Brain imaging before and after Covid-19 in UK Biobank
medrxiv.org
medrxiv.org
This doesn't matter so much for, say, your liver, which (given time, and luck, and otherwise decent health) can recover, but matters greatly for your slow-growing brain, or your lungs (dat popcorn scan)
Infectious diseases that don't have long term effects are actually comparatively few in numbers -- those are the ones we tend to "get sick" with, for the simple reason that they aren't worth the effort of trying to control.
This "flu" thing just won't die. No one expert EVER likened covid to "the flu", beyond pointing out that, like Influenza, it presents as an upper respiratory infection. Everyone knew from that first cluster in Wuhan that this was much, much more dangerous. Everyone told you that. Everyone trustworthy, anyway.
So why do you continue to insist, after nineteen months, that this is just "the flu"?
A lot of viruses do really shitty things to you. HIV, HPV, etc etc
And we've seen covid pass the BBB in mice. So expect more info like this.
I hope you find the CDC to be trustworthy because the CDC says on their website that the flu is more dangerous than covid for young people.
"For young children, especially children younger than 5 years old, the risk of serious complications is higher for flu compared with COVID-19."
"However, for adolescents, the risk of serious COVID-19 illness is less than in children younger than 5."
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/flu-vs-covid19.htm
I agree with you that there are people who cavalierly dismiss the dangers of covid. But there are also people who oversell and exaggerate the dangers as well. Both are doing a disservice to people and society in general in my opinion.
Perhaps you meant covid is much more dangerous to some portions of the population while the flu was more dangerous to other portions of the population? Though I guess things could change in the future with more data and information.
Don't call it the flu. It's not the flu. It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!). It's not the flu.
Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
It's not the flu.
Worst season in recent memory was 61k deaths among influenza patients. Last year saw 600k americans die of covid.
Meanwhile flu fatalities cratered due to the pandemic response. Full data isn't available yet, but this site has some details (e.g. pediatric flu deaths dropped between 37x and 199x -- there was ONE child who died of the flu last year):
Those aren't directly comparable because the various flus have been circulating for years/decades and people have died all across that time. While people do have cross-immunity with sars-cov-2 and other coronaviruses, sars-cov-2 is new so it's hitting those decades of people all at once.
The currently estimated IFR across all age groups is around 0.15%, putting it on-par with the flu (something like 0.07% IIRC; this one is hard to pin down because there's a lot of different flus). And in the past few months, cases have spiked without a spike in deaths all over the place, so that 0.15% is probably going to drop more, especially with indications that the Delta variant is more infections but less serious. (That said the effect the past few months could be the effect of the vaccines; it's not clear to me if that's supposed to affect the estimated IFR or that estimation is for a vulnerable population (but I'm not sure how you could estimate a vulnerable population for one that's been around for a while, so I think it does still count))
Yeah, that's gonna need one hell of a cite. This is false.
> Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5-2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries and locations.
An IFR of 0.15% for covid is laughably ridiculous.
The difficulty with "global average IFR" is that it neglects the massive variation in IFR by age. This Nature paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0
made an attempt to break down the IFR by demographic, and found an almost 100,000-fold difference between the youngest and the oldest groups:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2918-0/figures/2
As such, the "IFR" for a country is going to vary dramatically with the age of the population. It isn't particularly meaningful to talk about IFR as a single number, but it's decidedly true that for anyone under 60, the risk of death is measured in fractions of a percent.
For those under 25, the risk is measured in thousandths of a percent.
That's not at all clear. Different areas have had vastly different levels of response to Covid, but the flu disappeared everywhere. So either minimal levels of non-pharmaceutical interventions are sufficient to virtually eradicate the flu, or something else is going on. Viral interference seems likely: https://www.statnews.com/2021/01/31/a-viral-mystery-can-one-...
And while such excuses do exist, they don't represent consensus opinions anywhere. Those who believe them are essentially 1:1 with those who want to believe that covid "is only as bad as the flu", which is provably false.
The original commenter didn't call it the flu as far as I can tell. He wrote: "Is there some reason to expect that covid-19 is different in long term effects than a flu? This study is saying it causes substantial brain damage, right? What possible mechanism is there for this?".
Nowhere did he call it the flu.
> It's killed 20x more people than the flu even in the fact of pervasive society-changing mitigation strategies (all while the flu itself has all but gone extinct, remember! All that masking and distance learning actually worked!).
No. It killed 20x more people than the flu in 2020 to now. But the flu has killed far more people overall. The flu epidemic of 1918 killed 50 million people, far more than covid.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-19...
> Beyond that, nitpick with my phrasing all you like. This is HN, after all.
It's not the phrasing, you know that. You outright contradicted the CDC which makes your comment misinformation.
> It's not the flu.
In your zeal, you falsely attributed a statement/argument to a person and argued against it. In one of my philosophy classes, I learned that it was called building a straw man. It's a logical fallacy.
Your heart may be in the right place, but you aren't helping. Though I'm starting to believe the fanatics on both sides deep down want covid to ravage the world and that neither side has their heart in the right place.
Do. Not. Liken. Covid. To. The. Flu.
If you didn't, good! Don't.
If you're arguing that you shouldn't dismiss the danger of covid because of its flu like nature, then be my guest but asking not to make comparisons between things doesn't strike me as a very smart thing to do.
Covid can be dangerous and similar to the flu at the same time.
Across US states, there is no correlation, let alone causation, between stringency of masks/social distancing/lockdown and outcome.
