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Comment by thatswrong0 | Hacker News Reader

What about the long term safety data on catching / surviving COVID itself? Long COVID seems to affect between 10-30% of people who catch COVID. Why do I never hear anti-vaxxers being concerned about that?

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Ah yes, Long COVID the self diagnosed symptoms that surprisingly coincide with those that you would expect if you told a society to lockdown for 18 months.

For a nuanced take on long COVID I recommend Scott's post: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t...

Because its mostly undefined what long-covid even means. In the worst cases it means organ damage, but Ill bet you anything those are not anywhere near 10-30% of cases. More likely people randomly feel like shit for a while sometimes, like every other year in my adult life.

Which is exactly my point - we don't know what or how prevalent the long term effects of COVID are.

Agreed. But I guess I'm the odd-man out to err on the side of "not-fear".

> I'm the odd-man out to err on the side of "not-fear".

I'm not sure what this means. So you got the vaccine then because you're not afraid of it, right? Or you didn't get the vaccine because you're not afraid of COVID-19?

I am also not afraid really of COVID-19 but I got the vax because I'm also not afraid of that. Mostly I'm afraid I'd get it and then pass it to others where that could have been avoided by me just not being lazy for a second. I don't feel like an odd-man though.

Swine flu took me several months to fully recover. Nobody made this a topic back then but i know some other people who too had issues for months.

I put long COVID in the same bucket at long Lyme, which doesn't actually exist. It's a pretext for hypochondria, not a legitimate basis for public policy.

While I don't doubt that such psychosomatic disorders exist, there is simply not enough data yet to make such a strong statement. There are numerous reports of people not recovering their sense of taste / smell months after catching COVID, on top of all of the hospitalized people reporting symptoms long first catching it. It's not like there isn't legitimate evidence of this: https://time.com/6093164/long-covid-19-largest-study/. Obviously, it'll take a lot of time and care to sort out the effect that the lockdowns / hospitalization have vs. just the disease itself, and it's entirely possible that the mental effects of the lockdown play a large role in these prolonged recoveries.

But still, it's a novel, deadly disease which has a significant impact on the respiratory system (and perhaps the vascular system as well). The human body and our immune system are incredibly complex. It's far too reductive to categorize all of these collective experiences as just "hypochondria".

And it's not like post-lyme is a fiction either: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...

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