean that this particular paper is being reported correctly by the mass media, it doesn't mean that the paper itself supports the discussion of "long covid" amongst otherwise healthy people, and it certainly doesn't mean that other people on this thread reporting personal stories are representative of the actual risk. That last bit is what I'm emphasizing here. Literally any scary anecdote is amplified, and the (many more) pedestrian anecdotes go undiscussed.

As other comments on this page have noted, there are a number of legitimate criticisms of this paper that should be considered carefully, and even if you don't agree with those, the paper is self-admittedly discussing a predominantly elderly, sick population who were hospitalized for the virus. It doesn't generalize to discussion of anecdotes of "long covid" from much healthier people.

> It also talks about how poorer people, and those from non-white backgrounds are disproportionately likely to have worse outcomes. Just because you don't see it happening in your circles, doesn't mean it's not happening in other ones.

You're making assumptions.

You can go read their report yourself if you want and see that what you've claimed is factually incorrect. Plus, all the data is there, in CSV or XLS format if you want to check their maths:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...

To me, they seem to be trying to make it as accessible and clear as possible with most news articles taking the salient points directly from the ONS's own summary.

As you can see from figure 2, their data is not focused on old people as you erroneously claim, it does seem to show that more deprived = more symptoms, and that non-white are more likely to have symptoms.

We know that a majority of cases are asymptomatic or have minor symptoms. That's not news.

But the weird long-COVID cases are problematic - they're real, they affect a certain slice of the demographics, and can be pretty serious and long-term.

They seem to be in line and comparable to other post-viral complications, see e.g. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.12.21253448v... ; prevalence is 13-14%, distribution of specific complaints is somewhat different.

They are definitely real, and can be serious and long term, but they likely aren't novel; I suspect ME/CFS, "long lyme" and a variety of other conditions often dismissed as psychosomatic by practitioners who can't find a test for them - are post viral/post infectious syndromes, and they will be joined by "long covid".

Perhaps some good will come of this - those "long sequelae" diseases will get more and proper attention.

But none of the data I've seen so far about "long covid" puts it out of line with what we've known about post-viral sequalae for ages.

I had it based of an anti-bodies test. 0 symptoms absolutely fine...like 99% of everyone.

I have had a lot of exposed colleagues and friends. (~100 total) It’s a bell curve ranging from nothing to death.

The hard part is unless you have diabetes or similar, it seems random to me. And I don’t see good accounting of long term symptoms.

The political bullshit is such that we won’t really know what’s up for a few years.

What about this? https://www.instagram.com/p/CMwwVxZMiBb/

So... you weren't hospitalized, and also weren't readmitted to the hospital? What's the purpose of this anecdote?

No purpose, I guess. Just took the opportunity to share my experience.

I am interested in reading about others' experiences, it's just that everything I could find (mostly on Reddit) depicted a much worse picture.

And yet statistics say that the vast majority of people have it easy like me.

I mentioned I would love a database like Erowid, with input from everyone who has had a confirmed infection. I'd read through all of it and make my own conclusions.

I was told to self quarantine and call an ambulance if I felt worse. The hospitals here are overwhelmed just like many other cities/countries.

95% of people (which is a "vast majority") could have normal mild to moderate post-viral symptoms which go away entirely in 12 months. If 5% have long term disabilities then with something like ~100M people in the USA having been infected that would be ~5M with long term disabilities. That would be 20 times more people than were affected by Gulf War Syndrome. That amounts to a 1.5% chunk taken out of the civilian labor force participation rate.

A small minority of people having serious difficulties with the virus can turn into a large medical issue when the denominator is 1/3 to 1/2 of the country getting infected.

You're right that the experience reports skew in favour of the more extreme. However, I have enjoyed perusing reddit.com/r/covid19positive nonetheless (with that understanding)

Isn't taking levothyroxine without doctor prescription dangerous ? I mean this is a drug, not a Vitamin tablet.

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