The problem with those one-location-over-time ones is that quite often people don't take into account the incubation period and testing delay - for example, in Illinois cases started dropping the day stricter lockdowns went into effect Nov last year, which means it wasn't the stricter lockdown that did it because the effects of the lockdowns would've taken 2-3 weeks to show up in the numbers.
Granted, people here may have children of that age. But we're also talking about the expected value of vaccines as well. While I haven't kept on current information, last I heard vaccines also weren't approved for such young kids either.
Could they have been more exactingly accurate with their language? Sure. But the issue was small and basically entirely irrelevant given both the venue and topic at hand. Yet you basically tried to present this as an all-round smashing of their entire point.
Depends what you're defining as young people. Under 5 as in those quotes, maybe virtually no risk. But I know otherwise healthy people in their 20s who got sick over a year ago. Their sense of smell and taste is still completely fried with no sign of recovery.
Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid. It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The vaccine seemed like a safer gamble than potentially forever losing my ability to taste, or worse.
This is exceptionally rare. The vast majority of people who develop anosmia regain their smell and taste. And yes, it does happen with other viruses.
> Maybe that can happen with a bad flu sometimes, but it seems way more common with covid.
The danger here is the distance between what it "seems" like, and what it actually is. If you're basing your judgment on media reports, you have to understand that you're not getting a balanced picture. The news media dwells on the most exceptional examples, and neglects the (many more) examples of people who have no serious side effects at all.
> It seems like there's some nerve damage resulting from the virus that we don't yet fully understand.
The current best evidence is that the loss of smell is not nerve damage, but infection of the epithelial cells surrounding the nerves in the nose.
People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.
At this point, I know -- quite literally -- well over a dozen people who have had it. Varying ages. None had anything more than a mild illness. Nobody had lingering symptoms of any consequence (maybe a cough).
Either your sample is statistically skewed, my sample is statistically skewed, or....there is some creative remembering happening here.
> People who are screaming about the vaccine being a bigger risk than the virus are the ones being fed info by outrageous media reporting.
I am not going to defend every person saying this, but there are certain age groups in which this is absolutely true. The EU is not recommending vaccination of children for exactly this reason.
Free-floating spike protein is capable of crossing the blood/brain barrier. It's one of the reasons some people are wary of the long-term side-effects of the vaccines.
There's way more molecular mimicry between this virus and our tissues than any flu virus. This is a recipe for long term autoimmune diseases.
If someone is vaccinated AND still spreading the virus, is it any different from having an asymthomatic case of COVID?
According to the article, even an asymptomatic case carries a risk of brain damage.
As a corollary, the vaccine may save you from the disease, but not from the brain damage. Is this a correct assessment?
It carries about an order of magnitude lower risk of hospitalization or death, so... yes. Yes, it is very different. We don't know about long term effects, those are, y'know, long term and hard to study in this kind of timeframe. Which is why the linked article is notable.
Also note that risk of transmission is about 10x lower (vs. delta, better vs. the older variants) for the vaccinated. So even if they're just as likely to see long term CNS issues from infection they're vastly less likely to be infected in the first place.
I don't think this article changes the vaccine calculus at all. Get your shot. It's your best protection against everything to do with covid.
This is priceless, as, for the same reasons, we do not know the long term effects of any of the vaccines either.
The virus invades the bodies and start multiplying in both populations.
The difference is that the vaccinated body is prepared to immediately attack the virus, something that takes weeks for the unvaccinated body to figure out.
So during the short interval when the vaccinated body hasn't yet wiped out the virus, the person is technically infected, will test positive, and can probably transmit some of the few viruses it has.
But that both vaccinated and unvaccinated can transmit the virus does NOT mean the danger levels are anywhere near similar!
This is probably why so many athletes get positive tests. If you get tested every day, you can get a positive test while a minor infection is defeated, even though you don't feel any symptoms.
Is this known to be true, or is it an assumption you're making in your analysis?
Just curious, because I would have expected people who refuse to be vaccinated to also be more likely to socialize in ways that expose them to the virus.
Personally, I expose myself to a lot more virus risks than before I got vaccinated, if you want an opposing argument.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27569772
Related discussion on another study in the same area (covid effects on cognition) using alternative methods:
Any large-scale body damage should cause "brain damage," though it's possibly a little misleading to call it that (of course I'm not enough of a neuroscientist to know if that's all that's at play here).
related: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/a-new-theory-of-dreami...
How the vaccine cause a similar lighter effect ?
So what does this mean, need more research?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17549790
Almost exactly three years ago, on July 17, 2018.
He/she/it was informed about the banning, but didn't understand it (or missed the comment) and has kept posting for three years. (Mostly a string of the same, characteristic one-liner quips.)
From the abstract:
> We identified significant effects of COVID-19 in the brain with a loss of grey matter in the left parahippocampal gyrus, the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex and the left insula. When looking over the entire cortical surface, these results extended to the anterior cingulate cortex, supramarginal gyrus and temporal pole. We further compared COVID-19 patients who had been hospitalised (n=15) with those who had not (n=379), and while results were not significant, we found comparatively similar findings to the COVID-19 vs control group comparison [...]
> Unlike in post hoc disease studies, the availability of pre-infection imaging data helps avoid ...
That depends on why the earlier brain scans were done.
edit - I didn't find discussion on the UK one, but an Australian study found those with some health concerns were more likely to accept the invitation. Not surprising.