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Comment by iammisc | Hacker News Reader

When my first daughter was born in 2018, I had a respiratory infection. It lasted three months before I went in to the doctor. I hesitated to seek medical advice because it was clearly viral. But the cough was so bad it was causing the newborn to wake up.

The doctor (at a walk-in clinic) told me viral respiratory infections can last months and there's nothing you can do. Just wait. HE gave me some pills to stop the cough since it was interfering with my life.

That was it. It was about one year later that the cough finally dissipated. It got better after about 5 months, but it took many more months for all symptoms to go away.

I guess my question is... why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?

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> doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?

Because we all decided to collectively forget every single thing we know about respiratory viruses and infectious diseases. Somehow because covid is "novel" the world needed to rebuild our entire knowledge base from the ground up.

A good example is how lasting t-cell immunity was dismissed for the longest time (and still is in many circles). People apparently seemed to think that this virus was so special and new that people would just keep getting it over and over again every six months or something. Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this? If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago....

Labeling it as "novel" let people just ignore common friggen sense and completely loose the plot.

> If we kept getting infected with the same virus over and over... humanity would have died off a long time ago....

But it's only recently (~50-100 years) that we travel around the world so much, would covid-19 have propagated like it's doing now 300 or 2000 years ago ?

I can't edit but in the mean time I have been reading a bit of the Wikipedia page about the black plague in Europe and a world less connected than ours still can burn from a fast spreading virus.

And there's been plague outbursts in recent years.

What was interesting to me is if you went back and read up on how various childhood disease worked. Nothing about Covid would surprise or confuse you. And one would not be blase about just letting it rip.

But... we did get infected with coronaviruses (the OC43 and friends) and other common cold viruses over and over again. The reinfection rate of ~15% for SARS-COV-2 is comparable to those

It would have been better if reinfection was described as "you'll test positive again, but it will be milder". Instead the media was full of articles saying "immunity lasts only 6 months"

“There is just so much we don’t understand about this virus”.

Yeah. No. It’s a respiratory virus that is pretty nasty in really old people but not so much in anybody else.

Like forgetting that respiratory viruses are airborne?

> Is there any virus in the history of mankind that does this?

Yes. The common cold is a set of symptoms that are caused by many things, but a majority of instances are caused by rhinovirus. It is possible for people to be infected by the same strain multiple times, but more importantly there are over 100 variations they can catch, and previous infections from one variation do not protect against another. The worst case scenario for covid was exactly that.

> why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019, when according to what I gather here, doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?

I don't think most doctors are terribly surprised (at least not ones who have dealt with respiratory diseases before). The press, on the other hand, loves stories like these.

Interestingly I had a similar experience three years ago as well. I would cough non-stop and no medication was of any help. It lasted three months and then slowly disappeared. The weeks after I still had some respiratory problems (whistling when breathing), but nothing too annoying compared to the cough. Without joking, this was far from being an agreeable period and it impacted my studies quite a lot as coughing all day made me very tired and I was unable to study properly. Doctors never found what had happened.

Same here. Had a terrible, terrible flu (?) back in 2017. I was weak and couldn’t smell nor taste anything for months.

It took a long time before I was the old me.

Maybe it’s common with virus diseases and we have an attention bias now and it might be additionally more common with COVID.

I think it's an attention bias thing. I mean... when I found out about this phenomenon from my doctor, I was shocked -- how could people be walking around with these bad infections and just not be able to do anything about it. But then I realized that many people have medical things that I can't see that they just deal with. Like many people excrete their feces into a bag on their stomach. And some people have to inject hormones constantly.

It's just life, and you can't choose what cards you're dealt. I'm glad people are paying more attention to these disabilities (although I hesitate to even call them that), but on the other hand, we should be careful not too get drawn in simply because COVID is the current story du jour.

