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Comment by streetcat1 | Hacker News Reader

The main question is not the death or even hospitalization, but rather if you get long covid.

Agree, as a young, healthy person with access to top level care (Canada) I'm not really worried about death or long hospitalization, I'm worried about long COVID. I've heard many stories of people losing taste/smell for a long time and when it does come back their senses are all messed up and what used to taste great now tastes terrible. Also stories of people that were active prior and can no longer do any exercise. I have a coworker who is a bit older, but has been off work for a few months with long COVID symptoms. That's all my real concern.

I might get a ton of flak for this, but I discount the frequency of long Covid by a substantial amount. Not the severity, mind you, but the amount of people it's actually physiologically affecting.

If you can increase UFO sightings by telling everyone that UFOs exist and talking about UFOs... well, then what do you get from a global trauma with high and continuous uncertainty, that requires uncommon expertise to parse, on the news 24/7?

"Long COVID symptoms may have causes other than SARS-CoV-2"

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/11/long-cov...

I have seen no real research into it. No real proof that it's a major issue. But (guess who) the mainstream media has been playing it up for a while, and it's always used as the final indisputable argument by people who support the lockdowns.

This study, with some limitations (mainly data collected from EMRs), suggests 36% of those with COVID experience one or more 'long COVID' symptom between 3 and 6 months following infection.

https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Per https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/long-covid-much-more-t..., it sounds like long term physical and mental impacts can stay with people who get hospitalized by the flu. Why are you more worried about long COVID than persistent effects of diseases that have been around longer like the flu?

Perhaps it has about 10x the odds of causing severe post-viral syndrome than flu does, just as it has about 10x the mortality? We don't know much yet.

> when it does come back their senses are all messed up and what used to taste great now tastes terrible.

From what I've read, even that goes back to normal after a while. From my own experience, that's exactly what happened. I couldn't smell or taste anything for around 3 weeks, then coffee tasted like rotten bananas for around two months and ultimately everything went back to normal. I guess I got lucky on the other symptoms like tiredness and being short of breath, because I never had those to begin with.

The FLCCC protocol for long covid has had a lot of good results. I fixed my three and a half month bout in the spring with it. One dose of ivermectin and I felt better in a few hours and cured all the symptoms in five days with four more doses. The only remaining symptom of chest inflammation resolved with prednisone.

It could easily be that you had an undiagnosed case of worms. That was the outcome of a bit of research about those cases where Ivermectin seemed to have a positive effect on curing COVID-19.

No. Too many non worm symptoms that were exactly like covid symptoms.

My understanding was that a hypotheiss of why ivermectin seems more likely to be effective at treating COVID in studies conducted in places with lots of parasitic infections is that some of those undiagnosed parasitic infections exacerbate COVID symptoms.

So, having symptoms associated with COVID and not particular to parasitic infection wouldn't rule out that hypothesis, but instead be consistent with it.

Interesting. I've heard there's a few side effects when clearing parasites, more nausea for instance.

Brain fog, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, extreme high blood pressure, clotting issues, extreme fatigue, chest congestion, sore throat, sense of smell was haywire. All this got better than I had felt in the three months of suffering within a few hours of the first dose. Then better after each additional daily dose. After five days I felt well again. Only had chest/lung inflammation left to deal with. Prednisone fixed that. I don't live in an area where parasites and worms are at all common.

Is "long covid" anything other than post-viral fatigue syndrome? I still haven't seen anything to imply it's different than any other virus, in that regard.

Not that I want it, but giving it a new name just seems like more fear stoking.

Yeah there’s a whole bunch of things. As someone who enjoys eating and drinking coffee parosmia would have to be the worst.

https://healthcare.utah.edu/healthfeed/postings/2021/09/paro...

Well, it does mess with angiotensin receptors, which are all over, controlling the blood flow pretty much everywhere. That's why there's loss of smell, "covid toes", and multiple organs affected in high viral load cases, especially those with high blood flow... Brain is one of these organs, and neurological damage has been documented.

Covid? nein, danke. Vaccines, yes, please.

There are researchers who believe long covid is related to blood platelet microclotting, inducing hypoxia in tissues. Remains to be seen whether this holds up.

For me the symptoms were brain fog, weird sense of smell, headache, heart issues, high blood pressure, shortness of breath, cough, fatigue, fatigue after light exertion.

Long Covid is hard to accurately track. Most of the studies rely on self-reported symptoms, very hard to apply scientific rigor.

Yes, among symptomatic cases we really need statistics of not only hospitalized vs. not hospitalized but also severe vs. mild.

Yeah most people are not talking about the long term effects of having your body fight covid... oh well, rich people can't get richer if we slow down the economy.

Actually, if we "slow down the economy" it would likely adversely affect the lower income bracket blue collar workers and other wage earners who have to be at work in person, but no longer can. I suspect most HN-goers (on average very well off) can just work from home.

We slowed down the economy in 2020 and the rich only got richer faster.

Amazon isn't hurting because of shutting down businesses. Small business owners are dying in droves. Slowing down the economy just means centralizing purchases to large corporations.

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