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Comment by deregulateMed | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues with the medical industry is the refusal to use numbers.

Most familiar to you is when a physician will say "It's rare", without mentioning rare could be 1/10 or 1/10000.

In this article, "long term" seems to be about 6 months on the longest term. (Not mentioned in this article, but I recall reading something similar).

So when politicians/physicians/me/you need to make difficult decisions we are given words like "common, rare, long term, and short term" that contain little meaning.

I'm just not sure why the medical industry does this when the data is available. I sure wish we could push back against this. It's irresponsible.

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I have a colleague based in the UK who got infected with COVID in the early days of the pandemic, before any measures were taken. He still has important health issues - and he's young (under 30).

Similarly, I have a friend who got infected over the 2020 summer (even though he was taking precautions), and again, he's still seeing doctors, taking medical trials, etc. because of his long COVID symptoms.

I know it's n=2, but I would not dare being so fast to say "it's about 6 months on the longer term, and very rare". I didn't take this very seriously as I'm young, but these two cases shifted my perception on the issue and made me adjust my routines just to err on the side of caution.

there has been an analysis of the second biggest public health insurer in Germany (Barmer) that had a statistic that said that 6-7% of all of those infected were ill (and not working) for more than 12 weeks (and the numbers for young people weren't far of, like 4-5%)[1]. Also, there has been a study in UK that 400k people suffer from long covid [2]. Caution really is the only way as long as one doesn't have the double vaccination.

[1]https://www.spiegel.de/gesundheit/corona-fast-jeder-fuenfte-...

[2]https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/01/almost-400000-ha...

I'm at 16 months now.

Of course Long COVID has a short upper bound; this is a new disease! But similar conditions that predate COVID can last decades.

One could also see this differently.

The medical industry has to deal with the general population. Just like the food industry does. Now for both I do agree with you that I personally want the details, the numbers and make up my own mind. So give me those numbers. I want to know, this side effect happened to 1/100 people and this other one happened to 1/1000000. I want to know that 100g of this food contains 4mg of iron. I don't even want % of RDA as RDA is both a moving target and an assessment/decision someone made based on stuff I might not fit into. I.e. I'm male and not pregnant, my RDA is different from a pregnant woman's RDA.

I think it is still very important to have something that is easily understandable by the general population though. I.e. I'm totally for saying "this is rare" and "this is common". Food wise, I think it does make sense to have something like that color system some countries have "This contains a high amount of sugar". As long as you put the actual numbers on there too!

I am always told probabilities when I am alerted of complexities of e.g. a wisdom tooth operation. This is in the UK.

Given how wildly different they can grow that is a suprise.

I doubt you'll get much off a probability with that range.

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