With a "normal" viral cough, the infection itself lasts that long. With Long Covid, the viral load is gone from your system, and symptoms still persist

Previously, the general public wasn't very interested in chronic, unspecific symptoms that people have or had (google Chronic Fatigue Syndrome; it's a collection of people feeling fatigue, have concentration issues etc. similar to Long Covid, many long before COVID-19 was a thing). With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.

Except that Post-Viral Syndrome has been a thing since before Covid:

> Post-viral syndrome, or post-viral fatigue, refers to a sense of tiredness and weakness that lingers after a person has fought off a viral infection. It can arise even after common infections, such as the flu.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/326619

> With Covid, there are too many to ignore, so such things are now getting more attention.

Too many to ignore or just that we decided to put a huge magnifying glass on it? We have our log levels turned up to "ultra verbose" and are collecting every single scrap of data. If we looked at other respiratory viruses with the same amount of logging... I would bet we'd see just as much, if not more, crap as we are with covid. Never has a respiratory virus been followed this closely.

My friend was diagnosed with ME/CFS after a stroke at age 27. The term "myalgic encephalitis" is the preferred term, as I understand it, because the public seems to be unable to take a phrase like "chronic fatigue syndrome" seriously. In America at least, our puritan personality insists that "fatigue" is a sign of laziness.

If there's an upside to Covid-19, I hope that it's that the symptoms of ME/CFS are taken more seriously by the public and scientific community, and that the results of further research on "long covid" are transferrable.

Those here who are experiencing Long Covid symptoms should keep an eye on a drug called Ampligen. It is the first and only drug that has been approved for the treatment of ME/CFS, but thus far only in Argentina. There are a couple ongoing studies in the United States (one in Lake Tahoe), but no FDA approval yet. Recently, Ampligen has been put into trials for the treatment of Long Covid as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rintatolimod

https://www.clinicaltrialsarena.com/news/company-news/aim-do...

https://www.proactiveinvestors.com/companies/news/921928/aim...

"doctors are surprised that COVID may do the same?"

Doctors aren't. Epidemiologists aren't. We've been discussing and trying to study the long term effects of COVID-19 infections (and there were similar studies for SARS) pretty early on - the results are just long in coming, both due to the nature of the problem itself, and the pandemic.

Physicians are not scientists. They repeat what was taught in their craft.

If their professors and coworkers never mentioned this, they don't know.

>why did my doctor tell me that viral respiratory diseases can last for many months in early 2019

Going out on a limb here but coughing for months my first thought would be mold. Not sure why they didn't suggest that to you.

It wasn't coughing for months though. It started with a runny nose. Then I got a cough (coincided with the baby being born and waking up). I took cough suppressors for about 1.5 weeks. Then I had general sinus aches and the cough stopped. Then i had body aches. Then I had a runny nose and cought again, until finally it became general malaise until it finally dissipated.

I count the 'end' of the infection as the point in time at which I was able to do my standard gym routine in full again.

Because your doctor is right. Serious viral infections are no joke. Long covid asserts that people with very mild symptoms are also likely to suffer long term. This is controversial.

> Long covid asserts that people with very mild symptoms are also likely to suffer long term. This is controversial.

I'm not sure I understand. My symptoms I described above were never that bad. Were it not for waking up my newborn, I wouldn't have gone in to the doctor. It was just a mild discomfort for a long time for me

i think the key difference is the incidence rate. if long term symptoms occur in less than one percent of cases, that's still enough for doctors to see and treat without surprise. this article says the incident rate for covid-19 is 25%, which is shockingly high.

> this article says the incident rate for covid-19 is 25%, which is shockingly high.

To be fair, we're not fully aware of all the cases of COVID. Most likely, many people had COVID but didn't know. Because we didn't have proper testing for a long time, our sampling of 'those who had COVID' is almost certainly wrong

You aren't kidding. It isn't the norm, but I've had a viral bronchial infection for almost 2 months now. All you can do is wait and suppress the symptoms.

As a side note, having an unrelated cough during a respiratory pandemic is not a good time.

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