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Comment by Grim-444 | Hacker News Reader

"People choosing not to vaccinate are putting him at risk". This might not exactly be the strongest point to make, as the Covid IFR rate for those under 17 is 20 in 1,000,000, or a 99.998% survival rate. Sure, there's a non-zero chance of death but it's effectively zero. It's great to say we should reduce risks further as a society, but is it really worth the costs to reduce risks like that further?

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...

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"IFR" (infection fatality rate) is not the be-all end-all metric of danger.

you don't have to die to suffer harmful long-term consequences from COVID, it appears to cause all kinds of organ damage including to the brain, this includes "the young", and these people usually did not suffer "severe" acute reactions during their infection.

https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20210401/many-show-long-term...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/health/covid-psychosis-me...

it's not safe to get covid period the end, even if you're "young" and even if it doesn't kill you outright or even hospitalize you. it's still a dangerous disease and the spread still needs to be minimized.

What are the numbers on how often people are having those effects?

In a University of Washington longitudinal study, 32.7% of participants had persistent long-term side effects, and around 9% had moderate to severe long-term side effects.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Really don't know why some people are so determined to deny that COVID is a serious disease with a decent incidence rate of serious side effects. 10% of the population getting moderate to serious side effects from a single source within a year is a lot, and it sucks if you're that 10%! And another 20% get minor side effects on top of that. And it isn't just "the old" or anything like that, those side effects cut across the whole population, young and old.

I guess it's just the next iteration of the old "it's no worse than the flu" denialism. But a single bout of the flu doesn't leave 10% of the population with serious long-term side effects.

It wouldn't be 10% of the population, though, right? It would only be 10% of the people who caught a case of the flu bad enough to be hospitalized or outpatient-treated?

Hmmm, I couldn’t find how exactly the study population was selected. Where did you see that?

it's 30%/10% of all cases, including weak/asymptomatic.

That study wasn't controlled. The most common reported symptom was fatigue. Many people who have never been infected also report fatigue symptoms. We'll need more research to reliably quantify how many patients experience long term symptoms.

It looks like they did have a control group, although it was fairly small with only 21 people.

I honestly hadn’t seen any hard numbers and was hoping to become more informed on the matter. That study looks decent, thank you for sharing it.

I think the study mentioned that this is largest and longest study about long-term effects, which I find a bit disappointing given the massive impact of the pandemic. The control group was quite small with only 21 people.

Anyways, I have adjusted my priors a bit. I’m not some sort of rabid denier :). But I am a bit wary of people arguing for very strict measures. The vaccine exists and is widely available (in the US). We won’t have a more powerful tool than that anytime soon. We need to start moving on with our lives. Not recklessly, but it needs to happen. Thankfully, the numbers seem to be getting better and better. Hopefully the trend continues.

I'm sure you mean well are are just trying to help, but please be very very careful when repeating claims like this. You could also make it clear and indicate what the articles actually assert as fact (versus just reporting data) to avoid confusing the lay public. The differences between what we know, what we suspect, what we think is likely, etc are nuanced and subject to being misunderstood.

Consider then my family member, who is elderly and immuno-compromised such that the vaccine may not be effective.

Immunocompromised people always have been at risk and always will be at risk. The presence of one more endemic coronavirus doesn't really change anything. Other endemic coronaviruses already have a high fatality rate in that population. I don't mean to minimize your family member's situation but that's just medical reality.

https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/223/9/1564/5899001

Having an already-high baseline risk before adding covid is a reason to be more cautious, not less. The point is that this particular vector is so trivially preventable.

Unless I'm mistaken, if we look strictly at risk of serious injury and death — not inconvenience and cost of hospital admission, etc. — then it should be less deadly to enter a crowded public place while infected with COVID than to enter the same crowded public place eating peanuts messily.

Of course, you shouldn't do either, and you should probably doubly not do the COVID thing; I'm just trying to get a baseline of risk to compare to.

How hard is it to get vaccinated? Just get the fucking shot.

did you get yours?

We had to wait until just this last week to receive second doses. Shots have been rationed and rolled out by appointment only in our state.

That said, now everyone in our family is fully vaccinated.

Are you seriously implying that the only negative outcome is death?

Some people have long term side effects. Even if you fully recover if you have a bad case you could be out of work for a long period of time. The negative impact is significantly higher on the poor who can't afford health insurance or to take time off.

Stop looking at death and look at the total impact.

Lockdowns have also had a high negative impact on the poor around the world by preventing them from working and earning income. Hunger is more dangerous to many of those people than COVID-19.

Remember that death isn't the only bad outcome: just because you survive doesn't mean you're out of the woods, unfortunately. I'm afraid "Long COVID" is a thing, for adults and children.

"Evidence from the first study of long covid in children suggests that more than half of children aged between 6 and 16 years old who contract the virus have at least one symptom lasting more than 120 days, with 42.6 per cent impaired by these symptoms during daily activities. "

There are folks that are still debilitated, almost a year after their "recovery". We don't know if/when their sequelae will disappear. Time will tell.

Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

This isn’t a paper, it’s an editorial, and it’s utter trash, printed in a bad “journal” (New Scientist is essentially a mass-market magazine, on par with Discover). The only evidence advanced for the claim is this:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.23.21250375v...

This is a survey of parent-reported symptoms in 129 children, and of the “long-term” symptoms, all are vague, (e.g. headache, fatigue, muscle pain) overlapping substantially with the aches and pains of daily life.

They don’t even bother to link to it directly in the editorial; they simply mention the doi in the text. This wasn’t even proofread by an editor.

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